Well she isn't a member of a well-regulated militia, is she? Mother "warned" by police for displaying kitchen knife to ward off home-intruders.

Banned in england

Banned in england

Reader "Winston" sends along the cheery news item from Britain: mother "warned" by police for displaying kitchen knife to ward off home-intruders.

The TV presenter and Marks & Spencer model Myleene Klass has been warned by police for waving a knife at teenagers who were peering into a window of her house late at night.
Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.
Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon", even in her own home, was illegal.
Klass's spokesman, Jonathan Shalit, said the former Hear'Say singer was "utterly terrified" by the intruders and "aghast" at the police warning. "All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off," he told the Sunday Telegraph. "She is not looking to be a vigilante, and has the utmost respect for the law, but when the police explained to her that even if you're at home alone and you have an intruder, you are not allowed to protect yourself, she was bemused."

Coming our way, and we should be terrified, not bemused.

Age discrimination at Facebook? I'm shocked

To bad for verizon that under-40 copy editiors don't know grammer or speling

To bad for verizon that under-40 copy editiors don't know grammer or speling

Facebook helps employers like Amazon and Verizon restrict recruitment ads to age-specific categories. 

The libertarian in me says, "hey, hire who you want: it's your company". The lawyer in me says, "are you friggin' nuts? Class action!" And the realist side of me says, "who cares? You're [or "your" — whatever] over 40, you'll never get hired anyway". 

A joint investigation by the New York Times and ProPublica revealed that the telecoms giant recently posted a recruitment ad for jobs in financial planning and analysis - but restricted the post to Facebook feeds for users aged between 25 to 36, who lived in Washington DC and demonstrated an interest in finance.
That meant that an older yet more experienced financier living in the capital, even one looking for jobs in their field, would never see the ad.
Facebook Careers also posted an ad for jobs in their own engineering department, although only people aged 21 to 55 who live in the United States could see it. 
'We completely reject the allegation that these advertisements are discriminatory,' said Rob Goldman, a Facebook vice president.
'Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work.'

I suspect that Mr. Goldman and his employer will soon learn that "age-based targeting" for employment, illegal since 1967, is an expensive way to weed out older job seekers. Subtlety, Goldman, subtlety. You might want to hire an aging WASP and learn how Jews were excluded from the Ivies, or an old southern Democrat to teach you how blacks were kept in their proper place in "the good old days".

Sometimes, even the zebra and the orange need a little help

70 Sumner

70 Sumner

When 70 Sumner Road (NY border) hit the market last April at $4.295 million, I predicted that, notwithstanding its "aggressive" price, it would see a quick sale because of its agent's judicious use of both orange throw pillows and a faux-zebra floor rug. It turned out that even those two essentials weren't enough to overcome this northern-Siberian location, and a new broker had to be called in. While the orange and the dead zebra were retained, the price was slashed a million dollars, to $3.295, and it's now reported as pending.

Still overpriced, in my opinion, but I'm no fan of zebra. 

zebra.jpg

A bit squirrely, perhaps, but totally batshit crazy? Surely not. Transgender goes nuts.

You talkin' to me? Huh? You talkin' to me???!!

You talkin' to me? Huh? You talkin' to me???!!

Nothing to see here, move along, move along.

A transgender model, who mistakenly believed Muslim Heathrow security staff called her: 'Man' got in the face of one officer and shouted: 'This guy hates transgenders and wishes me dead.'
Frequent flyer Francesca Camicia, 23, who was travelling to Italy for breast augmentation shouted: 'You're the terrorist,' during a two-hour meltdown.
Camicia, from Hammersmith, who is identified as female on both her British and Italian passports, told Ealing Magistrates Court: 'When someone calls me "man" I feel so desolated.'
She was convicted of using threatening behaviour towards Mustafa Abbas and supervisor Fahad Arshad on September 17 and was conditionally discharged for two years.
Camicia, who was the subject of an extensive shoot in photography magazine Lens, was also ordered to pay each victim £50 compensation and £750 costs.
Mr. Abbas insisted he addressed Camicia as 'ma'am' during secondary security checks in busy Terminal 4. 'That's when the abuse began,' he told the trial.
'She said: "Don't talk to me like a dog, you need to learn some education, you f***ing idiot."
She said it with disgust and was looking down at me and made me feel worthless, like I am nothing as if I am a peasant.
'She said: "You earn six pounds an hour and you think you are God."
He reported the incident to supervisor Mr. Arshad, who told the court: 'She refused to stop and completely lost control. Just mad, I couldn't speak to her.
'She completely lost the plot, saying that she was transgender and that I wished death on all transgenders. She was in a blind rage.
'She pointed at my beard and said: "I should be afraid of you. You are the terrorist"
'She said I was homosexual and made an oral sex gesture with her hand.
'I have never come across anyone that angry or unpredictable in seven years at Heathrow. I felt intimidated when she came close to my face and poked my shoulder with her fingers.
'She said: "You're peasants. I'll buy this f***ing airport, this f***ing plane."'
'To be called a terrorist because of how I look is disgusting and she lost control with the police as well.'
The court heard Camicia also shouted: 'I've been a woman for twenty years. To call me "Sir" is a crime. I've got a diplomatic passport, you can't do anything to me, I know my rights.'
Camicia, who has a PhD in law, was upset there was no Jewish Torah on which to swear an oath. 'It's okay. My rights are breached everyday,' she told the court.
'Since I was born I felt like a woman and it has been a real struggle, it has been hell, but I've been so strong.
'I am here today, but I shouldn't be. I'm proud to be a woman, proud to be a transexual woman.'
The court heard Camicia has undergone fifteen gender reassignment surgical procedures and she claims to be insulted by Heathrow staff whenever she passes through.
'Every time I walk past they insult me. I have been travelling ten years through the same airport with the same people, I know them.
'They laugh at me, they hate me, you can feel it.
'I did not insult anybody. I felt so harassed and threatened. I'm not dangerous, I'm not a threat.'  

Uh huh.

Idiot sellers? I report, you decide

Name your price: doesn't mean you'll get it

Name your price: doesn't mean you'll get it

218 Clapboard Ridge Road, which debuted at $25 million in 2013, has sold for $9.650, exactly as I predicted back then.

In September, 2013, Greenwich Time ran its usual puff piece on this property, and included this quote that probably came back to haunt its original listing agent, as I warned it would at the time: 

"It's really a trophy property," she said. And while a price tag of $25 million will certainly narrow the perspective [sic] buyer pool, she said she's not concerned about the possibility that it will sit on the market long.
"There are pockets of people looking for something special," she said. "And this, this is something special."

Yeah, well. It's not that I'm so smart; it's that there are some agents out there that are so stupid. Or they don't like telling prospective clients the truth: I'd go with the latter on this one, because her clients had paid $7.750 million for the wreck in 1999 and sunk at least another $10 into rebuilding it. Ouch.

UPDATE: 4 years and some months later, Greenwich Time catches up with the news. 

Ol' Sigmund would have enjoyed this one

Ol' Sigmund would have enjoyed this one

The real surprise is that it sold at all

20 greenbriar.jpg

20 Greenbriar Lane, off Round Hill Road, has closed at $2.3 million. The sellers paid $2,688,750 for it back in 2011, which at the time I found almost as astonishing as the original price, the year before, of $3.4. This is a 1956 house, basically unchanged since Beaver and Wally were cutting up and risking the stern, but loving admonishment of Mr. Cleaver. Nothing against 1956: I have a brother who was produced that year and, so far, I have no serious complaints about his performance, but a house built then has pretty much hit its shelf-life, and should, perhaps, be priced closer to its land value.

Then again, opinions are worthless: it's the market that determines value, and the market just said that this is a $2.3 million property. So good for the sellers. 

Now we know why Democrats insist on net neutrality: without it, free porn is doomed

I don't think I'm going to like this

I don't think I'm going to like this

Or that's the claim.

The FCC’s decision on Thursday to kill net neutrality rules that provide for equal access online to all types of content will likely reshape the multibillion-dollar porn industry in the coming years.
It’s hard to overstate just how much porn is consumed online. Last year Pornhub viewers alone watched over 91 billion videos and there were a total of 44,000 visits to the site per hour.
But now that internet service providers will be able to control what users can access and charge a range of prices based on the type of content, that could change.
Pornhub and similar sites have been vocal about fighting against the repeal of net neutrality.
“Without [net neutrality], the cable and wireless companies that control internet access will have unfair power to pick winners and losers in the market,” Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub, told Motherboard.
The changes will impact anyone’s ability to watch porn and to upload their own pornographic content.
Alex Hawkins, a spokesperson for xHamster, told Life Site News the repeal would favor the promotion online of a “heteronormative version of sexuality.”

Tough to believe that the porn industry that flourished under the unregulated Internet days through 2015 is now dependent on protective regulations. On the other hand, I might be in favor of society's promoting "a heteronormative version of sexuality", if I even knew what that meant.