Quickies

More and more states are passing laws to forbid texting or using a cell phone while driving. Maybe they should also pass laws forbidding:

1) driving while all but a few inches of the windshield are covered with ice,
2) driving with the hood open and blocking the windshield, and
3) steering the car with your elbows while using both hands to roll a cigarette and reading from a clipboard placed across the steering wheel.

Because there are idiots out there who've done all of the above.

What, you say? Aren't those things already covered by laws against reckless driving? Why yes, they are. So is driving while texting and phoning but, you know, we can always use more laws.

Time for some quickies:

• From the department of strange ways to die: Imagine going for a jog on a beach in Hilton Head and getting mowed down by a plane that lost its propeller and made an emergency landing. He was wearing and iPod and never knew what hit him.

Hmm. Maybe there ought to be a law against listening to iPods while you jog on the beach. You never know when some plane's going to land right behind you.

• Heartbreaking: Part of the 9/11 call from the day Corey Haim died. He's not breathing, his mother's trying to get help and the 9/11 operator has a speech defect. She's previously reported that it took more than 20 minutes from the time she called until paramedics arrived.

• Speaking of dead celebrities: Peter Graves also died this week, heart attack, age 83. Don't call him Shirley.

• What's weirder than a middle school teacher biting off the ear of a stranger in a diner? The teacher was a woman.

• The answer: A severed head, two severed arms and a leg. The question: What was found on Beer Can Beach on the Feather River in California?

• "For love and stability they turned to their father's old nanny, Marie, an uncompromisingly down-to-earth, one-eyed Swiss peasant who, having lost her own baby, kept a picture of his corpse above their beds." Makes you want to know more about The Dowager Duchess of St. Albans, right?

• A British agency that helps former soldiers find jobs emailed a small business owner to see if he had any jobs available. He replied:

Personally, I'd rather recruit ex-drug dealers, convicts and even child molesters rather than consider anybody who has been in the pay of the British Government. Anybody who has been in the pay of such a military force, and by their silence and complicity has condoned such illegal and immoral actions while accepting a monthly blood-stained pay-packet, certainly will not be considered for employment by us!

I kind of agree with his sentiments about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the soldiers aren't the ones who should be punished.

• Good advice from Fark: Young, black men should avoid changing license plates in public in Carrolton, Texas. Even if they are a car dealer and are required by law to do so after a sale. Trust me on this one.