Funny article in the Providence Journal about eight guys who built and lived in a small apartment within the Providence Place Mall parking garage for four years:

The apartment, which was relatively soundproof, contained a sectional sofa, a love seat, a coffee table, a breakfast table with four chairs, lamps, a throw rug, a hutch and paintings on the walls. Although the group had bold improvement plans, the apartment lacked running water, a refrigerator and a toilet.

Chief McIlwaine, of the Utica police, is very confident that Charles O’Rourke, alias Roarke, is the masked robber who “held up” Night Agent Barger, of the West Shore Road, on March 14, and shot and robbed Messenger Leake on Wednesday night.

No relation to me. This is from the April 3, 1887 edition of the New York Times. Very cool that they’ve opened up a huge amount of their archives for free. Also cool that I have a kickass murderin’ no-good namesake.

As everyone interested knows by now, Steve Jobs posted an open letter promising a $100 store credit to anyone who bought an iPhone at its original purchase prices of $499 and $599.

Classy move by Apple, but I still maintain that the company had no legal, moral, or ethical obligation to do this. It’s clearly a smart move from a PR standpoint; they don’t want the backlash from early adopters to start getting mass-media coverage and distract from their new product rollout. What’s a shame is that so many early adopters threatened to create that backlash. Do everyone a favor and sit out the next time a new product is released.

There was an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal Saturday (subscription required). John Semmens, a research fellow at the Independent Institute and a research project manager in the Arizona Department of Transportation, suggests that we should have auto insurance companies in charge of checking people’s driving qualifications instead of the state DMV. The idea is that, since they have a profit motive to keep unsafe drivers off the streets, they’ll do a better chance of weeding out the unsafe than the state, most of whose DMVs are basically making sure you’re not legally blind and can get the car out of park.

I think it’s a great idea in concept, but can you imagine the mock outrage that will erupt when grandma is rejected for her license by the big evil insurance companies? Americans don’t look at the ability to drive their cars as a privilege, even though that’s exactly what it is; they regard it as a right, and they’ll never allow that right to be regulated by insurance companies.

I’d like to think that if the captain of Comair Flight 5191 wasn’t dead and the co-pilot wasn’t recovering from his serious injuries, they’d have put the brakes on this stupidity and taken the blame that they deserve for their mistake. Their wives are suing the airport, Jeppesen, the FAA, and the squirrels who looked at the pilots wrong as they taxied to the wrong runway, failed to check their compass against their assigned runway heading, and then failed to abort the takeoff in a timely and safe manner.

This reminds me of the accident at Westerly, Rhode Island that was a battle of the stupids — Stupid #1 taxied onto a runway with an aircraft on short final, and then Stupid #2 continued to land on that runway, despite the presence of another aircraft. Their widows then commenced suing each other, the airport, the FAA, the state of Rhode Island, et cetera. Pilots make mistakes, and sometimes with tragic results. The tragedy is only compounded when their families try to lay the blame where it doesn’t belong, harming the aviation economy for everybody else.

Note to my family: if I crash and die, and it’s even the least bit attributable to error on my part (which it will be — almost every general aviation crash is), please do not sue anybody. Do not compound the injury to my piloting memory by engaging in totally frivolous lawsuits that harm the rest of the aviation community. Thanks.

See here.  And yet Lindsay Lohan gets a slap on the wrist for her nth case of DUI and possession of cocaine.  It’s an odd world we live in.