mugshot of 31-year-old Daniel Wood

Some people have no compassion.

I mean, here was 31-year-old homeless victim of Capitalist Imperialism Daniel Wood, minding his own business, merely hassling a few customers for spare change outside a shop in Lancaster, Ohio, when along come the local gendarmes to interfere with Mr. Wood’s preferred means of acquiring income. When the structurally disenfranchised Wood, understandably enough, protested his oppression, the police zapped him with a taser. Unfortunately, Mr. Wood had been not long previously been seeking spiritual illumination, huffing keyboard cleaner. Chances are, Mr. Wood had inadvertently spilled a certain amount of toluene on his clothing, because the spark from the police officer’s taser unhappily caused Mr. Wood to burst into flame.

Can you imagine? Fox News and Crunch Gear were actually heartless enough to find an incident like this funny.

Sensitive Foster Kamer, at Gawker, on the other hand, shed one exquisite tear, and complained that he found contemplating the mugshot of Daniel Wood (who was promptly extinguished, and then booked, by police) “sad and spiritually emptying.”

I found this on Pat Burns’s blog today. The original source seems to be Comedy.com back in February.

When a BMW Z4 hits a deer at 140 mph (225.3 kph), this is what happens.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

South Africa’s Kevin Richardson is following in the footsteps of such other renowned animal behaviorists as Timothy Treadwell.

2:41 video

Hat tip to Gwynnie.

Timothy Treadwell

Randall Hoven, stirred by liberal rhetoric about “reality-based” policies, cites a long and amusing list of counter-examples.

Giuseppina Pasqualino

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

The encierro (bull run) of San Sebastián de los Reyes, held annually at the end of August, is ranked the second most popular in Spain, right after the encierro of San Fermin held a month earlier at Pamplona.

A (typically unidentified) video of the 2005 disaster in which 63 people were injured is circulating currently as an Internet curiosity.

2:15 video

Hat tip to JonHenke.

Described as somewhere in China, it’s really a neglected suspension bridge, constructed in the 1950s (and not recently repaired) located in the Akaiski Mountains of Southern Japan. It’s called Musou Tsuribashi.

6:31 video

One wonders if the videographer came back the same way.

29-year old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, a Canadian citizen from Ottawa of Somali origin, was found deceased in his room at the Burnsley Hotel in downtown Denver, about four blocks from the State Capitol.

The cause of death remains to be determined, but the pound (.45 kg.) of Sodium Cyanide found by authorities next to the body may provide an important clue.

A suspicion person might conjecture that the late Mr. Dirie was visiting Denver in connection with some kind of plans related to the upcoming Democrat Party Convention, taking place August 25-28, and that the unlucky, or possibly maladroit Mr. Durie, while examining or otherwise manipulating the cyanide compound he had brought along for reasons of his own, met with an unhappy accident when he breathed in its vapors or somehow contacted the very dangerous chemical with his bare skin.

Mr. Dirie’s death (now being described as a suicide) somehow reminds me of the 2005 “suicide” of Joel Henry Hinrichs III, an engineering student with a Pakistani roommate who mysteriously chose to kill himself with a bomb containing the highly unstable and explosive compound triacetone triperoxide, in the very near vicinity of a football stadium where a game was being played with more than 80,000 people in attendance.

Fascinating, isn’t it, the way some people choose to commit suicide using very much the kinds and quantities of materials suitable for use in mass terrorism attacks in locations suspiciously close to suitable targets?

A reader sent Steve Bodio this picture with the title: “Why City People Shouldn’t Move to the Country.”

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I see this, and think immediately: “California!”

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Hat tip to Karen K. Myers.

Allahu Akhabar! Rusty Shackleford has an (inadvertently very funny) Islamist recruitment 0:36 video. They would never recruit Ace with this one.

Hat tip to Dr. Mercury.

Things went wrong for 19-year-old Cameron Sands of Fort Worth on Tuesday. Upon breaking into a house in Grand Prairie, Sands found himself confronted by the homeowner. News reports are conflicting. Some say that he fired unsuccessfully at the homeowner. Others say that he merely brandished a gun. In any case, either while drawing his pistol from the waistband of his trousers, or while holstering it after taking a pot shot at the robbery victim, Mr. Sands mishandled his weapon and shot himself in the lower abdomen. Police arrived to find Mr. Sands had succumbed to his injury just outside the house.

Dallas Morning News

Pegasus News

MyFox Dallas

Rodion Medvedev picks the 13 “most irresponsible” self defense gadgets.

How about a flashlight which doubles as a single-shot .410 shotgun? The catch is: It fires out the rear, so that when you are using it as a flashlight, the business end of the shotgun is pointing in your direction.