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 It is 10 o'clock on a Saturday night.  I have been relaxing after a 250 mile trip to watch an eight man football game in Fresno County.  My 17 teen year old is in the hallway trying not to throw up as he listens to my side of a phone conversation.  On the phone with me is my first born son. My 280 pound six foot four, former football lineman, championship wrestler, college rugby playing baby boy....in tears.  I cannot understand anything he says. I ask if there is something wrong with his dog, Banana, my grand puppy. I can make out a yes. And that she's been hit by a car. As he begins to compose himself I can make out further details.  Apparently he has just gotten back from the emergency vet.  About two hours earlier two high school girls on their way to their second (maybe third) party of the night blew through a stop sign and hit his dog as she and my son were crossing the street.  The girls were drunk. Too drunk to even think they did anything wrong.  "We're cool, right?"  they ask, giggling when the dog gets up and barks wildly at them.  He is too upset to think about getting a license plate number.  He is too mad to even look at the young idiots while his friends chastise them for their stupidity. "She's ok and we gotta go. We're late for our party,"  they tell his friends as my son checks Banana for wounds. They leave before anyone can call the police or find out their names.  Just another drunk rookie driver and her friend  menacing the streets on a Saturday night.  If you don't actually know could you please ask your barely old enough to drive daughter what she and her friend did last night?  Check the front of your SUV for any signs of blood or brown fur.  If you find any you need to hug your brat and thank God (or whoever) that she made it home without killing herself, her friend, or any other folks innocently using the roadways.  Then you should ground her snotty clueless butt from EVERYTHING and start saving some money for when she gets arrested for DUI.  Maybe you should set aside some funds for the inevitable lawsuits and her funeral expenses too. 

Every day I read many online newspapers.  One of my favorites is the Billings Gazette.    The news items that I found most interesting this week concern an  illegal immigrant  that has been living in California  who faces deportation because of driving the wrong direction   http://www.billingsgazette....   http://www.billingsgazette.... and a freak accident  involving a tree branch http://www.billingsgazette....    The pictures are interesting also although some folks complained they were too shocking.  What other online newspapers do you enjoy reading? 

What is the proper etiquette when starting a blog about a current event?  If you wish to include phrases about the topic copied from another website I thought that the phrases should be in quotation marks and that web addresses should be included.  If a person posts whole paragraphs written by someone else don't they have to at least mention that these are not their original thoughts and words.  Shouldn't  credit be given where credit is due?  Sometimes the blogs I read here at TBC seem to be similarly worded as news items I have read elsewhere online. What is the correct way to include phrases in your blog that did not originate with yourself?   I always appreciate a clickable link so that I can read the entire article from which the quotes came.  That way I can make sure they were not taken out of context.  What do you think?  Am I being too picky? 

There are many things I like about the Internet.  One of its big perks is that people can read online newspapers from other towns, states, and countries from the comfort of their homes. This gives us all a chance to learn things that we might have missed by only reading our local newspapers. For example  did you know that  "Homeland Security doesn't make mistakes" ?   At least that is what they told one tax payer from Nipomo. I wanted to share this story that I read in Today's Tribune Newspaper from San Luis Obispo.   http://www.sanluisobispo.co...    The article, Bill Morem: Nipomo man caught in a Kafka-like nightmare, details the hassles experienced by an US Army veteran who has been trying to straighten out his citizenship issues since 2003.  I think you may find it interesting.    The article ends with this.  "Here’s the bottom line: John De Sousa has been a good, honest and earnest individual in pursuit of his citizenship. A homeowner and taxpayer, he’s a decorated, disabled American vet who has served his country through the military and the sweat of his brow. And this is how our government rewards such an individual?"  

If you plan on attending the town hall-style meeting on health care reform hosted by Bakersfield's Congressman Kevin McCarthy ( Locals want bigger venue for health care town hall  )  what questions do you plan on asking?    I am concerned about oversight and fraud abatement procedures.  We have been hearing about Medicare fraud for decades.  How can we be assured that our tax dollars will be doled out more honestly and fraud free with this proposed expanded government supported health care? Greed seems to be incurable.

 More Than 30 Arrested in Nationwide Medicare Fraud Sweep ...     38 Individuals Arrested For Alleged $142M In Medicare Fraud        Dozens arrested for $50M in alleged Medicare fraud schemes ... 

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I was searching the NPR website for a quote  and I found instead this item about  The long awaited romance of "the rarest living creature,"  A Galapagos Tortoise named---"Lonesome George is the only known living Geochelone abigdoni tortoise in the world. He is estimated to be between 90 and 100 years old. Scientists say that's actually the sexual peak for giant tortoises. They can live to be 150."  The rest of the story can be found here.   http://www.npr.org/template...    I will continue to look for that other news item.  In the mean time enjoy this other news about 90 year old George and his (maybe) father to be status.

Looking at the wierd news on the internet I ran across this http://billingsgazette.com/...      I thought it was funny.  

A New Hampshire man says he swiped his debit card at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes and was charged over 23 quadrillion dollars.

Josh Muszynski (Moo-SIN'-ski) checked his account online a few hours later and saw the 17-digit number _ a stunning $23,148,855,308,184,500 (twenty-three quadrillion, one hundred forty-eight trillion, eight hundred fifty-five billion, three hundred eight million, one hundred eighty-four thousand, five hundred dollars).

Muszynski says he spent two hours on the phone with Bank of America trying to sort out the string of numbers and the $15 overdraft fee.  

The bank corrected the error the next day.

Bank of America tells WMUR-TV only the card issuer, Visa, could answer questions. Visa, in turn, referred questions to the bank.

Many of you bloggers have commented in the past about the stress and sadness of having a lost pet.   Lt. Dan DeSousa of San Diego County's Animal Services Department reports that they have a male Saluki dog at their shelter.  This dog has a microchip indicating it came from Saudi Arabia. He is assuming the dog was brought to the US by someone in the military. Please read the following from AOL news.  If you know any military families mention this to them.  Maybe the owner can be found that belongs to this dog.   http://news.aol.com/article...    Thanks.

There was an interesting report today on Yahoo about a college student who wrote something in Wikipedia that was untrue. "When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news." You can read about it here http://finance.yahoo.com/ne...

"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.

"It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done, and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so," she wrote. 

Mr Fitzgerald says, I didn't want to be devious. I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."      

This next part is enlightening. Fitzgerald "warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote."

I found it comforting to learn that at least the Wikipedia administrators  "twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it."

Nazita Aminpour is suing Chase bank for telling her husband, David Shamash, about her secret account