August 13 - 19, 2009editorial@boulderweekly.comKitty porn People have been placing the blame on their pets for years: The dog ate my homework. The ferret lost my jewelry. The canary took all the oxygen in the coal mine.
But one man in Florida has taken pet scapegoating to a new level. Keith Griffin of Jensen Beach, Fla., is facing 10 counts of possession of child pornography. Detectives recently found more than 1,000 images on his computer that were assessed as child porn. But Griffin has an explanation for the images. His defense? The cat did it.
Griffin has told investigators that he had been downloading music when his cat jumped onto the keyboard, and its menacing kitty paws started pecking away at the keys. Griffin then claims he left the room, and returned to find “strange things” on his computer.
We all know that cats are fairly independent creatures that can be mischievous, and oftentimes immoral. But not even the evil Smurf-hating Azrael would stoop so low as to look for child porn.
We performed an experiment at Boulder Weekly to see if the scenario that Jensen proposed was possible. We released a dozen feral felines in our editor’s office to determine if they would start looking up offensive material on her computer. They illegally downloaded several Stray Cats songs onto her iTunes and scratched a message about Meow Mix onto her desk, but there was no underage pornography to be found.
A lot of bull Colorado ranchers are struggling to stop the spread of a sexually transmitted disease called trichomoniasis (or “trich”), which can cause infected cows to lose their calves. The disease is not harmful to humans who consume infected meat, but it could be devastating for ranchers who depend on the continued growth of the herd for their livelihood.
Bulls are the primary carriers of trich, and they remain infected for life, although they show no signs of the disease. Part of the problem is that Colorado grazing laws permit cattle to co-mingle, which allows infected bulls to spread trich to other herds.
Of course, it’s typical male behavior. The dude runs around the pasture, mounting every pretty female in sight, not pausing to consider the ramifications of his promiscuity. Afterwards, he grazes for a while, takes a nap, and then starts the process all over again.
But we can’t blame the bull entirely in this particular case. After all, if you throw a horny male in with a giant harem of sexy females with large udders, what do you think is going to happen? Bovine do not have thumbs, which makes putting on condoms extremely difficult, and they’re still teaching abstinence-only out on the prairie.
However, we suggest the ranchers use an old trick for stopping sexual intercourse: move the bull to the suburbs, get him some mindless job as a corporate functionary, and convince him to become monogamous. After that, he’ll only want to have sex on major holidays and following the Super Bowl.
Knife vs. gun vs. head-butt Remember when you were a kid and your brother tried to beat you up? He was bigger than you and had a better chance of hurting you. After all, you only had a couple ways of defending yourself. You could scratch him — only sometimes effective. You could bite — this worked well if you picked the right spot. Or you could pull out the big one: the head-butt. If you caught him off guard, this move would often send him to the ground.
So you can see how you might revert back to this kind of thinking if you were confronted with a situation in which your opponent is bigger or has better weapons than you.
Perhaps that’s what happened when John Abram Smith was arrested Saturday on suspicion of second-degree assault of a peace officer, two counts of felony menacing and resisting arrest.
The 38-year-old homeless man apparently pulled a knife on two different people on a bike path near the intersection of 13th Street and Arapahoe Avenue. He allegedly showed his pocketknife and demanded that each of the men return his backpack to him. Both men said that they had no backpack and didn’t know what he was talking about.
When the officers who responded put Smith in the patrol car, he apparently tried to bite the closest officer, then head-butted her.
It seems clear that this man was not of the soundest mind, but we’re thinking maybe he just thought that the officer was going to try to beat him up like his big brother used to do. And really, a pocketknife doesn’t have anything on police guns, right?
