Seattle's ambitious Office of Arts & Culture has allocated $10,000 this year to pay a poet or writer to create a work while present on the city's Fremont Bridge drawbridge. The office's deputy director told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in January that the city wants to encourage "public art" and that the grant will oblige the recipient to create a work of prose or poetry from the bridge's northwest tower, to help the people of Seattle understand the function of art in the city. (The artist will not be "in residence," for the tower has no running water.)

New world order

In its brand-new communications stylebook this year for city workers, San Diego officials noted that the city's then-upcoming Presidents' Day announcements should, to be bias-free and inoffensive, never refer to America's "Founding Fathers" — even though they were all males — but only to "founders."

Bright ideas

The roadside billboard giant Clear Channel Outdoor Americas announced in February that it would soon be recording the cellphone locations of drivers who pass the company's signs in 11 cities in order to give advertisers more information on how to pitch products to people with those particular travel patterns and behaviors. Clear Channel asserts that no individual identifications would be sought, but privacy advocates fret about potential abuses, and even a Clear Channel executive acknowledged that the program "does sound a bit creepy." (On the other hand, as Clear Channel pointed out to the New York Times, cellphone users' locations and characteristics are already being extensively monitored by advertisers.)

Not the usual suspects

A then-married couple, both graduates of elite California law schools, were convicted of felonies and went to jail briefly two years ago for a criminal scheme inexplicably tawdry — and in February 2016 lost a resultant lawsuit for $5.7 million to the scheme's victim. A woman at their child's school had referred to the lawyers' son as "slow," enraging Kent Easter (University of California at Berkeley) and then-wife, Jill (UCLA), who retaliated by planting drugs and paraphernalia in Kelli Peters' car and then, a man identified via circumstantial evidence as Kent, called in a DWI tip to police, resulting in Peters' arrest. According to Peters, neither perpetrator has ever expressed remorse, and although Kent admitted to "stupidity," he now complains that Peters does not deserve her windfall (like a "Powerball winner," he said).

Didn't think it through

Simon Chaplin, 62, thought he had cleverly evaded police near Hebron, England, recently (thus avoiding a speeding ticket) by employing a do-it-yourself, James Bond-style smoke screen device on his Peugeot sedan, facilitating a smoggy getaway. Initially, baffled police officers were forced to hang back, but as the haze broke, they merely followed the smoke trail up ahead and caught Chaplin.

The man who tried to vandalize a cafe in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, in February got away, but surveillance video showed that, in dousing the outside of the building with fire accelerant, he had also doused his own shoes and was spotted running off with his feet on fire.

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