The Daily Drift

Dang, Minion Be Mad ...!

 

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Today in History

1096		Crusaders under Peter the Hermit reach Sofia in Hungary.
1691		William III defeats the allied Irish and French armies at the Battle of Aughrim, Ireland.
1794		British Admiral Lord Nelson loses his right eye at the siege of Calvi, in Corsica.
1806		The Confederation of the Rhine is established in Germany.
1941		Moscow is bombed by the German Luftwaffe for the first time.
1954		President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposes a highway modernization program, with costs to be shared by federal and state governments.
1957		The U.S. surgeon general, Leroy E. Burney, reports that there is a direct link between smoking and lung cancer.
1974		G. Gordon Liddy, John Ehrlichman and two others are convicted of conspiracy and perjury in connection with the Watergate scandal.
1984		Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale chooses Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.

When the FBI Went After Mad Magazine

Mad magazine would make fun of anyone who was in the public eye, but some of those public figures had no sense of humor. In 1957, the target of one of the magazine’s articles was the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover.

In a memo dated November 30, 1957, an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation identified as “A. Jones” raised an issue of critical importance: "Several complaints to the Bureau have been made concerning the 'Mad' comic book [sic], which at one time presented the horror of war to readers."
Attached to the document were pages taken from a recent issue of Mad that featured a tongue-in-cheek game about draft dodging. Players who earned such status were advised to write to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and request a membership card certifying themselves as a “full-fledged draft dodger.” At least three readers, the agent reported, did exactly that.
Mad, of course, was the wildly popular satirical magazine that was reaching upwards of a million readers every other month. Published by William Gaines, who had already gotten into some trouble with Congress when he was called to testify about his gruesome horror comics in 1954, Mad lampooned everyone and everything. But in name-checking the notoriously humorless Hoover, Gaines had invited the wrong kind of attention.

A visit from the FBI elicited an apology from the magazine, but the Bureau did not seem to realize that you can’t calm a nest of hornets by poking a stick at it. And thus began a back-and-forth battle between the feds and the humor magazine that lasted years.

A Home in a Cliff, Over the Sea, Under a Pool

This home concept from Open Platform for Architecture is embedded in a cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea. The entire house, called Casa Brutale, was designed around the breathtaking view. It is almost flush with the ground- all you see is the pool and a descending staircase. The pool has a glass bottom, so it doubles as a skylight. The entire front is glass, so the sea can be viewed even from the loft bedroom.

After marveling at the stunning design, you have to wonder about the utilities -especially water and sewer. Where do you put your cars? Is there any storage space? What if someone else moved nearby? Would you ever let children in that pool? Who's going to wash the window? How hard would it be to throw someone over that little balcony? See lots more pictures of Casa Brutale at My Modern Met.

Why Did Mechanics In New York's Worst Neighborhood Go On Hunger Strike?

Willet’s Point, often called The Iron Triangle, is a neighborhood in Queens, New York, filled with corrugated metal quonset huts and automotive junkyards. Between Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, and Arthur Ashe Stadium, mechanics and car parts dealers had made their living in Willet’s Point since the 1930s. The city stopped providing services, such as sewers and road repair, decades ago. The blighted neighborhood covers extremely valuable real estate, and the city has tried to move the mechanics out several times. Over the last few years, plans were made and deals struck to move the entire neighborhood to the Bronx, demolish the existing structures, and build high-rise residences and shopping and entertainment complexes in their stead.

Under an agreement with the administration, the city’s Economic Development Corporation would actually give the mechanics $4.8 million to facilitate moving the entire Willets Point community to the South Bronx. The would-be developer of the site, the Queens Development Group, was going to kick in another big chunk of cash, almost a million dollars, to help out as well. The money wouldn’t just pay for the move, it would pay for a legal team at the Urban Justice Center to make sure everything would run smoothly.
And it wasn’t just the money that would be helping the workers of Willets Point. Free English classes and GED classes were offered, along with job training and placement for people who wanted new careers, and referrals to immigration services for those trying to obtain legal status.
Six-hundred and thirty workers eventually signed up for the program, and it was considered, by most (though most certainly not all) accounts, a success.
Not only was the future going to come to Willets Point, but it had already made almost everyone happy before it even got there.
So why were the proprietors and employees of 48 different auto shops now going on their fifth day with nothing but water and occasional mug of herbal tea?

It was a low-level bureaucratic snafu, of course, that stopped all progress. One that would go months without correction, and leave the mechanics in place past their June first move-out deadline. The weak point of the intricate plan ended up dropping the heaviest load on those with the least power to fix it, hence the hunger strike, which at least generated publicity. Read the entire story, including a vivid description of the ugly yet historic Willet’s Point area, at Jalopnik. 

This a Fully-Functioning Winery inside a 550-Square Foot Apartment in Manhattan

Matt Baldassano lives in a little apartment of the East Village of Manhattan. It has 550 square feet of living space, which I suppose isn’t tiny by New York City standards. But most of the space is taken up by his wine processing facility that produces 10 different wines using the 2 tons of grapes that are delivered there. It’s a lot of work, but Baldassano has help. He throws grape-crushing parties to do some of the work:

Twice a year, Matt throws a party where members and invited guests come over to crush. Most of them just grab a box of grapes and throw them into that electric crushing machine. But others take off their shoes and stomp on the grapes, because they’re in the club, and it’s their wine, so they can do what they want. The grapes ferment in vats in the yard for 8-10 days before they get pressed and racked (that’s a fancy way of saying the grape juice gets extracted and put into barrels). Once the wine is in the barrels, he sets the temperature in his apartment to a necessary 66 degrees. Then 10-18 months later, boom, you’ve got matured wine.

You can see more photos of his impressive in-house facility at Thrillist.

Theater-goer jumped on to stage in attempt to charge his phone

An audience member at Thursday’s performance of  Hand to dog at the the Booth Theater in New York, startled crew and fellow theater-goers by climbing on to the stage before the show started.

Once on stage, he tried to plug a cellphone charger into a power point on the show’s set which, it turns out, was fake. Chris York, who was in the audience, said the incident occurred about two minutes before the show was set to begin.
There were no stairs to the stage so to get to it the man had to leap and then walk about 15 feet to the outlet that York said, was “clearly fake”. “The whole thing, it was very bizarre,” York said.

YouTube link.Alternative video link.

At first, people thought it was a part of the show, he said, but once they realized the truth, the audience started laughing and heckling the man, who was in his early 20s. The crew stopped the pre-show music, removed the charger and made an announcement to the audience prohibiting them from charging their phones on stage.

Why Website Redesigns Make You So Angry

It’s a bit jarring when you navigate to a bookmark you use everyday and something totally unfamiliar pops up. That happened just this week at Flavorwire, but it’s happened to almost every site I visit at least once over the last few years. When a popular website updates to a new interface, or even just a new front page design, the immediate and loudest reaction is …complaints. The regular users ask, “What did you do to my website? It’s awful!” Then over time, readers realize that many of the changes made the site more usable and reader-friendly. Flavorwire is less compact now, but easier to read because everything’s bigger. But it was still jarring, just because it's unfamiliar. Anger over the unfamiliar exploded over the new redesign of Seamless, a site where you can order food to be delivered. What regular users don’t like about the new design is immediately apparent, while the really useful improvements take time to explore. And then there’s the 9X effect.

The 9X effect, which seems to have first been described in the early 2000s in a Harvard Business Review essay by John Gourville, works like this: A product’s users overestimate how beautiful and useful the original product was by a factor of three. On the other side, the makers of the product overestimate how beautiful and useful their new product is by three, too.

In the end, the redesign ends up being the focus of intense nostalgia and optimism on both sides—a fiery mix that only time and use seem to really dampen. In some cases, it consumes the new product completely.      

It doesn't help that there are always unforeseen bugs in a new system that take time to work out. Gizmodo explains more about the inevitable anger over website changes in a way that should make any publisher feel a little better about facing that anger when the time comes. 

14 Awesome Abandoned Websites (That Are Still Online)

What happens when someone, or some group, loses interest in maintaining their website? Maybe they take it offline. Maybe they just abandon it, and then it disappears when the bandwidth bills are not paid, the hosting service changes or goes out of business, or the site decays from lack of maintenance. But that doesn’t always happen. Some websites hang around for years, even decades, after they are abandoned, and you can still visit them. The funniest are those that promote or decry something totally obsolete, like the site Internet Explorer is Evil!

As you can guess, the site is dedicated to the evil of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It’s also an epic flashback to what most contemporary websites looked like – the long, long humor lists against the hypnotic, almost psychedelic tiled backgrounds, the rants, the story, the flashing header, and, of course, the obligatory button willing visitors to go get Firefox.
There’s even a walk-through and tutorial on how to remove IE…. from Windows 98. And just in case you’re really old-school, there’s a tutorial for installing Windows 95 without IE, too.

Looking through these old websites is like a trip back in time, and an archive of website design history. We’ve come a long since Angelfire! Aren't you glad that the concept of readability won out over flashing bright colors? You’ll find overviews and links to 14 of these obsolete and abandoned websites at Urban Ghosts.

Glitch

Michigan Judge Sends Three Kids To Jail For Refusing To Visit Their Dad For Lunch

America’s sickening prison culture has even spread to how courts deal with children: Lock them up and ask questions later.

Read more 

Youth Pastor Molested Girl 100’s Of Times

A Missouri youth pastor has been arrested for molesting a girl hundreds of times over the course of five years, yet religio-wingnut “christians”...

But 'Christian' Religio-Wingnuts Say Gays Are Danger To Kids

Anti-Vaxxer Vows Lawsuit After Daughter Gets Vaccinated Behind Her Back; Is Mocked Into Oblivion

On one of link-sharing website Reddit’s more interesting subsections, people from around the world come to ask about legal advice from their fellow...

Anti-Vaxxer Is Mocked Into Oblivion

Panera Bread Manager Punches Female Employee In Face, Slams Her Head-First Into Wall

A Panera Bread manager brutally attacked an employee whom he fired earlier in the day, punching her in the face and then slamming her into a wall face-first. Since he was black, we can pretty much guess how wingnuts reacted to this.

Read more 

Police seek leads in case of stolen nuts

Police in Shelby Township, Michigan, are seeking help in locating 28,000 pounds of stolen nuts.

Late last week a semi-tractor and loaded trailer were stolen. The truck and trailer were recovered in Detroit, but the cargo was missing.
Stolen were 18 pallets (roughly 28,000 pounds) of packaged walnuts and other snack nuts valued at over $128,000.
On Tuesday they issued an appeal for information. They note that the squirrel is not a suspect and request that people don't call in squirrel sightings.

Man who flew in lawn chair attached to helium-filled balloons charged with causing mischief

A man from Calgary, Canada, used helium-filled balloons to fly over the city on Sunday, risking his life to draw attention to his cleaning products company, and also landing himself in trouble with the law.

Daniel Boria, 26, pulled off the potentially deadly stunt by attaching about 110 balloons to a lawn chair. "At one point I was looking up at the balloons, they were popping, the chair was shaking and I was looking down at my feet dangling through the clouds at a 747 flight taking off and a few landing," he said.

YouTube link.

"It was incredible. It was the most surreal experience you can ever imagine. I was just by myself on a $20 lawn chair up in the sky above the clouds." Boria was detained on Sunday evening and released on Monday morning. He has been charged with one count of mischief causing danger to life. "I knew I would get arrested, but I didn't think they would pursue it as heavily as they did," he said.

YouTube link

"I've never done anything wrong before and this was with good intentions." Boria said he sprained his ankle, but was otherwise unharmed. "We did make it as safe as possible for everybody else," he said. "Our end goal was to only put myself in danger." The charge of mischief is related to the lawn chair, which could cause damage or hurt someone when the balloons pop and it falls to the ground, said Insp. Kyle Grant from Calgary police. He expects more charges will be laid under the federal Aeronautics Act.

Parents forced daughter to live in tent in the woods after eating unauthorized Pop-Tart

Two South Carolina parents were arrested  after forcing their 14-year-old daughter to live in a tent in the woods because she ate a Pop-Tart without permission, authorities said. The Sumter County Sheriff's Office said on Tuesday James Driggers, 33, and his wife Crystal Driggers, 36, had been denying their child entrance to their home for two days - and she was expected to remain away from the home for a week.

The child was ordered by her parents to set up a tent, in a wooded area known to have wild hogs, and was provided with only a roll of toilet paper, a flashlight, a whistle, and a watch, police said. The girl was allegedly told by her parents to meet "someone" at a fence on the family's property at specific times during the day if she wanted to receive any food: Her brother delivered her an open can of Spaghetti-Os with a plastic spoon one afternoon, authorities said. The child was also left to fend for herself during severe thunderstorms that hit the town last Thursday night, police said.
The girl's grandmother called police after hearing she was outside on Thursday. The grandmother went out in the rain to take the child to her own home right around the corner, authorities said. After the child was returned home later on Thursday night and police talked with the parents, the child was sent back outside. In a follow-up on Friday afternoon, police discovered the girl had been sent back to the tent, more than a quarter-mile from the home. Investigators also learned that during the previous month, the child had been sent from the home every day at 8am and prohibited to return until 6pm.
"She couldn't return for any reason," Police spokesman Braden Bunch said. "Not to get a drink, not to use the bathroom, nothing." Bunch also said Sumter County had been experiencing heat issues during the month with temperatures regularly surpassing 100 degrees. The Driggers have five other children, four of which were in the home at the time. Those siblings have been placed in the custody of their grandparents while the 14-year-old girl is with the South Carolina Department of Social Services. "We feel very confident that the parents were overstepping their bounds," Bunch said. "From trying to correct a child's behaviour to true criminal punishment." Both parents have been charged with a single count of unlawful neglect of a child and more charges are possible as the investigation continues, police said.

Woman punched mother in eye and attacked boyfriend after he refused to have sex with her

An Augusta woman was arrested after she attacked her boyfriend for refusing to have sex with her.

Tabathia Lee Grooms, 35, came home at around 11:30pm on June 24 and attacked her boyfriend while he was sitting on the couch, according to a Richmond County Sheriff's Office incident report.
She said she was angry that he refused her advances earlier that day, so she scratched him on the face, head and neck, then bit him on the arm. He ran into a bathroom and called 911. When deputies responded to the house, Grooms would not give her name at first and threatened to run over a deputy with a baby stroller.
She admitted she had been drinking. Grooms also punched her 66-year-old mother in the eye during the ordeal, according to the incident report. Grooms was arrested and charged with simple battery family violence. She was booked at the Richmond County jail.

Man charged with battery after accusing ex-wife of cheating on him with sex toy

A Florida man battered his ex-wife after accusing her of cheating on him with a sex toy, according to police who arrested him for domestic battery. As detailed in a probable cause affidavit, Triston Horne, 36, was visiting his former spouse’s Bradenton home last Wednesday when the pair began to argue.

Misty Clark told police that Horne does not live at the residence, though she “does invite him over to the house.” Clark invited Horne over on July 1 to spend the night because “he was going to take her to work” the following day, police noted. While in Clark’s bedroom, the duo quarreled.
When Clark repaired to the bathroom, Horne barged in and “began accusing her of cheating on him. He told her that she was cheating on him with a sex toy,” according to the affidavit. After allegedly twisting Clark’s hand, Horne returned to the bedroom, where he “grabbed Misty’s sex toy and went back to the bathroom.” Horne then "snapped the sex toy in half and walked away."
With the help of her teenage daughter, Clark subsequently pushed Horne out of the residence. Clark told officers that she used to be married to Horne, but “later learned that Triston was already married to another person and that their marriage was null and void.” Horne was arrested on a misdemeanor domestic battery charge. He is being held in the county jail in lieu of $1500 bond.

Man told court he'd been bribed with bacon and cabbage

A 50-year-old man told a court he was “bribed” with the offer of home cooked bacon and cabbage to go to his mother’s house and cut the back lawn. He insisted he ate the meal on the porch and believed he did not breach an order not to enter her home. Donal Cosgrave of Rathmore, Co Kerry, Ireland, was arrested for breach of contravening a barring order on July 1st. Mr Cosgrave was willing to produce the shoes with the grass still on them, to back-up his story, Killarney District Court was told on Tuesday. Mr Cosgrave was arrested for breach of contravening a barring order on July 1st. The order, made in Killarney last April, was that he should not attend the home of his mother. Mr Cosgrave said he only called to his mother’s home in Killarney because she offered to cook him bacon and cabbage if he cut the grass.
In effect it amounted to a bribe because no-one could resist his mother’s cooking, he said. “Was the bacon and cabbage to be given before or after the grass cutting?” Judge James O’Connor enquired. Mr Cosgrave said it was “before”. He said: “You have to have a full stomach for hard work ... I did not enter the house, I ate the bacon and cabbage on the back porch. I did not go into the house.” “And mom gave me some mustard, and a little bit of dessert,” he added.
The court was previously told Mr Cosgrave was originally from the US and has health problems. He had arrived at his solicitor’s office at 8.30am with a pair of sneakers and grass deposits on the runners and he was not sneaky and was telling the truth, he said. Padraig O’Connell, solicitor, told the court the shoes were in an evidence bag, in court. Judge O’Connor adjourned the matter to 21st next but warned his solicitor that Mr Cosgrave “has to stay away completely from the house.”

Woman fined for revealing affair to lover's wife

Telephoning your lover's wife to reveal an affair is a crime. At least according to a ruling by Italy's Court of Cassation. The court upheld a fine given to woman who made anonymous phone calls to her lover's wife, revealing details of their affair.

The woman also told her lover's wife about other extra-marital mischief her husband had been getting up to in Bari and Potenza. The woman was trying to overturn a €400 fine she had received for harassment in Italy's highest court of appeal.
She argued that the telephone calls had lasted a long time and had not been interrupted by the wife, meaning that they had not been unwanted. But the judges decided otherwise.
“This cannot be seen as acquiescence on the wife's part, given the serious nature of what was being revealed. The petulant and disturbing nature of the calls is shown in the anonymous forms they took." A 2010 study found that 45% of women and 55% of men engaged in extra-marital affairs in Italy

Chainsaw road rage man given absolute discharge after pleading guilty

Manuel Delisle, accused in a bizarre road rage incident involving a chainsaw in Quebec, Canada, was handed an absolute discharge after pleading guilty on Tuesday.

Delisle was charged with armed assault following a confrontation last April in St-Jérôme, north of Montreal. In a cellphone video taken of the incident, the 37-year-old can be seen approaching a vehicle, swearing and revving a chainsaw.
The outburst came after a family had followed his car to try to get the license plate number because he appeared to be driving erratically. When Delisle reached the end of a dead-end street, he got out of his car and threatened the family with a chainsaw.

LiveLeak link.

In court, Quebec Court Judge Jean La Rue granted Delisle an absolute discharge following his guilty plea. He said the victims in the case were also partially to blame. No one was injured in the incident. Delisle was previously suspended with pay from his job as a pruner with the city of Montreal. He had been an auxiliary employee with Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough on and off since 2006.

Shoe

Naked man thrown from horse says he was conducting a ritual in memory of his dead father

A man injured in a naked horse ride in County Down, Northern Ireland, last week has said he was conducting a ritual in memory of his dead father. Tomas Finnegan, 53, said that he was carrying out an act of remembrance when he fell in a field near Castlewellan Forest Park, breaking his arm and dislocating his shoulder.

“I was doing a ceremony for my father the night that I hurt my arm - it was a ceremony of remembrance in a sacred place to me,” he said. “So I did the ceremony and these horses were in the field, the horse that I tried to ride was rubbing its nose up and down my back. I’ve ridden horses all my life and I thought this horse has been ridden before and it’s looking to be ridden.” He added: “I ended up on the horse and the horse bolted because it hadn’t been broken.”
Tomas, who works as an artist, suffered a badly broken arm and a dislocated shoulder and had to be rescued by the police and ambulance service after his adventure. “I shouted for help and lay in that field for three hours,” he said. Tomas, originally from Kircubbin, got the idea for the ceremony after spending time at a spiritual community based at an eco-village in Scotland. “I did a healing thing with them earlier in the year.
"At some point I was to find a sacred spot of my own to do something for my father and my father’s father,” explained Tomas. Tomas said he grew extremely close to his father, also called Tomas and the former owner of Finnegan’s Bar in Kircubbin, as he cared for him before his death from cancer four years ago. The owner of the field recalled the strange incident. Patsy King, was alerted by the police who wanted access to his field to help an injured man. Describing the scene, Patsy said: “He (Tomas) was lying along the wall, completely starkers and there was a police woman shining a torch on him while the ambulance crew were treating him.”

Fishermen surprised to catch wild boar several kilometers out at sea

Two fishermen in Whitianga, New Zealand, nailed a massive 63kg catch, but it was a bit hairier than they'd bargained for.

Glen Dobbs and a friend, named only as Adrian, were out fishing in a tournament over the weekend when they encountered a wild boar swimming a few kilometres off the coast of the Coromandel town. They were cruising along on their way to a fishing spot when they noticed a black shape bobbing up and down right in front of them and it was the pig swimming way out in the ocean.
Luckily they had a solid hull because they hit the pig doing about 15-20 knots. It floated up behind the boat and they turned around and went back. The baffled pair struggled to haul the tired animal out of the water, before putting it out of its misery with a fishing knife. Once the bewilderment wore off, they set to gutting it in the hope of keeping the meat.
"As soon as we gutted it and chucked all of that over, heaps of sharks came around and that was the end of the fishing," he said. "We put up with the smell for a couple of hours, and in the end, I said, mate, we've got to chuck the rest over. I've been fishing heaps and I've never seen anything like it," Mr Dobbs said. The pig didn't win the men the competition

Hunt on for single queen bee that is on the loose in Australia

The hunt is on for a single queen bee that has the potential to cause big problems for the agricultural sector in northern Australia. The Asian honey bee is a notifiable pest in the Northern Territory. The queen was part of a hive that was discovered in a campervan being trucked from Cairns to Darwin. The bees can carry the destructive varroa mite, however tests carried out on the destroyed hive show the mite was not present.

The mites, which attach themselves to bees and suck their blood can cause diseases and viruses, and are known to kill entire bee colonies and spread to others. Stephen West, chief plant health manager for the Northern Territory Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries (DPIF), said the swarm of Asian honey bees was killed by biosecurity staff in Darwin, but the queen was nowhere to be found.
"It's a matter of how that journey went for the queen, what condition she was in when they arrived, and that swarm that's moved off with her, the strength of those bees as well, and how quickly they can find a food source. If she's here we need to find her and we need to eradicate her. We need to do it as quickly as we can." Mr West said laboratory testing showed the bees that had made the journey from Cairns were not carrying varroa mite. "Australia is one of the last remaining countries in the world that does not have varroa mite."
Mr West said an Asian honey bee population has been established in Cairns since 2007 but ongoing biosecurity efforts have prevented their spread into the Northern Territory. He said the Asian honey bees are more aggressive than the European honey bee that most Australians are familiar with. "Their swarms will move into places such as letter boxes. They'll move into hollows and take the place of bird nesting spots and possums." The DPIF is asking for assistance from anyone who works in the East Arm precinct in Darwin to be on the lookout for any honey bee activity and immediately report any sightings to NT Quarantine on the exotic plant pest hotline.
There's an audio interview with Stephen West here.

This Dog Bed Is Designed to Simulate a Human Lap

My Papillon will crawl onto any open lap that he can find. He’s bred to be a lapdog, so it’s what he expects. Perhaps this new bed design by the Japanese pet supply company Unihabitat will be an adequate substitute when a real lap isn’t available. It contains gel-filled packets arranged like a pair of human thighs. Think of it as the canine equivalent of this home mainstay:

Dog got too close to newly painted fire hydrant

A little dog in Brampton, Southern Ontario, Canada, got more than he bargained for when he attempted to carry out a time-honored canine tradition on Monday.

Louie, a seven-month-old Shih Tzu, was out for a walk in Springdale with his owner Puneet when he found a choice fire hydrant upon which to mark his territory.
Little did he know, the hydrant had recently received a fresh coat of bright red paint from the city, though there was no sign visible, Puneet said. When Louie went leave his mark, the long-suffering hydrant returned the favor, leaving him with a bright streak of red on his white coat.
After a wash to try and remove the paint, the puppy’s coat retained a hue of pink, Puneet said. The city apologized for the incident, but declined to pay for a grooming, Puneet said. He said the dog will likely get a haircut to snip away the pinkish hair.

Python made high-wire escape bid along telephone line after slipping out of window

A python was caught making a bid for freedom across a telephone wire 20ft up in the air. The python's high-wire escape act was spotted over a quiet residential street in North Wales by worried neighbors.
Police say the Burmese python escaped its tank and managed to climb out of the upstairs window before slithering along the telephone wire at a property in Anglesey. The Burmese python was photographed mid-flight by Sergeant Rob Taylor.
Sgt Taylor, from North Wales Police's rural crime unit, said the Asian python managed to make it across the wire to the opposite house and was halfway down the drainpipe before it was captured. "The vast majority of people who own reptiles keep them in secure tanks - but for those who don't this is a timely reminder to do so," he said.
The Burmese python is native to a large variation of tropic and subtropic areas of Southern and Southeast Asia. They often live near water but are good climbers and can be found in the treetops of jungles catching birds. Special care is required when handling them as a three-meter long Burmese python is capable of killing a child and a five-meter long snake is capable of overpowering and killing a fully grown adult. The python, who has not been named, was returned safely to his owner with advice on keeping him secure.

Animal Pictures