Brickbats

Police in Vista, California, burst into Mario Balcazar Suarez's home at 5:25 a.m. and ransacked the place looking for drugs. The raid was prompted by the arrest for drug possession of a former tenant. (The man's driver's license still showed his old address.) When told that Balcazar Suarez was upset by the treatment he received, a spokesman for the Vista police told the Los Angeles Times, "I don't think they have a complaint.…We did do some damage…but the law allows us to break and enter."

The recent trial of S&L kingpin Charles Keating revealed that his company once spent $1,948 on Silly String for an office Christmas party.

The director of the upcoming Lethal Weapon III—the latest in the ultraviolent series featuring Danny Glover and Mel Gibson's butt—has decided against using General Motors automobiles in the film because G.M. uses animals in safety tests. The film presumably will instead depict the bloody deaths of dozens of Ford drivers.

And in Montana, Robert Redford has just wrapped up filming on A River Runs Through It, a film about the joys of fly fishing. In deference to animal-rights activists, Redford did not actually catch any fish. The "fish" tugging on actors' lines were really plastic bottles half-filled with water and placed under surfaces of the streams. Stunt fish were used for closeups, but Humane Society officials were on hand to make sure the animals weren't traumatized by being handled.

In Telluride, Colorado, environmentalists protested the construction of a new golf course by burning diatribes against the owner into the greens with chemicals. Funny, I remember when environmentalists used to protest chemical spills, not make them.

In Mobile, Alabama, a man has entered a conditional guilty plea to charges that he plotted to eliminate the Alabama red-bellied turtle from the wild. The man planned to get a federal grant to reintroduce the species.

In Kankakee, Illinois, a man was arrested for making a deposit at the bank. The man had two identical bags in his car when he pulled into the drive-in window. One contained money; the other, marijuana. He put the wrong one into the pneumatic tube.

A longtime REASON reader wants to thank the U.S. Postal Service for recently delivering his May 1985 issue.

Meanwhile, the Postal Service lost the entire shipment of the November issue of the New Hampshire Public Television programming guide. Viewers should get the guides around the middle of 1998.

Social workers in Canton, Ohio, took Raymond McIntosh's four daughters away from him because the girls had cavities. Charging McIntosh with abuse for neglecting his daughters' teeth, social workers returned the girls only after McIntosh produced their dental records, showing that they did indeed make regular visits to the dentist.

The musical group New Kids on the Block apparently has a friend in the Daytona Beach, Florida, sheriff's department. A deputy there arrested a motorist for violating state laws against obscene bumper stickers. The man's sticker read: NEW KIDS SUCK.

And in Palm Beach, Florida, the thong wars have taken a new twist. Longtime Brickbats readers will know that certain residents of that fair county have been trying to bar the lovely ladies operating sidewalk hotdog stands from wearing thong bikinis at work. County officials have given preliminary approval to a statute that will outlaw "G-strings, thongs, pasties, and socks." Socks, you ask? Lest you be alarmed that people with naked feet will be allowed to sell wieners, the law adds parenthetically "(For covering male genitalia)."