The California man who hid for 6 months in a secret room inside Circuit City
sfgate.comI once had a teaching job around 100 miles away from where I lived. I taught two days in a row so it made sense to stay overnight. Rather than rent a room I hid out overnight in an windowless store room. Personal hygiene was the first victim, but as I was teaching a smelly subject (painting) no one seemed to notice.
You normally don't start to smell from one skipped shower if you bring clean cloths (mainly underwear) and can spritz some water in your face in toilets. Having Shorter hair and brushing your teeth at say the toilet sink would help as well.
> can spritz some water in your face in toilets
I personally prefer spritzing my face with a faucet instead of a toilet.
English as a first vs second language in action! Also, much of the European world refers to a "powder room" as a toilet, which generally might only include the toilet bowl as well as a small sink for handwashing.
Toilet like many words has several definitions. 2. A room or booth containing such an apparatus. 3. The act or process of dressing or grooming oneself.
Key hint to definition was: 'toilet sink' See also: Eau de toilette
"Powder room" doesn't always need a toilet, but they usually do. The essential hardware of a "powder room" is some kind of mirror and a sink. They were the spaces for guests to get cleaned up and get their makeup and wigs right. These days its pretty much a synonym for a half-bath, but a half-bath always has a toilet.
Guily as charged - I should have payed more attention to my wording.
Which European language has this expression?
Danish, Dutch: toilet, Estonian: tualett, Finnish: toiletti, French: toilette, German: Toilette, Greek: τουαλέτα, Hungarian: toalett, Italian: toilette, Latvian: tualete, Lithuanian: tualetas, Maltese: toilet, Norwegian: toalett, Polish: toaleta, Portuguese: tolaete, Romanian: toaletă, Russian and basically every other Slavic language: туалет, Swedish: toalett, Turkish: tuvalet, Welsh: toiled
assuming Wiktionary can be trusted on all of these
Honourable mention to the incomparable Scots language for "cludgie"!
> Also, much of the European world refers to a "powder room" as a toilet
OK, now I get it that I misunderstood the comment! I thought that "powder room" was supposed to be a word in Europe.
Toilet and its variants - of course.
Thanks!
BTW for French it will be the plural "toilettes", the singular form means "the action of washing yourself"
British English.
The comment mentioned "much of the European world" :)
Or water closet (WC)
> As Allen approached the dark spot, he saw a makeshift door, painted to blend in with the wall. Inside, he discovered the lair.
This story reminds me of the movie "Inside Man" [1], where a bank robber hides with the loot behind a fake wall in the bank, until the police investigation is done, and he can just walk out.
It would be super interesting if this man's psychoanalysis' notes are ever published. Did he ever think that he would be re-integrated back to society? Was he planning to steal someone's identity? Was he planning to live like this forever? Was he planning to build "a cabin in the woods" (Walden) and move there at a later age? What was his plan for when he reached the age of 60-70? A robbery of $100k isn't 'enough'. Was he plan to keep robbing once-per-year?
I think the 'I lost focus' is very accurate and describes a lot on his life. At least he didn't kill anyone. I hope he finds the peace he needs.
I know a lot of people who are not planning ahead for old age. The Venn diagram of people who cannot think ahead and people who are incarcerated has a lot of overlap.
> After rounding up the employees, he would direct them to grab their jackets before herding them into the walk-in freezer. Once they were locked inside, he raided the store, then called police to alert them to the frigid workers.
Aren't freezers designed to be very easy to get out of from the inside? Is there something I'm missing about confining people in a freezer? Maybe it blocks cell reception or he's blocking the doors
As OrigamiPastrami notes there are real accidental deaths in specific freezers.
That said most freezers by law have an internal quick release that should work even if there's a padlock through the secure holes on the outside latch.
It's probable he has barricaded the door with something heavy and told the people inside that the first one out the door will be shot dead.
Quora suggested jamming the extraction fans to stop the freezer working and potentially triggering a service alarm should the quick release not work:
https://www.quora.com/What-if-I-accidentally-ended-up-locked...
https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1chqvq7/til_...
This was on the front page of reddit today.
That is an interesting discussion. I'd go for a small door (opaque)/large window (transparent) that one can from the inside. A large triple glazed window ON the door (a smaller door ON a bigger door), a red/yellow light switch, a elevator-like ring/bell, a walkie-talkie permanently installed inside, a staff-count every 30mins. And then I am thinking that after 2-3 weeks all the people-dependent solutions would be abandoned...
No one is going to buy a fridge that expensive.
Yes, I would assume he blocked the door from the outside, otherwise no need to call the police.
No he didn't. He squatted in an abandoned store, went about town, joined a church, and had a (seemingly) pretty serious relationship. Headline makes it sound like he's Ceiling Cat, but with more stealth ninja.
From the article:
> Over the course of seven months, the Roofman hit over 40 restaurants, mostly McDonald’s franchises, for a total score of $100,000. Armed with a gun and power tools, he drilled through the roof. Then, he would drop down from the ceiling, sometimes as far as 14 feet, and begin the holdup.
I would probably never use the term “ceiling cat” unprompted, but if there was ever a person to which the term could be applied, it’s this guy. Not in the spying sense you’re implying, but clearly acclimated to ceilings
Clearly my double meaning was missed.
By the headline, I was surprised Circuit City was still business, but then saw that this actually occurred in 2004.
It was already abandoned by that point too.
> Manchester was sentenced to a staggering 45 years in prison for robbing the two McDonald’s, primarily due to kidnapping charges for each employee.
If judges interpret the law so strictly, why don't we replace them by computers?
Kidnapping is defined for Federal purposes in https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1201
"Whoever unlawfully seizes, confines, inveigles, decoys, kidnaps, abducts, or carries away and holds for ransom or reward or otherwise any person..."
Locking people in a walk-in is pretty clearly "confines".
For North Carolina's purpose: https://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySec...
"Any person who shall unlawfully confine, restrain, or remove from one place to another, any other person 16 years of age or over without the consent of such person, ... shall be guilty of kidnapping if such confinement, restraint or removal is for the purpose of:
(1) Holding such other person for a ransom or as a hostage or using such other person as a shield; or
(2) Facilitating the commission of any felony or facilitating flight of any person following the commission of a felony; or"
So, confinement which facilitates the commision of a felony and fleeing thereafter.
Second: because we don't have human-equivalent AI, and if we did, why would you think that they would do better?
If only the police had to follow the laws they enforce.
I don't think it is necessary to reiterate the law here. And you missed the important part, where the sum-operator is invoked for the sentences corresponding to every individual offense.
He's a repeat offender numerous times over, and later became an arsonist as well. Clearly the judge read the situation correctly.
Any why shouldn't each offense be punished? Each victim deserves justice, not just the first few.
Well, one reason could be that being kidnapped alone is much more scary than being kidnapped with all your colleagues.
Anyway, don't you think that 45 years of prison for locking up people for about an hour (when the police arrived) is ridiculous compared to e.g. the sentence for murder which is far less. It is literally ridiculous.
45 years in prison for doing it multiple times to numerous people, and for threatening people with a gun, armed robbery, etc. If you read deeper into the article you'll find that his politeness act was only superficial (saying please and thank you while pointing a gun at somebody fails to impress me, tbqh); he pistol whipped somebody, not to mention ending his marriage with domestic violence before starting his crime spree. This guy committed a huge number of crimes and so his sentence was fitting.
And yes, the average sentence for murder is ridiculously short; most if not all murderers should never be released. The only exceptions I can think of require pretty extreme mitigating circumstances, like Gary Plauche. On the other hand, a repeat offender murderer will almost certainly never get out. The justice system is rightly much harsher on people who do whatever they did more than once.
> Each victim deserves justice, not just the first few.
Justice should be about punishments proportionate to the crime, getting dangerous/likely-to-reoffend people out of society for a time, and hopefully eventually rehabilitation.
Justice shouldn't be about the victims. Victims should have no say or sway over a criminal's sentence. Certainly someone who has hurt more people likely deserves a worse sentence (if for no other reason than they're probably more likely to continue to hurt people otherwise), but that's not strictly "justice for the victims".
Of course, that's the (my) ideal... our actual justice systems rarely live up to it.
... you don't think kidnapping multiple people should let you get charged with multiple kidnappings? Or are you hoping for a kidnap 4 get the 5th charge waived type of deal?
It's not like they're charging them with resisting arrest for every cop he ran from or something.
It seems to me that the judge acted appropriately here. The employees were subjected to all necessary elements of the kidnapping statute.
You miss the point. We use intelligent humans because they are selected through a process of biased manipulation and uphold the powers of those whom selected it. A democratically controlled computer system that black and white follows the rules- would likely make this approach to control, less wieldy.
> ... “The guy that every girl would want.”
> They were soon dating, sharing dinners at Red Lobster
I'm not entirely convinced that dinners at Red Lobster are what "every girl wants".
I'm imagining the bell-curve meme with the guy on the left saying "take her to red lobster", thr guy in the middle saying "if you respect her, put on a tie, give her flowers, and take her to Chez Pierre", and the guy on the right saying "take her to red lobster".
The guy on the right would need a high tolerance for terrible food.
https://slate.com/business/2013/12/red-lobster-s-bad-food-pr...
ITT: people who make a million dollars in a few years or less sneer at working class people enjoying what they can afford to enjoy.
There are plenty of cheap restaurants better than Red Lobster.
See https://slate.com/business/2013/12/red-lobster-s-bad-food-pr...
Two words:
Bottomless.
Shrimp.
Should the third word be bankruptcy?
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Food/red-lobster-eyes-bankruptcy-...
At least this time it wasn't because the Soviets boycotted the Olympics.
They probably selling the bottoms to someone else
I mean, I wouldn't mind being taken out to Red Lobster.
I've come to find too, partners who prefer whatever instead of having very specific expectations for time spent together are more comfortable to be around.
Many of the girls|women in my part of the world would rather go freediving for crayfish and eat them on the beach than hang out in a chain resturant.
Where I grew up, crayfish are freshwater mudbugs; those would be rock lobsters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4QSYx4wVQg .
Also where I grew up, we had a "baseball analogy" for dating, in which running the bases proceeds more or less as follows:
1st base - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_kTor63Ihw
2nd base - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHOo_b6Gn4c
3rd base - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-rB0pHI9fU
home run - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1niTEkP-6eo
So I would say (referring to the diving video!) that fingers in wet crevices and feeling around would be 3rd while sticking spears in and suddenly releasing tension would defo be a home run.
In countries that don't really have baseball as a sport that anyone plays, does the same pattern apply? Are there different analogies, perhaps involving "silly mid ons" or "brexit tackles"?
Aren't you special
Yeah, you know, sometimes HN really surprises me with the stances people have on dating.
I remember reading someone saying literally "it's just not possible to find a good-looking girlfriend before graduating college". I was like, what? This statement offends the whole humanity, and also offends me as a man. And yeah, I care to explain why. It's just basically a more covert way of saying that "all women are, err, for the lack of better term, golddiggers, and all men want a partner who will offer them no more than sex". I sure get the evolutionary take on mate selection but even if one really understands it, one will know that the reality is much more complex that that.
Not particularly .. why do you think that?
As stated above, first dates at resturants, etc aren't for everybody.
No one cares
> He was “funny, romantic, the most sensitive man I’ve ever met,” Wainscott later told the Charlotte Observer. “The guy that every girl would want.”
Then they started having dinners at Red Lobster - presumably that’s what she wanted, and a popular preference? Who cares if other people prefer free diving?
The conversation moved on from TFA, eg:
> I'm not entirely convinced that dinners at Red Lobster are what "every girl wants".
Yes, and that commenter sounds like a snobby elitist douchebag.
I know we're not supposed to go for the ad hominem, but I'm honestly not sure that comment warrants anything better.
A coffee or beer can be slammed quickly compared to waiting for and eating a meal.
Sometimes you wanna get out asap.
Reflecting upon this a bit more, perhaps something that helps in our parts of the world is that restaurants are not segmented by price point. For instance, at lunch time everyone goes to the restaurants close by, but apprentices and street workers take the meal of the day, while the office workers order from the menu.
So chain restaurants are really something that typically occur only in the same sorts of areas as big box stores, aiming at a similar demographic.
Haha, definitely. People come in different varieties. Even better you've linked to some evidence confirming that ;)
FWiW that comment of mine has gotten more bounce (up|down votes) than pretty much any other I've made here.
I'm > 60 and gone out on a lot of first dates over the decades, rarely to a resturant or a movie (I mean we have them here in W.Australia but of all the many ways to get to know a person these are not the best choices).
The Miss Manners approach to dating served me well:
All dates have three elements: food, entertainment, and affection. A first date should have plenty of entertainment and only a hint of affection. At some point, the affection becomes the entertainment, but under no circumstances may the food be omitted.
Dating/flirting on a full stomach is more likely to happen than on an empty stomach.
Exhibit A :)
https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/business-negotiations/in-b...
Aka the "hungry judge effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect. But it's not like you can only fill your stomach up at a fancy restaurant (neither that you claim that nor that I find it being something bad).
FWIW, the hungry judge effect is almost certainly nonsense.
The original research assumed the case were randomly ordered, and so everyone should have an equal shot at parole—-but they weren’t! Instead, all the cases from one particular prison were heard together, with breaks usually occurring between prisons. Within a prison, cases were arranged by lawyer, with prisoners representing themselves going last. If people without professional representation fare worse (and they do), then…that’s the whole effect. PNAS published a “rebuttal” article where someone actually interviewed court staff who reported this, but it’s been cited like…70 times vs thousands for the original article.
There are other reasons to think the original result wasn’t true too. The “effect” didn’t occur when considering wall-time (i.e., judges were similarly severe at 9:30 and 11:30), only order (first vs last), but you’d expect hunger, blood sugar, etc to track time elapsed.
Sorry for the aside, but the fact that people still cite this drives me nuts.
I don’t know how to interpret this chain — is red lobster not fancy enough? For some reason I thought it was relatively fancy? Certainly not Michelin rated, but still
Without ever having been to one, I'll note that as a European I know Red Lobster only from TV as a stereotypical place used as a joke about the type of places people presented as less sophisticated might consider fancy. It's used that way in Big Bang Theory, for example, though presumably because it is well known enough as at least a place that some people will consider fancy.
TIL I’m not sophisticated lol
(Don’t worry, I’m not offended)
Well, I've not seen one so for what I know it might be a complete mischaracterization anyway :)
But e.g Howard's mom going "Oh, Mr big shot with his Red Lobster": https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5edf85de-e15f-4507-8c70-f1e2a63...
(after rejecting Olive Garden, I think? I might misremember. Olive Garden is another chain I only know of from TV)
lol, as a kid the “date night” restaurants were Chilis, Olive Garden, Applebees, and random mom-n-pop places. I think places like outback, Texas Roadhouse, and red lobster were reserved for “you got a promotion”-esque events. I bet that’s pretty normal for low-middle-class Midwest folks
It's popular with middle class suburban families. So, snobs (who don't realize that's what they are) like to sneer at it to demonstrate their sophistication.
General question: can any chain restaurant be considered "fancy"? In Europe I would say certainly not, not sure about the US though...
Pick a point in the world. Find the area surrounding it within (an arbitrary) 30 minutes of travel by car under typical traffic conditions.
There are many such points in the world where there are no restaurants at all. If there's one restaurant, then it is the fanciest. If there are two or more restaurants, you can rank them. Without recourse to subjective comparisons, we might hypothesize that a restaurant with a higher average cost per main course is fancier than one with a lower cost.
Without actually doing the GIS searches, my contention is that there are quite a large number of points in the US where a Red Lobster can be considered the fanciest restaurant around.
When its competition is tgi Fridays and long John silvers, red lobster starts looking rather fancy. These places not only exist, but are probably most of the towns in America. I've lived in a few
I wouldn't consider Long John Silver's a competitor to Red Lobster. LJS is fast food.
TGI Friday's, sure.
I included it it because in a lot of central American towns those are your only two seafood options. And yes, if its competition is long John silvers, then red lobster might as well be Zuma
I don't see why a restaurant being a chain would automatically exclude it from ever being thought of as "fancy", but I guess it depends on your definition of fancy. Serving high-quality, well-prepared food in a decently high-class environment would be "fancy" to me. Would Fogo de Chão (a $50-$70USD/person Brazilian steakhouse) be considered fancy? Nobu is often also considered a fancy restaurant and is also a chain.
Does a "fancy restaurant" require absolute uniqueness? How do you define a "fancy restaurant"?
To me, "fancy" is about not allowing money-saving measures to have an effect on the taste and quality of the food. The menu is honest. The prawns are actually prawns and not shrimp (They ARE different!). Maine Lobster is actually from Maine and not some cheaper kind. Kobe beef is actually from Japan and not "American style Kobe".
Fancy restaurants create food with flavor, rather than trying to appeal to people with weak palates that can't handle a little garlic and rosemary.
All of this pushes prices up, but fancy restaurants aren't trying to compete on price.
The difference between prawns and shrimp only exists in some regions. The terms have no concrete scientific meaning, they're both vernacular and depending on where you are both or either term may be used for the same critter. I presume you mean that prawns are the bigger ones, but I've bought local caught fresh "shrimp" on South Carolina coast that were nearly as large as lobsters. There's really no consistent widely respected rule for which is which.
From a purely scientific naming, there actually is a difference between shrimp and prawns. They're different sub-orders. Prawns are Dendrobranchiata, while shrimp are Pleocyemata. I'm not sure it makes much culinary difference to me though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrobranchiata
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleocyemata
"True Shrimp" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caridea
It's a tricky one. I'd lean towards no, but there are some chains that push up against it. Often ones that are either small and/or where at least some of their restaurants are not "obviously chain restaurants" and often also employing the "trick" of a small number spread across cities that makes it seem "fancier"
As an example, Aqua has restaurants in New York, Miami, Dubai, London, and Hong Kong. Some of them are branded Aqua, but most are not. So while it's a "chain", it feels fancy, perhaps more so than justified. E.g. their London restaurants are perhaps more flashy / "tourist fancy" w/e.g. two restaurants in the Shard, than "actually" fancy. They're mostly pretty mid-range, maybe upper mid-range for London. I think that's about where you'll get to as a chain. To get above that, you get to the level where you expect the restaurant to at least tell you about their chef by name, whether or not they're actually famous enough for you to recognise it.
Yes. Some places in the US are a sea of chain restaurants so “fancy” is relative. People propose marriage at some chains, which I think indicates they think those chains are fancy.
Additional datapoint: I saw two people get married at a 5.11 retail store.
I'd flip the question the other way around.
Why does becoming a chain automatically disqualify a place as being fancy?
I think people apply a lot of assumptions once the word "chain" has entered the chat. They assume they've entered a race to the bottom on costs to maximize profits, but there are plenty of chains that I would still consider on the fancy side. Fogo de Chao and Ruth's Chris, for example.
I wouldn't call Red Lobster fancy, but I also think it's a perfectly fine restaurant. Certainly decent date material.
Its expensive enough but fairly generic there are probably better choices for the same money everywhere its like giving a gift card for a gift its good but it lacks thought and imagination.
It’s (one of many) pretty yuk chain. In my 20s I probably wouldn’t have minded. Later I’d be internally going “really?” unless it were some area that really didn’t have good alternatives.
Is it about "how clean is the place" or about "how clean is the table while we are/after we are done eating"?
I've been in the US plenty of times, but I'm a burger guy, so I made sure I tried all burger chains and as many (indi) restaurants I could. But I've never been in a Red Lobster. I do understand though that lobster-eating can be messy - thus the bib.
I can also picture that cracking lobster 'body-parts' is not the most romantic setup.
It's not really about either of those things. Some people look down on Red Lobster because it's more middle-class/working-class than they are.
Red Lobster is at the same level as Olive Garden.
The poor think they're fancy. Middle class think they're casual.
Wow, that's a really disgustingly elitist take. Pretty much everything wrong with some types of well-off/wealthy people is summed up in your comment.
While I haven't been to a Red Lobster since I was a kid, that was always a treat back then, and it was one of the nicest places my parents could afford to take us on occasion.
> While I haven't been to a Red Lobster since I was a kid
Why not? Have you become “disgustingly elitist”?
The scenario I responded to didn’t involve family meals with children.
My original comment was referring to nothing other than the fact that the food at Red Lobsters is pretty terrible. It’s not about price - there are plenty of cheap restaurants that serve good food.
See https://slate.com/business/2013/12/red-lobster-s-bad-food-pr...