Big retail stores have security cameras. The next time in you're in a Target store, look at the ceiling. See all those little black hemispheres? Many of them have cameras in them. Steerable cameras, and there's a guy in a locked room somewhere in the store who is looking at the images from those cameras in real time, and he has a radio that he can use to contact the security guards, some of which may not be in uniform.
And I can assure you that if that guy sees someone doing something illegal, whether the perpetrator be white, black, red, green, or purple-with-pink-polka-dots, he's going to have security grab him and call the cops. End of story.
Mychal Bell was not "targeted" due to his race. He was targeted because they saw him stealing.
The lawyer who defended him before:
“I am predicting that once all the facts are established, he probably will not be guilty,” Scott said. “There has been more put on this young man than anybody can bear — people trying to provoke him, trying to make him react."Oh, I get it. The store provoked him into stealing $370 worth of merchandise so they could get the act on tape.
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Hang on to your hats! Okay, no one thinks Yellowstone is going to blow up any time soon, but it is supposedly a "super-volcano" which has blown up twice before. If it goes big, it's going to rain ash as far as New York, and it's going to suck big time. And it'll be the end of the "global warming" nonsense, because all the ash and dust it'll spew into the air (to say nothing of all the sulfur compounds) will knock the global temperature anomaly far into the "minus" column.
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WoW:
Thanks to teaming up with a couple of other players--one of whom was a 70th level paladin--I got to run through the Deadmines yesterday. And I say "run" advisedly; the whole thing took about 15 minutes, tops.
I managed to pack in a lot of loot, and even found a few seconds to mine the only vein of tin ore I've seen in the game to date. I would have liked to have looked around a little more, maybe to have ensured all the loot was picked up. Dang it. But I found out the hard way--twice--that getting too far away from the paladin was a death sentence.
Fortunately the paladin can resurrect characters.
Calandraxyzz is 18th level now, and it's increasingly difficult for me to find appropriate encounters. Either the things I hit are too easy (and garner little or no XP) or else they're a mob that's too powerful for me to take single-handed. It's really frustrating when you just manage to kill one and drive most of the others off and then get killed. By the time you get your ghost back there they've all healed.
It's also impossible to find any decent armor that my character can wear. I want to fill my armor slots, but everything that is available is too high a level. Argh etc.
Also fortunately I found that you can buy healing potions in bulk at auction. That helps. I'll be checking auctions for other things (like armor) in the by-and-by.
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Today is the last day of 2008. I expect to spend it in Azeroth. Oh well.
