Eideard

Har!

A Miami man who attempted to smuggle a cache of cocaine concealed in Easter eggs pleaded guilty to the crime Monday. Esteban Galtes, 23, was taken into custody at Los Angeles International Airport after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers searched his luggage and found dozens of pastel-colored, egg-shaped candies.

The Easter eggs might not have aroused so much suspicion if Galtes hadn’t been transporting them just two days before Christmas.

“Drug traffickers are always trying novel ways to conceal their contraband,” said Claude Arnold, special agent in charge of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles. “But cocaine camouflaged as Easter candy is one of the more unusual tactics we’ve come across. Obviously two days before Christmas, this defendant didn’t expect his trip would end with federal officers conducting an Easter egg hunt,” he said in a December statement.

Officers found more than 14 pounds of cocaine, the majority camouflaged as Easter treats, as well as some stashed under the cardboard bottom of a paper shopping bag.

He can receive up to 40 Easters in the slammer as payment for his business venture.

On the first day of Christmas, my children gave to me … a vacuum cleaner packaged with $280,000 worth of drugs.

Investigators say a Green Bay woman got quite a surprise Dec. 25 when she opened the refurbished vacuum cleaner she’d been given, and discovered two pounds of crystal methamphetamine and 2.2 pounds of cocaine packaged inside the box.

“This was an ‘are you kidding me’ incident,” said Lt. David Poteat, who heads the Brown County Drug Task Force.

It’s likely that a smuggler inserted the drugs into the vacuum cleaner box before the unit was shipped from the Juarez, Mexico, area, where it had been reconditioned, Poteat said. No one, including the Green Bay retailer who sold the vacuum, noticed anything amiss, he said, until the woman opened the package and called police.

Authorities say they’re convinced the woman played no part in the drug shipment, and don’t plan to charge her. They aren’t identifying the woman, or the store where the vacuum was purchased, while the case is under investigation.

Phew!

… in all their hobbyhorsical manifestations.

NRDC $35 or more

Even though we’ve won back their endangered species protection, wolves in Greater Yellowstone and across the Northern Rockies are once again facing government plans to kill them on a mass scale. Under one proposed plan, hundreds of wolves could be shot and wolf pups gassed in their dens.

Your gift will help us come to their defense and fight for a recovery plan that ensures wolves have a healthy future in the Northern Rockies.

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A test explosion on a Boeing 747 has shown that a US Christmas Day flight would have landed safely even if a bomb on board was detonated successfully.

The plane’s fuselage did not break in the controlled blast, which used the same explosives that were on Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

However experts said it showed the suspected bomber and the passenger next to him would have been killed…

The controlled experiment was carried out for the BBC Two documentary How safe are our Skies? Detroit Flight 253.

Dr John Wyatt, an international terrorism and explosives adviser to the UN, replicated the conditions on board the Detroit flight on a decommissioned Boeing 747 at an aircraft graveyard in Gloucestershire, England.

The same amount of the explosive pentaerythritol (or PETN) allegedly carried by Mr Abdulmutallab was placed to mirror the location where he was sitting on the plane.

Captain J Joseph, an air accident investigator, and Dr Wyatt both concluded that the quantity of explosive used was nowhere near enough needed to rupture the skin of a passenger plane.

RTFA. I don’t worry about things like this anymore. I refuse to subject my life to the statistical absurdities of the TSA or the fears of cowardly lions in Congress.

Still, it’s encouraging to see the 747 and most of the passengers would have made it.

Why is this man smiling?

Amazon.com on Saturday released its annual post-Christmas statement on holiday sales and made one thing clear: the Kindle was king…

“We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history,” said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

In another milestone for the e-reader, the company noted that on Christmas Day, for the first time ever, Amazon customers bought more Kindle books than physical books. The company didn’t offer specific numbers for either category.

The peak shopping day for the online retailer was December 14, when customers ordered more than 9.5 million items worldwide, “a record-breaking 110 items per second.”

Among those items bought between November 15 and December 19, the top electronics, following the Kindle, were Apple’s iPod Touch 8GB and the Garmin Nuvi 260W GPS.

In the video game category, top sellers were the Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board; New Super Mario Bros., and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

RTFA for lots of detail – including some too boring to ever need mention. My favorite?

The last Local Express Delivery order that was delivered in time for Christmas, was placed by a Prime member and went to Seattle. It was a Kindle that was ordered at 1:43 p.m. on Christmas Eve and delivered at 4:57 p.m. that evening.

Outstanding. Having spent a number of boring years in traffic management, I’m astounded at what contemporary commerce can offer.

Stuck for Christmas gift ideas? Is your marriage or a friend’s going through a rocky patch? How about a divorce voucher?

In an unusual take on the season of giving, a London law firm is offering Christmas gift vouchers for divorce advice.

The firm, Lloyd Platt & Company, which normally charges £325 an hour, said it had been swamped with enquiries since it launched the vouchers early last week.

So far, more than 60 have been sold — a snip at £125 for a half hour session with a divorce lawyer.

The firm’s founder, Vanessa Lloyd Platt, said she had been amazed at the response to the vouchers. “They seem to appeal to an enormously widespread spectrum of people looking for that ‘must have’ gift for Christmas,” she said.

Not associated with the holiday, especially – but, I did schedule one of my divorces for after the first of the year – for tax reasons. Har! 8)

“No god? … No problem!” reads the advertisement featuring the smiling faces of people wearing Santa Claus hats. “Be good for goodness’ sake.”

Over the next two weeks, 270 of the ads will go up on city buses and trains in the Washington area as part of the holiday kickoff to campaigns sponsored by secular groups in cities around the country and abroad. If last year was any indication, the signs are likely to spark a theological war of words.

“We don’t intend to rain on anyone’s parade, but secular people celebrate the holidays, too, and we’re just trying to reach out to our people,” said Roy Speckhardt, the executive director of the American Humanist Association. “To the degree that we are reaching out to the godly, it’s just to say that you can be good without god…”

Elsewhere, this year’s secular signs vary in tone.

In Seattle, this year’s signs say “Millions are good without God.” In Las Vegas, signs to be put up this week will say “Reasons Greetings” and “Yes, Virginia … there is no God…”

The campaigns come against a backdrop of a growing number of nonbelievers. Fifteen percent of Americans identified themselves as having “no religion” in a 2008, up from 8 percent in 1990, according to a study by the Program on Public Values at Trinity College in Hartford.

Overdue. But, don’t get your shorts in a bunch over discovering Americans are more ignorant than the rest of the industrial West. That’s true in almost every aspect of life – whether it be politics, social structure, interpersonal relationships, knowledge of science.

You name it – we can figger out how to lag behind.

The day after Christmas
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Well, here’s something that’ll cheer you up. Let’s start planning Christmas 2009! Oh, why the sour face? Lots of people have it all boxed off already by now and some aren’t even mentally ill.

Let’s see. Bookings are already being taken for festive Pontin’s breaks next December. Isn’t that wonderful? Prices start at £124 per apartment, and you’re assured that, “The party never ends, with tinsel, balloons, party games and laughter, and a fantastic festive dinner with turkey and all the trimmings.” But hurry! You must book by February ’09 or prices will go up.

What do you mean, you’d rather deep-fat fry your own hair? All right, what about this offer: Christmas ’09 in Kissimmee, Florida, at a Best Western Hotel, from £569? No? Well, how about taking over an entire pub in Cumbria for £1,500? Apparently, it will be “a truly unique Christmas present for your friends and family”.

Yes, I know. It’s sick, isn’t it? The very idea of thinking about next Christmas when this year’s sprouts are still passing through the digestive system not only tempts fate but is grotesque. Yet plenty do. Which is why, as we speak, there are people out buying reduced wrapping paper, slightly damaged cards, cut-price shirt-and-tie sets, just so that they can say smugly, around next August, “Oh. We’ve had Christmas done and dusted since last December.”

You could waste energy fantasising about beating such people to a pulpy mass, but why bother? Probably best just to accept that Christmas now lasts for the best part of 12 months. January, of course, is taken up with sales and saying how glad we are that Christmas is all over…

I’ll race you to the basement!