Eideard

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.

Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy, the folks call her Mrs. Anderson, and the children Milly, Jane, and Grundy go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee.
The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master.

Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

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A cunning plan to rob the warehouse of his former employer went awry for one chubby Chinese thief after he became wedged, legs dangling, in the roof of a lift.

The man, named as Mr Xi by China’s Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, was fired from a technology company in the southern city of Shenzhen in October. In a bid to exact revenge, and improve his finances, Mr Xi decided to rob the company’s warehouses, hoping to carry away valuable surveillance cameras.

Last Saturday evening, he hid himself in the company’s offices, waiting until all the staff had left before trying to gain access to the warehouse underneath. However, he found he was unable to break into the warehouse and instead decided, in the early hours of Sunday morning, to make his escape by removing the ventilation fan of a freight lift and hoisting himself into the lift shaft.

But Mr Xi’s plan had not accounted for his girth. He found himself quickly wedged into the lift ceiling and unable to free himself.

According to the Southern Metropolis, Mr Xi called his girlfriend, who arrived at the offices to help him. But after two hours of trying to squeeze him through the gap, and the removal of his trousers to make him more streamlined, Mr Xi was still stuck.

When the company’s security guard arrived on Sunday morning, he found Mr Xi hanging trouserless, and his girlfriend exhausted from her efforts to free him.

Eventually Mr Xi was freed by the police, who detained him and his girlfriend for their attempted burglary.

Har!

Ankle monitor on real leg

Private security firm G4S has sacked two members of staff who tagged a man’s false leg, allowing him to remove it and flout a court-imposed curfew.

Christopher Lowcock…fooled the two employees by wrapping a prosthetic leg in a bandage when they set up the tag at his home in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. He was then able to remove the limb and break a curfew imposed for offences involving drugs, driving and a weapon. G4S sacked the pair for committing a serious disciplinary offence, it said…

G4S revealed managers became suspicious last month but when they returned to Lowcock’s home he had been returned to custody accused of a driving-related offence. The company revealed the second employee who went to check on the monitoring equipment at Lowcock’s home was also sacked for failing to realise he had fooled them into tagging his false leg…

The two staff involved had committed a serious disciplinary offence by failing to follow procedure and had been dismissed…

The MoJ said contractors were expected to adhere to “the highest standards of professionalism” and strict guidelines had to be followed when tagging offenders.

These clowns would certainly qualify for the same jobs – and pay grade – here in northern New Mexico. Cripes, they’d probably be acceptable to local politicians to campaign for office as judge.

I’ll just stay quite still and no one will notice me

A kangaroo is for the high jump after escaping from its owner and going on a knicker-nicking spree.

Benji bounced from garden to garden collecting ladies’ lingerie as it went. The two-year-old marsupial was only caught when one victim looked out of her kitchen window and saw it hopping it with her undies.

A spokesman for the police in Prague, Czech Republic, explained: “We had a call from the kangaroo’s owner saying it had escaped. At the same time, we started getting reports of a number of thefts from washing lines.”

He added: “We didn’t think they could possibly be related until the animal was caught red-handed.”

Benji’s owner Petr Hlabovic, 35, said: “I’m very relieved to have him back. I’ve got no idea what he thought he was up to – he certainly didn’t pick up the habit from me.”

That’s what they all say.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

Another superlative job of guarding the prison – afterwards

About 60 inmates tied to the Zetas drug trafficking organization broke out of a Nuevo Laredo prison Friday, leaving seven members of a rival gang dead in their wake.

The late-morning escape is the latest violent episode in a prison that was the site of a massive breakout last year and where the Zetas execute with impunity those who displease them.

Five guards also are missing from the Centro de Ejecución de Sanciones No. 2, known by its acronym CEDES, where 151 inmates escaped in December.

After that escape, the prison’s warden went missing. His replacement was stabbed to death in March during a confrontation in the prison…

“The situation is currently under control and the facts are being investigated in a coordinated manner with local and federal authorities,” according to the news release from the state of Tamaulipas.

RTFA for details. Frankly “coordinated manner with local and federal authorities” probably is an accurate description of how the jailbreak was designed and implemented.

Mexican history would say that is so.

Steven Slater may not be a flight attendant anymore, but he’s still a fixture on planes — no longer serving passengers but now observing them.

As he shuttles back and forth between his residences in New York and Los Angeles, Slater has collected 168,000 airline miles since August, when he burst into the public spotlight after dramatically quitting his job at JetBlue.

Slater is also writing a memoir that he plans to call “The Diary of a Mad Flight Attendant.”

He’s still recognized, especially on planes.

“It’s a lot of high-fives,” Slater said.

Slater recently spoke with CNN.com about the lessons he learned during his 20-year career in the air and in the past few months while sitting in the passenger seat rather than the jump seat…

“A lot of the headaches that the passengers and crews deal with are nightmare situations that the airlines have created,” Slater said…

“Most of the temper tantrums I see revolve around baggage. You’ve worked so hard to get to the airplane, you get on the airplane and all you have is your one little piece of luggage and there just isn’t anywhere to put it…”

“I never rely on the airline to provide what they say they’re going to.”

Agreed. RTFA for the details. Slater seems to have things more together than back with his famous JetBlue escape.

The article is interesting and maybe even useful.

Two suspected burglars on the run from police in Colombia have been detained while trying to hide inside a jail.

The two were being chased by police after a burglary in a house in the capital, Bogota. They jumped from rooftop to rooftop and over walls, only to land inside La Picota, one of Colombia’s biggest jails.

Their involuntary break-in immediately set off the prison alarm, leading to their capture…

If their case goes to court and they are found guilty, they could be sent back to La Picota.

Har!

Two prisoners have escaped from a prison in Argentina after guards placed a dummy with a football for a head in the watch tower because of a shortage of manpower.

The two men, Walter Pozo and Cesar Andres, leapt over a wire fence before scaling the perimeter wall and making their escape unnoticed by the remaining guards.

Prison workers said that a shortage of staff meant they were only able to man two of the 15 guard towers so they had to resort to using a stand in. A prison source said: “We’ve made a dummy out of a football and a prison officer’s cap, so that the prisoner see its shadow and think they’re being watched.”

“We named him Wilson, like in the film Cast Away, and put him in one of the towers,” the man told the Diario Rio Negro newspaper, referring to the Tom Hanks film in which his character invents a volleyball character for company.

The source said that the video cameras monitoring the perimeter wall had stopped working some months ago. He said that he hoped the incident would alert the authorities to the problems with lack of resources and that politicians would act to improve the conditions.

Both had been serving out sentences for armed robbery at the jail in Argentina’s Neuquén province. The escaped convicts, who were nearing the end of their sentences so were being held in a part of the prison with fewer security measures, have not yet been recaptured.

The casual quality of life in most Latin cultures has long been celebrated. Especially – sometimes – by crooks willing to show a bit more initiative than their guards.

Two Argentinean convicts who escaped from jail reportedly evaded capture by disguising themselves as sheep.

Maximiliano Pereyra and Ariel Diaz dressed in full sheepskin fleeces with realistic looking heads as they tried to evade capture.

Pereyra, 25, and Diaz, 28, who were jailed for robbery, escaped from a maximum security jail in Argentina, reports The Sun.

They stole the sheep hides from a local ranch and used their disguises to fool officials for more than a week despite more than 300 members of the local constabulary searching for them.

The local police have been left embarrassed by the episode after locals reported seeing the pair running through local fields at night.

“They were wearing grey clothes but had full sheepskins, including the sheeps’ heads, over their heads and backs,” said a farmworker at La Almeda.

Police sources said it appeared that identifying the pair among thousands of other sheep was “almost impossible”.

Har!

British police have appealed for information about the whereabouts of an escaped prisoner who has been telling the world via Facebook about his life as a fugitive.

Craig Lynch, 28, escaped Hollesley Bay open prison near Suffolk, eastern England, back in September, but has continued to update his Facebook status regularly — describing everything from his meals to who his next girlfriend will be…

In a…posting from earlier this week Lynch wrote “Is thinkin, which lucky girl will be my first of 2010!!.”

Police are trying to use clues left by Lynch on his Facebook to track down where the convicted burglar may be hiding…

“We have spoken to Facebook and we are trying to trace him from the information we have, but it’s one of those things that we’re also asking for help from members of the public,” Suffolk police spokesperson Anne-Marie Breach told CNN.

“Obviously we’re taking what he’s saying on Facebook with a pinch of salt because he’s now aware that people may be reading what he’s writing.”

Life on the lam apparently gets easier and easier. So much for snoops and database mining.