A Couple of Items of Note

Both of these come to us courtesy of the good folks at Reuters:

A Japanese man was arrested this week after making 37,760 silent calls to directory inquiries because he "wanted to listen to the 'kind' voices of female telephone operators." On its website, the daily paper Mainichi Shimbun says the 44-year old has plead guilty to obstructing the operations of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation...it turns out he made up to 905 calls a day from his mobile phone. He says, "When I made a complaint call once, the operator dealt with it very kindly, so I wanted to hear these women's voices."
Police allege that he caused psychological distress to more than 100 telephone operators between March and July of this year.

The part I don't get is, we're talking about the phone company. They know who's calling, because they see your number when you call. Caller ID isn't a new thing at all; it's just new to the masses. Companies have had it for years, particularly the phone company. You'd think they'd have blocked his number, or gone after him a little sooner, wouldn't you? Over 900 calls a day also makes me think this guy may have other problems besides an obsession with telephone operators...like maybe unemployment.

Okay, story two: A retiree just made history in Arizona in one of the bigger seizures border police have seen. An 81-year old man was arrested on Tuesday while crossing from Mexico into Nogales, Arizona with 80 kilos of cocaine stuffed into his car. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Brian Levin said, "It is pretty much the limit of what I have seen. I don't remember encountering someone quite this old trying to smuggle drugs into this country ... and he was driving an unusually large amount of cocaine." The man is a resident of Nogales, and this place is a big entry point into the U.S. for many Mexican drug cartels. Levin said border police rarely see loads of more than 70 to 80 pounds (32 to 36 kg) of cocaine in passenger cars.

Well, if we've got to pay old folks to smuggle drugs into the country, obviously there's a problem. Maybe we should think of another way to handle them, instead of having to deal with smugglers. Then we might make money off of them, instead of having to pay police to pretend they can stop the flow...