Fart Police, a Rogue Helicopter Path and a Toilet on Wheels

Read the episode (Narration script)

A jury in Colorado has put a price on bad Spanish. It's two hundred thousand dollars.

In 2023, a SWAT team raided a home in Aurora to arrest a tenant. Renting another room was Salvador Guerrero-Salmeron, a Mexican musician on a tourist visa who doesn't speak English and had nothing to do with the suspect.

The Independent reports that officers on a loudspeaker were apparently warning everyone about a police dog, in Spanish. What they kept shouting was "Pedo policía, pedo la madera." A translator later rendered that as "Fart police, fart the wood." According to court records, one officer remarked, "You just ordered the taco plate."

Guerrero-Salmeron held up his ID and visa. The dog bit his arm for about fifteen seconds anyway, and he was charged with failing to obey a police order. That charge was dropped.

On Tuesday, a jury found the dog handler liable for excessive force and another officer liable for malicious prosecution. The officers' lawyers argued he'd ignored commands for more than an hour. In fairness, it's very hard to comply with an instruction about wood.

In England, the National Police Air Service has confirmed that one of its helicopters did not draw a penis on purpose.

UPI reports that late Monday night, a police helicopter circling over Hampshire for fifteen or twenty minutes woke the two-year-old daughter of a man named Gordon Bird. So he looked up the flight-tracking data. By his account, the helicopter had drawn a penis and testicles in the sky.

Police say the crew was just "orbiting the locations they were directed to" while searching for a car that failed to stop, and that their helicopters "do not follow defined or predetermined flight plans."

That's the problem. Give anyone a pen, no plan and twenty minutes, and this is historically what happens.

In the spring, the Finnish Air Force disciplined cadets for flight patterns in the same shape. The Finns got discipline. Hampshire got a statement.

In Hobart, Tasmania, an old water main burst on Tuesday, and the taps in Sandy Bay started running orange.

ABC News reports that Emma Thornley's white laundry came out dark orange. When she called the utility, TasWater, she says she was told it was safe to drink: "I was guaranteed that there was nothing toxic in it." Then a TasWater crew advised her not to drink the bottle of it she'd collected.

Her description: "It may be safe to drink but it's the colour of fluorescent carrot juice at times and it's really quite thick and viscous."

Water should not have a viscosity.

TasWater blames sediment in aging pipes. And Australia's national drinking water guidelines say water should be aesthetically pleasing, because, quote, "Many customers equate aesthetics with the safety of drinking water." Customers have always been like that.

In Malta, a seventy-five-year-old woman named Mari Shires kept telling the contractor building next door that she would not sell him her house. Then a portable toilet appeared outside her front door.

Times of Malta reports it sat on a truck for two months, used by the construction workers. When it got emptied and the wind turned, she couldn't stay inside. She complained, and the toilet was taken away. A few hours later, it came back. She was told the boss insisted.

The mayor said the council couldn't act. A toilet on the pavement needs a permit. A toilet on a van does not. So legally, it wasn't a toilet outside her house. It was a parked vehicle with a toilet on it.

Her position: "He can be as insistent as he wants but I will not give him my house."

Then the story ran, a government minister called it "completely unacceptable," inspectors showed up, and on Wednesday morning the toilet left. The vice mayor posted video of the departure.

In Japan, a free stock photo site called Muscle Plus has the mission statement, "Adding muscles to everyday life." It offers pictures of very muscular men doing ordinary things around rural Fukuoka, to promote the area.

SoraNews24 reports the site has ranked its most popular shots. At the top, with more than nine million views: two muscular men standing in a field of pink cosmos flowers at a local park.

The tourism campaign worked. Nine million people looked at that park. Some of them noticed the flowers.

Over on AskReddit, someone asked, "Florida has oranges. Georgia's got peaches. What's your state got?"

The top answer, by a mile: "Tennessee is full of idiots." Someone replied, "I thought Florida already had the market cornered on that."

From Ohio: "I can only dream of the day when we are finally a state."

South Carolina pointed out that it grows more peaches than Georgia, summarized as, "South Carolina has peaches, Georgia has LIES." A Georgian conceded it's not about growing the most peaches. It's that half their roads have the word peach in them.

Another thread asked for the most unhinged opinion people have heard defended with a straight face.

One person has an employee who now takes smoke breaks farther from the building, because every day she stares at the sun for a full minute to repair her eyesight. Her boss has stopped arguing and calls it her "free lasik eye care program."

Someone knew a person who believed pigs don't have bones. A reply laid out the evidence: you can buy pig bones, give them to your dog, make soup. Quote, "Very well-established set of bones."

And one coworker insisted the way to save gas is to drive everywhere as fast as possible. A reply guessed her car: "a Nissan Altima with a doughnut tire and at least one panel mismatched color from the rest of the car."

Alright guys, That’s all I have for you today. Have a great day. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow!