The third and final idiot who cut phone service to thousands in Saint Paul last year has been sentenced to ninety days in jail for his part in the two vandalisms. A number of very interesting details came out in court, apparently - including both the scale of Levi Glennie’s believed activities, and - unfortunately - his involvement with the Urban Exploration subculture in Minnesota.
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Life and work have suddenly become busy, so here’s some random goodness, most from the other side of the pond, all in short-attention-span style:
Kids these days; go figure, eh?
The lengths police departments will go to to catch speeding motorists. (”Honey, I’m home… after spending nine hours in a horse trailer, doing traffic enforcement. Don’t ask. And yes, it was a used trailer, why?”)
New apparel for Brit police: among other changes, capes. Insert obligatory superhero joke here.
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Reproduced as the appendix to the engineers’ report on Saint Paul’s Lilydale-area caves that I’ve been putting online this week are two dozen or so early-1960s maps of Saint Paul caves. While I’m not entirely sure why these maps were attached to the report - many of the caves in question seem to be outside the “survey” area - I’m glad they were, as they have proven fairly difficult to acquire through normal channels.
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Today’s float in this week-long parade of documents pried from the cold and clammy fingers of the government is the third and penultimate part of the 2005 engineering report on Saint Paul’s Lilydale caves. Consisting entirely of illustrations and charts, this portion of the report (2.5MB PDF) lays out the choices, such as they were, for the then-future of the caves in question. It was done pseudo-scientifically, with all the various options being fairly arbitrarily “scored” on an apparently arbitrary scale. Not surprisingly, the City went with the “highest scoring” option - hiding the entrances, which was - coincidentally, I’m sure - probably also the least expensive and quickest option to implement.
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The manmade caves in the Lilydale area of Saint Paul are a lot more extensive than most people realize. Truth be told, they’re even more extensive than the city realizes; looking through the 2005 engineering report I’m putting online this week, it’s apparent that at least a few of these century-old mines were overlooked during the survey. How extensive are they? Well, let’s put it this way…
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