Whoops!
A woman is facing criminal charges after being arrested for not stopping at toll booths more than 2,900 times, police said.
Authorities said Evangelina Sanchez Gonzalez, 41, may be the most notorious toll-booth runner in North Texas, amassing fines of more than $76,000.
Over the 20 months that officials said Gonzalez ran through the booths, she would have paid roughly $1,800 in tolls. Now, she owes more than 42 times that amount with the addition of fines and penalties.
Not paying the toll is a Class-C misdemeanor.
The North Texas Tollway Authority estimates that 35,000 drivers out of one million daily transactions do not pay when passing through the toll booths.
Gonzalez was arrested in October and was released pending trial.
In the spirit of Halloween, here’s a flashback to certainly one of the creepiest stories I’ve ever worked on: The Ancient Art of Exorcism. More recently, there’s this ghost story.
- Here’s LeRoy Standish’s version of the ghost hunting story in Sunday’s Daily Press.
- Carve online pumpkins. (Source.)
- Not at all Halloweeny, but frightening in a different way: a database of everyone’s driver’s licenses from around the country. Yes, yours is in there, too.
- I almost hesitate to pass along these sorts of polls, but here you go. Adults only, please. (Note the page is not safe for work and you’ll probably want to use a Hotmail or GMail address or something to avoid potential future spam.) (Source.)
- And for treats of an adult nature, check out Tiki Bar TV. (This time, it’s probably work safe, depending on what sort of sense of humor your boss has.) It’s also available as a podcast — hello, Video iPod! — but you can simply watch the Quicktime files on their site. If giggly drunken girls, lounge music and hammy acting are wrong, I don’t wanna be right.
It’s true.
As previously mentioned, Shylo‘s wedding had a prom theme. Stephen’s Web comic strip, Avatars*, is featured in the Webcomic Hurricane Relief Telethon Book and Merlin, in a move that surprises no one who knows him, has founded his own religion.
* Avatars link has been removed, as the site has gone dark and is now infected with malware.
Not as geeky as you might think:
You are 45% geeky.
OK, not that geeky at all, are you? I’ll bet you even have a girlfriend (or boyfriend).
My mad trivia skillz have been instrumental to my success as a reporter, such as it is, thank you very much.
My friend Kris sent me this eBay link, asking if perhaps I was the seller:
You are bidding on a mistake.
We all make mistakes. We date the wrong people for too long. We chew gum with our mouths open. We say inappropriate things in front of grandma.
And we buy leather pants.
I can explain these pants and why they are in my possession. I bought them many, many years ago under the spell of a woman whom I believed to have taste. She suggested I try them on. I did. She said they looked good. I wanted to have a relationship of sorts with her. I’m stupid and prone to impulsive decisions. I bought the pants.
The relationship, probably for better, never materialized. The girl, whose name I can’t even recall, is a distant memory. I think she was short.
Ultimately the pants were placed in the closet where they have remained, unworn, for nearly a decade. I would like to emphasize that: Aside from trying these pants on, they have never, ever been worn. In public or private.
I have not worn these leather pants for the following reasons:
I am not a member of Queen.
I do not like motorcycles.
I am not Rod Stewart.
I am not French.
I do not cruise for transvestites in an expensive sports car.
These were not cheap leather pants. They are Donna Karan leather pants. They’re for men. Brave men, I would think. Perhaps tattooed, pierced men. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say you either have to be very tough, very gay, or very famous to wear these pants and get away with it.
Again, they’re men’s pants, but they’d probably look great on the right lady. Ladies can get away with leather pants much more often than men can. It’s a sad fact that men who own leather pants will have to come to terms with.
They are size 34×34. I am no longer size 34×34, so even were I to suddenly decide I was a famous gay biker I would not be able to wear these pants. These pants are destined for someone else. For reasons unknown – perhaps to keep my options open, in case I wanted to become a pirate – I have shuffled these unworn pants from house to house, closet to closet. Alas, it is now time to part ways so that I may use the extra room for any rhinestone-studded jeans I may purchase in the future.
These pants are in excellent condition. They were never taken on pirate expeditions. They weren’t worn onstage. They didn’t straddle a Harley, or a guy named Harley. They just hung there, sad and ignored, for a few presidencies.
Someone, somewhere, will look great in these pants. I’m hoping that someone is you, or that you can be suckered into buying them by a girl you’re trying to bed.
Please buy these leather pants.
Although I think of myself as brave and am, perhaps, a teensy bit famous, I do not own and have never owned leather pants.
Having said that, I did, in fact, wear leather pants in a college production of “Romeo and Juliet” my freshman year. I played Benvolio in an martial arts-fighting, knife-swinging, rock and roll version that sounds a lot more interesting than it really was. In reality, it was mostly a lot of college kids in leather pants who didn’t have fight training and who came dangerously close to putting out each others’ eyes and, in my case, getting their ribs broken by the male ballet dancer who played Tybalt. That guy was strong!
I did once get suckered into buying unfortunate pants, though, by a sales girl at Britches Great Outdoors in Tysons Corner when I was in high school. But they were merely corduroy.
