Quick Takes

Cowboy rescue

Their mutual hatred for the Dallas Cowboys helped a Columbia, S.C., police officer talk a suicidal man off the edge of a bridge. Officer Michael Blackmore encountered the man on a bridge in the early morning hours of Sept. 10. After gauging the interests of the suicidal man, the officer discovered he was a Washington Redskins fan. That’s when Blackmore turned the conversation toward the Sept. 18 contest between Dallas and Washington. “I’m definitely going to pull for [the Redskins] … because I hate Dallas,” Blackmore told the man. After sharing his common hatred of the Cowboys, the man allowed Blackmore and another officer to pull him from the ledge.

Alone on the road

A lane change foiled the plan of a Brea, Calif., driver to skirt the rules of a carpool lane on a nearby highway. The man, unidentified by police, had set up a mannequin in the passenger seat of his truck. The mannequin apparently appeared to everyone on the road to be a human passenger—everyone except a police officer on a motorcycle who on Sept. 21 pulled up next to the truck to warn the driver about a dangerous lane change into traffic he had made. The officer noticed the lifeless passenger and issued the driver a citation.

Snack attack

A mishap with a coffee machine delayed a British train for nearly a half hour on Sept. 15. According to Virgin Trains, a railway maintenance worker got his arm stuck inside the vending machine at a stop in Rugby, southeast of Birmingham. Rescue crews needed a hydraulic cutting device to free the worker’s hand from the machine, causing the early-morning train to London to suffer a delay.

Border barrage

Mexican authorities made a startling discovery in the border town of Agua Prieta in Sonora Sept. 18. Federal police officers in the town across from Douglas, Ariz., discovered an abandoned panel van specially outfitted with a 10-foot tube, an air compressor, and a gaping hole in the roof. Mexico’s National Security Commission believes drug gangs had been using the van as a mobile artillery piece to launch bags of narcotics across the border into the United States.

No Jersey girl

Faced with the choice of going the wrong way down a Manhattan street or continuing through a tunnel to New Jersey, one woman’s antipathy for the Garden State won out. Tennessee native Amber Johnson injured a New York Port Authority officer when she turned into oncoming traffic on a Manhattan street on Sept. 18, hit the officer, and then ran a red light. Police arrested Johnson, who explained her behavior by saying she really didn’t want to drive to New Jersey through the Lincoln Tunnel.

Delayed reaction

The gears of bureaucracy grind so slowly in Canada that Valentine Sicotte forgot she even made a request. Sicotte had requested an appointment with a gastroenterologist at a Saint-Eustache, Quebec, hospital in 2007. This summer she finally received a call back. “I couldn’t remember even having requested the appointment,” the 28-year-old told the CBC. “I told them to give my place to someone who needed it more.” In the nine years since the phone call, Sicotte has solved her medical problem by changing her diet.

Overexposed

It’s not just teens who should watch what they post on social media. An 18-year-old Austrian woman has filed a lawsuit against her parents for posting what she calls embarrassing childhood photographs on Facebook. The unidentified teen alleges her parents began posting pictures of her when she was 11 and they signed up for the social media site. “They knew no shame or limits,” she told Austria’s Die ganze Woche magazine. “Whether I was sitting on the potty or naked in my crib, my every step was recorded photographically and, afterwards, made public.” The teen filed the lawsuit in Austrian court, scheduled for November, after her parents refused to take down her pictures.

Night rider

A South Carolina toddler’s late-night joy ride in a battery-powered toy car ended safely when he was spotted by a good Samaritan. The 2-year-old from Sumter, S.C., got loose before daybreak on Sept. 11 wearing only a diaper and toddler jogging pants when a local woman discovered him and called police. Officers successfully tracked the path left by the small vehicle to a nearby home where surprised parents took back their son.

Still in 2016

Call it an experiment. Officers from Chelmsford, United Kingdom, ticketed Nigel Mills with driving 88 miles per hour in his DeLorean sports car on Sept. 11. “I wasn’t trying to time travel,” the 55-year-old told The Guardian newspaper, but admitted that he was trying to recreate a part of the 1985 film Back to the Future where the character Marty McFly drives to 88 miles per hour in a DeLorean built to be a time machine. Mills, who paid about $29,000 for the car, avoided a fine when the officers failed to show up for court.