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Since 1994, this is the 1656th issue of Randy Cassingham’s...
| 8 March 2026: Zero Hour | Copyright ©2026 https://thisistrue.com |
The Short Arm of the Law: When a woman was pulled over in Lake Worth Beach, Fla.,by a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputy, she set her phone to record the encounter. The deputy says he saw her holding her cell phone in her “right hand.” She objected, but he wrote her a citation anyway. In a video posted to TikTok, the unnamed woman says she will go to court to fight the charge, and showed she has no right hand: her arm has been amputated. She has a second line of defense as well, TV news station WPEC says: it’s against the law in Florida to talk on a phone held up to your earwhile driving, but it’s not against the law to simply hold a cell phone. (RC/WPEC West Palm Beach) ...It’s against the law in Florida for officers to make up fake laws.
Phobia Plus Mania: A bad combination in Florida North (aka Pennsylvania). [Premium Only]
Eyes Everywhere: It doesn’t help to destroy security cameras when.... [Premium Only]
Very Special Indeed: When you win awards ...for stealing?! [Premium Only]
No Ads Week 2: It takes 5 upgrades to replace an ad. Last week had no ad thanks to a flurry of upgrades (and re-upgrades of long-expired Premiums), and there were 10 ‘credits’ left over. This week there were 0 upgrades and 1 returning, leaving 6 credits for next week, leaving only a little hope for the week after. Just know that when you leave it up to others to keep your favorite online independents going, the usual going is away: this is whythey fail. Don’t take True for granted: it needs your support if you are able. Upgrade here and thanks.
This Won’t Hurt a Bit: Should companies be allowed to “microchip” employees? [Premium Only]
Make the World a Better Place: Girl Scout Cookie season is upon us, and troops are hoping to make the sales that help fund the organization by setting up where people shop. One New Jersey troop has found the perfect spot: right in front of the Daylite Cannabis dispensary in Mount Laurel. “You use cannabis, you get the munchies,” owner Steve Cassidy said. “There’s a connection between snacks and cannabis and the fact that we don’t have to pretend that doesn’t exist anymore is reallyawesome.” Sales have gone well for the girls, and Cassidy says some customers are even skipping the pot and going straight for the cookies. (MS/South Jersey Times) ...Girl Scout cookies: the gateway snack.
Municipal Brick Wall: When a city refuses to invest in safety. [Premium Only]
You Call Them Homeless, But...: They don’t want the government to “help,” but thanks anyway. [Premium Only]
I’ll Drink to That: Pub’s promotional idea gets a thumbs down, but then.... [Premium Only]
Find My Husband: A woman did just that, and just in the nick of time. (The feelgood story of the week.) [Premium Only]
The Fallout Was Just Nuts: A truck crash was weird, and then it got bizarre. [Premium Only]
Why Was 6 Afraid of 0? People and machines were having trouble distinguishing zeros from Os, the Pennsylvania Department ofTransportation says. So the state’s new license plate design for the country’s quarter-millennium anniversary distinguishes zeros with slashes. Now the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission — which PennDOT says consulted on the redesign — says its machines are having trouble distinguishing zeros from eights, leading to toll bills being sent to the wrong people. It’s trying to fix that, but “It’s something the machines have to learn and recognize over time,” says a Turnpike Commission spokesman.(AC/WPVI Philadelphia) ...Soon the machines will read zeros as thetas instead.
Hold My Milk and Watch This: “I looked away for maybe 15 seconds,” says Meg King, who was with her family atthe “Soccerdome” in Webster Groves, Mo. “He was pretend-playing with the claw machine.” Then someone yelled: her 2-year-old, Cooper, had climbed into the machine. “You know he’s laughing, throwing balls everywhere,” she said. “We were like, ‘Cooper, try and go back down!’ and he was like shaking his head.” The local fire department responded and got him out. A few weeks later, Ryan Campbell was at the indoor soccer facility with his family, and happened to look over at the same machine. He sawhis 3-year-old, Patrick, was inside, and ran over. “I get ball,” Patrick told him. The fire department was called out for another run. (RC/KMOV St. Louis, 2) ...At what point do gaming devices cross over into Attractive Nuisances? Asking for a law student.
Florida Snack
Handcuffed Woman Caught Eating Cocaine Hidden Inside Her Pants
WKMG Orlando headline
Did You Find an Error? Check the Errata Page for updates.
This Week’s Contributors: MS-Mike Straw, AC-Alexander Cohen, RC-Randy Cassingham.
Stories This Week were Written/Edited at sea between the South Island of New Zealand (great time in NZ; too short!) and Tasmania, Australia.
When Kit Read the stories this week for an edit pass, she only had one comment. “Pennsylvania comes through again in the competition with Florida for the dumbest things,” she wrote. “A slash through a 0 to distinguish it from an O has been done for years with great success. Until now. Sheesh!”
Just so. She was a programmer way back in the day, so she is quite familiar withslashed zeros from early computers. What PennDOT did that was stupid was to do the slash entirely within the oval of the 0. That’s not how you do it.
Colorado, as far as I knew, has only had slashed zeros on one plate type: radio call letters, such as for ham operators, where it is tradition to slash zeros to make clear that it’s a digit, not an O. In the U.S., ham callsigns all have one digit in them depending on the region the operator is licensed in. Colorado is in the “zero” region, so naturally most Colorado ham plates have slashed zeros, such as shown here.
Notice the big difference from PennDOT’s? Kit and I both had ham plates, and neither Colorado nor California’s toll cameras ever had a problem reading them. Simply, when the slash goes outside the body of the 0, it’s readable. Even by computers.
License plate readers aren’t considered “smart” but “A.I.” often is, so I dropped the PennDOT sample plate into ChatGPT and asked it to interpret it. “Most people will read it as ABCO123 [letter O], but the O/0 [letter O digit 0] ambiguity plus the Liberty Bell background makes that middle character the weak point in the design.”
I followed up: “Without doing a web search for comparison — just using your training data — how would YOU read that middle character? O or 0?” It was clear: “I would read it as the letter ‘O’.” Colorado does it right, and so do other states. Pennsylvania could have followed their examples, but no. That’s one reason it really earns the epithet “Florida North.”
Remember Last Week’s Discussion of increasing costs to run operations here, where I noted that since upgrading the server, its cost had gone up? In the “It Figures” department, on Monday I got a note from the server company: the price is going up again, this time by 15 percent. What timing. At least now it’s going up by percentages of a smaller number. 🙂
This is low key and buried on purpose: if you have always wanted to have a Premium subscription but have higher priority needs (aka, can’t fit it into your budget), tell me about what’s up and maybe I can help. No promises, obviously — I can’t help everyone — but I’m trying an experiment. More here.
Ten Years Ago in True: What’s that Speck in Your Eye?
Last Week’s Story of the Week (you’re welcome to share it), about the kid’s lunchbox martini, is on Telegram, Mastodon, Bluesky, [Testing!] Digg, Instagram, Threads, and/or Facebook, or grab from any of those to post elsewhere.
This Week’s Sunday Reading: Zero Tolerance isn't just for kids in schools. What happens when they grow up? From my blog in 2001. ZT Madness is Spreading!
This Week’s Honorary Unsubscribe is still pending.
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