Free Talk Live

This is an article I wrote about the stupid warning my neighbors received for having some mulch in their driveway and for having a pile of garbage...which the city was supposed to pick up.

An Avondale woman who spent 11 days sleeping in her car said the city treated her unfairly when her home was condemned in December for lack of electricity.

But city officials said Christine Stevens violated building codes, a health and safety concern because Avondale homes are required to have heating systems and a running refrigerator.

Stevens, 47, was trying to make ends meet by powering her home with solar panels and batteries for several months before Avondale code enforcement officials visited her on Dec. 10.

A city program launched in April has code enforcement officers writing thousands of citations — ranging from $25 to $1,000 — for infractions, including illegal dumping and improper storage of trash in open containers or paper shopping bags.

Their front yard was torn up after replacing a sewer line, so instead of replacing the dirt with grass, one Oak Park woman put in a vegetable garden and now the city is seeing green.

The city then sent out code enforcement.

City code says that all unpaved portions of the site shall be planted with grass or ground cover or shrubbery or other suitable live plant material. Tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are what Basses see as suitable.

this time it belongs to a teacher in Tennessee.

It's time people begin treating computer code the way we do the alphabet or arithmetic. Code is the stuff that makes computer programs work -- the list of commands that tells a word processor, a website, a video game, or an airplane navigation system what to do. That's all software is: lines of code, written by people. We are socializing, working, consuming, and living in a world increasingly defined by programs. Learning to code is the best way to understand what all those programs do, or even to recognize that they are there in the first place.

New York City cabbies' gruff demeanors and scruffy appearances are as storied as the black-and-yellow taxis they pilot, but some city regulators are trying to polish that image by implementing dress code for the city's fleet of drivers, according to the Associated Press.

The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project as started in 2009 as a method of recording and analyzing police misconduct in the US.
From 01/10 through 06/10 there were:
* 2,541 Unique reports of police misconduct cited.
* 3,240 Law enforcement officers cited in recorded police misconduct reports.
* 178 Of the law enforcement officers reported were departmental leaders, police chiefs, and sheriffs.
* 4,199 Alleged victims of police misconduct associated with these reports.
* 124 Fatalities associated with these reports.

The Cathedral of Junk goes far beyond the "sofa in the lawn" code violation with a massive 3-story 60-ton building made entirely of discarded and donated items. The city is giving the owner two weeks to clean-up, get architectural permits and otherwise make a structure made entirely of junk up-to-code or have the whole lot bull-dozed.