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FORT MYERS, Fla. – The Easter Bunny has been fired – for losing his head. Arthur J. McClure, 22, who had been hired to play the Easter Bunny at a local mall has been accused of removing the head of the costume and hitting a customer, authorities said.

McClure punched Erin Johansson when she got upset that the photo exhibit was closing 10 minutes early Saturday night, police reports said. The incident was witnessed by dozens of people at the Edison Mall, including 15 children.

McClure said he never punched Johansson. He claims he was trying to stop a fight between his wife – exhibit manager Crystal Frechette – and Johansson.

He said he took the bunny’s head off because he had been wearing it for nine hours and was hot.

“My shirt was soaked with sweat,” McClure said. “I almost threw up.”

Mall management issued an apology to parents and children. Golden, Colo.-based Noerr Programs Corp., which contracted with the mall to run the photo set, fired McClure and Frechette on Monday. They also have been charged with battery and disturbing the peace.

NEW YORK – Weeks after Hal the coyote attracted national attention with his adventures in Central Park, another one of the animals was spotted in a Bronx park on Tuesday and was given a much more formal name: Jacob Van Cortlandt.

The Department of Parks & Recreation said two golfers reported seeing the coyote at about 3 p.m. by hole No. 5 on Van Cortlandt Golf Course, a municipal course inside the park that stretches more than 1,100 acres at the northern end of the Bronx.

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said Jacob the coyote was named after Jacobus Van Cortlandt, who served as mayor in the early 1700s and had a hand in the land transactions for the park.

Hal, the Central Park coyote, died late last month as he was being tagged for release upstate. He had been captured several days earlier after leading police on a wild chase through New York City’s largest park.

Hal was caught near 79th Street and Central Park West, shot by a police officer with a tranquilizer gun. The coyote, about a year old and weighing 35 pounds, could have crossed the Hudson River from New Jersey or wandered into the city from Westchester County, which borders Van Cortlandt Park.

Benepe said parks officials had confirmed the Jacob sighting on Tuesday but had no plans to pursue him because he posed no immediate danger to humans or small pets.

“Central Park is an area frequented by thousands of people on a daily basis,” Benepe said. “We’re not going to seek out this coyote – it’s not a cause for alarm unless we get reports of them frequenting heavily used areas.”

Note: I get a lot of questions about the legality of parking scooters on sidewalks. I would say that, as a general rule of thumb, while you may park them there and be fairly safe, you may not want to drive them there… while carrying drugs… and weapons.

Officer Steve Harris stopped Michael Hernandez, 20, of 625 S. Airport Way, for riding a motor scooter on the sidewalk.

As he was being searched a crack pipe fell out of a pant leg.

Hernandez was charged with possession of a dangerous weapon — a dagger in a sheath — plus possession of narcotics paraphernalia and a small baggie of crack. Police also said Hernandez is a known Norteno gang member.

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A computer game that turns pet hamsters into virtual man-eaters could be the first in a new breed of games aimed at both people and their pets.

“Mice Arena” is an augmented-reality computer game in which human players are pitted against a real, live hamster.

The hamster is housed in a tank fitted with infra-red sensors that track its motion as it chases after a tasty piece of bait. Its movements are mimicked by monster hamster on a computer screen, which chases a virtual character representing a human opponent.

The human player must manipulate the onscreen movements of the character to evade the hungry hamster. As they do so, actuators move the real bait around the tank to keep it away from the real rodent. The game ends when the human’s onscreen persona has been caught and eaten, or when they have survived for a set period of time.

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Mariposa resident Dave Givens makes a 186-mile drive — each way — five days a week to his job in San Jose.

The electrical engineer has been doing that commute since 1989, spending seven hours every day getting to and from work at Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO).

Givens is the “ultimate road warrior,” according to Midas Inc. (NYSE:MDS) and drove home with its first-place prize in the nationwide search for “America’s Longest Commute.” Givens out-drove thousands of other entrants to take home $10,000 in gas money and a range of maintenance services and products.

“I have a great job and my family loves the ranch where we live,” Givens said. “So this is the only solution.”

On his long trek he said he listens to the radio, keeps his eyes on the road and drinks “a lot of coffee.”

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NEW YORK – The police bomb squad, responding Friday to a call of a suspicious device inside a parked minivan in midtown Manhattan, blew out the vehicle’s windows – only to find out the item inside was simply stereo equipment, police said.

The incident occurred when police received a 911 call from a passer-by who spotted the device inside a red minivan parked outside 4 E. 67th St., said police spokesman Dennis Laffin. It was a canister about the size of two shoe boxes, with a digital display of changing numbers and some loose wires visible.

“It looked suspicious,” Laffin said. “I think anyone would have thought something was strange.”

The police bomb squad responded after the 8:22 a.m. call, blowing out three side windows and the back window with a water propelled charge, Laffin said at the scene. A police robot was sent inside the van to take pictures of the device; the photos led police to determine the package was nothing more than stereo equipment.

The van’s owner, a Bronx resident, has yet to hear the bad news about his windows.

WADSWORTH, Ohio – Firefighters dousing a fire in a new home were confused when the man they thought was the owner suddenly left – until they found $700,000 worth of marijuana plants in the basement, officials said.

“It seemed so strange to me” that the man left, said Wadsworth Fire Chief Ralph Copley. “If it were my home burning, I’d want to be there.”

After firefighters extinguished the fire, which started in the attic early Friday morning, they found 239 marijuana plants filling one-fourth of the basement, which was wired throughout for indoor plant growing, authorities said.

“It was unreal,” Copley said. “In 24 years, I’ve never seen a fire quite like that.”

The Medina County Drug Task Force and firefighters on Friday confiscated items from the home, including peat moss, 1,000-watt bulbs and large reflecting discs. The basement had no fire damage.

The marijuana-cultivating system was wired to the home’s electrical system in a way that bypassed the meter, said Michael Barnhardt, acting director of the task force. Such wiring would help a grower avoid the large electric bills that clue in investigators, he said.

Copley said the cause of the fire was unknown, but it did not appear to be related to the marijuana operation or electrical wiring. It caused about $150,000 in damage.

The home, bought for $229,000 less than one month ago, is owned by a Lan Le. There is no telephone listing under that name in the northeast Ohio city 30 miles south of Cleveland.

MINNEAPOLIS – Mr. Sulu beamed down to lend support to student gay activists who tried to visit a private Christian university.

George Takei, who played the helmsman in three “Star Trek” TV seasons and six movies, made a surprise appearance Monday after a busload of Soulforce Equality Riders tried to talk about faith and gay rights with students at North Central University in downtown Minneapolis.

The 33 activists are traveling by bus to 19 U.S. colleges with religion-based policies opposed to homosexuality. They were locked out of school buildings when they arrived at North Central, which is owned and operated by the Assemblies of God.

After sitting in front of the doors for most of the afternoon, the Soulforce riders and supporters rallied at a park across the street when Takei, who came out as a homosexual last year, stopped by.

The 68-year-old actor said the activists’ “equality trek” shares themes with those of the starship Enterprise.

“They have shown courage and character in showing that most people of faith are not extreme reactionaries who oppose equal rights,” he said.

Tour organizer Jacob Reitan, 24, said the colleges they are visiting “equate homosexuality with sickness and sin. It’s time to have a conversation instead of defaming our humanity.”

Nate Ruch, executive director of university relations at North Central, said last week that the riders declined an offer to have a third party mediate a discussion.

Takei was in town to speak at a gay pride event at the University of Minnesota

http://www.georgetakei.com/

More than anything he’s done since parting ways with Roger Waters more than two decades ago, David Gilmour’s spectacular Sunday night show at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre captured the magic and majesty that was Pink Floyd.

His 2 1/2-hour set, which almost evenly mixed new and old material, was more like the best years of Pink Floyd than the last two tours he, Nick Mason and Richard Wright did under the quartet’s name.

That was largely because this time, on a four-city U.S. tour of intimate theaters, Gilmour felt free to challenge his audience with new music and some adventurous twists on the old tunes that made Floyd one of the top-selling bands of all time.

It also helped that the sound was perfect and the lighting sublime. Gilmour and Waters were always at the forefront of multimedia performance, pulling the audience into the show with lasers, roller coaster-like videos and, yes, famously flying pigs.

In one of rock’s ugliest and most bitter divorces, Gilmour apparently got the lasers, and Waters, the videos and Gerald Scarfe animations. Gilmour got keyboardist Wright, who sang Waters’ parts on “Comfortably Numb,” and Waters got drummer Mason, who is touring Europe with him now, and should be at Shoreline Amphitheatre in October. (No telling who got the pig.)

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This comes via boing boing:

GW Bush’s iPod contains “illegal” (according to RIAA) music
In the video linked below, we see that President Bush’s iPod contains songs by the Beatles; since no Beatles songs have been licensed for the iTunes Music Store yet, these must have come from ripped CDs. Remember last February, when the RIAA told a federal agency that ripping CDs is illegal? I wonder if they’ll bring charges.

Link to video