In Washington state, a woman was removed from a symphony performance. Read the very short article to see why.

If that brevity was good but not filling enough, the full police blotter provides even more intrigue. Is this a dispute between a mother and a daughter, or a conductor and a rival? We may never know.

In a practice known as “Pay for Delay”, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer pay rivals to avoid introducing cheaper generic versions. Pfizer keeps getting rich selling their full-price drug, the rivals get rich for not doing any work, and patients are stuck covering the bill. Sounds pretty lousy, right?

Worse, Pfizer is working on a new scheme, where they provide their drug at a discount to middlemen. This time around, most customers may not notice, as insured patients will be paying the generic price. Unfortunately, the uninsured will be left in the lurch, and the companies which manufacture generics will be cut out of the equation. With these kinds of business practices, it seems like Pfizer’s slogan could use some tweaking:

Pfizer: Working Together for a Healthier Stock Price.

An art installation worth more than $1m (£624,000) has been damaged by an overzealous cleaner who tried to scrub away a deliberate patina.

The patina was meant to look like a puddle beneath a rubber trough placed under a stacked tower of wooden slats.

Oops.

In an attempt to gain the upper-hand in getting deep discounts on Black Friday, a woman in California blasted fellow shoppers with pepper spray.

Words fail me, so I’ll simply ask: did Seinfeld teach us nothing?

FRANK: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had – but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way!

KRAMER: What happened to the doll?

FRANK: It was destroyed. But out of that, a new holiday was born. “A Festivus for the rest of us!”

Yesterday, Zappos.com arranged a promotion to pay for drivers’ tolls on the Massachusetts Turnpike. It seems like a brilliant marketing strategy — who doesn’t love a company that helps prevent traffic during one of the busiest travel days of the year? But the article mentions a curious wrinkle:

Signage will be set up at the toll complex to will alert motorists that their tolls have been paid courtesy of Zappos.com. And for motorists who stop to pay, there will also be a “second, unexpected surprise,” the company said

Any chance said “surprise” was a judicious punch to the face, for failure to read signs while driving, thereby causing traffic to backup unnecessarily? Probably not. Ah well — Happy Thanksgiving.

Remember the story of the abominable Halloween party put on by a New York law firm, mocking the poor? It looks like the chickens have come home to roost, as the firm has now been forced to close its doors. The New York Times has the full report, as well as a follow-up column by Joe Nocera, who uncovered the initial story.

Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy has collected some of the great poetic works of Mitt Romney. They’re all fantastic, but perhaps the best is this short tribute, entitled “On the Untimely Departure and Heavenly Ascent of the Golden Retriever Seamus Romney”:

This has been a mosquito-infested year with all the moisture.

                               They

                                         flew away

                                                           

 

 

                                                             with my dog.

Up in Canada, graffiti artist Dion Nordick found motion-activated cameras on his property, left by the police. Upon taking the cameras down and examining the contents of their memory cards, he found pictures of himself as well as images from other police cases. Incredibly, those images included a dead body and an apparently physically abused woman.

If that’s not incompetence enough for you, you might ask how Nordick discovered the cameras.

[Nordick] said he was alerted to the cameras because they used a flash when they were filming.

Exploiting inmates’ need, CCA charges detainees here $5 per minute to make phone calls. Yet the prison only pays inmates who work at the facility $1 a day.

For-profit prisons are one of America’s secret shames.