Up in Canada, a junior high art teacher is in trouble for selling student art without their consent. Obviously, that’s wrong, and he shouldn’t have done it. This, however, seems more than a little ridiculous:

The parents of 10 young students at Westwood Junior High School in Saint-Lazare, Que., an off-island suburb west of Montreal, filed the lawsuit for $1.575 million, or $155,000 per plaintiff plus punitive damages…for alleged copyright infringement.

Thought it’s a steal compared to what Basquiat’s “Untitled” will run you, that’s rather a lot of money for some not very good art:

Joel DeBellefeuille, another parent represented in the lawsuit, says while the amount of money sought might seem outrageous, it represents the scale of intellectual property infringement that took place.

“We requested $5,000 per artwork that was infringed,” he said, saying there were 31 pieces of plagiarized merchandise per student.

I doubt very much that these ridiculous numbers represent the “scale of IP infringement” at all. In fact, I suspect that not a single one of these items actually sold. The “31 pieces of plagiarized merchandise” were apparently available on pixels.com, which is a print-on-demand service offering items like mugs and yoga mats. Unless something actually sold, the “pieces” never actually existed.

In addition to the money, the lawsuit states the group of parents is asking for a written apology from Perron, the removal of the students’ artwork from all websites and a report of any sales made in connection with the plagiarized works.

All of that is fair. The money being sought here, however, is nonsense.

Last week, surgeons at MGH transplanted a pig kidney into a live human patient. Sometimes, the future is incredible. Now, let us hope it goes better than last time.

Earlier this week, I read about an Irish man named Terrence Crosbie who was accused of rape while visiting Boston over St. Patrick’s Day weekend. After police first questioned Crosbie, he booked a Saturday night flight back to his native country, forgoing Sunday’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities in the obvious hopes of eluding justice. He then managed to get a seat on an even earlier Saturday flight. He was caught in the nick of time, with his plane stopped on the tarmac, seemingly as it was preparing to take off. It’s a hell of a story.

A similar situation occurred the very next day in Utah, when a man named Wicliff Yves Fleurizard attempted to fly home to Austin in a rather unorthodox manner.

He had been booked on a Southwest flight but was later rebooked, as the flight was full.

Instead of waiting for the next Southwest flight, he went into the Delta area of the airport, where he was seen on surveillance footage taking photos of multiple passenger’s phones and their boarding passes while they were not looking. He then used the pictures on his own phone to ultimately board Flight 1683.

After boarding this flight, Fleurizard hid in the lavatory for an extended period. The plane also taxied toward the runway, headed for takeoff, before the issue was discovered and the plane turned around. Like Crosbie, things did not end well for Fleurizard.

Previously in winging across America with mala fides: Perception Is Reality

For the past year or two, I’ve found myself noticing some cars looking…weird. Though it was very difficult to elucidate, the paint jobs on more and more cars seemed somehow unfinished to me, or just otherwise wrong. These vehicles weren’t matte. That’s an uncommon look, but one that’s easy to explain. Instead, these cars still had gloss, yet also seemed dull.

An Audi looking weird in “Nardo Grey” [Photo credit: Viktor Hadjiev]

Recently, the universe presented me with an answer to the question I didn’t even know how to ask. I somehow stumbled on a rather frenetic YouTube video that matched my repeated thought (“That car looks peculiar, but I don’t know why”), then did a faster-than-real-time dive into the matter. That led me to this 19-month-old piece that covers the subject perfectly.

On the most concrete level, what’s happening with these paints isn’t just that they are significantly grayed down, but that they contain a very low amount, if not a total absence, of “flake” — the tiny metallic flecks that car manufacturers have been mixing into paint for decades, which makes their vehicles sparkle and helps highlight their (ostensibly) seductive, undulating lines.

There it is! There’s the explanation. These bizarro cars I’ve recently been seeing more and more lack flake. It’s strange to my eye, and I don’t much care for it. But after many months, I’m relieved that I at least finally know what’s going on.

This is very dumb, and I completely believe it will work. It will also make my life slightly more difficult, as I attempt to buy plant-based products, but I’ll manage.

At a Goodwill in DuBois, Pennsylvania, an unknown person recently donated a bag of jewelry. Inside that bag was one item that wasn’t jewelry, but was gold and worth almost 20 grand.

That’s a whole lot of money for a Lego head.