Prison Break!

Arriving to work at the crack of dawn on Thursday, I was welcomed with a hefty dose of breaking news! An inmate of the world-famous Folsom Prison had busted out during the early hours of the morning and was on the lam! Immediately I started picturing the intricate break-out plans of such classic films as The Rock, The Shawshank Redemption and, to a lesser extent, Escape from New York. Also glimpses of Fox's Prison Break flashed through my mind, and while I've never actually seen the show, the commercials made their escape plan seem quite intricate. Thus, I assumed, we were dealing with a master criminal!

With that, I loaded up the live truck and headed up the hill to Folsom Prison. Nothing like a Microwave Dish Sunrise to start your day:

Shortly into the morning, information was released on our criminal mastermind.

Standing at 5'6, buck thirty, he was picked up for Grand Theft Auto (like the game!) in LA a few years back. He was later paroled, then nabbed once again for "loitering while on parole". Clearly we were dealing with a potential disaster. Our parking lots, our parks and our freeway overpasses were threatened by this serial loiterer on the loose! A massive manhunt ensued.

We later discovered that his intricate escape plan, the one that had gotten me all excited, consisted of him climbing over a chain-link fence in the minemum security portion of the prison and booking it into the surrounding fields. Not quite Snake Pliskin shooting his way through gang members... but close.

Tips came flying in suggesting that he was seen boarding a bus going this way or a train going that way. However, five hours after his daring escape, he was once again apprehended. He had been discovered in a field, perhaps a quarter mile from the prison, by an off duty sheriff who happened to be biking by and saw a suspicious fellow.

He was actually going to be on parole in less than two months... now he's back to prison for a possible sentence of two years. Oh, and he's going to be inside those big walls now, not just them minimum security fences. So you can rest easy tonight, for the rogue loiterer is no longer a danger to society.

And on a separate note, here's a picture of a bird getting a healthy dose of microwave radiation. Take that, Al Gore!