Karma is a b*tch!
Oh! The irony...
Lawyer defending arson suspect flees court with pants on fire
Following the heat of a courtroom battle a lawyer defending an alleged arsonist was reportedly forced to flee proceedings temporarily after his own pants* caught fire. Miami-based legal eagle Stephen Gutierrez was in the midst of contending that his client’s car had spontaneously combusted and had not been deliberately set on …
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Friday 10th March 2017 13:06 GMT Steven Raith
Re: "not part of his defence strategy"?
If he did do it deliberately, he'd have to have shorted the cell out or severely abused it, as batteries - as a rule - don't just pop. They get shorted, overheated, or otherwise abused and then fail, typically through thermal runaway and venting.
There are exceptions (poor manufacturing practises, as seen by Samsung recently) but these generally don't affect the sort of cells used in e-cigs, which are normally cylindrical and are a mature, stable tech - not bleeding edge, trying to be as thin as they can flat cells.
If he had the cell in his pocket with a length of chain, his keys, or similar, then all he'll have proved is that his client may have done the same, rather scuppering his case.
It does all smell a bit fishy, frankly.
Steven R
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Friday 10th March 2017 14:36 GMT Mike Moyle
Re: "not part of his defence strategy"?
I can't claim this as a universal, but it seems to me that every case of a phone or e-cig battery catching fire that I've read, mention seems to be made of the device being in or having been carried in a pants/trouser pocket as opposed to, say, a shirt pocket. I have to wonder whether the majority of problems can be attributed to flexion of the battery, connections, etc., and could be ameliorated by simply carrying potentially explosive electronics in pockets not subjected to regular -- and sometimes extreme - bending.
I dunno... Too simple?
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Friday 10th March 2017 14:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "not part of his defence strategy"?
"If he did do it deliberately" - then it's surely contempt of court, plus charges of his own for arson around in court. If he is charged with contempt, then if it wasn't deliberate his forensics experts will be able to recreate the events. With cameras present.
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Friday 10th March 2017 15:08 GMT Jason Bloomberg
Re: "not part of his defence strategy"?
I once had my jacket pocket burst into flames when a match had fallen out of its box and rubbed up against the 'sandpaper'.
I have also accidentally set fire to tissue paper while cleaning gunk out of an e-cig battery connector when I inadvertently pressed the power button.
It still feels too much of a coincidence to have occurred spontaneously in this case.
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Friday 10th March 2017 13:32 GMT inmypjs
Re: “A lot of people could have been hurt,”
"Ummmmm, how?"
Indeed, but, some people want to imaging and declare improbable dangers.
Bit like political correctness the more improbable the danger you declare the more clever and caring you depict yourself as being, but, only to other stupid people of course.
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Friday 10th March 2017 13:26 GMT Haku
Ahh colloquial meanings of words.
For many years I was somewhat confused when in the American film Armed and Dangerous, Meg Ryan has a dance with someone at some event and afterwards says jokingly she was dancing so close to him she could probably get the guys fingerprints from her fanny...!
Only when I learnt Americans have a different meaning for that word than us Brits the penny dropped.
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Friday 10th March 2017 15:39 GMT Peter2
Re: Ahh colloquial meanings of words.
>Good post - Can anyone trump that?
As member of a multinational forum, the equally multinational staff once had a great deal of amusement discovering that our names for the products in a bakers window meant different things in each language.
For instance, what the UK would consider a biscuit, the American's consider a cookie, which is not the same as what we consider a cookie to be, and their idea of a biscuit is our idea of a scone etc.
Finally after some hilarity from our side over a sign in the window solemnly warning that food or drink might become hot when heated, and a total lack of understanding from the Americans we had to point out that it was true that Americans totally lacked a sense of humour, but we did generously concede that they had a sense of humor instead and tried to explain the difference to them.
Their reaction sort of proved the point. ;)
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Friday 10th March 2017 15:20 GMT Jason Bloomberg
Re: Ahh colloquial meanings of words.
I was quite surprised when "Married with Children" was airing and Al Bundy, commenting on his wife Peggy, made a proclamation along the lines of; "and that's why I married a wanker". I believe she was said to have hailed from "Wanker County".
It was only some time later that I discovered Wanker is a common American surname, and not as derogatory as it sounded.
And then there's "Ginger Minge".
Just popping outside to get myself a fag and some sticky buns.
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Saturday 11th March 2017 03:03 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Ahh colloquial meanings of words.
"calls Will a wanker on at least one occasion."
IIRC, Phil Collins also used wanker in an episode of Miami Vice many tears ago. It seems that it's way of getting swear words past the overly cautious US networks censors, ie, use words they don't understand which really are swear words instead of inventing euphemisms like Frack!
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Saturday 11th March 2017 06:24 GMT Haku
Re: Ahh colloquial meanings of words.
Liam Neeson said wanker in a Simpsons episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJp7drI8hWQ
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Friday 10th March 2017 23:02 GMT x 7
Re: Ahh colloquial meanings of words.
there I was, a few years back, minding my own business drinking in an hotel bar in Charlotte, South Carolina when a fat lardy type of girl walked up to me and asked "did I want a shag"? Much spluttering of beer ensued, during which I tried to explain that I wasn't very good at doing that kind of thing in public, and that I didn't really fancy her enough to f*** her. She looked at me a bit slantendictally and wandered off muttering about queer brits, to which I replied "not queer, I just don't shag munters".
Cue an interruption by the barman "She only wanted a dance - "The Shag" is the official state dance". That just made things worse.... In my alcohol induced mind I had now hallucinations of horizontal polkas with a girl who made Hatty Jacques look streamlined.
Be warned: go to the Carolinas and be very clear what you mean when talking to women
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Saturday 11th March 2017 16:23 GMT Dave 126
Re: Ahh colloquial meanings of words.
>Be warned: go to the Carolinas and be very clear what you mean when talking to women
It seems that it was your very clarity of expression ("I don't fancy you enough... you're a munter") is what got you in trouble!
When the Bonzo Dog Band was touring the States by bus, Viv Stanshall wearing a pair of trousers fashioned from green hotel towels and the rest of the band looking like freaks and oddballs, they were pulled over by a policeman:
"Have you boys got any drugs?"
No, goodness no, they replied.
"Are you carrying any guns, any knives?"
No, no, officer.
"Then how do you expect to defend yourselves?!" asked the incredulous officer.
"With good manners!" replied Stanshall.
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Friday 10th March 2017 16:52 GMT TitterYeNot
Re: Ahh colloquial meanings of words.
"she was dancing so close to him she could probably get the guys fingerprints from her fanny...!
Only when I learnt Americans have a different meaning for that word than us Brits the penny dropped."
Yes, as a Brit, the first time I heard a young American woman complaining that the strap on her fanny pack was too tight, I though I'd uncovered a drugs mule...
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Saturday 11th March 2017 12:16 GMT Wade Burchette
Re: Ahh colloquial meanings of words.
When I visited the U of K, I had many locals ask me "Are you here on holiday?" And just about every time, I almost said "No, I am here on vacation." Then I would ride the subway ... er, the underground ... and I saw a sign that said "Mind the gap" and I would think "I don't mind the gap at all". Or when going down a set of stairs there is a sign that says "Mind your head". Americans do use 'mind' in the same way, just not as often. We would say in that situation "Watch your head". And, of course, it is a cell phone and not a mobile phone. (This is because before cellular telephones were created, Motorola already had a device called a mobile phone, so a new name had to be created to distinguish the two. Since the idea was to place towers are placed in such a cellular design, cell phone became the name.)
I always remember that English is a living language. Just because it is different does not mean it is wrong. Just imagine how much difference British English and American English and Australian English and Canadian English would be if not for modern technology.
P.S. To 'x 7', Charlotte is in NORTH Carolina. You might be thinking of Charleston, South Carolina.
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Saturday 11th March 2017 03:13 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: As a northerner
As a 55 year old northerner living at 55oN, further north than the most southern part of Scotland, "trousers" and "pants" are freely interchangeable terms and the stuff you wear underneath are, naturally "underpants", also know as "undies" when talking to southerners or kegs/kecks in normal parlance. Sometimes kegs are called "skids" or "skiddies" but that's really a southern expression used in southern towns like Manchester or Liverpool and probably refers to their normal state rather than any clever rhyming slang thing.
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Saturday 11th March 2017 16:26 GMT Dave 126
Re: Limeys?
>But it might have come from Cockney originally. We'll never know.
Don't be so defeatist:
Australian Oxford Dictionary (2 ed.)
An authoritative guide to contemporary Australian English, produced by the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University and Oxford University Press.
- http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195517965.001.0001/acref-9780195517965
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Sunday 12th March 2017 05:58 GMT W.S.Gosset
English "Pants" is quite a recent thing
"Pants"="Trousers" is correct english, and remains that way outside the UK, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Fiji, etc. But colloquial english in most of the UK now regards pants as underpants. This intrigued me when I first arrived in London and over the next 20 years (I'm now back in Oz) I kept a sharp eye out for how it happened.
I've narrowed it down to starting in the 50s or possibly very late 40s (no occurrence in WWII) in the "upper" classes. But pants were still trousers for the "lower" classes until at least the late 70s. The source for the former, the earliest occurrence I ever found, is a story by P.G.Wodehouse in IIRC 1957, dealing strictly with the upper classes and actually playing heavily on the "dated" traditional usage of the word by Americans. The latter: a quote by Barry Sheene in IIRC 1978. I use "class" here strictly in the British sense. (From an Aussie perspective, Bazza was high class, Bertie et al were useless drips (albeit harmless and amusing).)
For pants=underpants to be declared fundamental (fnarr) --at least in the PLU subset-- in 1957, it had to have been a growing thing for a while. But that subset of the population featured prominently in British officers in WWII and there's not the remotest suggestion of such a substitution of meaning in anything written by them at the time or after. Quite the opposite -- pants were trousers (or shorts -- "short pants"). So it must have started some appreciable time after then. But it also needed to have been early enough for P.G.Wodehouse's story not to have been met with blank incomprehension when it was published -- which it was not. So I'm guessing around the cusp of 1950 among "the smart set", fawningly taken up in the usual UK-mass-rush by the wannabe smartset AKA the chattering classes. Throw in the British penchant for dressing up like and aping people they regard as high status (wanna buy an ordinary motorbike covered in racing stickers and random bolt-on "racing" accessories? go to england -- they're a dime a dozen), and hey presto, you have a cultural movement, leading to a cultural shift to a new equilibrium.
The fact that Barry Sheene was still automatically assuming pants=trousers 20 years later is a valuable data-point for all cultural anthropologists and linguists, in developing models for speed of cultural change.
Re the latter, the north-of-England's (not Scotland or N.Ireland) resistance to this modern wankery is entirely to be expected.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
