headline of the day

Not much to add to this, really:

- except to commend the nice deadpan tone of the article in Wigan Today describing the original incident, especially this bit:

He then began performing a sex act and walked over to the postbox and “started to make sexual advances towards it.”

See, you can't just leap onto a postbox and start humping it, you've got to start by making some "sexual advances" - you know, looking away all bashfully before casting coquettish glances back over your shoulder, that sort of thing. Not an easy thing to do with the required dignity and panache while sitting on a bench with your trousers around your ankles.

A statement read by the prosecution described the defendant as drunk.

Since the police are treating the death as "non-suspicious" I assume that Mr. Bennett failed to be sufficiently chastened by his experiences (or possibly just didn't remember them) to make the lifestyle changes that he needed to make. Or maybe he spoke out of turn in the Chinese restaurant and someone slipped him a tainted spring roll. I do have a recollection of sitting in Mr. Kong's Chinese restaurant off Leicester Square with my friend Tony and some others back in the late 1990s having a competition to see who could say TRIADS the loudest before someone emerged from the kitchen and attacked us with a meat cleaver. Luckily the staff failed to conform to racist stereotype and just ignored us.

Bennett was also obliged to sign the Sex Offenders register as a result of the postbox incident, which seems fair enough for an incident in a public place bookended by a lot of other trousers-down public exposing behaviour. The 2007 case of the Scottish man who attempted to have sex with a bicycle seems a bit less clear-cut to me, since he was in the relative privacy of his room at the time. This follow-up article mentions another man who was nicked for two separate incidents involving a shoe and a traffic cone. There's really no accounting for taste.