Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
• When Fort Worth, Texas, code compliance officers arrived at a home at around 8:30 a.m. on July 16 to issue a violation for too-high grass, the homeowner did not answer the door.
But when mowers hired by the city showed up and started cutting the grass, the person inside began shooting at them, KDFW-TV reported.
The police officers who had accompanied the compliance team took cover and waited for backup; the person inside continued shooting until SWAT units arrived and shot tear gas into the home.
The shooter was taken into custody at about 1 p.m.; the citation was his seventh in two years.
"Being shot at for trying to make the community look better?" said Fort Worth officer Jimmy Pollozani. "That just proves the dangers of this job."
The man was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. [KDFW, 7/17/2021]
• The Guardian reported on July 19 about a phenomenon among American preschoolers called the Peppa Effect.
The hypothesis is that children who watched a lot of "Peppa Pig" during the pandemic lockdown have developed British accents and started using British terms like "mummy" (mommy), "give it a go" (try it) and "satnav" (GPS).
Wall Street Journal reporter Preetika Rana tweeted that her niece "had an American accent before the pandemic. Now she has a posh English accent."
One responder agreed: "And for Christmas I had to put out a freaking mince pie for Father Christmas, or, as we call him here in the States, Santa Claus." [Guardian, 7/19/2021]