Changing a light bulb in Birmingham is getting expensive - the cost is now over 90,000 pounds. News that a council street and traffic lights engineer received 91,000 pounds for 2005/2006 including overtime bonuses, even though he was off sick, caused an uproar. Apparently the average pay in Britain is about 23,000 pounds a year.

Birmingham City Council’s Alan Rudge said he intended to stamp out the practice of workers getting bloated pay packets. Earlier this month, Birmingham council came under fire when news leaked that some road workers, whose job was to paint white lines on the city’s streets, earned 1,000 pounds a week.

Wow, maybe I should move to Birmingham England and get a job working for the city?

Now this is odd, Hans Monderman, a Dutch transportation planner is pushing his innovative plans for improving traffic.

Would you like to know what proprosals he’s made? Glad you asked. His proposals include eliminating traffic signs and street markings, which he thinks will force drivers to be careful as they hunt for their destinations, and building children’s playgrounds in median strips of roads, figuring that drivers would surely slow down.

Hans - you haven’t been taking your medications have you? Kids playing in the medians? No traffic signs? Hello? People have a hard enough time driving and not getting into problems with traffic signs. Plus- what wouldn’t that confuse tourists and out of towners even more?

What do you think of this proprosal?

Get this story, about a man who claimed to be carrying a bomb-

A recent stand-off between a man and the police ended peacefully in the streets of Phoenix.

The Phoenix Police received a call at about 3:50 p.m. one day, from a driver who said he saw a man acting strangely and walking in and out of traffic along Central Avenue in downtown Phoenix. I live in a big city too, I’m sure police gets calls like this often enough. When the police arrived to check out the complaint they noticed a man was holding a yellow blanket to conceal his hands and upper chest and he was saying that he had a bomb.The Police shut down the street and evacuated a Burger King and Circle K.

The officers asked the man to put down the blanket and surrender for more than an hour, but when he refused, police fired several stun bag rounds and concussion grenades, and sicked a police dog on the man. Ow!

After the police action, officers ran up to the man, and he threw what he had been concealing at them. It turned out to be a block of wood. It was unclear why the man was acting in such an odd way. He might have been mentally unstable or on drugs.

The man faces charges of aggravated assault and disorderly conduct. He was taken to a local hospital with a minor bite on one of his arms. I bet that ended up being an interesting story for the ER staff to talk about.

Sign of the Times

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Four Mexicans were killed when a dispute between two Tzotzil Indian families over a pothole in the street escalated into a full-blown shootout. I can’t imagine how a dispute over a pothole lead to gunfire but somehow it did.

As the story goes, one of the families closed off the cracked concrete and mud road in the town of Banelos in the poor southern state of Chiapas to fill in a hole left by heavy rain. That sounds like a reasonable excuse for closing off a round. Take the repair into your own hands.

However, the closing of the roadway angered a family with a transport business who needed to get their truck through.

When the first family refused to re-open the road, insults led to blows and finally the two families shot at each other using various caliber guns and a hefty AR-15 rifle. Shootings are not uncommon in Mexico’s little-policed indigenous regions, where many take the law into their own hands.

Something about this story sounds a little fishy to me. Where on earth did these families get all their gun power? Just what kind of transportation business did the second family run? I wonder.

The pothole has since been filled in with rubble to repair the orginal damage.