George Lucas is still pissed.

So there's nothing better than updating this site while avoiding my studies. I could be reading up on the 10 chapters I've fallen behind on in my one class oooor. . . updating a blog no one reads. Obviously, I'm going to root for the underdog.

A quick google search brings me exactly what I need. May 28, 1999. I remember this happening and thinking, That's awesome! Turns out the brother of one of the guys was in my creative writing class. But I digress. Here is a small recap of what went down. . .

Menomonie, WI - In May 1999, four men, aided by an employee of the State Theater in Menomonie, WI, stole a print of the "Star Wars" movie "The Phantom Menace" (value: $60,000) in one of the worst-executed crimes in state history. As the men lifted the 3-foot-wide spool from the projector, it unraveled, leaving two miles of celluloid on the floor. The men scooped the mess up, took it home, and tried to wash the film in a bathtub to get rid of their fingerprints (hint: doesn't work). Then, they cut it up for disposal but, after awhile, finally realized they needed to turn themselves in. Authorities said alcohol was heavily involved in the caper. Each was sentenced to five days in jail.

Five days? Five days? That's it? They performed a crime against geekhood and they only got five days?! Oh, oh, here's a snippit of another article:

Menomonie Police Chief Dennis Beety declined to comment on a motive for the theft. Three Menomonie-area men in their 20s were in custody Wednesday pending a review of the case by the Dunn County district attorney. Two men surrendered at the office of their attorney at 9 a.m., while another man showed up at the police department accompanied by his lawyer at 1:45 p.m. "There's no indication that they tried to bootleg it or sell it on the black market or reconfigure it to a different format," Beety said.

Wait. So. . . they had it for four and a half days. They not only managed to ruin the movie (which was probably a blessing) but then they couldn't make their crime actually COOL by selling it overseas? Or, hell, even not turning themselves in and making America wait on the edge of their seats while watching America's Most Wanted would have been pretty awesome. Geez. People from Menomonie need to work on their pilfering skills. We're too damn drunk - or too stupid - to function.

wiki this!

Did ya'll know we've got a Wikipedia page? Oh, yeah. We do. It's kind of annoying and amusing at the same time. Annoying because against my better judgment, I'm up at 1 am googling 'Menomonie, WI' rather than sleeping. Amusing because when I click on the UW-Stout link, it brings up none other than the smiley face mailbox bomber! This is awesome! My night just got better. I love seeing the blank look on people's faces when I tell them that the mailbox bomber went to college in my hometown. No one gives a rat's ass other than us townies because we're a sheltered bunch who get all excited when something of minute importance happens. (Without them, this blog would not exist.) And perhaps the reason for Luke Helder's mailbox hatred: he wanted to spice things up a bit.

Lucas John Helder (born May 5, 1981) was a University of Wisconsin-Stout college student and Pine Island, Minnesota resident who earned notoriety as the Midwestern pipe bomber of May, 2002. Helder tried to create a smiley face shape on the U.S. map in a pattern of pipe bombs which he placed in mailboxes and rigged to explode upon the boxes being opened. The police were looking for an unknown suspect supposedly driving around in a black Honda Accord. Bombs of his were found in Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, and Iowa where six people were injured including four mail carriers. Helder was captured in rural Nevada before he completed the full smile; at the time of his arrest the Leader-Telegram reported that he was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-Shirt.

Prior to his bombing spree, Helder was a member of a local three-piece Grunge band named Apathy. Even though the band was only locally successful, they recorded a CD named Sacks of People at the end of their first summer together which they funded and released themselves.

The bombings were heavily covered by the United States media and caused perhaps more of a public scare than they otherwise would have due to their occurring so recently after the September 11 terrorist attacks. When the news broke that Helder was the pipe bomber, the media made significant mention of his status as a musician. Many music critics scrambled to acquire copies of Apathy's CD, some of which were auctioned on Ebay for as much as $200. Material from an interview with Apathy bassist Eric Hielscher was even included in a Rolling Stone article on Helder.

While Helder wasn't at the top of his college class, his teachers described him as a reasonably good, quiet, and polite student and at first there was confusion as to what the motivation for the bombings could be. Within the year prior to his arrest, Helder had become passionate about astral projection techniques. He seems to have come to believe that death of the flesh and body is not the end of existence, as evidenced by a rambling essay he sent to The Badger Herald of the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the beginning of the bombing spree. The essay also includes sinister statements such as "I'm taking very drastic measure in attempt to provide this information to you... I will die/change in the end for this, but that's ok, hahaha paradise awaits! I'm dismissing a few individuals from reality, to change all of you for the better" and ending with the words "written before any of the bombs".

It later came to light that his actions were an attempt to garner media attention so that he could spread a message denouncing government control over daily lives and the illegality of marijuana as well as promoting astral projection as a method to reach a higher level of consciousness.

In April 2004 a federal judge found Helder incompetent to stand trial. While the judge could free Helder if doctors find he is not a threat to society, legal experts doubt this possibility due to the violent nature of his crimes. Luke Helder, inmate #36460-048, remains in the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota.

I don't know about you, but this guy is pretty awesome. He's not a threat to society. He's anti-Big Brother, plays in a band, likes to smoke pot and is a hippie. Oh wait. That's the entire UW-Stout campus!

Damn hippies. Trying to take over the world. . . one bomb at a time.

What a dumbass. . .

From the pages of the local Dunn County News . . .

Several local Harry Potter fans got a head start perusing the highly-anticipated and highly-publicized final installment in the young wizard’s saga.

An undisclosed number of copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were sold at Marketplace Foods in North Menomonie on Thursday before the book’s presence on the shelves was discovered.

“It accidentally got stuck out by the magazine company, so there was a couple that got sold,” said Marketplace Foods manager Steve Fenn on Friday morning.

Sales of the book were embargoed until 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, June 21.

The company responsible for the error is Valley News Company, based in Mankato, Minn. A call to manager Tom Leiferman on Friday afternoon was not returned.

Asked if there were going to be repercussions for the early sales, Fenn responded, “I don’t know. We yanked them as soon as we found out that they weren’t supposed to have been out there. When you’ve got a 65,000 square foot store, 120 employees and umpteen vendors, it’s a little hard to oversee absolutely every detail.”

Valley News provides Marketplace Foods with magazines and books. Fenn said has far as he knew, it was someone who alerted the store on Thursday about the mistake.

“I wasn’t here yesterday,” he said. “My assistant manager yanked it as soon as he got the call.”

According to Harriett Christy, owner of Bookends in downtown Menomonie, “All bookstores that expect to have the book in the store to sell are required to sign an affidavit. There are restrictions that it can’t be sold before 12:01. You can’t even open the box to look at it. Mine are under black cover in the back of the store. So at 12:00 we’ll open the boxes and at 12:01 we can sell.”

According to Harriett Christy, owner of Bookends in downtown Menomonie, “All bookstores that expect to have the book in the store to sell are required to sign an affidavit. There are restrictions that it can’t be sold before 12:01. You can’t even open the box to look at it. Mine are under black cover in the back of the store. So at 12:00 we’ll open the boxes and at 12:01 we can sell.”

Scholastic, Inc. is the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter series. According to its retailer’s agreement, stories that violate the restrictions will be liable for “any and all attorney’s fees and damages incurred as a result...”

The publisher is taking legal action against DeepDiscount. com and the site’s distributor, Levy Home Entertainment, after learning that beginning on Tuesday, June 17, approximately 1,200 customers had received their copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” in the mail.

As of Friday, at least one copy of the book was reported to have been sold on eBay. On her Web site, Rowling pleaded with Potter aficionados to “help preserve the secrecy of the plot for all those who are looking forward to reading the book at the same time on publication day. In a very short time, you will know EVERYTHING!”

Thanks to an oversight, that time was even shorter for a few local Harry Potter enthusiasts.

So. . . unless you were living under a bloody rock or have been in Darfur for the past year, I'm pretty sure the whole Western World knew that Harry Potter 7 came out last Saturday. So to the moron who put them out - I hope you get fired for being a dumbass. And I find it slightly amusing that Marketplace may get sued because any manager who can't keep track of 120 employees deserves to get bitch-slapped by J.K. Rowling's publisher. I used to work at Victoria's Secret and there were over 150 employees and the manager knew every person, all their schedules and even kept track of close friends and significant others.

Come to think of it, it was kind of scary.

Why, hello.

Welcome to Phenomonie! This blog's name is a blatant rip off of what was apparently a homecoming theme - so, sorry juniors, but you've been pwnd!

If you've ever lived in Menomonie, WI, been there or just heard about it on the news. . . maybe you've noticed a pattern. Weird shit goes on in that town and my childhood chum and I said, "why not make a site about it?"

So here it is. Our very first post. We'll start off with something recent. Something that's probably not for those who have overactive imaginations and a weak stomach.

You won't see a halo over Pepper Ann's head. Not that the eight-year-old Lab-German shorthair mix isn't loveable, it's just that see seems to find trouble without even trying.

"She's always been naughty, and when she was little it was 'you're lucky you're so cute, you'd be gone otherwise.' But she's just a cute little dog. She has personality, but she has issues also," owner Debbie Hulleman said.

One of those issues is a tendency to swallow anything that fits in her mouth.

"She's eaten lipstick, so lipstick gets all over the carpet, ball point pens all over the carpet, toothpaste, shampoo," Hulleman recalled. "She's done a lot. Kleenex, she'll eat a whole box of Kleenex if she can get it."

Recently, Pepper Ann topped even those feats. She and her sibling Zach were at Grandma's house, while Debbie and her husband were on vacation. Grandma had a friend over, who left a purse on the ground despite instructions not to leave anything in Pepper Ann's reach.

When the two women woke up, the dog had dug into the purse, and devoured more than $800 cash.

Some pieces were spread around the house - and some were left in the backyard, after Peppy swallowed the money and did her business.

"Pretty soon (I) came to a pile that had a fifty dollar bill hanging out, part of a fifty, and I said 'Gosh, look at that,'" Hulleman laughed. "There were lots of piles with money hanging out there, so I had to save it, rinse it, strain it."

The dog owner taped together the remnants she recovered, and swapped the mangled bills for more than $700 bucks worth of fresh currency at a local bank.

Hulleman is hanging on to half a one hundred dollar bill, in hopes she will recover the other portion. She is less optimistic that Pepper Ann will turn over a new leaf.

"She goes from room to room, looking to get into trouble."

(Copyright 2007 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)

And for our more visual readers. . .

Eh. Not the most exciting story to come out of Menomonie, but hey, you can't beat them all.