Recently in funny Category

Sometimes these things are unintentionally funny.* As in this one, faxed early this morning from state police in Harrisburg. A trooper went to an address in West Hanover Township, Dauphin County, and wrote the following on a news release:

"This crime occurred as the accused struck the victims about the head and face then left the above residence and became disorderly."

 Hit people and then became disorderly. Interesting.

Of course, that refers to the charges the person faces -- harassment (presumably for hitting people) and disorderly conduct (for whatever he did after hitting people). Still, it's kind of funny if you think about it.

*Said with all due respect for the job police do every day.

When Daily Record/Sunday News correspondent Teresa McMinn asked various townships and boroughs about how they kept meeting minutes for a story that appeared in last Sunday's paper, probably the most, shall we say, creative response came from Hanover borough manager Bruce Rebert.

Among McMinn's e-mailed questions was, "Do you audio or video record your public meetings." On a print-out of the e-mail, Rebert wrote:

"No. Why -- no one has ever requested or suggested same in my 35 yrs. Can you think of anything more boring?! We do post our minutes online to torture the unsuspecting (yes, it simplifies info. requests too.)"

Funny. He's probably right -- watching a video of a municipality's meeting can't be invigorating. But, on a serious note, the point of doing it would be to have it on record in case someone needs it, or to fact-check something that happened at the meeting, or to help a municipal staffer produce the official meeting minutes.

Oh, how I love irony! Good thing, because those of us who work with public records sure do run into it a lot.

I don't know what you are doing on this fine Sunday afternoon, but if you are in a windowless cubical like me maybe you could use a laugh to keep you from going batty. 

So, for hilarity's sake, here's an e-mail I got today regarding a federal open records meeting. Click on the jump to read it.