PaPaPeng wrote:
On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:04:35 GMT, Phisherman wrote:
This week school's out and houses in my neighborhood are getting
toilet papered. Originally, I thought these houses had someone in
school sports or the house has a coach, but this is not the case. I
guess toilet papering a house is not vandalism, but certainly can be
classified as littering (a $50 fine, max). At one house they
spray-painted "Ha Ha 
" on their concrete driveway. What can be
done? What can one do to prevent their house/trees to be toilet
papered?
This seems like an annual affair. The easy and cheap way is to have a
video camera running on automatic to record the going ons while you
are asleep or away from the house. You have proof. Get them to clean
up afterwards. No police, no fines, etc.
Easy? Cheap? Do you have a time lapse or motion-activated camera laying
around, and a long-play VCR or hard drive recorder handy? I don't. It
would cost me several hundred bucks to buy even a low-end model like
Sams sells, much less a commercial-grade one. Not to mention, what
weather-protected locations do you have to place them in that will
provide any useful coverage? There is a reason few ma'n'pa places have
cameras anywhere but over register- a system that will do any good is
expensive, even using IP cameras and computers as recorders.
And just how do you get them to clean it up, assuming you even recognize
the kids to know what house they live in (assuming they are from
immediate neighborhood, seldom true in my experience), and further
assuming the parents don't slam the door in your face? The tissue will
rot off the trees before that happens, I fear. When you get papered,
speed is essential, before the paper bonds to the trees. When it
happened to me, I said aw ****, put on some clothes, got some long poles
out of the garage and duct-taped them together, and had it pretty well
cleaned up in less than an hour. Figuring out how to coax the short ends
off the tall branches was almost fun, once I decided to treat it as a
challenge.
aem sends...