6 August 2026

H.I.T.s - WYSIWYG

I may or may not have time to add more stories before this posts (Narrator: She did not, in fact, have time). What you see is what you get.

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French teen gets off lightly in Singapore stunt

A 19-year-old boy from France, who is in Singapore for some type of study abroad business program, decided to entertain his Instagram followers with a sick stunt that was seemingly intended to mock the city-state’s high standards of cleanliness and safety. Didier Gaspard Owen Maximilien removed a straw from a vending machine that produces freshly squeezed orange, licked the straw, and then returned it to the dispenser, posting the resulting video with the caption “city is not safe.”

Clip from Maximilien’s Instagram video - Source: New York Post

When the video went viral, the vending company—which operates over 1,500 of the highly popular machines in Singapore—filed a police report, sanitized the dispenser, and replaced all the straws, and now says that it will be upgrading to individually packaged straws and more secure compartments.

After causing all this trouble, Maximilien got off surprisingly lightly, considering the harsh punishments often handed down in Singapore. Noting that he ended up retrieving the licked straw, so that no one else used it, and that he had pleaded guilty, the court only gave him a fine of $465 (he could have spent as much as three months in jail). His attorney, who had argued that the youth expressed “deep remorse,” told the court that Maximilien’s parents will ensure that he pays the fine himself. Immigration officials have not yet decided whether to revoke his student visa.

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New autonomous zone develops in Wisconsin

Protestors in Madison, Wisconsin appear to be developing their own autonomous zone in a two block area of Williamson Street, near where Corey Ruiz (age 38) was shot to death by a policeman he had stabbed while resisting arrest. Ruiz, who had been released from prison in May, was being pursued by police officers after he was reported trying to break into cars. Protestors are calling the zone “CRAZ”: “Corey Ruiz Autonomous Zone.”

City officials are actually assisting the development of the zone, providing portable toilets and moving in city trucks to replace the makeshift barricades. Additionally, local homeless people have moved into the zone, creating what local Alderman Davy Mayer admits is causing “disruption.” But he insisted that the people in charge of the zone have “implemented some self-regulation, including a 10 p.m. curfew for children and overnight quiet hours.”

A resident who is “trapped in the protest zone” described the occupation as “a lawless zone and homeless encampment barricaded on all four sides with groups blocking local residences and businesses from surviving.” But although Meyer admitted that the city isn’t keen on the zone being permanent, “we also don’t want to see a violent clearing of it either.”

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AZ man left paralyzed after ‘swatting’

Back in April, Axeel Melendez (age 23) of Tucson, Arizona was playing an online multi-player game when he inadvertently allowed another player to hack into his computer. Armed with his personal info, the hacker threatened to ‘swat’ him unless he paid them. Melendez rapidly sought help from police, telling them:

They said that they were going to call the police station and say that I have a bomb so that FBI shows up at my house so I could get swatted. They knew my ethnicity, so they said that they were going to call ICE to show up at my house and get my whole family deported. We’re all citizens, so it’s okay.

A Pima County sheriff’s deputy visited the Melendez home, reassuring the young man that, since he had let them know what was going on, there would be no problems. A build-up to a swatting attempt was actually made while the deputy was at the house, with the caller telling police that Melendez was “harassing a lot of people and abusing females.”

Two days later, at 5:40 a.m., deputies were dispatched after a call from a Wisconsin number to a non-emergency line claimed that the caller’s father had just shot his sister…at the address where Melendez and his mother live. Even as the deputies were enroute, they were warned about the swatting threats. But when no one responded from inside the house, deputies attempted (unsuccessfully) to break down a door and then smashed in a window that was covered with a blackout curtain.

As it turned out, that was the window to Melendez’s bedroom, where he had been playing a video game, using noise-canceling headphones to avoid disturbing his mother, who was sleeping. Upon the smashing of the glass, and unable to see through the curtain, he woke his mother and told her to call 911, while he retrieved his mother’s (legally owned) handgun. When a deputy climbed through the window, all he saw was an armed man. The deputy opened fire, as did the deputy outside the window.

Melendez is now paralyzed from the chest down, despite having been told by the original dispatcher—when he first reported the swatting threat—that “they can’t just call the SWAT on you. That’s not how it works. […] Nothing is going to happen.”

Last week, Melendez and his mother took the first steps toward a civil lawsuit against Pima County, the sheriff, and the involved deputies—a document called a Notice of Claim, which is required in Arizona before filing a lawsuit against a public entity. This is not the first time the Pima County Sheriff’s Department has been in trouble over a mishandled swatting. A 2013 incident resulted in PCSD owing a couple $1.25 million.

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Serial fraudster poses as funeral director

Just when you think the story of Michael James Green (age 45? 47?)—now going by Unique Mica Green—can’t get any weirder, it does.

Green appeared in a Houston courtroom last Friday to request a change of his bond conditions on charges of forging documents and stealing the estate of a man whose funeral he had been hired to conduct. (The judge declined to lift the limitations, which forbid Green to “plan any end-of-life services or have any affiliation with an entity that performs end-of-life services.”) It is unknown how Green managed to pay $800,000 bond the previous week or to hire the attorney his (current) public defender says Green has hired. In video below, the obviously trans Green is extremely rude to the reporter asking questions.

Green appears to have been in trouble since his teens, with charges for forgery dating all the way back to 1998. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, he submitted 18 different applications for disaster assistance—all of them fraudulent—claiming to live at 18 different addresses during the landfall of the two hurricanes, and collecting $2,000 in emergency aid from FEMA from each application. (It should be noted that Green is far from the only person who committed this particular type of fraud.)

Although Green pleaded guilty in 2007 and was sentenced to 45 months in prison and 3 years probation, by 2008, he was using trans status to claim that his sentence should be reduced:

Green complains that his prison sentence is so excessive as to be “cruel and unusual” because, as a “pre-op transsexual” with “large breast implants,” prison officials have placed him in segregated housing for his own protection.

That claim was denied. And Green apparently didn’t alter his criminal behavior afterward, because in the years since, “Harris County court records show Green has served sentences for several counts of forgery, assault, theft, and evading detention.”

It isn’t clear when Green opened A Community Funeral Home in a building that had been rented by a friend of Green’s: “Tricia Henderson, who was supposedly the only person authorized to access the location.” (Reportedly, Green was charged last November with filing a false lien against the property owner.) On the building’s sign, Green claims to have a PhD. And as revealed in court last week, Green apparently forged the documents he submitted to the Texas Funeral Commission to obtain a funeral director and embalmer license. Among those was a letter of recommendation from Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations; Green never served in the armed forces.

By 2019, Green had secured a contract with Harris County to provide half of their mortuary services for the indigent. Less than a year later, the county terminated the contract due to a long list of problems: “excessive costs and improper billing, transporting bodies in U-Hauls, unprofessional behavior and taking a body to the wrong cemetery.” Three families reported that their loved one’s body was “being held ‘hostage.’”

In 2022, the Texas Funeral Commission yanked Green’s license, but he continued (illegally) to operate. It wasn’t until 2025, when Green took aim at a bigger forgery target, that everything came out. In June of that year, the out-of-town family of Lawrence Gammon (age 78) hired Green to handle arrangements for his body after he was found deceased from natural causes during a police welfare check. The family sent Green money and information, not at all expecting what happened next.

It appears that Green used that information to forge a will, naming ‘her’ as Gammon’s “long-term partner and common law spouse,” and bequeathing Green his entire estate. Green then used fraudulent documents to gain immediate access to Gammon’s bank accounts, reportedly stealing over $2 million and three vehicles.

In November 2025, police finally raided the funeral home, finding “a Home Depot bucket filled with organs, and 48 boxes of cremated human remains.” Numerous people had reported that they had been waiting years to receive the ashes of their family members.

Houston resident Mary Miller told reporters that, while her two sons’ ashes weren’t part of the undelivered remains police found at the funeral home, she did have issues with Green submitting funeral charges to the life insurance company for one of her sons that were double the amount Miller had approved.

Green returns to court in September.

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