"While the police made light of Mr. Augustine’s pasta-and-switch method, calling it a 'pasta-tively terrible plan,' his scheme was just the latest in a trend of Lego thefts."

I'm reading "Man Charged in Lego Theft Scheme of Replacing Pieces With Pasta, Police Say/A California man was charged with grand theft after the police said he reaped about $34,000 in what an official called an 'off the charts' pasta-and-switch scheme involving Lego kits" (NYT).

Read Hayes, a research scientist and criminologist at the University of Florida and the executive director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, said it was possible that Mr. Augustine’s use of uncooked pasta — which he described as “off the charts” — was meant to simulate the shifting sound of the pieces inside the box.

So this guy was able — at least 70 times — to return boxes and get a refund without it being noticed that the box did not contain the original Legos? It was enough that the box sounded as though it contained Legos. This worked 70+ times?! And the police act like it's cute and make puns.

"Social analytics firm Talkwalker has just released its list of the world’s most loved brands. At the top of the roster: Lego..."

AdWeek reports. Also in the top 10: The Container Store, Four Seasons Hotels, and Tiger Beer.

[Talkwalker] "measured instances of phrases like ‘I love it when’ or ‘I would love if’ near mentions of the brands, giving different weights to those mentions if they occurred on social media or in the press.... This gave us a unique list of companies that have cultivated passionate fans, if not perhaps the largest number of mentions.”

“Lego placed tops because out of the 11 brand-love traits we measured, they hit theirs extremely well,” [Talkwalker CEO Todd] Grossman said. “Globally, the creative act of playing with bricks is universal and needs little translation....”

The creative act of playing with bricks....

We love building... that touches me this morning as I'm thinking about the passionate destruction that has taken over in America... even as our President is — or was once — a builder.

Years ago, before Lego snap-together plastic blocks took over, children were given wooden blocks. There was always an element of destruction with wooden blocks, with some children more interested in the destruction phase than others. It was a stereotypical sibling squabble in the 1950s and 60s, when most of us kids had wooden blocks that were simply stacked and balanced and therefore easily toppled. There were children who built things up meticulously and children who saw built-up blocks as an incitement to a bombing. And those wooden blocks would collapse on their own pretty easily if you got too ambitious.

But Legos stick together and therefore cultivate the constructive side of the human soul, and Lego is the world's most loved brand. We like constructiveness. We like when things hold together and don't fall down. We choose order over chaos. Is there any beloved brand that associates itself with chaos? I don't think so!

"They lost their freedom because they love freedom."

Those who try to order vast quantites of Legos will no longer be asked what they intend to do with them.

This policy change is a reaction to the criticism the company received when it refused to sell Legos in bulk to the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Lego didn't want its product connected to in anything political.

In response, Mr. Ai called Lego’s decision an act of “censorship and discrimination,” and set up Lego collection points at sites across the world, including outside the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin and his own studio in Beijing.

In a statement posted on its website on Tuesday, the Lego Group said it had previously asked customers to explain the “thematic purpose” of bulk orders “as the purpose of the Lego Group is to inspire children through creative play, not to actively support or endorse specific agendas of individuals or organizations.”

The old policy was deemed vulnerable to "misunderstandings."

Corporations are censors too.

In September Lego refused Ai Weiwei Studio's request for a bulk order of Legos to create artwork to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria as "they cannot approve the use of Legos for political works." On Oct 21, a British firm formally announced that it will open a new Legoland in Shanghai as one of the many deals of the U.K.-China "Golden Era."

A photo posted by Ai Weiwei (@aiww) on Oct 23, 2015 at 6:04am PDT

A proposed Women-of-the-Supreme-Court Lego set is rejected as a violation of Lego's policy against "politics and political symbols, campaigns, or movements"...

... which prompts NPR to delve into whether what the Supreme Court does is (or looks like) politics:

"I honestly understand having a policy in place like that," said [science journalist Maia Weinstock, who designed the set]. But Weinstock said she looked at the policy before submitting and didn't think that her project was political.

"The U.S. Supreme Court is supposed to be separate from political considerations," she said. "People are appointed for life specifically so that they don't answer to the changing whims of politics."

Of course, that's especially silly when you are celebrating the presence of women on the Court. They are there because Presidents appointed them, and it's obvious that the final selection from the pool of qualified candidates is political. Ronald Reagan had made it a campaign promise that he would appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court. And when has any President simply nominated the person with the best judicial mind or some such entirely neutral concept?