Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Mom cited when toddler pees on sidewalk PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- A Philadelphia toddler's mother was ticketed when her potty-training son urinated on the street. Advertisement Caroline Robboy said she was shopping with her 2-year-old son, Nathaniel, and other family members Sunday when the boy said he needed to go to the bathroom. Robboy asked an employee at the store to use a bathroom and was told the facilities weren't open to the public. As the family was leaving the store, Nathaniel took matters into his own hands, walking up to a light post and doing his business. A police officer watching the family came over and wrote Robboy a ticket, which also came with a parenting lecture. "He said, 'I'm doing this for your own protection because God forbid there might have been a pervert out there looking at my son,'" Robboy told WCAU-TV, Philadelphia. Advertisement The mother said she plans to fight the ticket, which carries a $50 fine. "It's not about the $50," Robboy said. "I want a place that feels friendly to me where my children feel safe and have positive experiences with police officers." A police department spokesman said the officer was within his authority to write the ticket. Cat hides in bag for plane ride ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 13 (UPI) -- An Ohio woman said her cat stowed away in her suitcase for the 10-hour trip to Florida's Walt Disney World, even getting past airport screeners. Ethel Maze of Circleville said she finished packing Monday morning for the trip to Orlando with her group of 18 disabled veterans and volunteers and Bob-bob, her 14-month-old feline, must have crawled into her bag before it was zipped up, the Orlando Sentinel reported Thursday. Maze, proprietor of the Maze Residential Care Home for disabled veterans, said the purring cat was not discovered until she opened her suitcase at her Orlando hotel. "We're just wondering how he got through the X-rays without being seen," she said. Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Sari Koshetz said the group's machines "are very sensitive to picking up explosives and other threats to aviation." Advertisement Unemployed profs write essays for cash MONTREAL, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- A Canadian website has hired unemployed professors to write essays and other papers for students for cash with no apologies for being unethical. In an email exchange with Postmedia News, the unemployedprofessor.com site centered in Montreal said it employs about 30 professors and doesn't guarantee top grades. In the site's Frequently Asked Questions section, "Isn't it really unethical for you to be writing these essays for cash?" is answered with "Incredibly so, and because the academic system is already so corrupt, we're totally cool with that. We even all have matching tweed t-shirts." Students register with a credit card number and then submit details of their project and the site's teachers bid against one another for the work. The site's language is youthful and full of sarcasm along with typographical errors, such as "our essays include all the supposes extras that our moronic competitors claim to shower on you." Catherine Bolton, dean of academic services at Montreal's Concordia University, told Postmedia she found the business to have reached a new low in learning. "There are for sure teaching assistants and graduate students who do this, but professors?" she said. Advertisement World's tallest mohawk grown in protest NEW YORK, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- The Guinness World Record holder for the world's tallest mohawk said while visiting New York to promote the record book he is protesting against conformity. Japanese fashion designer Kazuhiro Watanabe, 40, has held the record since 2011. His hairstyle most recently measured 3 feet, 8.6 inches tall, He said he has been growing his hair out for 15 years to protest conformity in Japanese society, the New York Post reported Thursday. "It's all about how you feel yourself, not what others think, that's the good thing about mohawks," Watanabe told the New York Daily News through a translator. "I always wanted to have the tallest mohawk," he said. Watanabe is visiting New York to promote the latest version of the Guinness Book of World Records.
