A 29-year-old man from Baltimore was arrested last week after attempting to rob a hair salon in Annapolis, Maryland. He would have gotten away with it, too, had the receptionist not noticed that his "gun" looked suspiciously like fingers, causing her to laugh at him until he just eventually left! Ugh. Women.

Ways to judge a crime movie: Box office earnings, critical acclaim, spin-off crimes. Ben Affleck's The Town performed decently by the first two standards, but on that third standard, The Town really knocked it out of the park!

How badly did Gumby screw up his attempted robbery of a San Diego 7-11? Well, really badly: Not only did he not, in fact, steal anything, he actually gave money to the clerk.

Is there any kind of crime better than the crime you can imagine being committed by a good-looking and diverse team of criminals cracking stilted jokes on, say, USA or TNT? No, there is not! And so it is with the "Sleeping Gas Bandits":

So now the American Kennel Club's saying that dog theft's up by 32 percent this year. Apparently their special database recording animal thefts has recorded 224 reports since January 1. That's almost as many thefts recorded in all of 2010 (255, if you're keeping score).

During a robbery at a Texas convenience store, the store owner, stranded at the back of the store, hurled Pepsi cans at the thief. Grand marketing scheme staged by Pepsi to sell more soda? That's for you to decide.

Three things you should not do when fleeing the police: Hide in a pool of liquid manure, hide in the greenhouse where you grow your pot, or stop for a bathroom break. Guess who's got some dumb criminal stories...

Rip Torn was heroically arrested for breaking into a bank drunk and armed over the weekend. Sadly, he wasn't launching a populist anti-banking revolution; he was so drunk, "he thought he had been dozing in his home." [NYP]