Wheels within Wheels

Over at Urban Infidel, there’s a post about terrorist street art, showing the following photo of some “artwork”:

It’s a lot more sinister than the graffito I saw stenciled on the sidewalk the last time I was in NYC:

Yesterday evening, Marion asked me to replace the battery in one of her smoke detectors … it had started giving her the “low battery” beep, and she couldn’t manage it herself.

It turned out that I couldn’t do it, either, without the help of serious tools. A few months ago, she had her house painted. When they painted the ceiling, the workers apparently detached the removable part of the detector, painted the ceiling and the mount, and then reattached the main part of the detector without letting the paint dry. Really, they should have not painted the mount, but they did.

The first thing that happened was that I broke off the cover of the smoke detector while trying to unscrew it from the mount. I ended up using a sharp chisel to slice away the various parts of the locking mechanism, and now I have two further tasks – see if the painters did the same thing with her other smoke detectors, and then buy and install replacements.