WELL, THIS IS EMBARRASSING:

CNN personality Richard Quest was busted in Central Park early yesterday with some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot, law-enforcement sources said.

Best line from the story: “It wasn’t immediately clear what the rope was for.” (Via JWF). Really, with this sort of arrest on his record, he might as well just run for Congress. He’ll fit right in!

UPDATE: Ann Althouse suggests some outrage along with the snark, and she’s right:

My first reaction was to laugh at the rope too. (And then to worry that kids might get the idea to experiment with rope and hurt themselves.) But now, I’m outraged that the public humiliation was out of proportion and unrelated to the offense.

It’s not illegal to walk around with a rope tied around you like that. (It was under his clothes, I’m assuming, but even if it wasn’t.) Being in a park after hours is a piddling offense. Don’t police normally just tell you the park is closed and let you walk away? That happened to me and my then-husband once, and we just got in the car and drove away, laughing at the police and saying, mock hippie-style, “The park is closed? You can’t close a park, man.” I’d have been shocked if the police had arrested us and searched us for that.

Good point. On the other hand, according to this report, Quest violated a rule of good sense that most hippies knew — don’t tell the cops you’ve got drugs in your pocket:

The police noticed Mr. Quest at 64th Street and West Drive at about 3:40 a.m., the official said. As he was being escorted out, he volunteered, “I have meth in my pocket,” according to an official briefed on the case. The police searched him and recovered a small amount of methamphetamine in a Ziploc bag.

So had Quest not volunteered that he had methamphetamine on him, he might have gotten precisely the treatment Althouse suggests, simply being “escorted out” of the park. And — assuming this NYT report is correct — why did he do that? Beats me.