Steaming Turd

As an integral member of the “world’s most powerful learning environment,”

And don’t you forget it!

we recognize your tremendous efforts as a member of the Case community.

It’s about time somebody did.

Now, it’s time to celebrate your hard work by attending the Case Quad Block Party.

Well, it’s good to know that my tremendous efforts are worth them providing me with “LOTS AND LOTS OF FOOD”.

Now if they could only fix every other example of this school’s poor attitude toward graduate students (and academia in general).

An interesting overview of the humble sling.

So this morning, I was watching me some Fox News. Regardless of what the left may say about Fox News, they’re always good for one thing - a spectacle - and this morning was no exception. They broke their normal morning show schedule to bring us a high-speed chase on the early-morning streets of Los Angeles. Some guy who was about to be apprehended by cops with a warrant for attempted murder ended up carjacking somebody and leading police around a couple local neighborhoods before the car eventually lost its tires (probably from 90mph traversals of rough intersections) and the guy surrendered.

But the more interesting story was tangent to the chase itself (geometrically speaking). The perp made a hard right turn onto a side street, but the cop who was right behind him couldn’t slow down for the turn in time. He gave the local store owner a new garage doorway as his cruiser just disappeared inside the building. Nobody was hurt, so I don’t feel bad thinking that the cop’s buddies aren’t gonna let him live that one down for some time

You know how sometimes you try to find something, and you spend a lot of time looking for it, but just end up giving up, only to find it later when you’re not looking for it?

Well, I was moving around some furniture today, and that happened to me.

Wanna see what I found? (Achtung: may be considered “gross” or “disgusting”!)

Regarding this report of British police chasing and shooting a man to death believed to be one of Thursday’s failed bombers….

Nice work!

You know, in America, our law enforcement is encumbered by tons of rules and regulations (some of them Constitutionally-demanded), not to mention the ever-present threat of lawsuits, that make such acts rare. And when someone is shot by the police, especially when it turns out that the person is (currently) unarmed, nine kinds of hell get raised. Yet the police of the once firearm-averse Great Britain shoot a man dead under suspicion that he might be about to set off a bomb.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I like less-lethal means of apprehending suspected criminals. For example, I’m really looking forward to the day that the military-developed microwave pain ray (the yellow line… means pain) is turned on members of our citizenry who are rioting in the streets after some random favorable or unfavorable event. I can just imagine the guy on top of a truck sweeping this thing across a crowd and watching people from one side of the crowd to the other just start writhing in pain, seemingly for no reason.

But when it comes to shooting a suspected bomber dead in a subway station right after he tripped and fell, you know what?

I’d like to buy those cops a round of beers.

Update: A later article notes the following:

[S]ources at Scotland Yard told Sky News reporter Martin Brunt that the man shot was not tied to the actual bombings. He is, however, being described as a man who emerged as being “of interest” in the investigation and is also described as a “terrorist suspect.”

I dislike stories where sentences containing critical information begin with “sources said”, but this news might result in even more turmoil in the near future, unfortunately.

Another update: Apparently, the British government now believes the person was actually not connected to the failed bombings. Because of this, I feel I should clarify my earlier post. Do I wish an innocent person hadn’t been killed? Of course. Why do I support the police officers in this case, then? Well, in America, cops have to be on edge about everything they do in order to avoid accusations of brutality or racism. They often have to make split-second decisions about whether or not to use deadly force, where on the one side, holding back could mean that a cop gets killed, and on the other, shooting could mean that an unarmed civilian gets killed. I have to respect anyone who can make those sorts of decisions and still sleep at night, because I know I wouldn’t be able to. Whether this “shoot suspected bombers first and ask questions later” policy is good or bad, I don’t know, but if anybody takes heat for it, I hope it’s not these cops.

Sean has a printout of a page that’s been floating around teh Intarweb for some time, entitled “The Good Wife’s Guide”. It purports to be an article printed in Housekeeping Monthly in May 1955, and features a picture of a doting housewife preparing dinner as the breadwinning husband arrives home. Below that are a dozen or so rules that a good wife should follow. It probably won’t surprise you to find that most of these rules are hugely supportive of the man-o-centric male-ocracy:

Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first - remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.

While I wasn’t necessarily convinced of the authenticity of this article, I did find it interesting enough to blog about. But before blathering on only to be embarrassed by somebody else’s debunking, I thought I’d search the web a bit. Turns out that Snopes has an article about this very subject, even re-featuring the page in question.

So, rather than extol the virtues of (post-)modern society, I thought I’d offer a bit of a positive spin to some of the things mentioned in the joke article. If a couple chooses to separate out the duties of home and work by having him head to the office/factory/construction site while she stays home, there’s nothing wrong with that. For that matter, there’s also nothing wrong if he’s the one who stays home.

My anecdote to support this: For close to 30 years, my dad worked at a chemical plant, while my mom took care of the homefront. (She quit a job as a telephone operator when they decided to start having kids.) Anyway, eventually the plant got bought up by a foreign company, which closed the place down shortly thereafter, putting my dad out of work. The upside is that the layoffs were covered by NAFTA, so dad got two years of job training plus a stipend out of it. During that time, Mom got a job at a drugstore while Dad went to an electronics class. What they discovered, though, was that in a lot of ways, their 30-year-old roles were reversed. Mom works the longer hours now, and that means that Dad gets to cook dinner so they can eat when she gets home. He’s actually found that he doesn’t mind so much, and in the cases where he gets to use the grill, he actually enjoys it. There’s no pressure to be a “manly breadwinner” - at least, none that he’s told me about - and I think part of that is because we’ve all been very supportive of both him and Mom taking on different roles. (It doesn’t hurt anything that he’s a fairly practical person who realizes that they need money if they plan on eating )

In terms of the joke article, while most of the stuff there is crap, there are still a few good points in there, if you eliminate the gender-specific references and make things work both ways. Well… except the “being a little gay” part, perhaps

Link courtesy of Rollin.

Tuesday night, I saw a rerun of Special Vics where some kid was killed by having rocks stuffed down his throat. For half of the episode, they go on a wild goose chase after known prior offenders and such, only to discover that the kid was killed by his friend and neighbor of similar age.

Anyway, the evil kid pulls a sob story about killing his friend because he had just killed a neighbor’s cat accidentally and wanted to avoid being told on, because his mom would send him back to a boot camp where he said the other kids tortured him. Partly because of this, somebody at the DA’s office decided to try him as a juvenile rather than an adult (even though the starring ADA wanted a trial in adult court). Meanwhile, the detectives interview people at the camp and discover that the evil kid was the one doing the torturing. In other words, the kid was a little sociopath.

Enter the father of the murdered child, a psychiatrist who had years earlier arrived at the conclusion that sociopathy couldn’t be cured, even in children. He had been snookered into believing the evil kid’s story about the boot camp as well, and fought to have the evil kid tried in juvenile court. When the ADA rushed into the first hearing in juvenile court to try to get the case remanded back to regular court (but was moments too late), stating that she had evidence that the kid was the torturer at the boot camp, the father was stunned. After the hearing, out in the hallway, the kid walks past the father and makes some goading remark. The father then grabs a passer-by, shoves him into the detectives standing next to him, grabs the gun of the court officer standing nearby, and shoots the kid.

Of course, at this point, I had no room for sympathy for the evil kid anymore. He pretty much got what he deserved, regardless of whether international human rights groups think that vigilante justice is wrong or execution of minors is wrong.

The rest of the episode consisted of putting the father/killer on trial for second-degree murder, at the insistence of the person at the DA’s office who first authorized trying the evil kid in juvenile court. He was acquitted, due to his defense of extreme emotional distress, which usually merits a charge of manslaughter. As it turns out, moments after the acquittal, the father approached the detectives and explained that he had decided to kill the kid from the moment he found out that the kid was sociopathic (back in the juvenile court hearing). But given the explanation that the evil kid would definitely have killed again after he was released from the juvenile system, I found that I really didn’t have much of a problem with the father getting off scot-free (though if the DA’s office hadn’t been morons, he would have gotten a manslaughter conviction).

Only a word like “sucks” could possibly have its synonyms and antonyms be the same.