| Random Thoughts @ 4AM A few things everyone ought to know about: -Tegan and Sara are a pair of identical Canadian lesbian twins who sing. It sounds like the Indigo Girls, only good. I randomly stumbled upon their site while searching for something totally unrelated, and downloaded a couple of the mp3's they have up. After hearing those, I decided to download the entire album (which I would have bought, but it is apparently sold out on their site). I am going to mail them US$12 tomorrow. -Exploding Dog. Pictures drawn to represent short phrases or words that readers send in. Some of them are funny, some melancholy. It's a site everyone should visit at least once. -The Guy who shot nine people apparently had a livejournal. Guess what color the background is. Guess what singer he has as an icon. Guess what the contents are. If you guessed "Black", "Kurt Cobain" and "EMO", respectively, you win a prize: your picture in the next issue of OBVIOUS magazine. Honestly. Why does everyone who's going to be insane and violent have to mope around like some goddamn misanthrope. It's weird: if you're going to go on a murderous, suicidal rampage, what's the hurry? Every time this happens, they never do anything beforehand. No added consequences to anything you do. The most free people on the planet are these seventeen, eighteen year olds who have almost no physical limitation (as, for example, a cancer patient might) who are about to die anyway. And they sit around and do nothing with it. It's seriously a waste. Get a tattoo. Eat some tamales. Crash a car. But all they do is sit around listening to whiny 90's grunge rock and ruminate about how bad their life is. It's funny, though. There's a sick thrill to reading what he said. January 4th, he writes, "The instrument of my resurrection was supposed to be freedom." I can almost see someone reading that and believing that the author is in a cult or some other idiocy. If I went on a spree tomorrow, and the FBI came to my house, I wonder what inferences would be drawn about me. I have a stack of books on my floor about intellectual property law. My TV is turned to ESPN, and The Incredibles DVD is in my computer. There is a fairly stocked bar. My trash is mostly filled with Ramen packets and discarded fast food wrappers. A dog-eared copy of Fight Club sits on top of a debate trophy that I ruined by eating cereal out of it. What does this say about me as a person? What would you think? People are inevitably going to try to find meaning in every little thing. Michael Moore keeps making 'documentaries' about unrelated events with a temporal proximity and casts his chicken bones to try and divine causality. When there's nothing to learn, no trial to prepare for, we still investigate as if there were. It's strange. I almost think that as a society, we investigate crimes because we don't understand why people do certain things. To this kid, shooting nine people makes sense. He killed his grandfather and his grandfather's girlfriend, and writes on January 27th, "I've seen mothers choose their man over their own flesh and blood..." We're going to read it and rationalize until we can pinpoint how he's different than the rest of us. Then we can sleep well. The criminals that get the worst treatment aren't the ones that are fundimentally different, it's the ones that eerily remind us of ourselves. The serial killers that everyone can't help but say nice things about. The real sociopaths, where there's no discernable cause for the action. It's been said that the trial is the catharsis. The punishment is our retribution for a harm to the social fabric, which I'm pretty sure is 300-thread count Egyptian cotton. I think it's really the investigation. When we make the case at trial, on a very real level, it's not an attempt to prove facts. May it please the court, it's so we can safely ascertain that he's an outsider. Ask a defense attourney. He usually did it. It's not about the facts, it's about the intent. It's about whether we can fit his actions into the constellation of our social order or not. If not, prison. If so, well, maybe a lesser punishment, but you're one of us! So how can we stay mad at you? Anyway, this is getting a bit long winded. - Why hasn't McDonalds stepped up to sponsor Teri Schiavo? That way both sides get what they want: she'll die of heart failure after a couple months, but the feeding tube can stay in! Everyone's a winner! PRACE YOUR BETS! - I saw the videos where she blinks and shit. It seems like she can track movement reasonably well, so I'm just wondering: could you play fetch with her? What about if she got one of those wheelchairs like Superman had? - I need sleep cranked out at 3:51 AM | |
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