Random Stuff

We drove Demi home today. We miss the little bugger already, as usual. And now that she's gone, the hamsters seem to believe that I'M gonna take them into the bathroom with me. Fat chance.
Anyway, we had a lot of fun this month. Demi and I watched many chick flicks and ate a bit too much junk food, Richard took her swimming several times, and she wrote and illustrated about half-a-dozen funny stories that I'd like to scan & post this week. Aaron's been busy at home, too; he's trying to build a motorized scooter with stuff he picked up at a yard sale, doing more 3-D drawings, and hanging out with buds. Hopefully it won't be long before we can pay the kids a weekend visit, 'cause Christmas vacation is a long way off.

Despite the junk food, I'm actually dropping the pounds I've gained in the last 2-2 1/2 years. My fat jeans are so loose, I can take them off without even unbuttoning them!! Of course, when I say junk food I don't mean piles of it. Just enough to taste. That's the way the French chicks do it, according to Oprah, even though they get ludicrous about it and eat individual molecules of creme brulee. And some of 'em look like they could stab you to death with their elbows.

On the 5-hour drive home I caught a few minutes of Matt Drudge's radio show on a Spokane station. He was broadcasting the sounds of a video in which a California woman and her boyfriend were dragged from their car and beaten by an angry mob, apparently some kind of revenge thing. Drudge was disgusted that someone had taped the beatings and put the footage online as entertainment for the masses. To him, it's a sign that the world is coming to an end. I checked out his website when we got home and discovered that this "lynching" video wasn't exactly culled from a well-known or reputable website. It's only posted at a site called Ogrish, which is a Faces of Death-style site that caters to sick bastards who like their gore, their sex, and their barnyard animals mixed together. This is not mainstream entertainment.
So what is Drudge getting all huffy about? First off, it's legit to videotape a crime in progress, and since we don't know the identity or motivation of the cameraman it's not very smart to assume he/she pulled out his camera for fun, nor how and when it ended up online. This person taped the beatings at risk of personal injury, after all. It may help send some of these a**holes to jail. Second, I don't see the point of handing free publicity to some sick website that caters to the Future Psychopaths of America. When it comes to garbage like this, it's probably in everyone's best interest to just ignore it. And BTW, why did Drudge watch this video in the first place? Third, where did Matt Drudge grow up? In a cellar? Does he not recognize that even though the technology has advanced considerably, the footage at Ogrish isn't any worse (and certainly not any better) than the graphic lynching ("barbecue") postcards that Southern folks used to sell to each other? Is he unaware that Strange Fruit was written a few decades before he was born? Wakey wakey, this stuff is not new! We're just as barbaric and retarded as we always were. We're not getting worse; we're staying the same. That's the tragedy of this story.
Fourth, judging from the racist and inane comments on the Ogrish forum, the video doesn't (as advertised) depict an actual lynching. Just a severe mob beating. And no, I didn't watch it - and I'm not into "Horse Bangs", either. If you're into that kind of thing, get the hell off my blog before I have to hose it down with Lysol.
Fifth, I know that middle-class white schoolgirls are beating the bejeezus out of each other in front of their local Starbucks and recording it with their cam phones so they can show it to everyone later. Funny, I didn't see anything about these Skipper dolls run amok at drudgereport.com, but he devoted airtime to a rare example involving black people. Hmm. Guess he fits right in at Ogrish.

For those of you not familiar with Drudge, he's a conservative neo-muckraker with a predilection for goofy little hats. His specialty is exposing political sex scandals, so long as they're Democratic ones. His website, www.drudgereport.com, is just a grab-bag of links that he finds interesting, with no commentary or explanation.