Lucky you

I can't keep this stuff to myself

Imagine if he had lost his Atari 2600 too

They're already calling it The X-Box Murders. Four men - well, one man with a violent criminal history and three teenagers - brutally killed six people with aluminum baseball bats. All because the man thought these people, who's home he had been squatting in until he was discovered, had stolen his X-Box.

The only thing more tragic than this act was that, had authorities done their job, it would have never happened in the first place. It seems that Troy Victorino, the "mastermind" (if one could call him that) of this horror, had been arrested for assault the previous weekend. Considering that Victorino was currently on probation for a previous violent crime, you'd think that his parole officer would have him picked up immediately and have him thrown back in the slam. But no - not only did that not happen, but the parole officer then met with Victorino between the time of his arrest and the murders, and, knowing full well of said probation violation, allowed him to leave on his own. An arrest warrant was finally issued by the probation officer - hours after the murders had occurred.

This disgusts me beyond all reason. Who the hell doesn't want to get repeat violent criminals off the street? Especially one with a history like Victorino's? What kind of lazy asshat can do this and sleep at night? Granted, I'm not a probation officer. I hear the stories about how they're underpaid and overworked. I know they feel stretched thin. But the signs were blatantly obvious, and no one who had the power to do anything about it did.

Luckily, we won't have to worry about a few of these losers anymore - the Florida Department of Corrections has already terminated the jobs of Victorino's parole officer and three of his supervisors, for job conduct so negligent even the government can't ignore it. But when people getting fired for being losers are the only good results to come from an incident like this...

Sweat and tears

Hey, if you don't like my rigorous posting schedule, perhaps you should get your own blog.

It's late, but she's at the beach anyway, so she'll never know it - congratulations to The Brat on surviving her Catholic school education, and joining the ranks of the few, the proud, the high school graduates. Well, actually, I should congratulate her on the sucessful bamboozlement of people in charge of enrollment at George Washington University, who seem to have accepted her despite the large scale letter writing campaign MCG and I had going to get her enrolled at a more appropriate school of higher learning. Hey, at least they won't teach her to be a Communist there - although I'm willing to bet she doesn't need a school to teach her that.

And yes, as Teh 1!!1 mentioned in the oft-perused comments section, we had ourselves a lovely partial power outage in the residence Monday night. But we got it all sorted out - eventually. At least the food in the fridge didn't spoil, anyway.

Random linky goodness follows.

A series of photo essays on modern ruins.

For those of you who hate music and silence, some ambient sounds for your day.

Run for your lives! The cicadas are here!!! AIIEEEEEEE!!

Woman, where's my SUPER SUIT?!?!