Category: Current Events

I had totally forgotten that we were supposed to spring ahead today.   It seems odd when Ohio bloggers are buried under snow.  SayUncle is already preparing for spring.  We didn’t get any snow in southeastern Pennsylvania, but we don’t really get nice spring weather until May, typically.  March isn’t quite as cold, but still jacket and sometimes coat weather, and most of April is rainy and miserable.

Eight people shot in #1 Brady Ranked southern California.  Hard to say if this one was another loon, or just a gang conflict gone horribly awry.  Doesn’t really matter too much.  California’s strict gun laws failed to protect these people in either instance.

Caleb speaks of Cal State going ape shit over someone walking around with an assault rifle.  When I was in college, one of the ROTC kids got himself a reprimand for toting an M16 openly down the streets of Philadelphia on his way to our school’s rifle range.  Oddly enough, perfectly legal for anyone to do; open carriage of pistols is illegal in the City of Brotherly love without a License to Carry, but openly carrying a long gun is not, and Pennsylvania law makes no distinction between legal machine guns and other types of long guns.

I’m not sure this is evidence of hoplophobia.  If I saw someone openly carrying what looked like an M16 around campus, I’d probably be a little alarmed too.   It’s not so much the gun as it is that it’s something out of context.  I’m not sure my level of alarm would be lower if the person was in uniform.

One commie rat down.  One to go.

One think I learned from friends who took anti-depressants, is that very bad thing happens when you go cold turkey and just quit.  You’re supposed to wean yourself from them.  Turns out the NIU gunman had stopped taking his:

“He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks,” Grady said, declining to name the drug or provide other details.

I’ve never known someone who went this crazy, but the friends I’ve known who have taken anti-depressants and stopped cold weren’t the same people while they were going through withdrawal.  These are drugs that are altering your brain chemistry.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find that psychosis is a rare side effect of the withdrawal process.

We do find out which guns the killer used:

 Two of the weapons — the pump-action Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun — were purchased legally less than a week ago, on Feb. 9, authorities said. They were purchased in Champaign, where Kazmierczak was enrolled at the University of Illinois.

He apparently had an Illinois FID, though it doesn’t say that in this article, I read that elsewhere.   There’s really no way you can stop someone who has no criminal or mental history, which this guy didn’t.

Expect a lot of talk from the media about how the Glock is particularly deadly, rather than a common side arm.  No doubt there will also be calls to pass a magazine ban in Illinois in response to this, even though their licensing of gun owners provisions and various other controls did nothing to prevent this.

Apparently dozens of towns in Texas reported a UFO sighting:

The reported sightings have become a catalyst on blogs and in chat rooms, triggering scientific and philosophical debates, religious inquiries, conspiracy charges and bad Texas jokes.

“It’s amazing how this has taken on an international profile,” said Kenneth Cherry, president of the Texas chapter of the Mutual UFO Network. “I’ve had calls from Japanese and British newspapers. I’m supposed to be doing ‘Larry King Live’ on Friday.”

All this thanks to reports of a strange, silent object over Stephenville, Texas, a town about 70 miles southwest of Ft. Worth.

No word yet on whether Jennifer W. Stein, PA CeaseFire Board Member and UFO researcher, was seen packing her car to head to the Lone Star State to investigate.

It wasn’t too long ago Bitter and I were discussing this “Cross on the Road” phenomena.  But neither of us could have talked about it in a way that’s as creative and amusing as Tam’s writing on the subject.

It’s a yearly holiday event around where I live; the re-enactment of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River.  Of course, the real crossing was done at night, not during the day, but for the sake of the crowds, they do the reenactment during the day.  This year it looks as if they had a minor mishap.

Hollywood’s latest hit, “I am Legend,” is still a rehash of older movies that were supposed to be cinematic versions of a book.  Anxious, I suppose to rehash more old movie ideas, it seems they are coming out with a new version of the movie Real Genius, once again starring Val Kilmer.

Don’t get me wrong, the original movie is an 80s classic, but please don’t tell me they are going to try to pass Val off as a college student?

I’m late getting this to you all.  A few other bloggers have covered this, and someone commented earlier about it, but it’s been a busy weekend with Bitter, so I didn’t get a chance to post it until now.

Joe’s Crabby Shack has a great eyewitness account of the Omaha mall shooting.   He’s got a lot of posts on this, so check out his main blog and just keep reading.