The 35th Precinct

Six hundred and nineteen words today, and I'm sure I'll add to that total as the day goes on.



Replace the bewigged behemoth with Richard Kruspe or Karl Urban, and this would be my default mode of transportation.

Really, Imageshack? A picture of a man with a bit in his mouth is just too naughty? Ha. Never had that happen before. Your site, your rules, but for the record, there was nothing pornographic or inappropriate about that picture

From this article about a mistrial in the murder of a gay teenager in his California classroom.


The school administration has been accused of being more concerned about defending King's civil rights than recognizing that his behavior and what he wore — high heels, makeup and feminine clothing — made other students uncomfortable.

Yes, how dare those school administrators be more concerned with defending a gay student's right to be openly gay than with protecting the delicate sensibilities of squirming homophobes.

This is the same hand-wringing bullshit that causes university administrators to refuse disability resource centers the chance to be housed alongside the other student organizations. God forbid they get furious, hateful comments from parents who don't want their children exposed to those scary cripples because Pookums might be made uncomfortable when confronted by the reality that not everyone is exactly like them.

"It's their fault for making me uncomfortable!" I wonder if that excuse would work if I shot everyone who stared at me in public or made "retard" jokes within earshot. I'm betting not.

This world can be incredibly beautiful and amazing, but sometimes, I hate the people in it.

I just... Boy, this kid is going to live in a bunker and eat rice cakes and trail mix when he gets older.

You know, as many issues as I have with Rammstein's management when it comes to their powers of North American promotion, this story of fannish alarm-raising is too dubious even for me. From Rammstein Honeymoon on Rosenrot:

I sent a message to Finger about the lack of promo for the North American tour and he was under the impression that they were all sold out already and because of that, no promotion was neccessary. I explained that I realize that promo is not his job but the shows are not sold out and someone within Rammstein management should know.

So...you've got Finger's email address? Okay, I might be able to buy that. Stranger things have happened. But...isn't Finger Till's body man, the same body man that fandom swore was leaving the Rammstein organization after the MSG show? In fact, fen reported that Till was so upset by the loss of his trusted friend that he spent much of the NYC afterparty(an afterparty that Guitarzk had heard from Richard himself wasn't going to happen, trufax)that he spent it in a dour drunk and had to be helped out by Nele. That Finger. A guy who, according to fen, hasn't been with the organization since December.

You emailed a guy who supposedly doesn't work for the band anymore to complain about the lack of promotion, and even though he supposedly doesn't work for the band anymore, he's worried enough to raise the issue with management.

Bullshit.

This story is so full of holes. Either this woman is being duped, or the fannish grapevine that was so sure Finger was leaving the band's employ got it wrong.

A few problems:

-If Finger left Rammstein's employ in December, then he wouldn't be in a position to raise the issue of promotion with them.

-If he didn't leave the band's employ, then the fact remains that Finger is part of the band's security detail and might not have anything to do with promotional affairs.

-There is no way that Pilgrim isn't well goddamn aware of how the tickets are moving. According to a large part of this bandom, Pilgrim are control freaks who know exactly how many condoms a band member has on his person at a given time or how many pubes Olli left on the toilet seat the last time he visited the loo. The same person spouting this story also offered up a rambling, cryptic anecdote about how Rammstein granted some radio producer named Mike Sullivan an interview in Quebec, and then forbade him from disseminating the interview anywhere because the band had been burned so often by negative press. One then wonders why the hell they granted the interview in the first place, but never mind.

So now I'm supposed to believe that this legendarily meticulous, controlling group of micromanagers has no idea how many tickets they've sold and have been walking around for several weeks under the mistaken impression that the shows were sold out, thereby relieving them of the need to do further promotion.

Lie harder next time. Say you emailed Emu.

cecirosenrot, I thought you said Mrs. Landers was sane.

( Jesus Christ )

Behold Rammstein as of February.

Um.

Oh, dear.

Till is as scrumptious as ever, and Richard looks perfectly scrumptious in the first picture, but something dreadful begins to happen in the second picture. His face suddenly looks rubbery, like overstretched plastic, and by the final picture, it looks like someone slipped him an Aging Draught mickey. He's jowly and bloated with alcohol and inertia.

And don't even get me started on the hollow-eyed chemotherapy patient that might be Paul. Or a late-blooming Make-A-Wish kid living it up with his sweaty idols.

Christoph looks like Weird Al and Kenny G had a torrid affair that produced a secret assbaby.

I know age leaves its mark on everyone, but it's always a shock when it catches our heroes.

Damn.

Yesterday, Roomie went out to get me some mashed potatoes from Popeye's, only to discover that it and four other nearby food shacks were closed because there had been a fatal shooting in the McDonald's parking lot. Apparently, the police were still searching for spent shell casings.

Well, this was a huge deal in my sleepy backwater, so I had Roomie hunt for details via Google. Turns out that one hundred and fifty people were, for reasons known only to the inscrutable hive mind, milling aimlessly in the McDonald's parking lot at 4:20 in the morning. Some of the wanderers were as young as fifteen. At some point, someone pulled out a gun and opened fire into the crowd, killing one and wounding five others. The shooter is still at large, and though police suspect gang activity, there is no clear motive.

I...just... There are so many things wrong with the preceding paragraph. What the hell are one hundred and fifty people doing milling around the McDonald's parking lot at 4:20 on a Sunday morning? There wasn't a concert or sporting event that night, and as far as I know, the town isn't home to a hippie moongazer cult. There was no reason for that many people to be gathered in a fast-food parking lot at ass-o'clock in the morning, and there was certainly no reason for young teenagers to be out that late, weekend be damned. Why didn't the McDonald's employees on the graveyard shift call the police and have them disperse the crowd? There are anti-loitering statutes on the books.

And don't get me started on the fact that fifteen-year-olds are out, unsupervised, at that time of night. There is no excuse for that level of parental negligence. Why do so many parents think their responsibility to their child ends the day it can pop a box of Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese in the microwave and wipe its own ass? Being a parent is an eighteen-year commitment at minimum and a lifelong engagement at best.

This is the unforeseen consequence of the kumbaya, global-village mentality. People heard, "It takes a village to raise a child," and saw it, not as a philosophy of cooperative engagement with society and a handy resource for those times when they were overwhelmed by the job of being a parent, but as a handy abrogation of parental responsibility and a means by which they could shift the primary onus for their offspring's welfare and upbringing onto the nanny state. Parents might balk and howl when legislators bandy about the idea of sex ed in the classroom, and claim that the state has no right to indoctrinate their children with shameful sexual thoughts and useful information on how to make informed choices about their bodies, but these same parents have no compunction whatsoever about expecting--nay, demanding--that Joe Average keep their child safe when they'd rather not bear the burden of parenthood.

"Well, someone should've been watching," they cry when Johnny falls down at the mall because he was running like a maniac through the food court and bounced his idiot face off a stranger's knee.

Yes, someone should have. You, Madam or Mister Parent. You chose to procreate. Therefore, it's your job to raise your child. This often means that you will have to perform such unpleasant and boring tasks as watching your child in public, being aware of his limits, supervising his activities at all times, and this is a real bummer, I know, foregoing something you want in order to ensure the safety of the child and those around him. It's not fair, but it's the price of being a parent. I'm not going to pay it for you, not unless I get a say in how he should be reared. Since I won't, you're on your own. If you don't want your child to break his face on a stranger's knee, then put down the cell phone. If you don't want your fifteen-year-old in the hospital with a gunshot wound, then turn off the TV and make sure his snotty, rebellious ass is at home at a decent hour. He might hate you for it now, but he'll be around to love you for it later when he finally has the tools to pursue his dreams on his own.

In short, parents are feckless, bovine creatures who frequently procreate to satisfy their own selfish vanity, and I wish fewer of them would.

Once again, LJ has chosen to show its corporate ass to its customer base in favor of sucking off the advertising conglomerates and appeasing whackjob fundamentalist groups, and once again, 6A has demonstrated its dubious cunning by initiating the strikes during Prophecy and eliminating the telltale strikethrough. Better yet, those deleted for "inappropriate content" are permanently banned from the servers with no chance for appeal.

I wish I could say fandom has conducted itself with the same restraint and decorum evident for most of Strikethrough '07, but that's not the case. Intelligent discussion and protest has rapidly given way to a morass of macros, porn spam, and rage-inducing games of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Last time, fandom put their best foot forward; now they're just so many baboons throwing shit through the fence at indifferent zookeepers.

Maybe it's because fen realizes that this is an unwinnable war. LJ will "clarify" and appease until the furor subsides, and then they'll simply resume the implementation of their restrictive policies. They'll restrict and ban until the site is nothing but soccer moms, knitting circles, and teenies too cheap to pay for accounts, and then they'll wonder why the advertisers they were so keen to court suddenly have more important clients in the Blackberry. Then they might try to woo fandom again, but I suspect it will be too late.

I will continue posting here until they bring down the banhammer because I've the audacity to write about two people having sex and being unashamed of it, but I have backup journals at GreatestJournal and Insanejournal. Both are updated concurrently with my LJ, but they don't have any posts before early June. The former allows comments, but only from site members, as the levels of anonymous spam had reached stupendous levels.

If you wish to read these journals without registering on those sites, here is a tutorial on how to syndicate the feeds to your LJ or blog flist of choice.

Aside from that, my Internet life will go on, and there will be no changes to the content or tone of my posts. It's not a matter of free speech, but of living comfortably with myself.

Minor items of note before I proceed to entry proper:

-A tale of good customer service. Today at 12:25pm, Roomie ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut. He was told it would be about an hour. When 2:53pm came with no pizza, he called to inquire what had happened to the food. The manager told us the driver had claimed he had called and knocked and gotten no response. We explained we had heard neither knock nor ring.

3:45, and a pizza arrives, along with an apology. The pizza was free except for a delivery charge and tip. Pizza Hut will be getting our custom for a good, long while, as opposed to Papa John's, who declared us a "bad order" when the same thing happened two years ago.

-Katie Couric is an idiot. Apparently, she repeatedly slapped a staffer for using the word "sputum" in a news report because she disliked the word.

I'll let that sink in.

Katie Couric, the first woman to anchor a major network evening news broadcast, physically assaulted an underling because he dared to use a word she didn't like. A word that is, insofar as I know, the medical term for spit and non-vomitous oral discharge.

No, no, no. This is adulthood, Miss Couric, and in the grown-up world, we sometimes have to discuss or refer to issues, problems, or words we don't want to hear. Yes, "sputum" is a thick, unlovely word that conjures nasty images, but suck it up. It is also correct, and when it comes to disseminating the news, your sensibilities don't count. Getting it right does.

Unless someone is endangering themselves or others(practicing brain surgery on a coworker with rusty salad tongs or peeing in the potato salad in the communal refrigerator), it is absolutely unacceptable to hit them. Hitting someone with whom you disagree is the last resort of the weak and an act for which children are punished. Act your age and restore a modicum of dignity to the job. How I long for the days of Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings.

And from the WTF Files:

( Dongs Exclude You From Expressing Your Opinion )