The News is Scary
by Scott Hardie on May 4, 2007
Sixth-grader admits stabbing ducks with pencil. Does anyone else read this and think, this kid will grow up to be Jeffrey Dahmer?
Vegan parents guilty of murder. It's a sad incident, but a mistake's a mistake. With two automatic life sentences, shouldn't they have gone for negligent homicide or manslaughter?
Students attend school's first integrated prom. Is there a quote in this story that gives the impression the community has fully faced and dealt with the racism in their community? Changing the school's custom doesn't make the past go away.
It's a wrap. You're hired! Video resumes are the depressing new fad. So people can't even be bothered to read resumes any more? What's next, picking up an item of food at the grocery store wondering if it's nutritious, and having a pre-recorded person on a monitor read off to you the calories and other statistics?
Two Replies to The News is Scary
Anna Gregoline | May 8, 2007
Those vegan parents? How can you watch your kid get thinner and sicker and sicker and not try and make them better? The article says the baby got down the 3lbs 8ozs!
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
Day 178
People have been asking me how the diet is going. I'm still at it, although I cheat much more often than I'd like, so the daily caloric average is now 1500-1800. However, I've been stuck on one seriously cruel plateau. Go »So Long, NCSA Primer
Someone asked me for help learning HTML today. I turned to my trusted traditional source, the good old primer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, but alas, it has finally been removed after all these years. This was one of the major how-to guides in the early years of the web, and it's the very guide that I used to teach myself HTML one weekend in 1996, from which this very site you're reading has since evolved. Go »All King and No Kubrick Make Jack a Dull Boy
I recently got to talking with friends who liked The Shining, both Stephen King's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of it, but who were unaware that King has always loathed the movie, despite its reputation as one of the best horror films ever made. It's hard to imagine that a writer doesn't know his own work better than someone interpreting it, but I think this is one of those rare cases where the writer is just too close to the story to get it. Here are three reasons why I think Kubrick's film better understands the material, and is better overall, than King's novel: 1) In King's version, Jack Torrance is a fundamentally decent man who wouldn't hurt a fly, but who is down on his luck and desperate. Go »Nooooooooooodge
You know what would be nice? If Google, one of the most web-savvy companies in existence, could manage to remember my goddamn user settings for more than 48 hours. I'm getting really sick of discovering them reset to defaults and having to change them all over again. Go »Pandora
[This post wound up being very long-winded and self-absorbed, but that's what blogs are for, I guess.] For years, I've gotten increasingly picky about how I listen to music. Sometimes I just want to listen to everything I have on shuffle, but sometimes I want to get more specific like only music from one genre on shuffle or all songs by one artist in chronological order, and sometimes I want to get really specific, like songs about dreams or artists from Michigan or recordings featuring violins. Go »
Jackie Mason | May 5, 2007
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