Many Tentacles Pimping on the Keys

In the living room, Gareth works on code and listens to David Gray. In the computer room, I switch back and forth between working on code and working on this post, hoping that no one is noticing that I've been gradually notching up the volume on the techno every few minutes.

The walls just need to shake a little bit. A little bit of shake and the code shall flow forth.

Going is slow on Quarto. Yesterday afternoon I threw in the towel on the "select an entry to edit" page, choosing instead to sally forth with my embarrassingly-high number of free weekend minutes on my cell phone. The end result: a long, rant-complaint-and-amusement phone call to Matthew.

Why tell you this? Every now and then I feel compelled to rant about current world events. It's brutal to say it, but many of the things that happen on the world stage have little direct effect on we "little people," who spend our days earning money and mowing our lawns and generally trying to be the decent people our mothers always said we should be.

On Thursday, Jeff was watching television and I was coding; Will pinged me, suggesting that I go to the TV and turn on the news. Sure enough, the headline-news channels were carrying the latest bit of doom and gloom; that day's particular form involved a shooting at the L.A. airport. I sat there for a few minutes, utterly dumbfounded but unable to form my amazement into words.

Eventually, I figured it out.

Let's just think about something for a moment here, folks. There are many, many airlines near whose ticket counters that, if one were idiotic and had a death wish, one could wave one's trusty little handgun around (when yelling and stomping just don't cut it any more). Certainly, in the security expert's wet dream that is our current society, any brown-skinned someone who attempted such a thing would virtually guarantee themselves a quickie trip to the clink—and that's just the domestic airlines.

Instead, this guy decides to haul out the weaponry near the ticket counter of the most heavily armed airline in the world? Admittedly, one must be a little insane to think that pulling out a gun at an airport is going to accomplish anything (except further delay a few thousand air travelers) but this is a bit beyond the standard garden-variety of stupid and insane.

Just what did this guy think he was going to accomplish in the 0.00005 seconds remaining in his natural lifespan after he pulled out his weapon)? I mean, really? Do enlighten me; I seem to have missed something.

In the meantime, I'll close up this little window of text and get back to beating on Quarto. Perhaps enlightenment will sneak up and whack me on the head in the meantime.

(Oh, and the title of the post? It's what I'm listening to right now. It's track 1 of Deep Dish's _Yoshiesque_, CD#2 (not volume 2; that's a different album). If it is not the best song name ever, I don't know what is.)

Comments

That was a rather scary event to read about - considering that David and I happened to be at the Tom Bradley terminal (seeing off a friend) two days earlier - exactly where it happened. I've often found that the idiotic and the frightening are anything but mutually exclusive.

Amy, you've gotta remember that martyrdom is seen by some as a good idea. Not by me, mind you, but hey ...

The idiot did manage to achieve one thing, and that was to disrupt normal programming on the radio station that i listen to some mornings (3AW, Melbourne). We heard interviews from the Mayor of LA (well i think he was anyway!), the head of LAX security, etc etc. With these poor buggers being asked stupid questions along the lines of "Is there any evidnece to suggest that this was an act of terorism?" Blah blah blah..... It would have been very terrifying for all the people in and around the area when the shooting occurred and later on for the families of the victims. But for an act of terroism, i dont think so.