Sheepville

Yahoo news links:


Deputies turned back after initial 911 call to... at Seattle...
Mournful silence fills a Black Diamond yard at Seattle...
Hawaii residents flea expensive islands at Seattle Times
Infamous potatoes: Tater Tots start blaze in... at Seattle Times
Seattle streetcar is stalling at KING 5
Downtown Seattle bus tunnel back open at KING 5

The third news item - I guess that's one way to lower property values. :)

Spent my birthday and Christmas in bed with my only caloric intake being Nyquil and orange juice. Actually started before my birthday, by Christmas I was down to the hacking up a lung stage after the fact. I worked half a day Christmas eve then went home and went back to bed to wake up at 6:00 - the exact time the store closed downstairs. They were not open Christmas day. Since I was sick I hadn't gotten groceries and didn't have my normal Banquet Christmas cube-carved white and dark meat turkey smothered in gravy with peas and carrots with a golden brown crustlike stuffing. It turns out I didn't have crap in the house. I found a couple of Ramen Noodle packages, expired 9/2006 - tossed. Christmas dinner wound up being a can of green beans and a half dozen boiled eggs. It's not like I'm a stranger to my fridge getting down to ice-cubes only, but I usually have my butt covered for holidays. I still had my internet connection and cable so I squeaked through.

If it weren't for still buying Tracy something for Christmas it would be as meaningless as any other day to me, so no big deal. But if anyone thinks they have it bad for the holidays, it could always be worse. You could have been eaten by a tiger at a zoo for Christmas and a day later no one still knows who you are or apparently has missed you. You could have been killed in a plane crash. Family wiped out by a mudslide. All of this happened on Christmas this year for some people. You could be homeless which is probably about the lowest it can possibly get. Christmas morning I still saw the homeless huddled under blankets in the doorways and anything with an overhang. They sure weren't happy to see the third Christmas snowfall in Seattle since the 1940s. So happy holidays - and a joke to end the year:

Frank always looked on the bright side. He would constantly irritate his friends with his eternal optimism. No matter how horrible the circumstance, he would always reply, "It could have been worse."

To cure him of his annoying habit, his friends decided to invent a situation so completely bad, so terrible, that even Frank could find no hope in it.

On the golf course one day, one of them said, "Frank, did you hear about Tom? He came home last night, found his wife in bed with another man, shot them both and then turned the gun on himself!"

"That's awful," said Frank, "But it could have been worse."
"How in the hell," asked his bewildered friend, "Could it have been worse?"
"Well," replied Frank, "If it happened the night before, I'd be dead now!"

Did Drew Peterson kill his wife? It's been made abundently clear the police and media think so. The media has gone from reporting the facts to an entity that can do and say anything with immunity under the guise of free speech. They can invade people's privacy, tresspass, harrass, threaten - anything. They were responsible for the death of a princess without consequence. The frenzy the media creates undoubtably has a negative impact on the investigations by police. The Joan Benet Ramsey (sp?) girl everything we saw in the media was trolling to get someone in the family convicted. The security guard that should have been a hero at the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta was turned into a villain with absolutely no evidence against him. If they had found so much as a cement nail in his house he would be in prison today. After months of public conviction by the media that poor guy couldn't get a job guarding chickens. When are we going to tell the media that freedom of the press doesn't give them a right to stalk people and stand in front of their cars preventing them from leaving. You want to stand in front of Britney's Beemer to get photos of her and the kids who may or may not be strapped in a car seat? She should get paid a bonus to mow your ass over.

As long as our society supports this type of media frenzy it will never stop. It used to be faceless masses buying the National Enquirer, but now these millions of people have a voice all over the internet. Some of these people post to these news blurbs like they have a personal stake in the issue. I've got news for you - if one of the primary things in your life is being on the edge of your seat waiting for breaking news about Britney stealing a lighter and posting all over the place about it - you have more mental issues than Britney does. Yeah, even I'm guilty to a certain extent - as soon as I read about Brit's beaver shot I'm over at tmz to see the pic. Anything short of answering the question of carpeting or hardwood floors I'm just not gonna be much interested in - and I don't see anyone else really cares either.

Drew Peterson may have killed his wife but we don't know that. If she pops up tomorrow there will be no apologies to this guy even though he has already been humiliated by the media. Even if she never shows up, no body is ever found, not any evidence to convict him - the public will always believe he is guilty now.

Of course I'm rooting for the wife to show up so I can tell Tracy "SEE! SEE! But if HE had disappeared they would never have suspected her."