A trip to the zoo

This weekend, my wife and I took a trip to Zoo Atlanta with my mom, sister, and niece. Here's a couple of the better pics that came out from that, the rest to be found here.

You just can't beat natural lighting.


























Baby gorilla, mom and the twins in the background.












Yang Yang, father of...













...Mei Lan, who was rather rambunctious during our visit.

Cool cakes

Just some cool looking cakes I ran across, obviously not in person.





































































For 100 points, for anybody not named the opinionated woodbutcher, can you name the game the following cake came from?

















50 bonus points, same rules (no OWB): from the same universe, but different game, name this shield -

And justice for all...

Original post on the Kathryn Johnston shooting, and the follow-up.

Now, finally, all three officers have been indicted for their actions leading to her death.

While this will seemingly satisfy the media and maybe even the family involved, it doesn't cure the problem - no-knock/ forced entry warrants should not be issued, with the only exception being in a hostage situation (in which case a warrant really isn't necessary). They most definitely should not be issued solely relying on confidential informants, most of whom are career criminals of some sort.

Positive proof that God exists!

Rosie O'Donnell quits the View.

And all the people in heaven and earth rejoice.

Because no one can be uncheered by bunnies

A dose of King Leonidas instead of Ritalin, please

A forewarning: this post is a leap, a pretty big one. It's about the Virginia Tech shootings. It could be interpretted as finger-pointing, but that's not my intention. If it's something else on this you're looking for, go to Gordon, b/c he flat out nailed it. My thoughts begin now...

Let's establish this at the beginning - it's the sick boy's fault any and all of this happened. The media and everybody will be out to blame the living for the dead, but it all boils down to him and his sick, twisted, "woe-is-freaking-me" view of the world. It's not the fault of the gun store, the gun laws, the lack of laws, the school administration, his roomates, his "friends", his family, his teachers, the police, or the fat cat that wouldn't sit in his lap. 100% ownership is his.

Let's also be clear about this - there isn't a law around now or in the future that would have prevented this. When a person gets this obsessed with doing this kind of evil, they're going to do it, period. You can't stop them every single time. Deal.

The thing that has alarmed me the most, out of all of this, is this one thing: nobody tried to stop him. Sure, some tried to impede him, allowing others time to escape - and paying the ultimate price for it - but nobody tried to stop him. No resistance at all.

Why?

"He had a gun." That's probably the answer you get from anybody, and I'm not here to say it's invalid. In terms of lethality and efficiency, he had the upper hand, but he also had the upper hand psychologically. Every report I've heard has said he wasn't "runnin'n'gunnin" like the Columbine boys were. He was taking measured shots, acquiring each target before pulling the trigger. Find some of the phone videos - it's not blam-blam-blam-blam-blam. It's blam - silence... blam - silence. He was calm, calculative, and that's far more intimidating.

Here's my leap, and where most will roll their eyes. I don't think the gun nor the gunman's demeanor was the main reason for inaction. I think it goes back further, to something that has been ingrained in many people of my generation and those after mine (and still going on today). And, as with most such downfalls, it starts with government bureacracy - in the form of Zero Tolerance.

In brief, schools' zero tolerance policies were designed to give administrators an easier time of handling school disciplinary matters - no messy committees, no answering to parents or parents' lawyers, no answering to the community. The rule book says we do this or don't do it, and it is so. No judgments, no decisions to be made, no hard questions to answer. The end.

Born out of this cluster was a policy concerning schoolyard or hallway fighting - essentially, if you fight, you're out. It doesn't matter who started it - or ended it. It doesn't matter if it was self-defense or bullying. You're suspended. And just what does that teach the kids?

Do nothing. Wait for help. Curl up in a little ball, and be subjugated. Call 911. Let somebody else take care of it for you. You get the point. And you probably see where this is headed.

Now they're grown up, and would rather play dead, hurdle themselves out of a 2nd story window, or submit themselves fully to the bad guy, hoping and praying that the worst won't happen. (Quick sidebar: as of the time of this writing there are rumors that some of the victims were lined up and executed like the Jews were in WWII. I haven't heard anybody fully substantiate it yet, but I also haven't heard anyone deny it. Thus, the previous sentence might be edited out later if this proves to be untrue.)

"Like you wouldn't try to escape." You're damned skippy I would. If I'm sitting next to the window when the shooting starts going down, I'm jumping. If I'm near the door, I'm busting out and down the hall, and I'm kicking those chained doors with as much force as I possibly can. When met with a potentially insurmountable foe, with life on the line, my response says flight if possible.

But there's a point in me - and everybody else - where you know escape is impossible. You know it's unlikely. You know you're about to get really hurt. You know you're going to die. It's at this critical point that our "wait for help" mentality, drilled in to us by school and society, does us in. Help's not coming. We're paralyzed.

We've taken the fight out of our kids, and instead filled it with passiveness. We've filled them with Ritalin. We've filled them with inaction. We've filled them with too much patience. We've filled them with dependency.

"What do you do?"

Fight. Throw a book. Throw a pencil. Throw a desk. Go all WWE on them and toss a chair. Rush him.

Will someone die? Most likely. But many will live.

It simply boils down to "how do you want to go out?"

To Jimmy Rollins

Dear Mr. Rollins,

You were very right when you said your team was the team to beat.

We had so much fun beating you. Thank you for inviting us in to your home so we could beat you.

We want to invite you up to our home at the end of this month so we can show all of our other friends how much fun it is to beat you. We think they would like that a lot.

Please bring your relievers. They throw real good, and we like to hit them. Because of them, we named all of our bats "Comedy Clubs." It really was that much fun.

Thank you,
The Atlanta Braves

Oh the doom and gloom of it all...

We interupt this hiatus to bring you the start of the baseball season in all it's glory. Or lack thereof, depending on your team(s).

I've always found it interesting how on opening day you have two kinds of people. The first kind are prepared to toss themselves down the stairs b/c their team lost the first game of the season. That's right, it's the first one down in a long string of 162 straight losses, nobody on the team will ever homer, the big hitters will strike out some 300 to 400 times for the year, and the pitchers will always yield 6 runs per game, easily becoming the worst pitching staff in the history of baseball. The opposite of this is true, too - if you win, you won't lose. Ever.

The second kind of fan are the ones that fake it. "Well, 161 more games. I'm sure they'll win some." Yeah, that's what the Orioles fans in 1988 said, too - look how that turned out. Everybody wants to win the first one, get the season started off right.

The Cardinals showed last year that the important time to catch fire and have everything clicking is at the end, not the beginning.