It was 64 years ago today that Uncle Sam delivered “Little Boy” to the city of Hiroshima, Japan, courtesy of a B-29 named after the pilot’s mother. :love: Aw. Mom, apple pie, and nuclear annihilation; that’s what America is all about. As we all know, Hiroshima and something like 140,000 of its citizens were sort of disintegrated. Makes 9/11 seem a bit timid in comparison, doesn’t it? Oh, I know, we considered ourselves at war with Japan, what with Pearl Harbor and all, so we were entitled to obliterate a city of limited military (yet tremendous religious, to them, anyway) significance, along with lots of civilian women and children. As opposed to 9/11, where we didn’t consider ourselves at war with the terra’ists, so they weren’t entitled (but now we do consider ourselves at war with them, so they would be entitled. Or something. :smack: I dunno, attempts at logical reasoning always seem to give me a headache. I’d be better off being a Republican; then I wouldn’t have to bother trying). As terrifying as the world’s first look at nuclear weapons was, we’d spent a helluva lot of money making two of the friggin’ things, and damned if we weren’t gonna use ’em both (give ’em hell, Harry, and whatnot).

On the Today Show this morning, Lester Holt (in for Matt the Rat, I guess) interviewed the sister of one of the shooting victims in the PA gym shooting. Her sister was an important victim, because she’d been a doctor. I was hoping he’d ask what her sister’s position on Single Payer Health Care had been, but instead Lester lamented that we were seeing lots of shootings “in places we wouldn’t expect to,” lately (by which I think he meant, “where you white people hang out”).

Meanwhile, here in the ‘Cuse, we eagerly await the start of football season. Nobody is expecting a national championship, of course, and we’ve been picked to finish last in the Big East (not exactly a bold prediction, given that we actually have finished last the past four years, winning a total of 10 games – including, I feel obliged to add, AT Notre Dame). But hope springs (and falls) eternal, and we have a new coach who played here and most certainly won’t dress up his players in those godawful all-orange uniforms of a couple seasons past (that’s what you get when you hire a touchy-feely West Coast coach; we got ourselves a no-nonsense New York City Irish boy now). We’re really just looking to not suck too bad.

Fortunately, we have a juicy little show trial in the area to take our minds off of football season while satisfying both our prurient curiosity, and our need to feel superior to others. A while back, some poor kid was killed in her home, and her stepbrother (or something) is charged with the murder. But that trial hasn’t started yet.

The one that’s taking up all our attention now is the trial of the girl’s father and stepmother, who are facing four counts each of misdemeanor endangering the welfare of a child for locking the kid in her room with padlocks and chicken wire, and for living in a house with 60 cats, dead kittens in the freezer, and chickens (live ones) in the kitchen. One of the stepmother’s co-workers apparently complained to her that she “smelled like cat,” and she (the stepmother) said she kept the chickens in the kitchen because it was easier to clean up the chickenshit from the kitchen floor (as opposed to, oh, I dunno, outside, maybe? I reckon it is hard to wipe shit up off the dirt). Apparently, she didn’t notice the smell from the feces and urine infested carpets, furniture, etc. :cat:

Now, I feel bad for the kid, and there’s definitely something not quite right with these folks, but I’m getting a bit tired of what seems like 24/7 lo-cal coverage. I guess people just love to sit in their trailers in front of the teevee shoving bon-bons into their faces, a mist of crumbs spewing forcefully into the air with each “tut-tut” they utter at how terrible “them people” are.

I find the whole thing sad and depressing, but I just don’t get the entertainment value.

As opposed to Syracuse football, which I also find sad and depressing, but very entertaining (at least until the losing starts).