June, 1999 School Violence in America
Pick one:
The Littleton shooting happened because of:
a) poor gun control laws
b) movies
c) video games
d) no religion in schools
e) decaying values
f) Clinton
g) abortion
h) women's lib
i) two-income families or
j) the fact that evidently none of the students, teachers, parents, police and/or counselors who dealt with these clearly unhinged boys would recognize a sociopath if one fell on their head, let alone know what to do about it even if they could buy a clue. "We had no idea he was this troubled. Well, we did know that he likes to torture animals, steal cars and publish death threats on the internet but you know how it is, boys will be boys!
Since the Littleton, Colorado, USA shooting I have heard every explanation on earth for why it happened and what we need to do to prevent future shootings, but in all that air time (which is considerable), nobody has even touched on the subject of sociopaths.
It's amazing to me that medical science can clone a sheep but the best they can do for a sociopath is wait until he kills someone and then put him in prison. People always wonder why we have so many more serial killers than other countries - answer: because we have so much more freedom than other countries. It's this freedom that lets a sociopath sail pretty much unchecked through the early stages of his mental illness - which, of course, includes the high school years.
If someone is torturing animals, setting things on fire and shouting "Heil, Hitler" instead of saying "Hello," and his parents aren't alarmed enough to make him see a health professional, his violence will escalate - it's as simple as that. He certainly won't be stopped by the law.
Americans can't be tossed in jail for wearing a swastika or spouting racist remarks or running a website called "How to Build a Bomb." If the parents don't figure out the kid is sick and take action, no action will be taken period. At least, not until he's finally caught for murdering somebody. Or several somebodies.
If we want to stop school violence, parents need to recognize mental illness when it's slapping them in the face and do something about it. Because as things stand right now, they are the only ones who can.
May, 1999 Forward THIS
FW: ALERT!!!!!!!!!! I MEAN IT!!!!!!FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:Alert!
Drop everything! Forward this right now! (And be sure to put all one-thousand email addresses in the CC: section, because somebody might like to reply to all the people who are on this forward and of course we want to make it very, very easy for them to do this because you just can NOT get enough email like, "Would you like to make one billion dollars overnight just by picking your nose?")
--------------------
Hello _______!!!
Please forward this to everyone you have ever known, or ever will know!!!! And I DO mean EVERYONE!!!! Even those people who you've only emailed once to ask why they didn't have any Nintendo cheat codes on their cat's home page, and they replied "Huh?" - yes, forward it to ***them*** too! Just forward away like mad - like your very life depended on it - BECAUSE IT DOES!!!!
This is the ONLY way this information can get out there people!!!! We all know that the media refuse to cover things like businessmen having their kidney's stolen in strange hotels, and Bill Gates handing out free money, and computer viruses that are so powerful they can erase your hard drive even when the email is on a computer in the next apartment and your laptop isn't plugged in. IT'S UP TO US TO STOP THIS!!!!!!
If you don't forward this to everyone you know and THEY don't forward it to everyone THEY know, a strange man will approach some poor woman at a mall and ask for a ride, and she won't know to *****run like hell***** because she didn't get this alert!!!!! Nope, she'll just let the strange man get right in her car!!!!! And once he does, he'll steal her kidneys and leave her in a strange hotel room!!!! And on top of that, she won't get a free trip to Disneyworld because she won't be home to get her
important forwarded email!!!!!
Now stop reading and get out your address book and forward this with utter abandon, regardless of whether you have anything more important to do OR ESPECIALLY whether the people you're forwarding this to might actually ******have better things to do!!!!!!****** THEY DON'T, TRUST ME! There is NOTHING more urgent than this!!!! Just to be safe, send it to everyone two or three times!!!!!!!
Oh and by the way - watch out for that new virus that's disguising itself as an Important Forwarded Message because it's ****really**** nasty. It is by far the most powerful, vicious virus yet. It not only infects your hard drive, causing your keyboard to lock up if you try to forward email to anyone who hasn't personally asked you to alert them if Bill Gates is giving away money, it also sends out a secret subspace alert to all strangers in the area and the next time you go to the mall they'll follow you to your car and try to take your kidneys. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!!
NOTE: How many times a week (or day) do you get such ludicrous emails as the above in your mailbox? Emails scaring the bejeebers out of you, filled with exclamation points and all capital letters: unbelievably (and they
are) fantastic product or vacation offers, bizarre stories of real diseases, lost and/or terminally ill children, and oh Jeeez, those countless virus alerts. Even the most archaic email program comes with a Delete button. It's really a simple feature to use. Who knows - it may prevent you from losing an email pal or two. If you are truly concerned, before forwarding this type of email to family, friends and mailing lists, check out the following URLs to see if it's myth, hoax or fact:
Computer Virus Myths
Current Net Hoaxes
Don't Spread that Hoax!
Urban Legends Reference Pages
April, 1999 Febreze and Real Fur Pet Toys
Febreze may or may not cause your pet to be ill - I'm sure you've heard from all sides by now and you can draw your own conclusions - but if there's a worse way to handle this kind of incident than the strategy Proctor and Gamble devised, I'd hate to see it. One person told me that Febreze replied to her letter about her dead bird by sending her coupons for Febreze. Now
there's some smart executive thinking. "Well, the bird is dead now
anyway so..."
"It's all a lie, no birds or dogs have died," they said. But I read that zinc chloride is toxic to birds. "Well of course we advise you to use normal precautions. But it's safe." But you don't have any precautions on the label? "Looky here, it's
NOT DANGEROUS. Ask your vet,
HE'LL tell you." (If I told my vet, "I heard Febreze might kill my cat and I'm worried about using it," and he said anything besides "Then don't use it, you idiot," I'd change vets. But I wouldn't ask him in the first place because:
- I am not legally required to buy Febreze even if it's safe enough to eat for breakfast, and
- being an extremely inventive and even brilliant person I can come up with a Plan B for that stinky sweater, like THROW IT OUT AND BUY A NEW ONE. But, I digress.)
In their last exchange with me, Febreze mentioned in passing that they're taking zinc chloride out of the formula. "It's
not dangerous but
FINE, we're taking it out. Just to humor you bunch of wild-eyed nutcases. Now buy the damn stuff, will you?"
Never, at any point, did Febreze express an interest in our pets. The pets were incidental in all this. Basically, the pets were the big roadblock in the way of selling more Febreze. In their only smart move, P&G resisted the urge to tell us to get rid of the pets instead. "Febreze is safe. It's your stupid dog that's got a problem. Take him to the pound and buy some Febreze on the way back."
And now it looks like the Hartz people are going to try this same old tap dance. (Hartz, selling fur cat toys bought in "Cat&Dog Fur R Us" China.) Their first response is already laughable. "The fur is a by-product of rabbits." Well, I'm sure all their rabbit-owning customers will be relieved to hear that. But of course it doesn't bother us cat owners - we don't care what gets mangled and killed so long as our cat can chase it around on the floor. We're notorious that way. Duh.
February, 1999 Toilet Training Cats
What's the Big Deal About Scooping Litterboxes?
Why can't people just let cats be cats? What's the big deal about cleaning litterboxes? Scooping and cleaning litterboxes are part of the bargain we make when we get a cat and everyone knows it. It certainly isn't time-consuming for the average cat owner. It's much fairer to the cat. I have yet to see a cat voluntarily, without provocation or training, rush to use a human toilet. Yet, when I scoop my house cats' boxes in my home, or place a scrubbed litterbox down with fresh litter in it, the race is on to see who can get in there and eliminate first.
Cats shouldn't be made or expected to use a toilet for several reasons. First, it is an absolutely unnatural thing for a cat to do. By expecting and forcing cats to eliminate in a "human" way, they are unable to do what comes as instinctual - such as dig and bury their urine or feces. Isn't it enough that people attempt to modify their cats so they fit in with what that person might deem as "socially acceptable" - such as declawing? Expecting cats to do things as humans do is going just too far.
Second, toilet seats are slick and slippery even for young children, so think what it must be like for a cat. There is always a chance of a cat slipping and falling, possibly injuring himself in the process. This could also be an experience that will frighten the cat enough that he will refuse to use the toilet again. Toilets also require that the cat jump up. While this may be easy for a younger cat, it will be difficult and/or painful for an ill, or injured, or older, or arthritic cat to attempt. We provide hand-grips in public restrooms and our homes' bathrooms for our elderly and infirm humans. We also provide for them portable toilets in hospitals, nursing facilities, and our own homes, so why should we expect our elderly and infirm cats to eliminate with difficulty and pain?
Third, toilet training a cat also makes it impossible to see the urine output, which is important in monitoring the cat's health. A cat who has a urinary tract infection may not feel comfortable trying to balance on the toilet seat when he is already miserable from painful urination or an inflammed bladder. He will more than likely seek out other spots in which to eliminate. Feces can't be checked accurately if there is a possible problem, as the water in the toilet will change the feces' consistency.
And fourth, another problem is that many cats have a location preference when they eliminate. A toilet can't be moved from room to room. While a litterbox in the bathroom may work for some cats, in many households there are litterboxes placed in other locations as well. Not able to move an elimination area can be a setup for innappropiate elimination by cats who prefer other locations, especially in a multi-cat household.
Toilet training a cat does NO favors for the cat. It is done strictly as a convenience for the owner. Be a responsible cat owner, please ... let a cat be a cat.
January, 1999 About Midis
...Or lack thereof...
I never used midis much prior to putting up my site but when I did, I went to
Laura's MIDI Heaven to find them. I went back there recently to grab some midis, but her wonderful site has pretty much been decimated by Harry Fox, the licensing agency for (evidently) most of the music in the world. Surfing around for another midi source, I found that other midi sites have been equally eroded or even shut down completely.
There have been a lot of idiotic copyright suits recently - Paramount's war on the Star Trek fan sites and the Toys R Us suit against a tiny British cat shelter called Cats R Us, to name a few - but the particularly crazy-nuts aspect of the midi crackdown is this: midis are internet-specific. The music licensing companies lose nothing at all by allowing the midis of their songs to exist on the internet, because you wouldn't listen to midis anyplace
but the internet. You wouldn't substitute midis for the real thing in your home or on a radio station, and you wouldn't sell them because nobody in their right mind would buy them. Nobody is going to spot a midi of their favorite song on the internet and shout, "Hey, I found the midi, now I don't need to buy the CD!" To sum up, the only
good thing about midis
is that you can play them on the internet. They aren't worth anything in and of themselves. They don't even have lyrics. They're like a grainy black and white photocopy of a painting: you get the general idea,
period. Somebody just
humming the song would sound better.
So, why are these big companies wasting time and money suing webmasters of
non-commercial sites for using midis of their songs? Nobody is charging for them, nobody mistakes the webmaster as being the composer of "Jumpin' Jack Flash," and nobody is rushing out to return their CD now that they've got a midi version of "My Heart Will Go On." There's only one possible explanation: the music-licensing people must honestly believe that we're going to spend
actual money to acquire the right to play a tinkly, bass-heavy three-chord version of "Theme from Godfather" on our websites. Well, good luck to them.
Meanwhile, it's just about impossible to know what midi is okay and what midi is going to bring the wrath of Legal down on your head, so I'm only using midis that seem to be public domain or are not part of the lawsuit madness, like folk songs, classical, video game music and what other little stuff is still widely available for downloading - presumably because nobody is suing anybody over those songs, although it's early days yet and I might have to yank them too in the end. In which case I'll just compose my own midis - they couldn't sound much worse really.
I suppose I should have said
computer specific; I don't even separate the two in my mind anymore, but that would have been more precise. Computer games, computer screensavers, and computer-generated presentations do use midis but once again, that's because they have no real choice. Midis were made for the computer and there they will stay. We are in more danger of seeing eight-track tapes return than we are of seeing midis bootlegged off the net for your personal listening pleasure at parties or in the car or all those other (infrequent) times you're off the computer.
Which is why I think these music companies are nuts to squabble over someone using their song on the internet; why not attack little kids singing "Happy Birthday" at parties while they're at it. The new Copyright Mafia has no common sense or sense of perspective and if they gain something by succeeding in keeping their midis off the "Cats Galore Home Page," I would
love to know what on earth it might be.
December, 1998 Free?
There are all kinds of free services on the internet, everything from the home page itself to whatever you can dream up to put on it - polls, forms, guestbooks, chat rooms, message boards, graphics, postcard sites, link exchange banners ... the list goes on and on. Sure, your website ends up looking like a racecar in the Indy 500 - people can barely see your index for all the banners and logos and pop-ups - but if you had to pay for this stuff, you'd need a second job. So overall, this free stuff is a good thing.
Lately though, those who provide these "free" services have forgotten that this is a symbiotic relationship. We may be getting something for free, but we're also giving
them something for free - namely a place to
put their ads. They are getting -
for free - all the labor we put into making our website a place people want to visit. Not only do they have no respect for this fact, their rules are getting pickier as competition picks up - they want you to display more banners and bigger logos, their list of what you can not link to is getting longer, and God help you if you violate one of their terms of agreement. (One free home page service,
fortunecity.com, will yank your page off the net without warning and put you in "jail" - that is, they'll advertise your name
and email address on a page so lurid you'd think the crime was murder.)
What the free-service people don't seem to understand is that the wheel is turning in our favor. We don't have to take this anymore. Now that entrepreneurs have caught on to the fact that they can make lots of money by using free services to sell advertising, there are more of them than ever competing for advertising space on fewer and fewer content-driven websites. We can choose from dozens of services, instead of one. We can go with whoever has the least nitpicky rules and the most tasteful advertising -
because we are more necessary than the free services. Without us, advertisers would just be displaying their ads to each other. And advertisers aren't stupid. They know this.
If you're using a free service that has unreasonable rules or requirements, shop around - you can probably find something better. We don't need to let these people hold our websites hostage anymore. They may like to pretend that they're doing us a big old favor, but without our advertising space these businesses simply won't
have a business.
November, 1998 Let's Make a Deal
For some reason, some pro-life groups have decided that we animal-welfare people are
The Enemy. The logic escapes me. These are two unrelated topics, and trying to promote one by denigrating the other doesn't further their cause, it just makes them look peevish. "Hey, if nobody is going to care about stopping abortion then we'll make sure there's
NO kindness or mercy in this world period, so
THERE."
Republican Dan Boddicker from Iowa, USA is one such pro-lifer. He has made his position crystal clear: pro-life = anti-animal. (Iowa is the American state where two teenagers got off with community service for
bashing 16 helpless cats to death in an animal shelter because legally, the cats were worthless property.)
Boddicker says that "as long as abortion is legal in our state and nation I will support no law which puts a value of an animals life and the punishment for taking that life over the life of an innocent human being. Animals are property and laws dealing with them should reflect laws dealing with destruction of property."
So his logic is, since abortion is legal then someone should get a longer jail sentence for stealing your expensive TV than for killing your "worthless" shelter cat. That's not a pro-life stance, it's a pro-appliance stance. (Which surprises me, considering appliances can't vote.)
We all know that politcians use these bargaining tactics with each other, but this is the first time I've seen one of them try it out on the public. Usually they try to maintain at least the pretense that they're serving
us, and not vice-versa. But this brings up an interesting concept - wouldn't it be a vast improvement in our system of government if we
could actually bargain directly with our politicians? Imagine a Town Hall Meeting in which voters could make deals with the likes of Boddiker. Then, his system of serving the people by using his personal agenda as a bargaining chip might be useful to us.
Boddiker: I'll vote for felony cruelty laws if we make abortion is illegal. Any takers? Let's see a show of hands.
Voter #1: I'll trade making abortion illegal for strict gun control laws.
Boddiker: I'll vote for gun control laws when I see prayer allowed back in the schools, and not a minute before. How about making it illegal to burn the flag - who's got something to trade for that?
Voter #2: I'll concede to prayers in schools in exchange for felony animal-cruelty laws.
Voter #3: I will not concede to prayer in schools if I don't get legal abortion. But I might trade mandatory abortion counseling for more gun control.
Boddiker: I'll trade prayer in schools for mandatory abortion counseling, if you agree to make it illegal to burn the flag.
Voter #4: I refuse to endorse any gun control legislation, but I might drop prayer in schools if I get illegal flag burning, and I'll trade illegalizing abortion for felony cruelty laws.
Boddiker: Now we're getting somewhere. Anybody else want to trade flag burning for prayer in schools? How about if I throw in the death penalty?
I mean, this could really work out. Of course, you'd run the risk of having some nut in the crowd shoot someone else for not having proper respect for life or the flag or religion (statistically the shooter will have a
history of cruelty to animals, not that anyone will connect
those dots) but still, it sounds a lot more rational than the system we've got now, doesn't it? If I lived in Iowa, I'd be writing up a proposal for Boddiker as we speak. Because evidently it's the only way you're going to get a break for cats in
that state.
