wow.

Ken: someone actually said "He did it because he wanted to go out in style"?!?!

That utterly and completely floors me. If I were not the sort of person who generally abstains from cursing (especially on this blog), I'd probably be dropping a string of four-letter words and body-part and bodily-function references to refer to that person.

"Going out in style" in my book amounts to something like saying, "Either this wallpaper goes or I go" before you breathe your last. Or picking out your best pimp-suit for them to put you in for your wake. Or maybe doing an Isadora Duncan.

But one doesn't make a statement by taking innocent lives. That's terrorism. I don't care what the statement is, how important the terrorist thinks it is, how global or how personal.

Saying that this creep did that to "go out in style" is not unlike commenting that under Mussolini, the trains ran on time.

People f-ing amaze me.

Of course, if we didn't have the concept in this country that getting on television and saying something makes you "famous" (no matter how imbecilic that something is), or if the bottom-feeding newsgrubbers didn't feel the need to cram a microphone in the maw of every Joe and Jane Sixpack out there when some tragedy happens, we might be spared this kind of idiocy. (Of course people might still THINK such betises, but at least the rest of us are spared listening to them.)

And the local radio news is all talking about "stepped up mall security." Good thing I wasn't planning on going shopping any time soon. (I wonder what that will amount to - frisking customers as they walk in the door?)