Check the exposure, something's wrong with the picture

I had some great (and funny) posting ideas for this week, but to be honest, the clearly wasn't the week to bring teh funny in full. I'd attempted (and failed pretty miserably) at trying to write about the whole VT situation. Instead I'm going to follow suit from some other blogger's and just say Doug's got a helluva write-up on the tradgedy, and his sister Ann does a bang-up job depantsing the arguments of douchebuckets like John Derbyshire that think all college students should be as gung-ho as the kids in Red Dawn were. So I highly recommend clicking both links, as you're looking at some of the best related-to-each-other writers since Theo Epstien's grandfather and grand uncle (I think that's right) hashed out Casablanca.

And also, I remain pretty convinced that the world is pretty nuts (or at least our corner of it is). VT students are clearly unhappy with the continued heavy media prescence in Blacksburg. How do I know this? Because there are (by lunchtime on Friday) 2,742 news articles detailing this on Google News. And undoubtably slightly less ethical journalists considering asking VT students why they don't like the media there when they'd like to grieve and hurt privately. If Dom DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon or John Barth (though really this seems mostly in Dellio's wheelhouse) 25 or 30 years ago, it'd be considered cutting-edge satire and post-modernism. And now what would be considered satirically overexaggerated coverage is: reality.

We've got a man running for president that adapted the words of "Barbara Ann" to "Bomb Iran," it's on YouTube, and sadly, there's quite a few Toby Keith-loving folks that probably want it released as a single they can pick up at Wal-Mart.

The world's pretty crazy, and I've found (at the oddly late age for idealism) that I'd rather try and do something about it rather that sit back and polish brass on the titanic. If we can take anything away from all this, it should be that a little empathy and compassion (delivered sincerely, sans ironic winks), couldn't hurt us. If that makes me a "bleeding-heart" or "emo" well...I don't care.