American Madness

(Originally titled American Psychos… but the new title just worked so much better)

So, would I sound crazy if I said I was drawn to articles about serial killers?

I thought American Psycho was well written, I am a fan of some horror movies, but my tastes tend to lean more toward 28 Days Later and Evil Dead then slasher and killer movies, but why is it that when I find an article about a real life honest-to-god nutcase serial killer I can’t help but want to read it?

I didn’t actually notice this as a trend until I saw this article from yesterday’s New York Times about Robert Charles Browne who claimed to have murdered 48 people in 9 different states. It brought me back to an article I had read back in September about everyones favorite “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz from New York Magazine (The Devil in the David Berkowitz).

I would have guessed it was just me and some really odd interest in the real life macabre, but the article on Browne is the 19th most emailed article today. For me I think it is an interest in the mind and looking to these articles to find out what actually made these people snap, essentially get a snap shot of crazy from some of the crazies still alive out there today. What is it about Helter Skelter that could inspire some one to kill?

Anyway, as the NY Times showed me, I am not the only one who likes reading about incarcerated psychos so I felt someone else out there reading this might be interested in these articles as well

So I came across this site for Sean Kenney. Sean has the job I always wanted when I was 8. He is a Certified Lego Professional. Sean is my hero. Check out more of Sean’s work at his website. He has a great model of Greenwich Village
(Though I am pretty sure his Homer should have a Duff beer and not a Newcastle in hand)

So, as I have mentioned in the previous 2 postings I have been at a conference. My conference was on the Disney compound, I was not looking forward to this at all. I envisioned overly tired, overly hot kids, frustrated parents, and an endless streaming of Disney tunes. Well, needless to say I was not let down.
Spending time here without a child makes you think that there are a lot of people out there who really need some lessons in parenting. When your kid is standing next to a total stranger who is quietly reading a book while waiting for a bus and the kid starts to pound his fist on the drainpipe between the two of them just to see how much noise this pipe can produce telling him to stop is a good first step. When your kid doesn’t stop I am pretty sure the next step in the parenting manual is not to walk away from the kid and ignore him while he continues to pound on the pipe and irritate the stranger.
When your kid is taking a pay phone and repeatedly bashing it against itself, and your saying “Come and sit down Nick” doesn’t seem to be affective, maybe it is time to switch up your strategy rather then sit there looking pissed but doing nothing. Another two left out of the parenting handbook: When you see your child drop candy on the floor, pick it up and throw it out, otherwise it will end up in the kids mouth (just watched that happen with a handful of Tic-Tacs, apparently daddy kicking them to the side didn’t discourage the kid from eating them anyway… Stupid 3 year old, why doesn’t he listen when Dad says “don’t put any of that in your mouth? Oh right he’s 3). Also, don’t reward bad behavior, you’d think that was obvious, but apparently not. For those without child Disney is an excellent form of birth control.
Sometimes the parents are not to be faulted, kids will throw temper tantrums from time to time, it happens and usually there is nothing that can be done about them. I am not blaming any parent for a crying or screaming child (well except those parents who grab their kid’s arm with such force it is surprising the arm is still attached to the body, let alone still in the socket). It is the behavior issues that these parents seem unwilling to control because they would much rather sit on their overly abundant ass then deal with their child. Spend a few days here with these kids and you will not feel the need to have one of your own anytime soon.
Plus if I have to hear Wendy, Michael, John and Peter sing one more song I think I might go on a psychotic rampage faster then if I was hopped up on Fairy Dust.

Well, that was one generation name that never quite stuck did it, too bad for that failed campaign, otherwise we might have a definitive name for the current generation. Another meeting attended, another tidbit of information to throw up here (take that how you will).
There were the Baby-Boomers, Gen-X and now we have the Me-llennials.
Me-llennials (or Millennials) are the Baby-Boomer’s kids, born around 1982 (give or take. While I don’t particularly like the implications of the Millennials, some of the traits described about them fit a lot of the people I know who are currently read and writing for this blog, so there is some cross-over and overlap). They have been called Generation Next, the Generation born with a mouse in their hands, and a number of other things. Anyway, these Millennials tend to be coddled, tech-savvy, over achievers who work well in team settings and when ever they have any problems their parents come to the rescue (these parents are called Helicopter Parents due to all of their hovering or Blackhawk Parents because they feel the need to swoop in and save the day when a problem arises… I heard a tale of a Millennial not getting the raise he desired which prompted his mother to call his boss to find out why he was denied the raise and explain why he so dearly deserved it). Oh, Millenials are also apparently conservative, though about what I am not sure from the television, clothes and marketing directed at them (and all the tales of sexual horrors going on at Bar-Mitzvahs) they are clearly not socially conservatism.
Millennials drive social networking services, prefer email and texting to calling (and emailing is primarily used for contacting “old people”), probably have their own blog (which may come back to bite them in the ass when they apply for Harvard and the admissions committee reads about the drunken orgy they had at their bar-mitzvah when they were 13), think advertising is dishonest and were raised on the inclusionism of Barney telling them that we are all the same (as opposed to Gen-Xers who were raised on Sesame Street and learned that we are all different, but that is good).
Now, technically I am not a Millennial, and for this I am actually kind of grateful, though I am not really a Gen-Xer either though, those of you I know who are reading this tend to fall into the category with me, we are a little of both: tech-savvy Sesame Street lovers who text, but also know how to dial a phone. Our parents have probably never spoken with our bosses but may have read about them in our blogs.
There was a whole lot more I got from this meeting, but 1- my battery is dying on my computer, 2- I didn’t grab a paper copy of the PowerPoint presentation (I plan on downloading the PDF from the presenters website instead). I’ll post some more ME-llennial information up here as I remember/re-read it, maybe even the presentation, though, unless you work in admissions, it doesn’t contain that much interesting information. And if you are reading this and thinking “Whatever, I am SO not part of the millennial generation” consider how many of your friends have home phones in addition to their cells.
Oh and this is the video they started this meeting with: My Generation

P.S. It is much harder to tag an entry written a few days ago… I am blanking on which tags to use now

So many things to write about, where to start? Okay, let’s pick up from my last entry- I am at a conference this week and while typing that last entry from my phone was actually in a meeting about “legal” and “illegal” use of the internet and information found on the internet in admissions and, by extension, the hiring of new employees. Basically this is how it works: If you apply to a school or a job and you think everything is going really well: you passed the initial screening process, aced the interview and are just waiting for that call with the offer, well, keep waiting, cause they are still getting information on you. You can bet that once you walk out of that door from your interview, that interviewer you just met with is going to get back on to their computer, open up Google and type your name into that search box.
And it doesn’t stop there, after they’ve Googled you they’ll probably search for your MySpace page, Friendster Profile, Facebook Page, Personal Blog etc. Now this may be great for the number of hits you get on your pages, but you know that video you pjust posted of yourself on MySpace, you know the one, you drinking an entire bottle of Cuervo in one gulp, punching someone’s grandmother in the face and then throwing up before you black out, well, they just saw that too and all of that “community service” that you have listed under interests on your resume starts to look more like “court-ordered community service.” That comment you wrote on your friends blog about what a great idea it was to play hookie from work the other day cause you hate your boss and much prefer to take hits from a gravity bong then listen to the corporate mumbo-jumbo that spews from his mouth, yeah, they’ll see that too. So, when they call you and tell you they have decided to go in another direction don’t be surprised.
Remember, the internet is all public domain, you are posting for the world to see and now your greatest desire for everyone and their grandmother to read your blog has become your worst nightmare. Oh, and if you thought you could go back and sanitize it all, get rid of the blogs you wrote divulging company secrets, yeah, thanks to Google caching they are all still around, floating in the ether. Now go forth and cleanse your pages, pull the naughty videos from MySpace and the embarrassing pictures from FaceBook, you know the ones I mean, the ones that are going to cause that law firm you just interviewed with to reconsider hiring you, forcing you to look for a job at 1-800-LAWYER instead.
Okay, you are done reading now, I know your fingers are twitching, let me help you out- Just click here and see what you find out about yourself.
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MIT Dean Resigns

This entry was written by Orlando Jetblue

So, I am sitting in a meeting room at a conference in Orlando ‘listening’ to a talk about checking credentials and background and what Admissions people have the right to know and reject people based upon (might be time to change my name here on the blog).

Kind of interesting, may even deserve a post of it own.

What I just discovered, though, is that I can blog from my cell phone. Probably something I was better off not knowing.

Oh and don’t lie on your resume/CV or school applications. It will come back to bite you in the ass… Put more on that later. It is a bit tiring to type all of this with my thumbs.

One of my peeves with the Media (capital M!) is that even though the Internet allows instant disintermediation of information, the media clings more closely to the idea that it needs to tell you things that you could read and interpret for yourself.

Hence, you’ll see a bunch of articles coming out this week (and probably for a while) based on a recently issued U.S. Trust report on the behavior of high net worth individuals.

I thought, hell, I’ll just give you the report. Here it is: U.S. Trust survey of affluent Americans. Press release (with summary) after the break.

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So many things to comment on in this picture. Let’s not start with the obvious AK-47 or ask which generation the iPod is, or even ask which tribe she is from (Mursi tribe in Southern Ethiopia). Instead let us focus on the real questions here: Is she using a Apple or PC to load her iPod? Does she buy music from iTunes, upload from CDs or illegally download it?

(Photo from iLounge)

In 1998 President Clinton discreetly got a BJ in his office. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the best thinking on his part to do this while on the phone with some other world leaders, but hey, no one lost their life over it.

Months later, when this news leaked out, the Republicans (and folks at Fox News) flipped, they saw weakness and they struck. Not only did they run every one of their campaigns since 1998 on Family Values and their moral superiority (as they continue to do), but they called for Clinton to be impeached. And, as we all know, this was not just the public, this was everyone.

Clinton getting a little something-something under his desk was such a scandal that the Republicans in office thought they might actually have a chance to impeach the president. While they failed at doing so (as they should have), they were able to create a platform to run on for the next presidential election and a core set of beliefs that made them appear superior to enough people to keep them in office for a while.

The Republican Machine saw the President’s screw-ups (no pun intended) as a chance to build up their own platform; not just with subtle innuendo during their campaigning, but by making it a national issue for everyone to see.

Now, let’s fast forward to 2005. President Bush has just acknowledged that the WMD’s that we were positive were in Iraq, thus prompting us to go to war in 2003, well, they may not be there after all. Oh and those close ties that Iraq had with Osama may not exist either, and that Mission Accomplished banner, well, it may have been a White House PR faux pas, but who are they to take credit for their mistakes?

So, at this point in 2005, we are now aware as a country that we have been lied to not once, but at least a few times already about this war we are involved in. Okay, cool, time for the White House to make it up to us, right? Maybe call back some of our troops, tell France and Germany they were right in the first place and that this was an unjustified war, and basically ease off a little, right? Well, apparently not, instead it is time to increase troops in Iraq. And we see this tactic again and again. We fucked up, something is going wrong, let’s increase troops.

Fast forward to 2007. The Democrats have finally gotten power back in the House and the Senate. The people have decided they are tired of the B.S. we are being fed on a daily basis by the people in power and want to see a change. Instead, what do we get? Lies from the Attorney General about firing judges because they were a bit more Democrat then the Republicans liked. The President allowing “behind closed door” testimony to Rove and Miers in the same scandal, essentially so they would not tarnish their names too badly when they ran for re-election. As well as a number of other Presidential blunders, including threats to Congress if they did not back his plans for escalating the effort in Iraq.

Now I ask: Where are the calls for impeachment? Our current President is not only doing serious damage to our country and our relations with foreign nations, but also causing the deaths of thousands in Iraq (as of today at least 3320, while we wait on confirmation from the Department of Defense on another 12).

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Ever since I first read about it I have been a fan of the White House meeting between President Nixon and Elvis.
Here is the quick rundown:

On Dec. 21st, 1970 Elvis was on an American Airlines flight and felt it would be a good idea to write to President Nixon, telling him he wants to meet him, give him a gift and become an agent in the war on drugs (could I even make this up?).

Nixon and his people decide the meeting would be a good idea and accept.

At the meeting Elvis shows up in full Elvis regalia (sunglasses, large belt and what appears to be a velvet suit) gives Nixon a WWII Colt .45 revolver and some family photos. In return Nixon gives him a badge to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (so he can be an agnet at large… He didn’t want an official title) presumably so he can battle against The Drug Culture, Hippie Element, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc. who see Elvis as their friend and not part of “the Establishment.”

Well, there are tons of web sites devoted to this meeting but a great one is up by the Nation Archives called When Nixon Met Elvis.
Definitely worth checking out