no words

I have no idea why this hasn't made the national news. I know its on AP and that some national papers like the Washington post have run the story, but for the life of me I cant comprehend why a story of 16 yr old boy being brutally beaten, sodamized by having a pipe kicked into him, carved with a knife, burned with cigarettes, and then doused with bleach simply for trying to kiss a 12 yr old girl and being Mexican (as the two skinheads beat him they shouted racial slurs at him) doesn't make the front page of CNN or the New York Times, but stories about Brooke Shields commenting on Tom Cruise's baby and Paris Hilton breaking up with her boyfriend get top billing! I couldn't even find the story on either CNN or the NYTimes. What scares me is that awful horrible things like this happen all over the US all the time, to the point that its not newsworthy when it occurs. If I didn't live in Houston, and didn't obsessively watch the local news I wouldn't have heard about it.

He lay in the backyard unconscious for hours (at first I heard 12 then 6) without anyone coming to his aid. Why isn't this national news?

You want to know what makes me impossibly sick about this whole thing? This case isn't being charged as a hate crime because prosecutors say it wont affect their sentence. If this isn't a hate crime what is? At the very least this is Texas and both assailants will be charged as adults (they're 18 and 17), which means that since both have criminal records they aren't going to be given probation or community service or whatever bullshit is handed out in other states for minors.

Yea. I don't know what else to say about it.

Now some much lighter links as an attempt to balance the impossible horrible sadness of this post:

* The absolute cutest shirt ever!

* So this is impossibly funny a group of ultra-orthodox hackers are replacing the porn on some Israeli porn sites with a picture of a Rabbi Lubavitch and following message: "the holy kabbalah warns that the sin of spilling sperm in vain is the cause for most diseases and misfortune!" via nerve (of course where else can you find such random hilarity?).

* So when I was flying back to Texas they stuck me into an air machine thing, remember? Well apparently I'm not the only one who's been stuck in this thing because they scream terrorist.

* Yet another funny clip from the Daily Show, this one is a bit about Bush and a warning to nuns.

* Stephen Colbert is on a role this week with his gig of hosting the white house press corp thingie. Here's a clip of excerpts of that and over here is a clip of him interviewing Phil Gingrey, a Republican congressman from Georgia.

* The entire time I was reading "Memento Moris: When gifts come back to haunt you" by David Sedaris in the New Yorker I was thinking that I hope one day to write this well. It was so impossibly funny that I imed it halfway through finishing it to a bunch of people, something I never do because I just had to share it right away. Now go read it and enjoy. via kottle.

* A disturbing video of Mexican police shooting at striking miners. via boingboing.

* A nice round up of a variety of opinion about yesterday's protest/boycott from global voices which posts roundup of blogs from around the globe. A bunch of countries are listed, you should check it out.

* As you know when I first heard about Kaavya Viswanathan I was relieved and a wee bit smug since well I'm a bad person. Now however as new similarities between her book and yet another book are being discovered this whole situation has just become sad. Partially because if its true that there was even more plagiarism (I heard an estimate of 49 similar passages) occurred, then that in itself is just sad that she doubted her own ability as a writer to the point where she felt the need to steal from other writers. Part of me though (the tiny little part of me that is you know not evil) wants to defend this girl, because maybe she really didn't maliciously use other writer's work and pass it off as her own, maybe there are just no original ideas left. How many books have been published? How many have similar themes, ideas, situations, characters? Its overwhelming to think about as someone who sits around and writes stories. So overwhelming in fact that at times it makes me want to not write anything ever. And yet some how I still do.