Last Year

Last year, not long after moving into our new home, I went to work the Oklahoma Ren Faire in Muskogee Oklahoma. It was quite an experience. Although the show wasn't aweful I still didn't have a great time. For one, I was alone. Rossana was overseeing various repairs at the homefront. I suppose if I had been alone for a month in New York or L.A. I might have been able to pass the time easily. But this was godforsaken Oklahoma.

I saw everything that needed to be seen in two days. After four days of sitting in a cheap Motel room I started to dift out of my own head, like the opening scene from Apocalypse Now. There were five good Chinese buffets in the city and there was a 24 hour Ice Cream parlor across the street from me. I had to get out or I would become Marlon Brando.

I talked my way into a 1 month trial membership at a local gym. I found the public library so I could surf the web and I eventually took a part-time job as a sign maker. The work kept me busy and helped the week days pass faster. I also got to shoot the shit with some great rennies. Thanks to Hoss, Virgil, his assistant and Randy I kept my sanity.

Here are some pics and commentary from the trip for you to enjoy.

Note to self...

So, if you're already feeling pretty crappy about your species because they tend to do awful things to each other in the name of science (see below) then maybe you shouldn't go and see Hotel Rwanda two days later.

My insides physically hurt leaving the theater. You may not remember the civil war in Rwanda between the tutsi and hutu's. Remember? Oh, you may have never heard about it in the first place. After all, we had other fish to fry back then. And there's still the tricky issue of whether or not actual genocide occurred. Is only a million dead really genocide? What about the 80 of women who were systematically raped?

This is a great film and I advise you to see it. Great performance by Don Cheadle. And it might make you pause for a moment the next time you see a little blurb on CNN about the latest fighting in Darfur. Every time says there is fighting in XXX, that means that a few thousand people were killed. Probably in some rather horrible way.

Evil

The word 'Evil' isn't used much in a professional sense. It is an inexact term. One mans evil is another mans pre-emptive war to stop Saddam from using WMD's... ahem. Psychologists & scientists don't like to use the term. Is someone evil if they hurt people as a result of suffering from szchitzophrenia?Certainly not. Is euthanasia evil? You can argue back and forth.

But make no mistake. There is evil in the world. True, concentrated evil. Well documented, and Government sanctioned. More specifically, there are evil people. People who's actions are so beyond the pale of human decency and compassion that no other word describes them. And even when these evil acts are stopped, those responsible continue to live their lives without punishment. Below are three stories. You can do some googling on your own, I could only take so much before I began loosing all my faith in our species again and had to stop.

The stories are about how a hospital in Austria killed approx 800 children in order to study their brains during WWII. One of the doctors who was right in the thick of it, is still alive today. He has never served a day of jail time. There is a documentary coming out called "Grey Matter" that deals with this story. I honestly don't think I could watch it. The stories below were awful enough:

http://www.cbc.ca/witness/graymatter/clinic.html

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/ber4-m03.shtml

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/171/6/619

I don't know about you, but I'm going to go crawl into bed and hope the nightmares don't keep me awake all night.