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Molentik posted:
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Sep 12, 2014 16:50
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I thought it would be fun to highlight some creepy/disturbing stories from previous generations.  Judge Crater, whose mysterious disappearance in 1930 made it into popular myth. "Though no longer in wide use, the phrase "to pull a Crater" means to disappear. For many years following Crater's disappearance, "Judge Crater, call your office" was a standard gag of nightclub comedians. To promote the 1933 film Bureau of Missing Persons, Warner Bros. advertised they would pay $10,000 ... to Crater if he claimed it in person at the box office." He was last seen leaving a nightclub, then ... nothing. It was very likely a mob hit. He'd spent two hours destroying all the documents in his office. Then he withdrew $5150 in cash (then a lot of money). This strongly implies that he was planning to run somewhere at the time. He hung out with a dubious crowd. His coat was later found in the home of a woman who'd offered to testify about Tammany graft; she was murdered five days after making the offer. Benjamin Bathurst, a Napoleonic-era British diplomat who got into a carriage and then ... vanished. Much play of this was later made by mystery-hunter Charles Fort; the elaborated version was that Bathurst walked around a horse and then vanished. He was murdered. His expensive fur coat was found hidden in an outhouse; it had been taken by a servant and given to her son. His pantaloons were found three miles away. In 1852, a skeleton with a skull injury was found "three hundred paces away", concealed under stable previously owned by a serving man at the inn. The servants' enthusiasm for pillaging his clothes suggests very strongly that they knew he wasn't coming back. Ambrose Bierce, an American writer who travelled into Mexico and then ... vanished. His last letter, written from Chihuahua in December 1913, closed "After closing this letter by saying, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination." Bierce was travelling with Pancho Villa's army during Mexican Revolution of 1910. Any disappearance under these circumstances doesn't really qualify as unexplained, does it?
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Sep 13, 2014 19:19
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Actually, the animated "How It's Made" was made in collaboration with Macaulay; at least, I owned a similar computer game that was. I think it even had the mammoths. Obligatory scary: Methods of execution are depressing. Go read up on  breaking on the wheel, which was done well into the 1700s. The ideal was to break all the major bones and the spine without killing the victim immediately; one guy lived for three days. 
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Sep 13, 2014 21:28
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Astrofig posted:http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/50ufny.html Anjelica Castillo, the child in the cooler, was identified in 2013. Her father had stolen her and a sister from her mother, Margarita Castillo, and had then dumped the children with his niece, who covered up her brother's murder of the child. Anjelica's mother was afraid of calling the cops. The other sister grew up and is now married.
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Sep 23, 2014 18:55
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Gloomiebat posted:A viewing or anything happening before the funeral isn't something I've ever heard of here either, but again this sort of thing seems to differ greatly between UK and US. I guess you would visit the relatives of the person who died to pass on condolences prior if you wanted but you'd never visit the body. You'd probably enjoy the 50-year-old but still relevant The American Way of Death, by Jessica Mitford. Back to the U.S., most funeral notices I've seen in the newspapers either give times for the "viewing" or explicitly state "there will be no public viewing". I hate the things, because the corpse rarely looks like the person. My father-in-law just died, and I stayed behind while the rest of the family went to see the body one last time; there was no public viewing, just a last farewell for the family.
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Oct 14, 2014 17:06
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MrGreenShirt posted:Kinda like how the flavors of spearmint and caraway are the same molecules, only mirror-images of one another. That is a very, VERY cool fact. I had no idea.
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Nov 2, 2014 22:10
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Shore_shark_attacks_of_1916 The attacks that inspired the novel Jaws, that's what. edit: Because "don't read the comments" long predates the Internet: quote:In a letter to The New York Times, Barrett P. Smith of Sound Beach, New York wrote:
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Nov 3, 2014 07:06
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outlier posted:Some of the family indignantly insist she never drank or used drugs, although repeated tests show she "had a blood-alcohol content (BAC) of 0.19, with approximately six grams of alcohol in her stomach that had not yet been absorbed into her blood ... high levels of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, in her system and had smoked marijuana as recently as 15 minutes prior to the collision". However: Edit: Part of the Wiki article you didn't quote: Wikipedia posted:According to reports issued after the accident, a broken bottle of vodka was found inside the wreckage of her minivan.
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Nov 29, 2014 19:56
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Wedemeyer posted:Maybe this is rudely romanticizing, but I always thought the taman shud case was a simple suicide.
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Dec 1, 2014 23:15
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[original unsuitable for thread] I give you Brugada Syndrome, which causes apparently healthy young men to develop heart arrhythmias and drop dead. Most victims are of Hmong descent. The syndrome was originally called Sudden unexpected death syndrome; it was renamed after the Brugada brothers who figured out what was going on. The Wiki page for sudden unexpected death needs editing, because it makes it doesn't clarify the difference between whatever is going on in the Philippines and the sudden unexpected death whose cause has been identified. Arsenic Lupin has a new favorite as of 08:32 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 03:37
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The Sulfanilamide Disaster, or Why the 1938 Food and Drug Act was Passed. Back in the Wild West Days to which the libertarians would like to return us, you could slap any drat thing you liked in a bottle and call it medicine. In 1906, in response to Sinclair Lewis's The Jungle the U.S. passed the Pure Food and Drug act of 1906. For drugs, the act specified that (A) a medication label couldn't "be false or misleading in any particular" and (B) if you included any of 11 "dangerous ingredients", including heroin, morphine, cocaine, and alcohol, you had to give the quantity. You didn't have to list anything other than the 11 ingredients, but if you did list them, you had to give the dosage accurately. It became clear pretty quickly that the 1906 Act wasn't good enough, but people argued about what would be better for years. Then, in 1937, came the Elixir Sulfanilamide incident. Sulfanilamide was one of the early antibiotics, the namesake of the "sulfa drugs". It works quite well, but it isn't very soluble, so it was sold in tablet or powder form. A chemist named Harold Cole Watkins discovered that you could dissolve sulfanilamide in diethylene glycol. His employer, S.E. Massengill Co, made up the solution, added raspberry flavoring, saccharin, and caramel, tested it for " flavor, appearance, and fragrance", and sent it out. You may notice a missing test there. Massengill didn't test for either safety or effectiveness. Under the 1906 Act, they didn't have to. Harold Cole Watkins didn't even bother to check the medical literature, which would have told him that diethylene glycol could cause renal failure and death. Elixir Sulfanilamide was sent out to pharmacies and sold, and people -- children in particular -- started dying in great pain. Through heroic acts of detection and contact tracing, the FDA managed to retrieve or account for 228 gallons and 2 pints of elixir from the 240 gallons that had been produced. If you've got the time, click through the individual states in Dr. Barbara Martin's round-up of the lengths the FDA went to in order to retrieve remaining elixir from pharmacies and the individual patients, and to count the dead. All told, at least 96 people died from ingesting Elixir Sulfanilamide, with more deaths probable but not proven. Then it came time to prosecute Massengill for killing all those people. It turned out they couldn't be. Elixir Sulfanilamide didn't contain, or claim to contain, any of the 11 dangerous drugs. It didn't list the diethylene glycon on the label, but there was nothing illegal about that. Massengill didn't have to test diethylene glycol for toxicity. There was only one thing Massengill was on the hook for: "Elixir Sulfanilamide" didn't contain alcohol, and legally if you called a medicine an elixir there had to be alcohol in it. If it hadn't been for that irrelevant (as far as toxicity went) error, the FDA wouldn't have had the legal authority to recall the drug at all. The Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster hastened the passage of the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which said that you had to safety-test products intended for human consumption. There is a Wiki page, but it isn't nearly as good as the FDA page. I highly recommend Dr. Martin's book, Elixir; it's a page-turner.
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Dec 18, 2014 22:56
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Rabbit Hill posted:I've seen the body of St. Clare of Assisi, and either her remains themselves look like she's been turned to wax, or someone has put a wax mask over the face, because that's what she looked like. A friend of mine (who was with me in Assisi when we saw St. Clare) was in France this summer and saw the body of St. Catherine Laboure, and she said that, unlike St. Clare, the body looked like a living person who was asleep. IIRC an incorrupt corpse is no longer required (or counted) as a precondition to sainthood. This link is a good place to start: http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/really-whats-incorrupt-corpses e: I forgot to mention that most saints on display have wax masks over their faces and hands: hence the doll-like appearance.
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Jan 9, 2015 23:21
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The thing I find particularly disturbing about Rosalia Lombardo is that her corpse has persisted long past the people who were so griefstricken they wanted her preserved. Most people who are deliberately mummified have it done for cultural/religious reasons: beliefs about the afterlife, human sacrifice, political significance (Stalin, Mao, Eva Peron). In that case, there are reasons for the embalming that outlast the people personally affected by the death. Rosalia, by contrast, was preserved because of her parents' grief. Now they (and everybody who knew her) are dead, and the only reason for her corpse to persist is tourism. She's not even being used as a "Remember that as thou art, I was" memento mori; by comparison with the other corpses in catacombs, she looks great (ish).
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Jan 10, 2015 22:15
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This one disturbs me because I remember it (I was out in the yard playing and saw the smoke); I hope it's interesting to y'all. The 1968 Richmond, Indiana explosion. Marting Arms was a sporting-goods store in downtown Richmond. Unfortunately, they were storing way more gunpowder than they were supposed to be. Even more unfortunately, there was a gas leak. Most unfortunately, the whole thing happened midway through a sunny Saturday afternoon in downtown Richmond, the county seat of a largely rural area. If you were out running errands in those pre-mall days, you would have been downtown*. There were two explosions, gas first, gunpowder second. As with many disasters, the explosion was bad, but the fires afterward did a lot more damage. 41 people died, including 7 children; more than 150 were injured; and 15 buildings were destroyed, plus 5 that had to be demolished due to damage. Half a block away was the State Theater, which was showing a matinee of "Stay Away Joe", an Elvis movie, and many of the children's deaths happened there or nearby. If you imagine that nobody commented on the irony of this title, you would be wrong. So, why disturbing? Because local habits that, in retrospect, look extremely stupid -- see the 1937 New London school explosion caused by siphoning gas from a oil company waste line -- were taken for granted at the time. There had been gas leaks reported all over town, but Richmond Gas Company, a privately-owned company, didn't take them terribly seriously. The day after the explosion, the gas company zoomed in and removed the gas line leading up to the store; they wound up losing a lawsuit anyway. In response, Congress passed the first Natural Pipeline Safety Act. The Cocoanut Grove fire gave us stricter laws on egress from public structures; the Triangle Fire gave us stricter laws on fire safety in the workplace; the Richmond explosion gave us regulation of pipeline safety. You're welcome. * One of the survivors remembered "Back then, downtown Richmond was the center of Wayne County," Bales recalls. "Everything you bought was downtown." Ironically, the renovations in response the explosion converted Main Street downtown into a closed pedestrian promenade. This accelerated the decay of the town core, because it became harder to get to the remaining stores. Of all places, the Rachel Maddow show has an excellent summary putting the explosion in context of the times.
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Jul 13, 2015 20:27
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I was very fond of the Swayne, Robinson building with its immense sign. It was still in use when I was growing up, along with Purina, Alcoa, a plastics company I can't remember, and a Wonder Bread bakery. It was always exciting finding out which way the wind was blowing by what you smelled.
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Jul 16, 2015 01:05
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In 1836, three Scots boys were goofing around. They found a cave full of tiny coffins containing dolls. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/edinburghs-mysterious-miniature-coffins-22371426/?no-ist Charles Fort posted:That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits’ burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur’s Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they pulled out. Since 1836 people have been wondering what the heck was going on. One of the most enticing theories is that the original seventeen coffins (many were destroyed at the time or have vanished since) correspond to the seventeen victims of Burke and Hare, none of whom got proper burial on account of being dissected.
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Oct 26, 2015 16:04
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EvilGenius posted:Unfortunately I think every man knows that guy who likes to share sick videos and pictures off the internet. I knew a guy at college who was always trying to show us stuff off rotton.com (not sure if it even still exists, and I'm not going to bother to find out). For years I confused somethingawful.com with rotten.com.
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Dec 20, 2015 23:00
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The St. Francis Dam collapse In the early 1920s, Los Angeles was in desperate need of water. The population was increasing fast, and people who didn't like the Owens Valley water grab (California Water Wars; see also Chinatown) kept blowing up the Los Angeles Aqueduct. William Mulholland, Manager and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, proposed a dam in San Francisquito Canyon. The previous dam built under his department was such a success that it had been renamed the Mulholland Dam. The new dam was under construction from 1924-1926. However, there were a few flaws with the design and build.
A government investigation was sent in on March 21, and took five days before issuing their report. Not surprisingly, the report was based on incomplete investigation and inadequate information. The report blamed the whole problem on the unstable foundations of the ground under the dam. William Mulholland took full responsibility and retired. There's a fascinating coda. A lot more is known about both geology and dam building than was known in 1925. An excellent set of slides by J. David Rogers argues convincingly that what set off the dam collapse was a combination of two things. First, the dam was built on an ancient (and thus unrecognizable in 1925) landslide, which let loose before the dam itself broke. (Rogers argues that the pre-collapse power surge must have been due to the landslide, since the power poles affected were well above the highest level of the flood waters.) Second, the dam was built with inadequate drainage underneath the dam foot. For complicated reasons laid out in the slide set, the ground underneath any dam tends to fill with water, and if this is not drained away, the dam tends to float ("hydraulic uplift"). Dams are not built to resist upward pressure, and furthermore the high-pressure water underneath the dam easily scours away underlying rock or, in this case, unstable ground. According to Wikipedia, Rogers's conclusions on the geology are sound, but a later paper argues that the structure itself still didn't meet 1925 standards for dam building. So. Build a dam in the wrong place, copy the design unchanged from another site (the design was a copy of the Mulholland Dam, with nearly no alteration), build it much higher than the design without modifying the design to account for that, fill it past the as-built design limits, and 600 people die. In 1935, in response to popular pressure, the original Mulholland Dam was inspected and found to be severely underdesigned. As a result, the dam was reinforced, and the Hollywood Reservoir behind the dam was lowered substantially, to the levels seen today. Conclusion: Civil engineering is haaard. In 1929, California created the state Board of Registration for Civil Engineers (now the Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists), so that seat-of-the-pants construction was no longer considered acceptable. Mulholland, a brilliant man -- his Los Angeles Aqueduct still stands and is still essential to LA's water system -- was self-educated; I have no idea whether the new Board would have registered him absent the dam collapse. His record up until the dam collapse was stellar.
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Dec 28, 2015 18:30
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TheFallenEvincar posted:Yeah but I keep making the mistake of getting high and listening to Sword and Scale episodes, it's a trip Because postpartum psychosis is a genuine thing, and is treatable.
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Jan 11, 2016 20:11
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I just read Dave Cullen's excellent book on Columbine. If you're an American, you've probably heard about the Columbine high school massacre: in 1990, a sociopath and a deeply depressed student teamed up to kill 13 people and injure 21 more. They shot up the school and then committed suicide. What I didn't realize until I read the book was that the killers weren't aiming for a mass shooting. They wanted an explosion bigger than the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 and injured 380. The killers carried with them 99 explosives (this counts gunpowder shoved into empty CO2 cartridges, so they weren't all major), the biggest of which were two 20-pound propane bombs. They set up the bombs in the school cafeteria, timed to explode at a time they had calculated would have the maximum number of students present. Then they left the school and went back to their cars to set up an ambush to kill any fleeing survivors, as well as first responders. Had the bombs actually worked, they'd have collapsed the ceiling of the cafeteria, killing or injuring the 488 students present. Instead, the killers had to return to the school and shoot people inside. Fortunately for the students of Columbine, the killers had based their bombs on the Anarchist's Cookbook, and hadn't done enough testing. As a result, not only did the bombs not go off when their timers hit zero, they didn't go off when the killers shot them. Columbine was quite horrible enough, but it was planned to be much worse.
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Feb 17, 2016 20:39
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china bot posted:Ie: to clarify, Isaac's Storm is about the 1900 Galveston Hurricane.
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Feb 17, 2016 22:11
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Harold Stassen posted:Frederic Bourdain- assumes the identity of a long-missing child. The family is only too eager to "adopt" him- why? They seemed to know he wasn't who he said he was- why did they go along with it? What happened to the kid he replaced? Wikipedia posted:Roger Tichborne, heir to [a baronetcy and the money attached to it], was presumed to have died in a shipwreck in 1854. His mother clung to a belief that he might have survived, and after hearing rumours that he had made his way to Australia, she advertised extensively in Australian newspapers, offering a reward for information. In 1866, a butcher known as Thomas Castro from Wagga Wagga came forward claiming to be Roger Tichborne. Although his manners and bearing were unrefined, he gathered support and travelled to England. He was instantly accepted by Lady Tichborne as her son, although other family members were dismissive and sought to expose him as an impostor. After she died, he sued for the title, resulting in a civil trial followed by a criminal trial. Neither worked out well for him. Fascinating case.
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Feb 20, 2016 22:22
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Real-life unnerving: Somebody has now done a plug-in widget that tracks the latest American mass shooting. I saw it embedded in a Kansas City newspaper. Link to page; note </> icon at top right to get widget. A loving plug-in widget, because you know you'll need it again.
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Feb 26, 2016 05:20
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A grand jury report has just been released on priest (and monsignor!) child sexual abuse in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnston, Pennsylvania. A lot of the details are sadly now routine-- priests offending, upper management being most concerned about the church's reputation and shuffling abusing priests around, pressure on the victims to say nothing, cash payoffs. Altoona-Johnston had a couple of special new twists. The district is very, very solidly Catholic, which means that most police officers, politicians, prosecuting attorneys, and so on would also be Catholic. At least once, when a group of parents banded together and talked to the District Attorney, the district attorney reported back to the diocese, and agreed with the bishop to drop the case if the monsignor were moved out of town. The police also conspired to cover matters up. In one case, a priest left the state just ahead of a case being filed. The police claimed that they didn't know where he was and anyway the "400-day rule" kept them from pursuing the matter. The grand jury pointed out that there was, legally, no such rule, and that if the case had been filed they could have requested a federal warrant for his arrest. Here's the capper, though: in at least one town the Bishop appointed the fire chief and police chief. Literally. The mayor sent the Bishop a list of candidates, the Bishop interviewed them, and then the Bishop sent the Mayor a recommendation. Imagine living in a place where, if you wanted to report a crime committed by the church, the police chief owed his job to the church. The other special twist is that when victims directly spoke to bishops, at least one of them threatened the victim with excommunication. Finally, the Diocese made a payout chart for dealing with victims. Victims fondled over their clothes were to be paid $10,000 to $25,000; fondled under their clothes or subjected to masturbation, $15,000 to $40,000; subjected to forced oral sex, $25,000 to $75,000; subjected to forced sodomy or intercourse, $50,000 to $175,000. No mention, of course, was made of prosecution. The grand jury has called for the statute of limitations on child abuse to be lifted, so that the few surviving perpetrators can be prosecuted. Post-Gazette summary of grand jury report Contents of an attorney's letter sent in 2002 to three different district attorneys with specific charges
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Mar 9, 2016 23:27
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Maricopa County. They'll probably award him a free box of Omaha Steaks in acknowledgement of his achievement.
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Apr 2, 2016 02:02
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theflyingorc posted:I absolutely cannot believe Caro isn't dead Only the good die young.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:15
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canis minor posted:On the topic of suicides - The Bridge is a great documentary about Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I think that documentary was one of the reasons that, after complaining for years about "but the historic structure!" and "but our views!" the people in charge of the Golden Gate are finally installing anti-suicide stuff.
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Apr 14, 2016 17:56
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Basebf555 posted:Of course by "anti-suicide stuff", I'm sure you just mean a simple barrier that would force people to put effort into climbing over it. Even better. A 20-foot-wide steel net under the bridge on both sides. quote:A similar net was placed more than a decade ago on the Munster Terrace cathedral in Bern, Switzerland, and since then no suicide attempts have been reported.
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Apr 15, 2016 20:52
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That was glorious writing, Droogie. If there's still an independent newspaper near you, you might try pitching this as a story or essay, or sending it to a Southwestern magazine, literary or otherwise.
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Apr 29, 2016 16:41
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pookel posted:It helps not to treat autism as a horrifying disease. To stay on-topic, here's an article about autistic and disabled kids murdered by their caregivers: This is one of the many reasons to boycott Autism Speaks, because they not only have been sympathetic to child-murderers but have printed parental stories that include "sometimes I think she would be better off dead." The only time people with actual autism were on the board, they were shut out. No, murdering your severely disabled child is not the forgivable solution. That narrative is bad.
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May 3, 2016 17:36
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joshtothemaxx posted:My gf and I are historians. She writes about riots/uprisings with racial elements. I often write about Southern lynchings and honor killings. Our work talk is really truly awful and depressing. "Honor killings" as in "murdered his wife and her lover", or other kinds of honor as well? ranbo das posted:The weird thing about the American past is that there are people who are considered "white" today who 120 years ago were very much minorities and treated very, very poorly. Like poo poo, the largest mass lynching in US history wasn't white people going after black people, it was a mob of thousands breaking into a jail and murdering 11 Italians who were standing trial for a murder, some of who had already been acquitted. You had national newspapers running headlines like "Chief Hennessy Avenged...Italian Murderers Shot Down" and "New Orleans Arose to Meet the Curse". quote:Numerous witness accounts described airplanes carrying white assailants, who fired rifles and dropped firebombs on buildings, homes, and fleeing families. The planes, six biplane two-seater trainers left over from World War I, were dispatched from the nearby Curtiss-Southwest Field outside Tulsa. Law enforcement officials later stated that the planes were to provide reconnaissance and protect against a "Negro uprising". Eyewitness accounts and testimony from the survivors maintained that on the morning of June 1, the planes dropped incendiary bombs and fired rifles at black residents on the ground. I had forgotten that in the summer of '68 (I was nine) there were several of what were then called "race riots". Now we just call them "riots", even when racially motivated.
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May 17, 2016 17:53
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MissEchelon posted:The Milgram experiments were also done in La Trobe, Victoria (Australia). Here's an interview that talks with some of the people who were involved: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/beyond-the-shock-machine/4044812 tl;dr: Psychology researchers have no business scarring their subjects for life.
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May 19, 2016 18:33
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Thwomp posted:The fever breaks after another week but you're left without the use of your legs. You are the 1% of the 1% of people unlucky enough for a virus, that only inhabits human beings, to make its way, by accident, into your nervous system and destroys most of your motor neurons. (you are also Franklin Roosevelt in this scenario) That is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that the polio hits high, cutting off the nerves that supply your lungs. and you slowly suffocate. Then comes the invention of the iron lung, which saves people with lung paralysis, but at the cost of their lying on their backs in a tin can until they either improve or die. There are still a very few (estimates range from 7 to 20) iron lung survivors around who, for whatever reason, can't or won't transition to more modern breath-support equipment. No company remaining services iron lung machines, so the survivors rely on parts cannibalized from other iron lungs. (Presumably not in use.)
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May 27, 2016 23:34
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Shillary posted:First Amendment absolutists always baffle me, every rule has some exception or else society wouldn't work. Yes. And the Supreme Court jurisprudence is that the exception is imminent danger, not (A) being disgusting or (B) doing something that will make people angry. I think this is a reasonable line. Wearing a "gently caress [your favorite group]" shirt is not saying "And beat me up if you disagree". We've tried that, and oddly enough the people beaten were often anti-war protestors, people being arrested by police, and so on. See also the Nazis marching through Skokie. Trying to provoke other people into being angry is not actually an excuse for assault.
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Jun 1, 2016 17:25
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Nckdictator posted:Back in 1886 NYPD detective Thomas Byrnes published Professional Criminals of America , an absolutely fascinating look into crime at the time.
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Jun 3, 2016 03:17
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The offender's dad is also disappointed by the sentence.quote:Brock always enjoyed certain types of food and is a good cook himself. I was always excited to get him a big ribeye steak to grill or to get his favorite snack for him. ... Now he barely consumes any food and eats only to exist. These verdicts have broken and shattered our family in so many ways. His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life. The fact that he now has to register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life forever alters where he can live, visit, work, and how he will be able to interact with people and organizations.  But will nobody think of the rapists? He only did it for 20 minutes.
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Jun 6, 2016 22:56
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When you think about it, aren't we all the real rapists?
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Jun 6, 2016 23:22
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Madkal posted:You joke but I think what get's people upset is the idea that "wait, I had sex where both I and the other person was drunk and that wasn't rape, therefore this isn't rape either". You are absolutely right. Add this to the "character" narrative, in which a person who has a "good character" (is nice to his/her friends and in public) can therefore not have done something heinous. The idea that a person can be kind to one person and cruel to another is apparently unthinkable. A lot of people can manage to behave appropriately in public situations, and to friends and superiors, and then do awful things when they're sure nobody important will find out about it. Domestic abuse, for instance.
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Jun 7, 2016 00:02
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You are one hell of a writer, Droogie. Start shopping that stuff around. Start with the Southwest Review, maybe, when they reopen the reading period in September.
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Jun 7, 2016 22:00
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Cythereal posted:They are. It's Florida. Any standing body of water that's not a swimming pool is liable to have gators in it, and the resort had a bunch of "NO SWIMMING. DO NOT FEED OR DISTURB THE ALLIGATORS" signs. A two-year-old splashing around in a retention pond exactly fits the profile of ideal prey for a gator.
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Jun 17, 2016 15:04
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