We Should All Grow Beards in Tribute

In a shock to the early-morning infomercial world, TV pitchman Billy Mays died last night at his home in Tampa, Florida. While an autopsy has not yet been performed, Mays was on an aircraft that had a hard landing last night when its tire blew out, and a portion of the aircraft ceiling fell and struck Mays in the head.

Mays probably didn't think it was much of a big deal, but then, neither did Natasha Richardson.

I hope that this serves as one more warning that when you take a nasty blow on the head, you really ought to go see a doctor. Maybe Billy Mays will succeed where others have failed? The dude could sell OxyClean, OrangeGlo, and ESPN360.com. If he could do that, well, he could do anything.

Oh, and as an aside, I can't believe Billy Mays was outlived by Sham-Wow Vince.

Why Can't They Just Kill Themselves Instead?

Today some gun nut shot up the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., shooting a security guard in the back before being downed by two other guards. The shooter, James von Brunn, is in the hospital, and I can't help but hope enough that he lives long enough to go to jail for the rest of his life.

James von Brunn graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, according to his own autobiography (link available here, for the moment). He played football and was president of SAE.
EDIT: Biography has been shortened on AskArt, but NPR has a Cliffs Notes version on their website.

After college, he served in the Navy, got married, had a kid, got divorced because his wife couldn't put up with his wacko-isms anymore, was in marketing, got into a bar fight, served time in jail, got married again, got divorced again, moved to Maryland, and became a painter.

According to The New York Daily News, he's also a "birther" - someone who questions whether President Obama was actually born in the US (for the record, he was, or that birth announcement from the Honolulu Advertiser is part of one crazy consipracy theory). Of course, it's not surprising he'd be a conspiracy theorist; he writes crazy-ass books, too!

His latest loony tunes book is advertised on his website, HolyWesternEmpire.com, where he purports to believe that a few million Jewish folks are, apparently, going to rise up and kill the gentiles. A statistical improbability, to be sure.

His autobiography reads like a schizophrenic wrote it, which isn't that surprising given the content. He's a paranoid racist blaming Jews and African-Americans for his problems.

Why did he have to kill someone? Can't people like this just chew on some buckshot and save the rest of us the time? Honestly. If you kill yourself and meet God and nobody who's not a white Christian was there, huzzah, you were right. If you meet Ghandi and Jesus and Oskar Schindler and Golda Meir, well....don't say I didn't tell you so.

Stuff like this really bothers me. And it's not a proud day for my alma mater, that's for sure.

EDIT: Washington University has confirmed that Von Brunn was an alumnus with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism.

Why I Don't go Grocery Shopping in China

Tiananmen Square was 20 years ago today.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Sunset

Kirsten and I are sitting in Palm Beach International Airport (built 1988) right now waiting for our flight to Atlanta, which will eventually connect us to St. Louis. We've been in Palm Beach over the weekend for a good friend's wedding, and are about to head home.

I take that back. "About" is a very loose term, so I'll attempt to define it here: We are going to head home at 4:44 PM. It is currently not quite 3:00. Why at the airport so early, you ask? It might have something to do with our hotel's 10:00 AM checkout time.

That's right.

10:00 AM. Like, in the morning.

Which meant we had 6 hours to kill between checkout and flight departure. Palm Beach is many things, but great for people who aren't going into the ocean, it ain't.

At least the airport has free wireless, though, which is more than can be said for the airport in Atlanta (Hartsfield-Jackson, for those keeping tabs). There, internet access is $7.95 a day, which translates to, roughly, $240 per month. That's about what you might pay for unlimited access if you were, say, a University, or top-secret bioterror research facility.

But for wireless? Bitch, please. I might as well just buy a Kindle, or something a lot like it.

Back on less whiny ground, Karen's wedding was wonderful, and I think I'm going to like her husband Adam. At first, he confused me - at my own wedding, he spent much of the unscripted time checking his Blackberry. I think I understand, though, as I sit in an airport waiting area, here before the gate crew, checking my email because, quite frankly, I have no idea what else to do with myself.

Worse yet, my wife just signed off of Facebook and I can't FB message her. Now what do I do?