Let's Try This Again.....

Soooo...... It's been awhile. Almost exactly a year, to be precise. And, to put it mildly, a lot has happened since then. Let go from a job, got a new job, laid off from that job, got a new job, laid off from THAT job, and now looking for yet another new job. In the middle of all of that, we've moved to a new place, planning on moving out of state (possibly out of hemisphere), I've had an emergency appendectomy and broken my foot. It seems like the one thing that DIDN'T happen was the end of the world. Of course, we'll have another chance at that in about 7 months.

So, since I've only got about 7 months, I think I'll do a bit of writing. I don't know about what. As usual, it'll probably be a hash of things that make me laugh, piss me off, and otherwise interest or entertain me. So, I suppose we'll start with this:

You may have heard about the protests in Chicago last weekend because of the NATO meetings. I'm not going to get into the politics of this, simply because most everyone reading this knows how I feel, and if you don't, then you probably aren't interested in finding out. One of the things that happened during the protests that went completely unnoticed amidst the transformation of downtown Chicago into the 38th Parallel was this:

Ok, listen. I have no doubt that these guys jumped in front of that van, so I have a hard time completely throwing the driver under the..... well, van, in this case. But c'mon..... Even the Chinese hit the brakes:

I think my bigger issue here is that this received basically no attention at the national level. A little bit after this happened, I jumped onto CNN and MSNBC to see if they were reporting anything about it. I didn't bother with Fox because..... well frankly, why bother? Their headline would probably read something like "Drug-Crazed Commie Pinko Tree-hugging Hippie Rioters Assault Police Van - Heroically outnumbered CPD officer gently nudges them out of the way in self-defense". But I digress. So I check the national websites that might actually report this and..... nothing. Not even a mention. I wasn't expecting a size 47 font headline in flashing red letters across the top, but not even a mention? Huh.

I guess it's just a bit disturbing when, regardless of the circumstances, a police vehicle can run over protesters and it doesn't even warrant being mentioned from any news sources that even attempt to be moderate. Hell, the only reason I heard about it is because I subscribe to a couple of Twitter feeds (yes, I have Twitter, no I don't tweet) that are the kinda-sorta official accounts for Anonymous. I follow them because they link out to some interesting (if incredibly biased) news articles, and because it's a bit surreal to occasionally see a message stating that they've just taken out the website for (in this case) the Chicago police department and the city government.

So, back to the point that I was trying to make. I don't know what the exact circumstances were here. I don't know if that van was responding to a crisis, or if he was just on his lunch break and was SERIOUSLY jonesing for some Quizno's. I also don't know exactly how fast he was going when he was pushing/running over/heroically nudging those protesters, but it looked relatively fast. Not VEYRON fast, of course, but a good solid running speed. And my question is: Why? What was so damned important that he couldn't stop?

So in closing, the lesson that you need to take away from this is as follows: If you're ever driving a van through a riot, don't bother slowing down. The only people that will notice are the ones that you're using as speedbumps.