No Criminal Record? That’s a crime!

Curse my computer for eating my first attempt at this post. Here we go again.

I know you’re going to probably think I obsess about this, but I like to follow a story to its end, and well, here’s the end of this one.

Remember our enemy of development, friend of the earth and lover of spray-paint? The guy who painted supposedly satirical messages on affordable housing buildings and bridges throughout the city? Well, it finally came time for his day in court, and what a strange day it was. He didn’t exactly get found not guilty as he had hoped. But he got the next bes thing. After pleading guilty to everything, he got an absolute discharge and no criminal record!

Yup. You read that right. Justice Norman Douglas, who I always thought was a sensible judge from what I’ve read in the newspaper, decided that Matthew Soltys was “one of the good guys.” After hearing from several character witnesses that told him stories of how Soltys addressed the UN’s conference on climate change, won a scholarship from Environment Canada, runs a radio show about the environment, teaches guitar and helps out with lots of local causes, virtually steals from the rich and gives to the poor, I guess he got the warm fuzzies for him. He gave him no criminal record on the promise that he will, so to speak, never ever ever do that again, Your Honour!

Ok, first off, one of the charges against him, to which he pled guilty, was breaking a promise to police that he would never ever ever carry spray-paint again, Officer. So what makes this any different? What makes the judge think he’s really learned his lesson this time? He doesn’t respect authority and obviously isn’t true to his word. So why give him that leeway? Sure, this time it was court and involved lawyers and lots of other crap and last time it was the police, but I think the principle is the same.

Soltys wrote a little opinion piece that got published in the same paper as the news of his non-convictions. In it, he tried to explain why he was out with the spray-paint after he was told not to have it on him. He claimed that it was because he had an attack of conscience and decided he should cover up his original work. Um, get real. You expect me to believe that? If you had an attack of conscience, wouldn’t you just come to the police or the city or whoever owned the buildings that you put your “satire” on and offer to pay the cleanup bill? Would you really put more grafiti on the same place and make it harder for the rightful owners of the property to clean up? Does that make any sense? Of course it doesn’t.

The thing that bothers me most about the judge’s decision to just let Soltys off is that no matter how much of a good guy he’s been, it doesn’t unhappen a crime! It’s not like you can earn a free crime with every ten good deeds you do. I can see the sales pitches now. “help ten old ladies across the street and you can rob a candy store, no questions asked!” Wouldn’t that be screwed up? If you’ve been really good and you do something bad, a judge can decide to be lenient with you. Instead of locking you in jail for a few days, he can just make you pay a fine and do some hours of community service. But you still! did! the crime! There should be consequences of that, you shouldn’t just be able to walk away. He can’t even claim that he did this out of desperation because he had no other way of expressing himself. Um, hello! He had the ear of the UN, a radio show, and he writes for a website! There is no excusable reason why he would feel compelled to write on a wall that wasn’t his own because he had no other choice.

I think a perfect punishment would have been to make him pay for the costs of cleaning up his grafiti. Then, he should have made Soltys do a little community service. He’s “one of the good guys”, remember? I’m sure he wouldn’t mind anyway. A perfect job would be to get him to clean up other “works of satire” from around city buildings. Soltys should find out how hard paint is to remove so he knows why it pissed people off when he did it and why they didn’t share his sense of humour. That’s the only way he’s going to learn, it seems.

I know there are a lot more serious crimes that get laughable sentences, and in the grand scheme of things, he didn’t hurt or kill anybody. But it’s the principle of it. It’s the fact that there were no real consequences. The judge just wrote it off and told him not to worry about it. The most he’ll say about this little brush with the law is, “Phew. I really dodged one there.” The lesson he’ll learn isn’t, “I was wrong.” It’s “Be more careful next time and you won’t get caught.” It’s not “Maybe I should use my voice in productive ways,” It’s “Hmmm. I know I can’t spray-paint. What about damaging construction equipment? Does that count? Maybe I should feed a few more homeless people first.”

Order your Creepsake Today!

Eeewww! I don’t know what took me so long to talk about this, but better late than never I guess.

I keep seeing this ad on TV. Thankfully, the sound quality is better on TV. But the concept is the same. Basically, these sick freaks have made a coin to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the September 11 tragedy. What makes them sick freaks is each coin has silver recovered from ground 0. You even get a certificate with your coin stating that the silver is really from vaults beneath the crash zone.

Ug! I have no problem with commemorative symbols. That’s great, if you’re into that sort of thing. But why can’t we just have a symbol without having a piece of the action, literally? What kind of morbid collector would want a coin that has World Trade Centre death guts all over it? For Christ’s sake, leave them a lone already! Must we mine a tragedy for profits? Are people next going to want genuine ashes to pour over their gardens to use as fertilizer with special gifts from the dead for their plants? We’re getting sicker and sicker.

But then again, people like to wear and decorate their houses with crosses, so why should this surprise me?

Man People are Lazy

Attention dude who took out the audio version of Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts from the library:

When you returned it, did you not notice the stream of tape hanging out of cassette 2? The one that could not be wound back in because it was broken? Did you not remember your tape machine munching on it, because I’m sure it did. Did you not think that, maybe, when you returned it, you should have said something to the nice library lady? Accidents happen, she wouldn’t have eaten you. But now that I’ve brought it home and found your damage, I may want to.

What is with people and their absolute lack of respect for other people’s property? Their attitude seems to be, “It’s not mine, so who cares if I break it? I’ll just return it and let someone else deal with the mess.” I hope the next book they take out has pages ripped out of it. Then they’ll have a taste of their own medicine.

It’s Official, Human Beings Are Retarded

Honest to God, I actually read the words below just now on a real website while unsubscribing from a real newsletter.

“if you are unsure what your email address is that you are subscribed under, this is located in your ezine below the Unsubscribe Link.”

Let’s give these people a pass on the poor wording and read that sentence again, and let its meaning truly sink in.

“if you are unsure what your email address is that you are subscribed under, this is located in your ezine below the Unsubscribe Link.”

I hope that all of you realize what this means. The people who run this website felt that they had to put that statement there either because they are stupid, or more likely because somebody had trouble with this concept. This means that for there to be no mind-bending stupidity involved here, we are expected to believe that it is entirely possible for the following to take place innocently and completely by accident.

Somewhere out there in the world, the same world in which you and I live, there is a person who is wanting to leave a mailing list that he somehow signed up for that is being sent to an email address that he doesn’t remember having, and the only way to do that is to check that address, find the right email, and then click a link that says unsubscribe on it. Or if he starts out knowing what the address is, he would have to forget it completely between the time he clicks the link and when he is asked to enter it into the confirmation box. He then has to send an email to the webmaster presumably from another email address alerting him that he is having trouble unsubscribing from a newsletter at an address he can’t remember through a link in that very newsletter that he just finished clicking on. Or if it was option 2 and he forgot his email address while waiting for the page to load, he would have to forget how to read, making him unable to check which email address he is currently logged into, in which case he’s got bigger problems than some jokes he doesn’t want anymore. Yes, my head is spinning too.

I don’t believe in God, but it’s becoming more and more apparent to me as the years pass that we were definitely put here simply for the purpose of amusing someone or something. There is simply no other way to explain something like this.

That Ain’t Right

Right now, at 7:33 AM on Friday, January 5th, 2007, the temperature is 9 degrees Celsius. It is expected to rise all the way to 13. This is happening in Canada, not long after Christmas, in a part of Ontario generally thought of as a portion of what people have taken to calling the snowbelt. For whatever reason I felt that this needed to be mentioned, perhaps in the hopes that when we have all been incinerated, whatever comes along next will know what the hell happened.

It’s a Nice Day…in A Disturbing Sort of Way.

Someone said that the other day and I thought that was a perfect way to describe the weather. Check the date. It is January 5. Now check the weather forecast. It is supposed to go up to 13 C. Now check the geographic location. Yup, I’m still in Guelph. This is wrong!

As much as I’m loving the warm weather and not slogging through the snow, I can’t help but get the haunting sense that…we’re screwed. There are so many more natural disasters now, I saw a show that showed the ice in the northwest passage is melting, some foods are harder to grow because our seasons seem to be in fast forward. By the end of my life, what is going to be left of the world?

Wow, that was depressing. And then I wonder if I’m contributing to it. I feel guilty as I throw my unsorted garbage down the shoot because there’s no recycling system here. I know I walk and take the bus out of necessity, so that makes me feel a little better. But I wonder if, as things get more dire, I’ll find out that if only I, and the rest of the world, had done X and Y earlier, we’d be a little better off.

What a way to start the day. Try and enjoy the nice weather, if it doesn’t give you too much of the creeps.

What’s So Special About Dean Koontz?

Somebody told me that if I thought Stephen King was good, I should try and read Dean Koontz, and he’d be sooo much better. So I thought I’d give him a try.

I’ve read 3 of his books, at least one of them unabridged, and the whole experience left me unimpressed. Reading his stuff is like watching a cheap horror flick. And that’s never good. Books are supposed to be better than movies, and certainly better than cheap movies.

Here’s a sample of the sheer stupidity I’ve read. Some woman gets pregnant in the free love era, and takes lots of hallucinogens. Then she tries to abort her baby with all kinds of herbal and other non-medical methods. It doesn’t work. He’s born, and he becomes an evil demon child with super psychic powers, can control clumps of mud which he makes to looklike people with his mind and set people on fire with thoughts. Give me a break.

The best part of the whole book was when he narrated what a dog must have been thinking. That was kind of cute. But the rest was just dumb.

So what is so good about this author? Has anyone read anything cool by him? Maybe I just picked the wrong 3 books. But somehow I doubt it.

Maybe He Should Eat Some Fruitcake Instead of Being one.

Man, some people are just loopy. I heard about this guy who went on a hunger strike to protest the fact that raw milk cannot be sold. He gave up the fight after not eating for a month, only drinking raw milk and other fluids, losing 50 pounds, and being urged by supporters that he needed to be strong to continue the fight for raw milk. Translation? “Dude, stop that! What in hell are you doing? You’re killing yourself!”

Ok, it’s raw milk. There was a reason that pasteurization of milk got started. Ya know, all the goodies that end up in it because, um, it came from inside a cow! If you want to drink raw milk, go ahead. Knock yourself out, or more accurately, fill yourself with bacteria. But you can’t sell it, or at least you can’t sell it without making perfectly clear that this is raw milk. End of story.

But this made me think about something else. Why in christ do people go on hunger strikes anyway? What do they hope to accomplish, aside from killing themselves, or doing long-term damage? I know it’s supposed to make people feel guilty, making concessions so the person will just eat, damn it! But the whole thing makes no sense. The striker is only hurting himself! How threatening is, “Unless you change your ways, *I* will not eat?” Um, I can see a little more effectiveness in “If you don’t change your ways, you will not eat.” That has some consequences. But somebody inducing misery on themselves to try and get their way just doesn’t make sense.

Let’s look at prisoners. They’re in prison for something they did, or something someone thought they did. So really, the people keeping them there aren’t happy to see them. If one of them decides not to eat, woohoo! Less food for the guards to make! I hate to be a cold prick, but the guards only care about the prisoners’ health because they’re legislated to care. If somebody voluntarily decides to inflict harm on themselves, it’s not really going to make the guards feel real bad.

At least in a prison situation, the guards have to see the prisoners getting thinner and thinner, even though they know they’ve brought this on themselves. Plus, there’s the potential for public outcry, but I think that’s dwindling now. People might see these hunger strikers as doing this as a final desperate act to change their so-called plight. They might side with them and petition for concessions. But the operative word here is might. I did some research on why people have been doing this for so long, and the success rate is less than stellor. People die from hunger strikes, end up blind and with kidney damage, die from being force-fed by prison officials, and some just give up the strike after having no effect. Sometimes they get what they want, but it’s definitely not a guarantee, not even a 50 percent success rate.

But certainly, some random man on a farm going on a hunger strike because he can’t sell his unpasteurized moo juice isn’t going to elicit more than, “What a weirdo! Next story.” from the public. No one is going to look at him as a desperate man fighting for a morally just cause. Plus, government officials aren’t going to care because they aren’t going to even see him becoming more of an emaciated shell day by day. What is most likely going to happen is he’ll lose his supporters because they’ll see him getting weaker with no effect and realize that maybe he should try taking a different cow path. And that’s exactly what happened.

Man some nutty people live among us. Now that I think about it, maybe hunger strikes serve a purpose. Only stupid wackjobs would go and starve themselves for a cause. So it raises the chance of eliminating them from the gene pool. Maybe I’m evil for thinking that, but maybe it’s the truth.