Vigilantes kill the wrong person

Knoxville.  My old stomping grounds.  Seems some hicks near Knoxville found out they had a child-oriented sex-offender and decided to send him a message.  Unfortunately, the message they sent him involved his wife dying in a fire.

Everybody in this little mountain community knew that Timothy Carl Chandler had been arrested on child pornography charges. It was in the newspaper and all over the TV news.

Two of Chandler’s neighbors decided to do something about it, police say. They’re accused of trying to scare him off by setting fire to his tiny house tucked away in a hardscrabble Appalachian hollow.

Chandler, 53, escaped from the flames. But his wife was killed in what authorities are calling an example of vigilante justice.

Ahem – that is, allegedly dying in a fire, or something like that.  Wouldn’t want to poison the jury pool.

[tags]Stupid, Vigilante justice fail, Drinkin FTL![/tags]

More on the stupid – don’t game so damn much

It’s a little embarrassing how much of a work-out the stupid category is getting here on the Blahg, yet I’m realizing I should have instituted it earlier. Hell, I might need to start StupidBlahg just to track all the stupid in the world these days.

That said, here’s a new story of stupid, that, sadly, is something of a repeat of stupid like we’ve seen before. This time we have news of a man in China who died after a 3-day gaming marathon in an internet café.

A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said on Monday as China seeks to wean Internet addicts offline.

The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted by the Beijing News as saying.

And I know it’s unkind and maybe a bit politically incorrect to call this man stupid, but I don’t know how else to call it. I love gaming, but even I know to get my fat ass away from the computer every once in a while and do something else. (via Wired’s Game|Life blog)

[tags]Man dies after gaming marathon, Stupid, Gaming addiction?[/tags]