Two of the nastiest crimes of the year occurred during the past week and both have Riviera Beach connections. First, on Saturday, Miss Florida Basketball runner-up Christi Nardozzi was savagely beaten after a game against a Riviera Beach team in Port St. Lucie. Post reporter Jamey Eisenberg tells the story: Broken was her nose, facial bones, and eye orbit. In other words, the Royal Palm Beach High junior's face was crushed and she may suffer permanent damage. They're trying to sort out who did the beating and have apparently filed charges against three juveniles. Find them. Then charge them as adults and put them away for 20 years.
Early Tuesday morning, gas station attendant Tanya Hughey was doused with gasoline, set on fire, and locked in a Riviera Beach Mobil while she burned. The assailant, according to police, was her ex-boyfriend Lester Parsons. She suffered burns over 90 percent of her body. It was so bad the Sun-Sentinel, on its web site, described Hughey as being in "extremely critical" condition. Don't do that. We know it's code for "gonna die," but it's still redundant and renders regular old critical condition basically meaningless.
Plagiarize Thyself
City Link associate editor and music columnist Dan Sweeney has started a blog called the Doomed Generation, a title redolent of his literary hero, Hunter S. Thompson. I'm going to add it to the list at right. Sweeney, a New Times alum, gets his brain crackling and unleashes righteous lefty tirades about the greed and violence of the killers and unrepentant criminals who make up the American government these days. And it has the advantage of all being pretty much true, too.
I heard about the blog Monday and managed to find it Tuesday, after first coming across a journal he'd been doing on DemocraticUnderground.com in which he calls himself SteppingRazor. I read his stuff there and then found the link to DG. In the first real post, as Dan called it, he went off on Tom DeLay. To wit:
Tom DeLay was a ruthless bastard with a heart so full of hate that he was occasionally known, in the middle of House debates, to vomit forth a black, tarry substance that was later identified by scientists as "pure evil."
It sounded hauntingly familiar. I went to the DemocraticUnderground site that I'd just read for the first time and looked at Sweeney's post on the death of Casper Weinberger last week. Weinberger, he wrote, was
an utterly amoral apparatchik with a belly so full of hate that he occasionally had to excuse himself at cabinet-level mettings in order to go to the bathroom and puke up a viscous, oily substance that scientists later identified as "pure evil."
My God, both DeLay and Weinberger had the same ghastly condition. No wonder Cap died. How much longer does that awful bastard DeLay have left? I have to say, the phrase "vomit forth" is an improvement on the pedestrian "puke up," though.
I keed. Just helping good Dan get in fighting shape.
The Pulp Violates Tradition Eleven
I'm going to finish the never-ending post on author Jim Greenhill and the Lords of Chaos this afternoon, but first I have a little unfinished business. In Greenhill's first comment, he wrote that, basically, it wasn't proper for me to mention that he was in AA, even though he's very open about being an alcoholic/addict/what-have-you. Here's what he wrote about it:
"I've never said anything in public about being in AA. I have said (repeatedly) that I'm an alcoholic/addict. My understanding is that anonymity is one of AA's 12 traditions. In fact, researching this point, it would be Tradition Eleven, which states (in part), "We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films."
I understand the importance of anonymity if you want to keep it from employers, friends, etc., but if you've told the world on national television that you have a problem, why not go ahead and say you belong to AA? I don't get it. It's freakin' cultish, like a Skull And Bones for drunks. Anybody care to clue me in on the logic behind that rule? God knows you can remain anonymous.
