Letters to the Editor
jebldmm
Published Letters: 933 Editor's Choice: 164
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Bicycles and Canoes
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have a certain amount of respect for Patrick because of the common sense and balance he has shown in the past, but I am sorely disappointed that his fatigue in composing his latest missive has precluded the exercising of any kind of reasoned analytical approach to cerebral games in his latest article.
Comparing Sudoku to Crossword Puzzles is like comparing bicycles and canoes. A more accurate comparison would have been to compare Sudoku to those logic puzzles that ask you to deduce which house Mrs. Smith lives in if she has a green car, yellow dress, and sews doilies for her hobby and which color of truck Mr. Shapiro drives if his house is brown, Ms. Sanjay takes the bus to work, prefers oranges over strawberries... well... you get the idea.
Sudoku is a simple form of puzzle designed to exercise a person's logical thinking skillset while a crossword is a simple form of puzzle to exercise a person's memory skillset. Those of us who want to improve, and maintain our thinking ability, as well as avoiding the onset of Alzheimer's Disease, will use and enjoy both. For what it's worth, Sudoku can be played with more than just numbers. In fact, you can use 9 of anything to populate the appropriate 9 squares in each of the nine squares.
But comparing Sudoku to Crossword puzzles as if they were just the same sort of game is just wrong. It would be a lot like comparing a Nepalese Yak herder to... a pilot ?
- ejb -
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I'm not sure this is fair
[Read the article: University officials waited two hours to warn campus, students say]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Murders happen all the time, and we don't shut down schools and offices unless there is an expectation that the perpetrator is likely to hurt someone else, or if it is obvious that the crime is extraordinarly (such as multiple killings). In retrospect, lives could have been saved if they had shut down the school. But it was not possible to know that at the time.
That said, I wonder that there were armed police officers all over the campus, and they had numerous bomb threats over the last few weeks, and still nobody was able to stop this person from killing so many people. I've read a few things suggesting that terrorists might try to attack colleges or high schools. I assumed that the articles were paranoid ramblings, but that school officials would make plans so that they could quickly respond to emergencies, just in case. It doesn't sound as if the officials in Virginia had any such plans. A simple lockdown in response to a general alarm when the first bullets were heard in the classrooms could have saved a lot of lives. It may have been reasonable to not shut down the campus after one murder, but it takes time to kill over 30 people, and I can't see how that could have happened without any alarms going off.
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Have you seen the action figure?
[Read the article: Rapist No. 1 action figure]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I looked it up. It's a paunchy, unattractive man waving a gun around. It's not glorifying rapists... well, at least I doubt anybody would want to be this particular character based on the figure. He doesn't look like a hero. If anything, it's a parody of action figures. Action figures aren't just for kids any more. Did you know you can get Freddy Krueger and Jason action figures? And a 12" talking "Stuntman Mike", from Grindhouse. Yes... figures glorifying fictional mass murderers. There is a market for villians as well as hero's.
I probably won't see Grindhouse, myself, at least until it comes out on DVD. My husband may want to see it, in which case I can sneak into the kitchen for the gory parts - are there any non-gory parts?. I watched "Kill Bill" with my husband, and was rather suprised to find that I enjoyed it. The violence was so extreme that it wasn't real. I don't usually like violent movies, but in this case the movie was more like a Monty Python sketch than a typical action movie. Tarantino's movies aren't so much about violence as they are about societies obsession with violence, and Hollywood's tendency to romanticize violence. How many times have we seen an action scene where the villians are shooting at the hero repeatedly and they keep missing? How many times have we seen action adventures where hundreds are killed, but there is no blood on the streets and no mourners crying for the victimes. Tarantino takes the violence to an extreme, and his movies become charicatures of action movies, teaching us all something in the process.
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I actually thought that myself
[Read the article: More cruelty from right-wing crackpots]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I didn't understand how someone could have killed so many with only 2 handguns without anybody stopping him. Then I thought about the chaos, and the fact that nobody knew he only had two guns, and that nobody knew that there was only one gunman, and the fact that some people did try to stop him. What bothers me is that the first thought has made it into print in many places without the moderating thoughts that should have come after. The same people who seem able to find any excuse for the bad behavior of anyone on "their" side are unable to empathize with the victims of this tragedy.
I think it's a defense mechanism. If they blame the victims, then they don't have to wonder how 1 untrained man could get away with killing 32 people on a campus covered with police officers 5 years after 9/11... and what would have happened if instead of 1 angry man, the perpetrators were half a dozen trained terrorists.