Because it really does help when it's a dry heat?
Anyway, I walked home every schoolday for 12 years in Mossburg, and Floridian snowflakes being traumatized by one itty-bitty serial killer is most amusing. (Nothing ever happened to me.)
Anyway, I can remember being in Gainesville and being afraid to go out to the car after dark to get something my dad sent me for because I had heard it was one of the cities with the highest per capita murder rates in America. I don't know if that was true or not. It was a few years before the serial killer was active.
4: Which means you might be a serial killer.
4: It might be objectively more crime-prone, but dying in Florida is really something for the elderly only. Anybody under 75 is embarrassed to do it.
Mossburg is much more egalitarian that way. People of all ages and descriptions just die all over the place, wherever convenient.
I had heard it was one of the cities with the highest per capita murder rates in America.
I haven't heard this, but for a long time it held some title as the petty crime capital of the United States.
So, they got this guy through pulling a warrant on his Google search history, which is about as legitimate a use of that kind of warrant as there can be.
Still, its an uncomfortable reminder that your search history exists out there on the cloud and can be accessed, should the Man choose to do so.
"If guns are outlaws, evil murderers will just..." laboriously kill three people over a period of weeks instead of dozens at one go!
1: I'd guess b/c Austin is the nearest hip and culturally interesting city to Gainesville for those new graduates who want to do the post-college urban migration thing? Atlanta is close too but somehow it seems like more of a draw, culturally, for black kids, or for kids of whatever colour who are focussed on more corporate jobs.
Like, the kids who grew up in Florida, went to U of F, and then move to Austin are the same ones who would move to San Francisco if they grew up in Colorado and went to U of C, or so I imagine. I could be full of it. What do you think Heebie?
Outlawed. Now I'm imagining ronin guns coming to town in the old West.
10: Murder can be petty for certain definitions of "petty".
13: I think there's a big Atlanta migration as well. And Tampa/Orlando/Miami. But I also agree with your last paragraph.
As well as plenty of people just staying put in Gainesville. I don't think it's a mass exodus dying city or anything.
All the rest of Florida is about to sink into the ocean.
I was also afraid of being eaten by an alligator when I was in Gainesville.
I remember the Beltway sniper, who killed, what, like 20 people maybe in the '90's? I remember once when I was pumping gas at an otherwise pretty empty gas station and feeling exposed.
I had that feeling once also. Turned out that my zipper was down.
Hunh. Turns out it was 2002. My (failing) memory puts it considerably earlier. It was also two different people working together. They killed 10 people and injured 3.
I walked home from school in the eighties and early nineties in Oakland. Back then the really shooty cities were us, DC, Medellin, and a few cities in South Africa. No huge deal, you just have to know/be in the right neighborhoods.
We had a serial killer here a couple years ago who killed two people in the park right by my apartment, among other places. I never felt scared but certainly a lot of other people did.
I would think one major factor in Gainesville to Austin migration is just that both are home to big universities. Definitely not climate; Austin isn't the dry part of Texas.
Serial killers were scarier when they had nicknames. "The Night Stalker." "The Unabomber." The "Gainesville Ripper." In fact I feel like nicknames in general are declining -- is there a sports nickname that comes close to "Phi Slamma Jamma" recently? It seems somehow connected to the decline in print newspapers.
I blame the president. "Sleepy Chuck Todd" is just the dumbest thing ever aside from all the other dumb things Trump has done.
I get the impression serial killers were a Thing at one time, like airplane hijackers, that prompted lots of imitation, but that died down. Of course, if you watch police procedurals, homicide bureaus barely spend time on anything else.
Is there merit in journalists voluntarily stopping publishing names and specifics of mass killers to reduce glorification and imitation in this way? We already did this for suicide, I believe.
I stopped reading Alex Cross novels because the whole Thing got too repetitive. I don't even want to know why so many of the serial killers were men who could get an erection but not ejaculate.
Ironically, the reverse is what motivates Trump voters.
26: I blame rap.
The rappers took all the best nicknames for themselves.
OTOH, the Situation isn't a rapper, is he? What about the Weekend?
The Weekend must be rich. Everybody's working for the Weekend.
I walked home by myself through the rough streets of Royal Oak, Michigan. It was pretty scary -- some of the other kids were a lot bigger than me!
31: One of our attribution codephrases is "a source close to the situation".I'm sometimes tempted to capitalise it.
What about "The Source, close to the Situation"?
OP reminds me of a conversation at the school bus stop in the morning when my son was around second grade. School rules require adults at the bus stop for younger kids. I'm next to the grandfather of one of the other kids. Grandpa had a noticeable German accent.
Me: I don't mind standing out here, but when I was their age I walked six blocks to school without parents or any grown ups around.
Him: In grammar school I walked to school with other children. The bad part was crossing the railroad tracks, especially when you were dropping bombs on them.
Me:
seems like a rare situation where an "at least your friends got to go to school, instead of being brutally murdered" is a totally normal response.
I mean, a super-dickish response, but when else do you get to say that with a veneer of normality?
37: Unlike in the US today, where kids get to do both at the same time.
32 - "The Weekend" is George Soros's nickname?
The DC snipers were amazingly frightening, and they did it on a budget. I don't understand why terrorists don't take better advantage of US gun craziness.
I used to live within short walking distance of one of the first gas station killings -- close enough that I had pushed a stroller past that gas station with my kid.
At a nearby shopping mall, I remember watching a woman duck down as she walked to her car, quite obviously to avoid giving the sniper a clean line of sight. I saw this because I had spent some time standing in a mostly protected entrance area, scanning the fringes of the parking lot for potential snipers and pondering the best way to get to my own car.
Wikipedia tells me it lasted three weeks. I remember it going on forever, and seeming like it would never stop.
During the sniper I was working as a substitute teacher in Maryland, and one day at the height of it my job was to stand outside looking for the sniper. At the time there was false information out there that he was working from a white box truck, and let me tell you until that day I never realized just how many white box trucks are driving around out there.
I get the impression serial killers were a Thing at one time, like airplane hijackers, that prompted lots of imitation, but that died down.
I don't think this is true. I mean, that may be a component for some of them, who are now on the murderous fad du jour, but there seem to be plenty from the 1800s, early 1900s, all over the world, etc, whose patterns don't stand out particularly from any others. This is because I'm now an expert from listening to that podcast.
It's almost like there were more Unfogged commenters in DC in the early Aughts than in Gainesville in 1990. Weird.
Amanda Marcotte wrote last month about how serial killers have been on a decline (over and beyond the decline in all crime), just as mass shootings have risen. Her hypothesis is that the sort of men who used to be serial killers are now considering mass shootings to get out their murderous urges, although not enough research has been done yet to say one has replaced the other.
I wonder if everybody having a cell phone hasn't made serial killering harder.
Anyway, the Austin bomber was a home-schooled conservative who was, according to reports, "quiet".
22. Wasn't it a father and son team? The son appeared to have been more or less bullied into it.
It's hard when a parent demands their kid go into the family business.
One of the shootings happened in Ashland, Virginia. I completely agree with the comment that I never realized how many white box trucks there were before that time.
The only time I visited the Newseum, they had a replica of the snipers' Chevy Caprice, which seemed really crass and sensationalist.
who would move to San Francisco if they grew up in Colorado and went to U of C
I always feel like SF is a particular draw to midwesterners but it's beyond anecdotal.
51: In a certain sense, the snipers' Chevy Caprice was already a replica of the Platonic Chevy Caprice. In another sense, a used Chevy Caprice is not exactly a hard thing to find.
SF was very nice, but honestly Seattle seemed better.
45- Lead lead lead lead lead!
SF was very nice
De gustibus.
The only time I visited the Newseum
The only time I visited Newseum, I annoyed everybody by repeatedly making the joke, "You mean there's a new Seum?" the way people joke about New Mexico.
I guess I'd buy that they died down, so I'm walking back 43. But I guess I just wanted to assert that they've been around through the ages.
Also there was very recently one in Orlando, I believe.
Only four murders. It really is on the decline.
Right in the middle of the DC sniper thing one of my kid's soccer teams was scheduled to play in a tournament in suburban Northern Virginia. Everyone made a good show of supporting going as a show of normalcy (and I assume local outdoor youth sports continued in DC during the time) but I will admit it was hard to not visualize the degree of exposure of 20 kids running around on a soccer field (even though that was not the kind of thing they had targeted). Then a couple of days before it was to start they shot someone at a gas station across the street from the hotel that was to be the tournament HQ. Tournament cancelled--and our team would not have gone even if it had not.
Right in the middle of the DC sniper thing one of my kid's soccer teams was scheduled to play in a tournament in suburban Northern Virginia. Everyone made a good show of supporting going as a show of normalcy (and I assume local outdoor youth sports continued in DC during the time) but I will admit it was hard to not visualize the degree of exposure of 20 kids running around on a soccer field (even though that was not the kind of thing they had targeted). Then a couple of days before it was to start they shot someone at a gas station across the street from the hotel that was to be the tournament HQ. Tournament cancelled--and our team would not have gone even if it had not.
The same thing happening twice was what was really weird.
We moved into our house in Orange County CA during the Night Stalker thing. At one point it was postulated that he was selecting yellow houses near freeway exits. Sort of like our house (not super close to an exit but reasonably close). I recall trying to puzzle out what I should do with that information. Vaguely worry a bit was the answer.
56: To be fair, I was last there years before you ever moved there.
I guess I thought about it, standing at the bus stop on Western Avenue. Plenty of white box trucks.
The only time I visited the Newseum, they had a replica of the snipers' Chevy Caprice, which seemed really crass and sensationalist.
The Newseum is weird. Mst of it is artefacts from newsworthy events, but only tangentially connected at best to the journalistic process. The idea seems to be "Hey, this was big news at some point, wouldn't you like to see Dillinger's gun? or a bit of the Berlin Wall?" It's absolutely useless at telling you how the news is made and why. But the archive of historical pamphlets and newspapers at the top is fantastic.
Anyway, the Austin bomber was a home-schooled conservative who was, according to reports, "quiet".
NYMag: BuzzFeed spoke to a 21-year-old woman named Cassia Schultz who said she "ran in the same conservative survivalist circles in high school as Conditt." [...] The Austin American-Statesman reports that Conditt wrote about his opposition to gay marriage and abortion, and his support for the death penalty.
He practiced what he preached on that last one.
"Just look at the male and female bodies," he wrote in one post. "They are obviously designed to couple.
"Laydeez," he neglected to add.
||
Not that there was much doubt about the final outcome but Rick Saccone has conceded to Conor Lamb.
|>
Good to know. It's been 8 days, so that's only 0.0808 roymoores of sweaty desperation.
Unofficial results have Lamb's lead going up by about 130 votes to 758.
Also Trump conceded for him earlier today:
"Good man, Rick Saccone. Good man. And (he) didn't quite make it. But lost, think of it, lost by about 300 votes out of all those votes," Trump said Tuesday at a GOP fundraising event in Washington, D.C., CNN reported .
Trump is getting better at counting.
Canada is now on two horrifying-serial-killers-who-were-ignored-by-police-for-years-because-they-killed-less-privileged-people-that-the-police-thought-were-overreacting. Robert Pickton is a former pig farmer who killed mainly indigenous women linked to sex work. Police had complaints about him going back decades. They also ignored/under investigated many many reports of missing sex workers and/or women who used drugs in Vancouver for years and years. He was convicted on 6 counts of second degree murder but likely killed dozens more. http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Pickton+murders+Explosive+evidence+jury+never+heard/3360225/story.html
The newest murderer, Bruce McArthur, looks like Santa Claus and worked as a landscaper so a bunch of his clients had their landscaping dug up for body parts (police ended up finding a previously unknown murder victim). He was also known to the police due to cannibalism (not sure if fulfilled, at some point I start blocking out horrifying details). Police ignored and then half-heartedly investigated gay men disappearing from Toronto. I'm not sure what made them restart it but they literally had closed the investigation and concluded nothing was wrong. So far it's 6 known victims and likely the total will be more.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/bruce-mcarthur-serial-killers-robert-pickton-1.4509608
http://www.metronews.ca/news/canada/2018/03/19/how-alleged-serial-killer-bruce-mcarthur-hid-in-plain-sight-for-.html
Anyway, my point is there are probably serial killers out there still! But as long as they're just killing sex workers or homeless people or drug addicts or LGBTQ folks or immigrants, etc., we probably will never know about them.
In the United States only about half of all murders end with an arrest, and the security services probably aren't secretly killing that many people.
The only time I visited Newseum, I annoyed everybody by repeatedly making the joke, "You mean there's a new Seum?"
I annoyed people by saying I was going to read the exhibits online for free.
The Newseum does have a bit of the Berlin Wall, making it perfect for impromptu annoying "Heroes" karaoke.
If I ever take up fighting the elderly, I think I could take Trump pretty easily. I'm not so sure about Biden.
The thing that I most remember about the Newseum was in their display on the transition to the digital/electronic age of news and they had a cell phone in the display case that was the same model as my first cell phone.
Yes, one ball. You'd have to be able to hold two before you could even get a promotion to jock strap.
84 You know who else had only one ball?
75: I've definitely heard about the ongoing murders of Native women, so it's at least made progressive mainstream circles. I didn't realize it was a serial killer, though - I thought it was something more like the murders of women in Mexico - mushpot of violence and drug crime and poverty and knowledge that it wouldn't be seriously investigated.
85: In college I thought it was very funny to replace the error-ding on my computer with my computer reading that song in its tinny fast monologue voice.
87: There's two related-ish issues: Pickton and his victims, but generally there has been/continues to be little police effort to look into missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW).
Years ago, families were saying their relatives disappeared from Vancouver and police were dismissing it as 'that's just what those people are like'. Enough pressure on the police finally forced them to investigate and sure enough, there was a serial killer. I don't think all of Pickton's victims were indigenous but indigenous women are over-represented among drug users and sex workers across Canada and he picked his victims from those groups.
Report on the police work:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/pickton-inquiry-slams-blatant-failures-by-police-1.1191108
Separately but related to the acknowledged failures by the police to listen to IW, there's a federal inquiry going around the country listening to stories of MMIW. It's based on one held in Vancouver and BC that was directly tied to the Pickton investigation. It's not going well in terms of IW's families feeling heard and some of the commissioners have resigned.
Some unformatted links:
http://www.cbc.ca/missingandmurdered/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/missing-indigenous-women-inquiry-1.4204708
Oh also, based on this article, there's been 8 serial murderers targetting IW in Canada since 1980. That's not including possible serial killers "along stretches of certain B.C. highways and in the Edmonton area".
The most distressing thing about 89 is that the phenomenon is large enough and has gone on for long enough that people have come up with an acronym.
Like the discovery a few years back that (IIRC) sexual assault peaks in the first few weeks of the new academic year, which is known as the "Red Zone". Bad that it's happening; worse that it's happening often enough that there's a slang term for it.
What's even worse that you might not notice is you don't watch enough football is that "Red Zone" is also the slang term for the final twenty years to the goal line and that it is common for sportscasters, players, coaches, and the like to talk about the importance of scoring in the Red Zone.
Did Da Vinci's Inquest have an arc based on the Vancouver murders?
92 That was an excellent show and I wish it was all available on DVD or streaming (maybe it is now?).
93: Comity. Also something I'd like to catch up on sometime.
I think I could take Trump pretty easily
The guy rides golf carts onto the greens. If you just circled him for a couple of minutes, he'd be too winded to defend himself once you started punching.
This seemed right to me, from a former Googler:
Something that surprised me a few years ago was how a bunch of companies were suddenly making self-driving cars. I *knew* how many years Google's cars had been tested for before they got anywhere near a public road; how did others move so fast? I'm increasingly suspecting, "recklessly."