In much ado about nothing, someone seems to have shot himself — whether accidentally or as a suicide attempt is not known yet — and then drove on to the Seton Hall campus, looking for a friend for assistance. The person who was shot was not himself a student there.
So the shooting did not actually occur at Seton Hall, the single victim was not a student, and there is not, as of yet, any evidence the gun involved was ever on campus. Yet it has already been dubbed the Seton Hall Shooting. Sometimes the Internet works too fast.
The campus was in lockdown, briefly, while police searched for the weapon. The South Orange, NJ, campus has since been opened again. Students are free to resume their normal activities, and no weapon was ever found, though the victims car was impounded and could contain the weapon.
I have done a lot of genealogical research — that’s family history stuff for those of you who don’t like big words — and noticed that most people know the details about their parents and grand-parents, but few can go further back than that. Now a study out of Iceland gives some explanation for this social phenomena — it is better to marry your third cousins! (Biologically speaking, that is.)
Don’t believe me? You can read the study here. Third cousins who marry have more children and grandchildren than those more distantly related. In small communities, if you can manage to forget who your great-grandparents were, you can enjoy the fiction that the third-cousin you just met is not related to you.
With just a year and about ten days to go to D-day (Digital Day) lots of folks are still confused about what it means to them. It is simple, really. If you have a digital TV, fine — no problems. If you watch Cable (e.g. Cablevision, Comcast, Time-Warner Cable, etc.) or satellite (e.g. DirecTV or DISH) transmissions — no problems. If you get your TV from the airwaves, you have rabbit-ears on your TV or an old-fashioned TV antenna on your roof — then you will need a converter to be able to watch digital broadcasts on your current TV. Don’t worry, the government is so concerned about losing their main brain-washing medium that they are giving away $40 certificates, which will cover the full cost of the cheapest converters.
Of course, you will probably want to upgrade to a real digital TV if you can afford it, because the quality of the image will be much better. People are already visiting the great outdoors less, in order to spend more time in front of the tube — we will be able to close the National Parks once TV goes digital — the picture will be so sharp and detailed it will be much better than really being there. Those silly Park Rangers never tell you which deodorant to wear, really — TV is much better.
In another instance of ‘weird’ weather, no doubt attributable to global warming, a string of powerful tornadoes swept across the southern U.S. late Tuesday, killing at least 50 people. Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee were hardest hit. Meanwhile ten inches of snow fell across the more northern states, from Iowa to Chicago, with more to come.
Some people who don’t understand this claim we are ‘killing the Earth’ with our pollution and poor stewardship of natural resources. But it is really more the opposite. Earth has a slight fever, brought on by an infection of humanity. There are far too many of these humans for the Earth to support, so their numbers are being cut back — slowly at first, but the process will speed up as the fever increases.
Earth got along fine without people for billions of years, and if humans go the way of the dinosaurs Earth will do just fine without them. We aren’t killing the Earth, but Earth may be ridding itself of us — or at least cutting back the numbers to minimize the damage being done.
The famous guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died today at his home in the Netherlands. Apparently he was about 91 years of age, though the exact date of his birth has been cited differently by different sources. He just announced his retirement a month ago.
For the past 17 years he resided in Vlodrop Netherlands, but his Transcendental Meditation empire spans the globe. Originally made famous when The Beatles endorsed him in 1968, the movement attracted several Hollywood stars and was a prominent feature of the ‘counter culture’ of the 1970s.
In the U.S. the organization has a university at Fairfield Iowa, and local chapters across the country. Backed by scientific evidence that there can be biological benefits from the practice of meditation, the movement continues to attract followers. Some of the more controversial claims — such as the supposed ability of adepts to ‘hover’ in defiance of gravity — have never been supported by scientific evidence.
The pernicious practice of helicopter parenting — parent who hover over their children and micro-manage their lives — is in the news. A UCLA study found that most college freshmen do not resent the constant interference of their parents — no kidding? Gee ain’t it great to sail through life without having to make any of those difficult decisions, much less those nasty mistakes?
Of course young college students don’t object — they are relieved of all the learning experiences that help them grow up. They can bask in infantile bliss, without a care in the world. What are these parents thinking? The most important lessons of college life are not those learned in the classroom. Making decisions, and learning to live with the outcome, is an important part of the education process.
College is a time to step out of parental control, and learn some self-control. These aren’t children — they are young adults. It is a time to face reality, and learn how to decide those important things that affect the rest of their lives. It is also a time to make bad decisions — how else can you learn? If parents have done their job well, setting the groundwork by instilling values as a basis for sound judgment, their offspring will make more correct choices than wrong ones. It is time for parents to step back and let their youngsters start living their own lives. Trust them, they can do it.