All I know is Slash had better be careful...

Whenever I hear a news item that is particularly screwed up in it's weirdness or depravity, I always wait for the inevitable "reporting from Florida..." at the end of the segment. Why does this state produce such compellingly messed-up stuff all the time? The weather? The swamps? 2 Live Crew? Elian? I have no idea, but this article about a brewing reptile gang war (WARNING: picture of an exploded burmese python with 1/2 an alligator sticking out of it inside) due to a turf dispute between indigenous 'gators and pythons that Floridians have abandoned in the swamps is a thoroughly typical/awesome example. All the Floridians I've met have been great people, but I always ask them why their state can't just have some normal crimes or whatevs.

Hitting the ground running...

Well, the "Moderate Justice" we just got appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court wasted no time showing where he would rule about stuff, tag-teaming with Scalia to tear apart Oregon's assisted-suicide law in his first at-bat. So evidently the Federal Government has no obligation for say, health care if I'm uninsured, but once I get terminally ill and am suffering horribly and am on life-support and racking up massive hospital bills that will be passed on to my descendants (well, hypothetical descendants), the federal government does have to authority to tell me I can't have my doctor end it safely and humanely. At this rate, we'll be lucky if we Roe V. Wade lasts until Christmas. Not entirely unrelatedly, I woke up in a cold sweat Tuesday morning after having a crazy dream about Portland in 10 years, only I was still 30 years old. I was walking to a friends house and I was at the corner of 20th and Morrison and realized I had left something at home and I had to walk back to the house. Only I couldn't go straight back the way I came, you see in 10 years evidently something is quite wrong with the power system or it's too expensive so there are kind of rolling hourly blackouts all night throughout town. This is especially problematic since there are now roving gangs of homeless teens running quite rampant in weird masks and stuff all over town, probably the children of the current generation of street teens who have migrated out of the downtown core where they were born into the neighborhoods. They all are on meth (or whatever meth has transformed into by 2015-does anybody remember "cat"-it was supposed to be the next crazy white-trash drug back in the mid-90's and it was made out of battery acid or something, and it was a total flop, I just remember one really funny hysterical write-up about it in SPIN or something) and as a result do not require food and are superhumanly strong and crazy. So the police had all these helicopters flying low through the dark parts of town shining spotlights everywhere, generally everything was like 200X more fucked-up in the dream than it is now, but everyone had kind of accepted it just like we accept the occasional car window breaking or constant spare-changing now. In the dream I was wondering how it got this way and assigning blame to various entities/attitudes, then I woke up and realized how much less elemental my nightmares had gotten. Weird.