New York, New York

Sometimes the regional news is the sickest. What the hell was going on with this family? Double murder-suicide? Did the mother kill the baby and the man kill the mother, then himself? Was it actually a triple homicide? Is Queens directly to blame?

You think 911 is a joke in your town? Check out our fabulous operators! Kids go out on a boat in freezing weather. Kids get in trouble. Kids call 911 and nothing happens. What's the problem? "Long Island Sound" isn't in the computer. Oh well! Guess it doesn't exist! Guess nobody's really drowning! Who wants a doughnut?

[On a side note, who the hell cares if Pete Rose is still gambling on sports? He's an adult, it's legal, and he's been banned from baseball. What was he supposed to do, become a priest? Besides, everyone knows that even if Pete bet on baseball, he never bet on the Reds to lose, which would be the only truly unethical bet he could have made. Give our boy a break. He deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Let me see Bud Selig try for 4192 hits!]

It's absolutely disgusting that New York State allows rapists to be prison guards rather than forcing them to be prison inmates. What the hell kind of message does this send to the female inmates? How can someone who is being abused by their captors ever be rehabilitated? These guys should be sent to Rikers, where they can find out what it's like to be trapped in a cell and sexually violated.

And finally, if you're trying to intimidate through vandalism, at least learn how to draw your chosen symbol of hate. Neither the newspaper nor the TV news mentions this, but I've seen pictures of these spray painted swastikas, and they're backwards. If I have a sick and twisted pet peeve, it's that vandals are constantly drawing the Fascist swastika wrong. And how do they know whose car they're spraying? Sloppy work. This says to me "ignorant teenagers" rather than "hate-filled terrorists." (It's still bad, though.)