Peoria Pundit

Madelyne Gorman Toogood is wanted by authorities after she was filmed delivering a four-minute long beating her a four-year-old daughter in an store parking lost. The woman was upset after losing an argument with a store manager over an iten she was trying to return to the store. Gorman’s sister is beign held by prosecutors after giving false information about the woman’s location.

I have seen authorities get worked up about child abuse alegations that turned out to be little more than a spanking. But this videotape would make any person’s blood boil. This grown woman deliverd closed-fisted blows to a child’s head and body. It is very easy to get worked up into a state of hatred against people like this. Most abusers have been abused themselves. Do we lock her up and throw away the key? If we do, who watches her children. This woman’s family are no winners themselves.

Madelyne Gorman Toogood,child abuse

According to information I picked up at the Poynter Institute Web page, coal mining has becoming increasingly safe over the years. A decade-by-decade breakdown of coal mining deaths is as follows:

2000-2001: 80
1990-99: 454
1980-89: 944
1970-79: 1,547
1960-69: 2,662
1950-59: 4,830
1940-49: 11,652
1930-39: 13,203
1920-29: 22,461
1910-19: 25,299
1900-09: 21,407

mine safety,coal miners,miners rescued,pennsylvania miners

That’s the only conclusion I have for what I saw here.

All blogs listed in the Ecosystem will experience significant changes in link counts and ranking over the next several days. Do not be alarmed. Remain calm. All will be well!

Well, something is screwy. According to this page, I am 131st in the entire Ecosystem. I’m ranked higher than Acidman (rank 146 with 2151 daily hits) and Spoons (rank 140 with 6548 hits each day).

My Site Meter is averaging 217, although I cracked the 300 mark yesterday.

I therefore gather that the ranking is only based on incoming links, and I’m fairly certain these stats include the inbound links from several previous URLs, which I have set to redirect to my new permanent URL.

I have a feeling that once all the recalibration or whatever N.Z. Bear does is complete, I’ll be back to being a Maurading Marsupial.

There. Now if Rob is consistent, I ought to be moving from “large mammal” to “playful primate” status in the Ecosystem any time now. Go ahead. Take your revenge and try to crash my servers. Bwahahahaha!

And by the way, Rob. My mama’s family is from Tennessee, and she’s from a long-line of shiners. You should hear the relatives talk about who went to jail for this or that. Grandpa was a Holy Roller tent preacher, though.

HOG ON ICE: Tsunami Blogging: Concern or Bloodsucking?

The video bloggers are providing a service, at what must be an enormous cost in bandwidth. They’re also providing plenty of non-video links as well, including links to charities.

Steve H. expresses a thought I’ve had about all this.

I haven’t posted about the tragedy for two reasons.

1. What could I possibly add to the discussion? I’m not there, I’m here. I have no insight to add. More than a hundred throusand people are dead, and I don’t know a single one of them. It’s a horribly tragedy, but the inly reason to post would be to say “yeah, me too” and maybe pick up a few search engine hits.

2. I be a link whore at times. Consider all the eye candy. But it can bite you in the ass. One night, I came home from work and learned at the Nick Berg beheading. I furiously made about a half dozen posts about the matter, including the greusome video that was making the rounds.

Because I was one of the first bloggers to comment on the damn thing, for a time I was the only site spidered by the search engines, and I was flooded with hits by folks looking for the video.

I tore through a months worth of bandwidth in a few hours. I cannot tell you how much grief that caused me.

It’s responsible for a switch in hosting companies.

The Journal Star reports some tragic news:

A female Peoria police officer was killed and a male officer injured after the squad car they were riding in crashed head-on into a utility pole in the North Valley Thursday night.

The accident occurred shortly before 9:30 p.m. at Adams and Van Buren streets, in front of Komatsu Mining Systems.

Peoria County Coroner Johnna Ingersoll confirmed that the officer killed in the crash was Christy Tindall of Peoria. Tindall, a patrol officer, had worked at the Peoria Police Department for nearly 10 years.

Firefighters worked for more than 30 minutes to free Tindall from the mangled car.

The second officer, who was removed from the car shortly after the crash, was taken to OSF Saint Francis Medical Center by ambulance, Ingersoll said. His name and condition were not known late Thursday.

Related post: There are real heroes

You can also call it rebootitis, although Legionnaires Disease works nicely. It’s the tendency of comic book companies to simply hit the “do over” button and erase a comic book character or characters’ entire back history. Supposedly, this boosts sales and erases the dead wood from continuity. As often as not, it’s because someone feels the need to do repair work left over from an earlier reboot, sometimes from a different character or book.

But sometimes — as often as not, I suspect — there’s just a lack of fresh ideas, so a reboot is cobbled together to breathe something that superficially resembles freshness into a moribund series. I also blame the sick, twisted desire from some creators to deconstruct classic heroes until they stop being being, well, super heroes. It’s a post modern approach that can be entertaining, but would prefer that it be used for “imaginary” or “what if?” tales, or for entirely new characters designed for that purpose, like the “Watchmen” were. I don’t want to be told that a character I loved as a young kid was wife beater. C’mon.

I’m calling it “legionnaire’s disease, for a reason.

By my account, there have been six distinct versions of the Legion of Super Heroes, this includes the most recent version, the first issue of which I picked up today at Acme Comics.
Read more »

WMBD 31: Peoria Special Census Results

The numbers found an additional 5,000 new residents in PeoriaÂ’s northwest cell.

The city was only expecting a growth of about 25-hundred people.

Based on the findings, the city will get an additional half a million dollars [each year?] from now until and the next census in 2010.

Since the least says that Peoria’s gonna get “more than $2 million” because of the new count, I’m assuming that half mil is an annual figure.

So it’s found money, right?

Not when you consider that all these people will require additional services, like police protection, fire protection, streets and sidewalks, and will certainly put demands on the city bureaucracy.

Count on the city council to find some shiny new development project to spend it on, though.

If the guy at Mostly Cajun can adjust his blogroll to reflect my migration from pMachine to Moveable Type, I can change my blogroll to reflect his URL now that he is using WordPress.

Dean Esmay discusses the possibility that it does not.

Given everything now theorized about decades-long dormancy periods and the possibilities some grant that a patient might be an AIDS “carrier” but personally immune, is it medically possible that a patient might be HIV and have some AIDS symptoms and not have AIDS? Are there any rigorous diagnostic standards for telling one type of patient from the other? If so, what are they?

Is it not true that there have in the past been people who came down with the entire original list of AIDS symptoms from the early 1980s (Kaposi’s Sarcoma, diarrhea and vomiting, drop in t-cell count, rapid weight loss, and eventual death by a specific type of pneumonia), but were HIV negative and therefore diagnosed as having an “idiopathic” condition? Even though they looked exactly like all the gay men who died of AIDS in the 1980s? Do you think that people who find this suspicious are being irrational?

Dean and the doctors he quotes raise a lot of questions.

I still wouldn’t suggest anyone diagnosed with HIV stop their drug treatments based on these questions alone; there are far too many doctors and researchers who are convinced that it does.

But honest scientific scrutiny is needed here. There’s nothing wrong with questions.