Voting is open for the 2004 Weblog Awards, and I want a meaningless award! Vote for me as best humor blog now or no more humor!
And you can go vote in the myriad other categories if you want, too.

Apparently there is a big fight scheduled.

I haven’t said anything about the Scott Peterson trial. I’m not a big trial guy (though I am waiting expectantly for the Saddam trial), and there isn’t anything funny about it. To me, it ended up being like the anti-OJ trial. I knew OJ was guilty, and I was pretty sure he was going to be convicted and was quite disappointed when he wasn’t. On this trial, I was pretty damn sure Peterson did it, but I assumed he was going to get away with it and was quite happy when he didn’t (Note to Whom It May Concern: To most people, OJ’s murdering and getting away with it had nothing to do with race). Anyway, now that the verdict is down, my reaction is pretty simple: Fry the bastard.
Then I get to thinking, we don’t fry people anymore; we lethally inject. Even Old Sparky here in Florida was retired. (Ed Note: I originally wrote “Ole Smokey” as I was thinking of a famous “mishap” the chair one had that caused the state attorney general Bob Butterworth to quip, “People who wish to commit murder, they better not do it in the state of Florida because we may have a problem with our electric chair.” Heh.)
Hell, we don’t even lethally inject people. I forget the exact number, but California has put something like 600 people on death row during the history of the modern death penalty but only executed five so far. How different from life in prison is it to have some possible execution twenty years later? And isn’t the point of having the death penalty to have a penalty worse than life in prison to threaten people with?
Now, in the arguments for the need for the death penalty, there are more reasons than just deterrence, but I’m going to focus on that to make this short. First off, it has to be threatening. That means you need to actually execute people and not just build some giant death row where you threaten to execute people. Plus, the means of execution should be scary. The gallows, the chair – these are ominous, scary things. The method of death is animated and lively – that means even scarier. A doctor’s table – which is basically what lethal injection is done on – is not so ominous. It’s about the same thing I lay on to give blood.
To get to my point, if you’re going to execute people, don’t be “humane” about it – because you’re @$%& killing people! No matter what you do, it ain’t going to be pretty, so go for the show. The death penalty just isn’t scary enough as it is, and that should change.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject, I have a big rant on how to argue against the death penalty and how not to argue against the death penalty – there are a lot of morons on that subject who seem to lack simple human understanding. I’ll save that for later, though.
Peace, I’m outta here.
UPDATE: Here’s a neat article on the history of Old Sparky/Smokey. Was I confused in earlier stating that the chair was retired?

@#%$ nature. How are we supposed to save the environment when the environment is the worst polluter?
My solution, as always, is to destroy everything.
What do you think?