The pull up bar is officially FUBAR.

You’d think that the screws included in the packaging would be able to handle the torque required to put them in a wooden doorframe without being stripped in 2 seconds. But you think a lot of things, probably, and some of them are going to be wrong.

Yesterday. Independence Day. Fourth of July.

An account in deathless prose.

We got up late and took the ribs out of the freezer. That’s right. The flesh of Dead Animals. We set them on the counter to thaw. Not advisable by Scientists Everywhere, but necessary if you want the ribs to thaw by dinnertime.

We proceeded at a leisurely pace to the Salem Fair, where we enjoyed many fairground delights such as peoplewatching and eating foods such as corn dogs and fried dough.

The Marines were there, encouraging burly men to do pullups:

My favorite person was this guy who was breaking it down for about 10 minutes:

The girls he was with abandoned him partway through his performance and we later saw him breaking it down on that carnival ride thingy with the swing and the rolling top. I don’t know what it’s called:

In addition to the fine corn dogs, I enjoyed Fresh Squeezed Lemonade, shaken on the premises with actual sugar. Tasty.

There were Racing Pigs:

And Elephants:

I was sorely disappointed by the fact that you could not take elephant rides until 6 PM.

I am sure this is great for the elephant, but horribly sad for me, since we left around 4:30 to proceed to Marc’s Magic Mountain for a cookout and to watch people burn their faces off with fireworks.

We made the slight tactical error- surely an understandable one- of packing the iced tea in an old Maker’s Mark bottle. People were overjoyed when we turned up at the gathering with what appeared to be a handle of bourbon.

They were disappointed. But that’s life. Sometimes you think someone has brought $50 of bourbon to the party, and in fact it is $.30 of ice tea.

There were ribs. There was banana pudding. There was ice tea and Diet Dr Pepper. There were fireworks and songs.

Parking was generally brainless but after convincing three people to move their cars, we eventually managed to make a seventeen point turn without running over anybody and proceeded home down the Frightening 2 Mile Long Vertical Gravel Driveway, where we collected the dogs and proceeded to watch fireworks from the Virginia Tech Beef Center.

Sadly, they had removed the bleachers which allowed us to watch the Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and Radford fireworks displays all at the same time. So instead we watched Snippet’s head in front of the fireworks.

This time next year, we’ll be watching the fireworks from the patio of our McMansion in the Oakland hills, no doubt.

W00t!

The End.

This has been 4th of July Chillin’ Extravaganza, A production by your Fearless Leader, Kevin Inman

I probably do, though.

I don’t think that President Steger is evil or anything. I just think the situation is a mess and I am deeply offended by the particular PR spin the school is attempting to use.

Like a lot of people, I am still in shock and trying not to let the personal narratives about the victims of this event pierce my bubble of denial.

And I am also strung out because we were lucky. As far as I know, everyone I am close to is safe. But it could have been some other building, and lots of people I know and love might be dead.

And the police haven’t definitively concluded that the killer acted alone, yet the school is still hosting a major grief convocation in an hour. Is that smart? I just don’t know.

I’ve already gone from being glued to the media, looking for any news that might tell me what was going on, to being completely tired of the coverage of this bloody spectacle.

I would like some closure, I don’t really care about Answers though.

To questions such as How Could This Happen In America or What About Those Gun Control Laws.

I would like the Virginia Tech Administration to apologize.

Whether it is fair or not to place blame on them, I don’t trust the campus leadership to do their utmost to try to keep us – the university community- safe. I believe that they are disorganized at best. At worst, they are more concerned with trying to build the school’s reputation than with safety.

Because the fact is that, following 9-11 and following the shootings here last August, the school and local law enforcement agencies should have known that potential terrorist action on campus is a real and valid concern. They should have been suspicious.

I think this would be an appropriate apology on the part of President Steger:

“I wish that the leadership of this university, including myself, had acted more decisively and made the proactive choice to cancel class pending a more thorough investigation of the shooting events in AJ.

In this era which is so conscious of the threat of terrorism, I realize than in hindsight our actions basically reflected a smug feeling that ‘it couldn’t happen here.’ We obviously wanted to believe that surely a shooting in a campus dormitory was an isolated incident. We decided to believe it could not have been part of a premeditated strike. We decided to believe that there was no real reason for concern- well, not enough reason for concern to spend lots of money and effort on it.

While a campus of this size is difficult to secure, I know I could have done more. I realize my own failure to notify faculty, staff, and students of a known threat before they began to arrive on campus for work and class was a significant error in judgment with a tremendous cost in human suffering.

I have in effect murdered 30 people and I am sorry for my part in this. I am sorry for my failure to act. I am sorry for my failure to notify the university community of the threat. I am sorry for trying to spin this yesterday in order to spare the jobs of myself and my colleagues.

I am hereby announcing my intention to resign as soon as the school is seen through the immediate aftermath of these events.”

If you are going to be in charge of a place this size, and you have exclusive access to push information to the local and campus media, then you have a responsibility to use that power wisely.

That is what leadership is.

Just like the people who lived near Nazi concentration camps and pretended they couldn’t smell the bodies burning in the ovens, the Virginia Tech campus leadership is complicit in murder by association and by inaction. And that is morally repugnant.

I think there’s really no good way to put spin on the deaths of 31 people.

That doesn’t stop them from trying.

From the LA Times:

There was criticism throughout the day that the university should have closed down between the incidents, but president Steger defended the school’s actions.

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” Steger told reporters during the afternoon briefing. “We can only make decisions based on the information you had at the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it.”

I really am offended that the University is defending their actions. They may not have suspected that there was reason for concern with a gunman on the loose.

But why didn’t they? What were they thinking? This is a small town where people don’t even feel a need to lock their doors. Do they expect the population to be prepared to deal with a murderer who has a gun?

Or were they more concerned with the school’s reputation, afraid that locking down the campus until the shooting suspect was apprehended would splash the school’s name luridly in the headlines and give them bad PR?

I don’t think that President Steger is to blame. He didn’t shoot those people. But this university’s administration denying that they made a catastrophic error in judgment is a wrong- headed, self- serving, and hypocritical insult to both the people who died today and the rest of us who were put in harm’s way unnecessarily by their inaction.

Nobody around here is going to feel safe in their classroom or office in the foreseeable future. Lawsuits are inevitable whether or not you admit you could have acted differently. So, for God’s sake, President Steger, just cut us a break and stop trying to spin this.

Like everyone in this town, I am shocked by the shootings today.

But more than that, I am truly dismayed by the Virginia Tech administration.

I have worked at Tech for 3 years. Until today, since I am seriously considering putting in my resignation. I know that the place is topheavy, bureaucratic, and plagued with poor communication. I know that problems in the system could well have contributed to the second round of shootings today.

But this is not the first shooting on this campus. Two people were shot on or near the campus last August. In this terrorism-conscious era, the school administration should have been prepared to cancel class and evacuate the campus following the first shooting at 7:15 AM. The majority of staff reports at 8 AM. No classes start before 8 AM.

The reason this situation is such a tragedy is that it could have been prevented.

All the people shot in that class building were sitting ducks! And they didn’t have to be there, if they had been warned. We should have been warned before 9:26 AM, which is when I received the first email from Virginia Tech regarding the situation.

There is still no good information from either Virginia Tech or from the media about what is happening today. We know that upwards of 30 people died and another 30 were injured. But we don’t know if the gunman acted alone. We don’t know if it is safe to go outside and about our daily business. We don’t know if the convocation about grief tomorrow is going to turn into the site of another rampage.

Even if they can’t tell us anything new, they should keep us posted on what is happening. Until we do, we won’t know if there is danger of further violence.

We have no idea what’s going on. Here’s typically contradictory information:

Virginia Tech’s Web site earlier said one shooter was in custody and officials searched for a second shooter as “part of routine police procedure,” but during the press conference Monday, police said they believe there was only one shooter.

Police also said there is no evidence that the two shootings at opposite ends of campus were related.

Which is it?

One killer or two?

If these two shootings are unrelated, doesn’t that mean one of the killers is still on the loose?

It would appear that whoever is manning the loudspeaker is now using it to practice his bird calls.

Does he realize it is still turned on?

Apparently another mad gunman is roving this town.

Loudspeaker: THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. PLEASE TAKE SHELTER INDOORS IMMEDIATELY. PLEASE TAKE SHELTER INDOORS IMMEDIATELY. PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS.

More sirens.

Did I just hear gunshots, or is it my imagination?

I suppose it might just be feedback from the loudspeaker.

You know those pancakes that come with Mu Shu pork? And how if you keep them in the refrigerator, they get hard as a rock and then they break the next day, and you get food all over the place and it’s a godawful mess.

I have just learned that if you leave them out overnight, they stay soft.

This changes everything.

Incontrovertible photographic proof will be published later, once I have roused myself to go out to the car and get the camera.

Here is the incontrovertible photographic proof:

Note how the pancake is not split into several jagged, painful pieces and is still capable of containing Mu Shu Pork.

Today I ran into the Piano Playing Downstairs Neighbor, who is emoting even as we speak. We were on the stairs. I froze.

She said, “Hello.” I could not speak. Then she went downstairs. I fled upstairs.

It had to be The Piano Playing Downstairs Neighbor, considering that she was not:

a. the hairy-ass guy
b. his mean girlfriend
c. the two Asian guys
d. Rob

And that is all the apartments that are downstairs. Only one is left. The Piano Playing Apartment below ours.

She seemed- strangely- normal. I mean, this is a woman who plays elementary Bach for at least 3 hours per day. And sometimes longer than that. Not to mention the finger exercises, and that one time when she played Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique.

She is obviously not normal.

Freaks. They walk among us.

Her: I had one of those white chocolate eggs. I guess white chocolate doesn’t form into an egg shape that easily- it looked more like a penis.
Me: Maybe you should have looked at the wrapper more carefully.
Her: I sincerely doubt your mother is mailing me white chocolate penises.

Random Stranger Watching Me Take Photo Of Insane Crowds: Are you going to caption it, “This is what a debacle looks like?”
Me: I think, “What the hell?” will probably suffice.

Today when I went to the library, I expected the usual smackdown regarding my fines.

Imagine my surprise when the computerized library system, as well as the humanoid library worker, offered me a new library card instead.

I graciously accepted.

The humanoid library worker then took away my old card and informed me that I still have $6.41 in fines which I can pay at any time.

“I suspected as much,” I replied, with a measure of despair tempered by bravado.

As art, I think this is quite successful. As signage for a BBQ, I am not so sure.

Does it leave the viewer wondering, “What is a FREEAT?” I might have thought of that before I finished, but whatever.

In any case, let’s hope this is the last time that anyone asks me to make a banner.