Author: Trench Reynolds

  • The Winner and NEW Champion

    The Winner and NEW Champion

    Camden, N.J., Is Most Dangerous City:

    In your face, Detroit! Go, Camden. Go, Camden.

    Beating out Atlanta, St. Louis, Gary, Indiana, and last year’s champ and everyone’s perennial favorite Detroit, Camden, NJ is the county’s most dangerous city.

    For those of us who have lived anywhere near the area can tell you this is no surprise, and we’ve been saying it for years. How many Mischief Nights (Or Devil’s Night) have we watched Camden in flames? And yet, this is the city that the state decided to put The New Jersey State Aquarium.

    We used to joke that when they built the aquarium, they built it around the fish in the Delaware River. Wouldn’t it make more sense to put the State Aquarium in a beach resort town like Wildwood or Atlantic City, or even the Island Republic of Brigantine? I mean, Brigantine already has the Marine Mammal Stranding Center. Instead, the state decided to put it in a crime-infested cesspool like Camden.

    Since it’s on the river, they call it “The Waterfront” now. Like, the Delaware River off of Camden is something to be romanticized. You can probably walk across it and it may be flammable. They even put the major regional outdoor concert arena on “The Waterfront”. It’s changed corporate sponsorship at least 3 times since it’s been open. Camden’s attempted revitalization is like putting a rose on top of a trash heap. Way to make New Jersey proud.

  • Hey kids…

    Hey kids…

    It’s The JFK Assassination video game. Remember kids, when you play “JFK Reloaded” it’s best to tilt your joysticks back and to the left.

  • 11/7/04: From The Mail Sack

    11/7/04: From The Mail Sack

    It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It’s been almost a month. I guess that’s a good thing because it means mutant activity is down, but I still have mail. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

    This one was an e-mail I got with the subject “colorado shooting on 4-20-99″…

    This is from:gdsmk624@aol.com robert(198.24.30.43)

    first of all there a are some parents that know what the word RESPECT means. i personally am glad that the parents didnt search their childs room cause other wise they might be shot first and the shooting may or may not have been prevented.

    RESPECT works both ways, Robert. It’s obvious that Harris and Klebold didn’t RESPECT their parents, or else they wouldn’t have kept their weapons in one of their parents’ houses. And obviously, they didn’t RESPECT life enough not to kill 13 people. Whether or not the shooting would have been prevented we’ll never know because their parents didn’t lift a damn finger to do anything.

    As usual, from The Eric Harris journal

    👿 I think all of those students deserved what they got.

    Every day that you say something mean you should remember

    this ” Are you willing to die for your beliefs”

    Comment by Vodka — Thursday Oct 28, 2004 @ 8:34 am

    Yeah, they deserve to be shot for having no association with those two scumbags. Whatever. Next. Also, notice that we have another mutant calling him/herself Vodka. Not an original thought by yet another of the mutant collective.

    From my entry on The Columbine Death Photos

    All of you need to shut the fuck up, I knew dylen and erric they were both nice boys we were in the same gang together.

    And they were my heros when they shot up the school like that. Did you know that they asked me to help them but i said no because it was stupid but now i realize i should have done it and helped them. It would have been so cool.

    so all of you need to shut the fuck up, Those boys did what was right, Erric once said to me”i need to kill those kids and i’m going to, you know i need to fuckin kick start the revolution here!”

    So all of you think what you want but what they did on that day was awsome and i wish i could have done it with them.

    Comment by trenchcotemafia — Tuesday Nov 2, 2004 @ 8:53 pm

    Another mutant claiming to know those two scumbags. Like I keep saying, if even half the people who claim to have known them actually knew them, they would have been the most popular kids in Colorado. You can’t even spell their names right. Not to mention the fact that they weren’t actually in The Trenchcoat Mafia. Just another mutant trying to convince people that his or her fantasy is the reality.

    And lastly…

    This guy is an asshole we all know Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are fucking heroes!! 😈

    Comment by plAyeR76 — Sunday Nov 7, 2004 @ 9:23 am

    This could be your son or daughter leaving this comment, but you’ll never know because as a parent, you couldn’t be bothered to be involved in your kids’ lives.

    It’s like those commercials. Parental Involvement: The Anti-killing.

  • Calling all blog developers

    Calling all blog developers

    Since it’s Friday and hardly anyone reads this between Friday and Sunday, I’m doing this for my own benefit.

    This is a call to all blog software developers. You may think that your blog software is the greatest, but it’s not. What we need is some standards across all blog software platforms.

    Importing and Exporting: Stop locking people into your software. You may think that people would never stop using your software, but there’s always another software around the corner that just might be better than yours. Since most blogs will import entries from Movable Type, I think they should all export in the MT format as well. Right now, I’m stuck in WordPress. Not that there’s anything wrong with WP, but I just don’t like being tied into one software format. I’ve tried the WP to MT export scripts, but so far, I have yet to get one to import properly.

    Subscribing to comments: When I leave a comment on someone else’s blog it’s nice to receive an e-mail when someone else replies to it. A lot of blog developers think this is unnecessary and an RSS reader should be used instead. That’s all well and good, but only a small minority use RSS readers. Plus, I don’t want a line in my RSS reader for each comment I’ve subscribed to. I’ve left thousands of comments on hundreds of blogs. I don’t want a line on my RSS reader for each of those comments that I’ve left. This is a standard feature on PMachine and Serendipity. A plugin is available for WordPress. There used to be one for MT but since they went to 3.0 I don’t know.

    Permalinks: The URL’s to blog entries should be uniform so when someone moves from one platform to another, their URL’s will stay the same. Personally, I think WordPress’ URLs are the best. It goes domain/archives/date/entry-title. Seems simple enough to implement.

    Toggle options: While the developers may think something is a great option or feature, the user may not. Since I’m not a PHP or Perl guru, I would rather just click a button to turn a function on or off and not have to alter any code. For example, in WordPress, if you want a pop-up comment window you have to remove part of the code. Granted, it’s labeled real easily within the code, but I’d rather not mess with the code. In Serendipity, trackbacks are automatically pinged whether you want them to be or not. To turn it off, you have to alter the code. While I may be comfortable doing that, someone else may not be.

    Not that any of these platforms are bad, with the possible exception of MT 3.0, but I just think there should be some kind of blog industry standards. Trust me, if I had the time to learn how to write scripts I would at least try to develop my own. (Hmmmm. TrenchBlog? Trenchpress? Movable Trench?)

  • Hoping against Hope

    Hoping against Hope

    Things I hope for in tomorrow’s election:

    1. A clear winner. Hopefully, there will be enough of a difference in the results, so the election won’t be in dispute.
    2. If someone concedes, be a man of your word and stick to it. Al Gore could have saved this country a lot of frustrations and leftist cries of a stolen election if he had just stuck to his word.
    3. If President Bush wins by a considerable majority, that the left will finally shut up about “stolen elections”.
    4. If Senator Kerry wins that conservatives regret the loss, congratulate Senator Kerry and focus on 2008.
    5. That the news media shows a modicum of partiality and not declare winners in states that are still too close to call. If the media didn’t declare Gore the winner in Florida too early, we wouldn’t have had the problems we did in 2000.
    6. That the people who say they’ll leave the country if Bush gets re-elected actually leave if he gets re-elected.
    7. This bears repeating. That when we all wake up on November 3rd we have one clear winner, a gracious loser, and citizens who can get on with their lives.

    I know I’m hoping for too much.

  • Osantowski Case Delayed

    Osantowski Case Delayed

    Case delayed for teen accused of making threats against Detroit-area school:

    Judge Linda Davis denied a motion by defense lawyer Brian Legghio to remove herself from the Andrew Osantowski case, following a claim by Legghio that Judge Davis is being swayed by a community outcry. Legghio is going to appeal the decision, which could take 6 to 10 weeks.

    Assistant prosecutor Steven Kaplan claims…

    “It’s a desperate ploy by a guilty defendant to seek to delay the proceedings in an attempt to motivate the witnesses not to return,”

    Legghio defends his decision to appeal…

    “The motion was filed to ensure fairness and judicial integrity,” Legghio said. “It was not a stalling tactic.”

    This has got all the earmarks of a long-drawn-out court case.

  • Kerns charged as an adult

    Kerns charged as an adult

    2 teenagers indicted in Marshfield school plot:

    Both Tobin Kerns and Joseph Nee have been indicted by a grand jury. What’s surprising here is that the 16-year-old Kerns is being charged as an adult. Usually in these cases, if no one was hurt and no weapons were found, the kids are tried as juveniles.

    Locally, we had a situation about a year ago where a kid was drawing up plans to shoot up his school and even had homemade napalm. He only got 12 months probation.

    While I’m all for trying juveniles as adults when the situation warrants it, there are too many unanswered questions swirling around this case to make such a decisive stand as trying Kerns as an adult.

    Either there are facts that I am missing or there is something shady going on. Nee was the one who allegedly brought a gun to school, but Kerns has more charges against him. Again, I’m not saying Tobin Kerns is completely innocent, but the prosecution seems to be going harder on him than on Nee.

    Nee’s lawyer is becoming my favorite comedian…

    Nee’s lawyer, Thomas Drechsler of Boston, said after the indictment was announced that his client is being used as a scapegoat by the Marshfield police.

    ”Joe was promised confidentiality, that he was a witness and not subject of the investigation,” Drechsler said in a telephone interview. ”They used him and got the information, which they were too incompetent to get on their own. They seek to use his own information against him and hold him without bail.”

    Like I said yesterday, if you come forward to the police about a murder plot, that doesn’t make you automatically innocent, especially when it’s your plot. It sounds like Nee was trying to cover his own ass before the shit hit the fan. Unfortunately, for Nee shit splatters.

  • Swastikas in schools

    Swastikas in schools

    Still blind to swastikas in school:

    I’m going to commit an act of lazy blogging here because I really don’t have anything else to add. Anyway, this is from an op-ed piece from The Boston Globe…

    As happy as everyone should be that the plot at Marshfield was stopped, the Globe’s profile of one of the two accused youths was deeply troubling. “This was a boy unafraid of a fight, a boy who once smirked as he wore a swastika-adorned shirt through the halls of Marshfield High School,” the Globe wrote. The boy was also known to have worn a T-shirt that had the date of Columbine and “Remember the Heroes” in German.

    Other students, the Globe wrote, thought the youth was “just posturing.” There was no further information about the wearing of the swastika, which leads to obvious questions. Did his parents know about the swastika, and did it not make them wonder what was in their kid’s head? Did teachers see the swastika and ignore it as a passing adolescent stupidity? Did the students who saw it feel so intimidated that they shrank into a self-defeating code of silence?

    In schools across the nation, principals and superintendents are banning gang colors, which are usually associated with violent African-American and Latino boys. Yet somehow, glorification of Columbine is “just posturing.” Though Columbine and Oklahoma City demonstrated how antiblack and Jewish hate can take out lots of white, non-Jewish folks, perhaps white Americans are still tempted to look the other way at such garb because deep down, they feel the swastika is not meant for them.

    If that double standard is true, then no lesson has been learned. Columbine was scary enough to result in stopping actual violence. It was not scary enough for America to make the fight against racism and anti-Semitism as mandatory as mandatory tests. With so many incidents that echo Klebold and Harris and so little done to stop the reverberation, we dare kids to go from posturing in swastikas to cooking up a massacre.

    Emphasis mine.

    Now here is where I insert the lazy blogger’s credo…Indeed

  • Marshfield Suspect Held For 90 Days

    Marshfield Suspect Held For 90 Days

    Cops detail Marshfield school plot at hearing:

    This is real responsible journalism by the Boston Herald, isn’t it? I can imagine that editorial meeting. “Hey, I got an idea. Let’s print their plans to blow up and shoot up the school in great detail so someone else can come along and improve on their plans.”

    Another thing that’s bothering me, Tobin Kerns is being held without bail but Joseph Nee, son of a Boston cop, is being held for 90 days. Is there some legal argument that I’m missing here? What happens after 90 days? Will Nee be released into his father’s custody?

    Speaking of Nee’s father and his attorney…

    Nee’s attorney, Tom Dreschler, punched holes in the prosecution’s argument, calling Nee the hero for revealing the plot to unsuspecting police. “A young man comes forward and the thanks he gets is the government using his words against him,” Dreschler said, adding, “They say thanks for the memories. ‘We want to lock you up.’”

    Nee’s father, Tom Nee, said he was appalled.

    “I don’t even want to hold a shield given what I saw today,” said the 25-year veteran.

    If you come forward to the police about a murder plot, that doesn’t make you automatically innocent, especially when you’re involved in the plot. Why don’t you want to hold a shield anymore? Is it because the Marshfield police are actually doing their job? Or is it because they won’t turn a blind eye for a fellow police officer? I have the utmost respect for law enforcement, but when they start demanding special treatment for family members who are suspects, then the shield becomes a little more tarnished.

    UPDATE: The Boston Globe is saying that Nee is also being held without bail.

    UPDATE 2.0: From the Worcester Telegram & Gazette

    Nee has pleaded innocent to one count of conspiracy to commit mass murder and one count of promoting anarchy.

    Kerns is being held without bail on eight counts of threatening to commit a crime, two counts of promoting anarchy and one count of attempt to commit a murder.

    If they’re equally culpable, why are the charges so disproportional?

  • More Marshfield News and Views

    More Marshfield News and Views

    Second arrest was warranted:

    Just a couple of more items out of Marshfield…

    During Monday’s arraignment prosecutor John McLaughlin said Nee and Kerns developed a fascination about the incident at Columbine High School and Nee even did a school report on the tragedy. The two formed the group known as NBK – natural born killers in December 2003 to protect those at the high school picked on by popular kids, he said. They later came up with the plot to kill teachers and students, McLaughlin said, noting that a female student told police Nee showed a 40-caliber gun at school and said the school was going to be “shot up.”

    Another student said during a meeting under a bridge in Humarock, Nee tried to recruit him to help lock doors during the planned attack to keep students and staff from escaping and showed the hit list, McLaughlin said. He also said Nee spoke of plans to have people on the roofs with rifles to keep police and fire department responders from getting into the building.

    “The defendant (Nee) is just as dangerous as the individual already arrested,” McLaughlin said.

    According to Kerns, Nee lived in a spare bedroom at his house for about three weeks last May after telling Toby he’d been kicked out of his house and had nowhere to go. Ben Kerns became troubled by the apparent influence Nee had over his own son, convincing him to shave his head, and putting a swastika on the spare bedroom wall. Kerns said that most of the evidence police found against Toby was discovered in the spare bedroom where Nee stayed and likely developed the plot last May.

    Emphasis mine. Let me speculate here for a second. From what I’ve read so far, it sounds like that the Marshfield police went strictly on the word of a policeman’s son. By doing that, they may have possibly put the student’s lives in danger. The school and the police deny the students were ever in danger.

    It’s also starting to sound like to me that Nee was the Eric Harris of the two, and Kerns was a reluctant Klebold. Then when Kerns started to turn his life around, Nee may have been afraid that Kerns would turn him in, so Nee went to the police first. Again, this is all speculation.

    I’ll bring you more as it develops.