Dead Kitties Tell No Tales

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I recently received an e-mail about two teenagers microwaving a kitten to death. Once such an idea or ugly picture is engrained in your mind, it is hard to shake it. I spent several hours researching this story, in an attempt to understand what would cause two teenagers to do such a thing. I would rather believe it to be some sick case of abuse, leaving the poor teenagers so disturbed that they could not help themselves. Anything but believe that a fifteen and thirteen year old could do something so cruel on the own accord.

All my searching produced no results, it turns out the story might be a fake. However, don’t get too happy, there are dozens of such cases from all over the world.

In the UK, there is a woman who was recently jailed for 168 days for microwaving a neighbor’s cat to death. Why did she do it? Because the neighbor reported her boyfriend for physically abusing her, some people don’t deserve help. The judge helped her a little, at least he won’t be beating her for 168 days.

There are several cases of small children who are probably too young to know the difference doing it, children under the age of five or so. It seems to be a pattern that burglars are sometimes microwaving cats while burglarizing homes. Maybe reports of such things being perpetrated by deprived individuals are spurring such copy cat stupidity by teenagers. Who can argue that teenagers are inclined to do stupid things?

A lawyer in Maryland recently microwaved a kitten to death and is using alcoholism and depression as his defense. I say a little jail time might at least cure his alcoholism and the severe case of horse’s butt he’s suffering from. How big are prison microwaves? I’m just asking, don’t take it too serious.

Then you have the closest thing to reality that I could find. A fifteen and sixteen year old in Pennsylvania, placed a kitten in the microwave recently and apparently too stupid to grasp the concept of such complicated technology, threw the microwave and the kitten out a three story window. Being cruel is horrible; being cruel and stupid is simply tragic.

All this brings back one of the horrors of my childhood and one of the most horrible episodes in my book, Informally Educated, which was released as an audio book yesterday, September, 23^rd and is the true story of my growing up in an abusive household.

When I was eight, I had a kitten; I also had three younger siblings who were like stair steps. My step father Jack, had named the kitten the N word, because he was solid black and Jack was solid prejudice. The kitten had gotten into the habit of eating food left on the table overnight, biscuits covered with a rag; that sort of thing. Jack had soaked some left over hamburger patties in hot sauce, the night before. They were left on the table, to teach the kitten a lesson.

We all arrived in the kitchen together that morning, there was the kitten eating a hamburger patty. He would take a bite, and shake his head as he chewed it. Then he would bat the rest around, trying to figure out why it was burning him. He would then go for another bite. We watched for a time and soon started to giggle. It was cute, and we had not yet learned that giggling was tempting or possibly defying fate.

 Suddenly, in one bound Jack was at the table. He scooped up the kitten, wound up like a pitcher and threw him against the wall, which was only the width of the table away. We watched in horror as the kitten literally exploded and fell to the table in a pile of intestines and blood, squirming only briefly before it died.

The poor kitten died on the same plate that contained the hamburger patties. We spent the rest of a nightmarish childhood, eating at that table and never knowing with any certainty, which of us were eating off of the plate the kitten had squirmed to death on. To this day I rarely eat at the dinner table. In our home, the table, our bedrooms and Christmas mornings were the main ingredients of our lifelong nightmares.

There are many lessons learned from a kitty, and not all of them are pretty.

The March of the Morons

You know, I try to be careful and not alienate those who might help in the fight against child abuse. Sometimes I just can’t sit still. This idiot at Penn State, just keeps on dancing and those around and above him are his doe-see-doe buddies. If I had it my way, some if not all of them would dance on the end of a rope, it might not stop it, but it would slow it down.
It’s bad enough that Sandusky has been running around sexually abusing boys for decades. It’s worse that he started a national charity, Second Mile, as some sick farm team for his perverted pleasures. It’s bad that head coach Paterno danced around this issue, it’s worse that those above him danced even longer. These allegations started back in 1998, Sandusky retired in 1999, but continued to use his power and privilege at Penn State to molest boys for at least ten more years.
Dancing with pedophiles is a dangerous business and not just for innocent children. This has already ruined the careers and good names of the head coach, the president of the university, the athletic director and the senior vice president of finance. Not to mention the CEO of Second Mile has resigned. Oh and we must not forget the problems this is causing poor old Sandusky, sticking him in a cell with a bunch of prisoners who are survivors of sexual abuse, gets my vote.
It’s bad that so many ignored what was happening for so long. It’s worse that the more they dig the more they find, it’s always that way when you’re dealing with pedophiles. It’s bad that when I speak on child abuse, people get upset, thinking I’m about to tell them how to discipline their children. It’s worse that people don’t know the difference between discipline and beating a five year old to death. I really don’t think it’s that tough to tell the difference between the two and I shouldn’t have to keep trying to explain it go good caring citizens.
It’s bad what has happened to all these innocent children, do you think the fact that their abuser was famous will make a difference, it will not? It’s worse that when the announcement was made that the president and head coach of Penn, State would be terminated immediately, the students rioted. Penn State is a shining example of the problem and perfectly mirrors what is going on in our society today. Abuse the elderly and the young, but you best not get caught abusing a dog. The morons are marching, the parade is headed to Hell and the country is following along behind waving little banners and American flags.

Guest blogger William G Jones

Kennesaw handed over the reigns of his blog to me today. I’m not quite sure why, but I figure I should make the most of it. I’m William G. Jones, and I wrote a little book called Driving to BelAir. It’s a story about brothers, an ex-fiance, and a poodle all on a road trip in a ’56 Chevy. People keep telling me it reads like a Lifetime movie. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. But they really seem to like it.

I’m a big car buff and drive a black ’57 Chevy quite often. I also have a toy poodle, a little dog hat’s become my little buddy. Both the car and the dog had a heavy influence on me writing my book.

A couple of days ago, I got my hands on a Kindle Fire, and I’m super excited about it. I’ve had a third-generation Kindle for nearly a year now, and I love it. I read more on the Kindle than I ever read traditional books. The Fire, though, isn’t about reading. It’s more of a tablet computer. I bought it hoping to take some of the wear and tear off my MacBook Pro, which I use extensively in my day job doing graphic design and video editing for various clients.

Contrary to the hype that’s been swirling around the media, the Kindle Fire is no real competition to the iPad, except in the sense that many people (including myself) lump all tablets into one big category the same way some people (not me) lump all laptops into one category. By way of comparison, the iPad 2 is like a powerful and complex DSLR camera compared to the Kindle Fire as a point-and-shoot. For most people, I’d imagine, the Kindle Fire is more than enough to get the job done.

It’s obvious to me that Amazon took a page out of the Steve Jobs book of design. The Kindle Fire looks incredibly smooth. It feels incredibly solid.

Because there’s only 6.5 GB of internal storage (1.5 GB is used for the operating system), managing content on the device will be a challenge for some users. The Kindle Fire is likely not a device you’ll load up with movies and music and take on vacation. You’ll be able to get some movies onto the device to watch on, say, an airplane, or while riding shotgun in the car, but mostly this is a device you’ll use at the hotel to check email and surf the web, or a device you’ll take to Starbucks or McDonalds or Panara Bread to use in-store wifi. I have the sense that most Kindle Fires will find a place on the coffee table in their users’ homes, ready to grab for a quick web browsing session or to look up prices on some need-it-now items and little more.

The worst that I can say about the Fire, aside from a few glitches with the touch screen not registering the touch I wanted, is that my dog is insanely jealous of the device. I love my dog, so I’m having to put it away more than I want just to make the pooch happy.

I do recommend the Fire for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that my book, Driving to BelAir, is available on it. It’s also available for nook, and at Smashwords for just about any eReader on the market.

Thanks for hosting me, Kennesaw, and I hope your readers will check out a sample of my book!
www.williamgjones.com