Web surfing isn’t a firable offense? When, exactly, did we become France?

I realize this ruling pertains to a city government, which is slightly different from a private business, but goofing off on the job seems like a textbook example of a valid reason to fire someone, if you’ve given them warnings.

That might seem hypocritical of me. I get my work done, but there are occasions that I check out the news online. However, I understand that my employer has every right to fire me for that if they wish. Heck, if they want to fire me because they don’t like my new glasses, they could do that, too — that’s the whole point to at-will employment, isn’t it?

Another weird aspect to this whole thing is that he wasn’t, as near as I can tell, fired for actual internet use, though he’d been warned about that by supervisors in the past.

The ruling came after Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a worker in the city’s legislative office in Albany earlier this year after he saw the man playing a game of solitaire on his computer.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he went to some website to play solitaire because the city removed solitaire from all of their PCs, but it seems much more likely that he was playing solitaire without any use of the internet at all.

I have to ask… if Mayor Bloomberg had walked in, and the guy had been playing solitaire with real cards on his desk and gotten himself fired for that, would he still be fighting this? Would he have a shot at winning? Would it be news?

I have to say, I know that I just got back from vacation, but I find this very tempting.

By this point, everyone’s heard of Kevin Underwood, the blogger (his blog can be found here) who murdered 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin. (More on Underwood and his blog can be found here.)

It’s a horrifying story, and I’ve found that it’s almost impossible to tear myself away from Underwood’s blog. Underwood isn’t the first murderer to leave behind a collection of writings. Heck, he’s not even the first blogger to commit murder. Joseph Edward Duncan III kept a weblog called Blogging The Fifth Nail. But where The Fifth Nail gives a glimpse into a man whose mind seems truly alien, Underwood’s Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K is fairly common fare for the blogosphere. Underwood presents himself as “Single, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy.” He posts links to news articles he thinks are worthy of note (mostly without comment), and talks quite a bit about his personal life.

Some people have been saying that his friends and neighbors should have seen the warning signs. I find it reprehensible that people would blame this man’s friends and family for missing (or, worse, ignoring his cries for help. The friends he mentions on a regular basis — Chris, Alicia, Melissa — I can’t begin to imagine what this sort of news would do them. To then have to face persecution from strangers who have nothing better to do than to blame you for “missing the warning signs” is just adding insult to injury. The likelihood that they or anyone who knows them would ever come across this post is virtually nonexistent, but I’d still just like to toss this out there.

Even more interesting, I’ve yet to see any of these people with 20/20 hindsight give any detailed mention of what those “warning signs” were. He wrote some things that now seem a bit disturbing, I’ll grant you, but I seriously believe that if you took any blog that had a couple of years of entries, and told someone “the writer of this blog kidnapped and murdered a young girl,” they’d find “disturbing” posts. He also played video games (*gasp*), a fact that’s not been played out to the extent that I would have assumed, but this is still a recent development. I’m sure video games will get their share of the blame soon.

Are these the warning signs that his friends were supposed to have seen? Lame jokes about cannibalism (apparently not spontaneous, but prompted by a weird profile question from Blogger)? Slightly ominous and/or bizarre posts on an online journal? Video games? Loneliness? Not getting out to socialize much? Voting Democrat? Though I’ll concede that the last one is probably cause for an immediate intervention, most of these things are true of a huge percentage of people in general, far too many to be reliable as “warning signs.”

Honestly, I think that it’s far too easy to place blame in these sorts of situations, to jump to the conclusion that someone must have been able to do something to save Jamie Bolin. We want to believe that Kevin’s monstrosity was always present, and it must have been obvious, but the people around him were either incapable or unwilling to see it and do something about it. We’d like to be able to think that people who would do this sort of thing are easily identifiable because the alternative, that sometimes, very, very dangerous people are able to blend in with the rest of us without arousing any serious suspicion from the people around him, is terrifying.

Unfortunately, it’s also true. John Bradford reportedly said, as he watched several criminals being led to their execution, “there, but for the grace of God, [go I]” (Bradford said “goes John Bradford”, but the more common ending makes it more universal). I think that’s very much true in these sorts of cases. Kevin Underwood was a disturbed young man who slowly slipped beyond “disturbed” into something far worse, but he did so without making his descent obvious to his friends and family. While I don’t want to go so far as to say it could have been anyone, I think that the difference between Kevin Underwood and most other human beings is far less than what we’d like to believe.

In the end, reading Kevin’s blog, I feel sorry for the man he once was, but that doesn’t change the fact that the man that he’s become is a monster. Kevin is to blame for what he did, and he fully deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Just don’t spread the blame to his friends and family. This is, no doubt, hard enough for them already.

Dave Ryan, at Foreign Perspective the Ramblings of a College Freshman thinks he’s discovered a plot by the Easter Bunny to attack the President.

I’m afraid Dave’s misinterpreting the evidence, though.

If you listen to the left, President Bush is a drunken psychotic who’s hellbent on destroying the entire world. Pookas are fond of crackpots and rumpots (and how are you, Mr. Wilson?), after all, so it’s obvious that this is a rare photo of Harvey, who is the real mastermind behind President Bush’s political career.

It all makes sense now, doesn’t it?

[Update: Please note that the preceding was not intended as an attack on Dave. I recognized that the Easter Bunny attacking Bush was intended as a joke, and since that joke and my Harvey joke couldn't both be true, I phrased mine as a "correction" on his. Sine I followed it with "if you listen to the left", I see how he misinterpreted it as me labelling him a leftist, but I truly didn't intend any such thing. The Harvey joke required me to compare Bush to a crackpot/rumpot, and I simply wanted to make it clear that, despite my problems with him as President, I didn't really believe him to be either of those things.

I apologize for any confusion/insult that this post may have caused.]

The Gazz’s Rudy Panucci, who writes PopCult, and who attended CAB4, writes that his mother passed away Saturday Morning.

He has my sympathies, and my prayers.