an article in the newspaper, originally 6/13/06

there has been a lot of talk in the media about school violence reports in NY state.  well, there is a map of long island school districts in the middle of section A of today's LI Newsday.  each district is color coded, depending on the number of violent offenses per 1000 students in schools.  that's just what we need, another color-coding system, especially since the terror color-coding system has worked so well for us.  i can't come up with an original joke about color-coding, so i refer you to lewis black's rant about national security from his 1st HBO special or his "rules of enragement" album.  as lewis black would say, "it's cracker-jack material".

anyways, i'm getting off track.  in today's newsday map, there are 5 subdivisions/shades of the color red:  peach, sizzlin' hot pink, red, brown, and dark brown.  districts colored in peach had the lowest number of offenses/1000 kids while the districts in dark brown had the highest number of offenses/1000 kids.  if that doesn't grab your attention, let me reword it in simpler terms:  the districts with the least # of offenses were light-colored and the districts with the most # of offenses were dark-colored.  the makers of this map must have a very sick sense of humor.  these soon-to-be-world-renowned-cartographers may have been secretly implying "place your arm next to your school district.  chances are that they're the same color!"  why couldn't they have picked blue?  or green?  or a combination of colors, like mauve next to seafoam, or something pretty like that?

oh my god...let me compose myself...ok.  i was just trying to do a yahoo image search of the map in question.  i typed in "school violence long island".  one of the image results is a very bad picture involving an animal (i've edited this because some people might be squeemish).  believe me, i am not clever enough to make this up, that is actually one of the search results.  all i wanted was a picture of a map.  god, now i feel bad for any high school kid who has to research this topic in their social studies class and is looking for pictures.  i can imagine some poor kid doing a related project with his best friend.  "hey billy, you wanna see how our school ranks in the...JESUS CHRIST!!!"  i have no idea what that has to do with school violence.  i'm a little afraid, but now i'm going to try a google search for the same thing...ok, good, no sick images.  unfortunately no map, either.

well, this has been an interesting rant.  i started with a possibly racist map and ended up with an unrelated picture.  the moral of the story...use google.  i see my new apartment tomorrow.  until next time, snootchie bootchies.

(update, 7/23)
the most discrete way to describe the aforementioned picture is that it deals with the same thing that happened with the donkey in "clerks 2".  let that image stew around in your head for a while, then try going to sleep.