A Million Angry Kooks

Our daily newspaper, like many papers, allows reader comments on stories in the online edition. Unfortunately, on many stories they have had to disallow this feature because of the tenor of comments. It is pure hatred. Any story that reports a negative event, be it a crime or even an accident, will unleash a flood of vicious comments, if it contains a Spanish surname or the words illegal entrant. There is a cadre of posters who live to rail against illegal entrants. Even stories about bodies found in the desert used to be greeted with nastiness from these people. So the paper has had to muzzle them. It must be a hard decision for a newspaper to be the censor. And it's not just the illegal alien stories that raise the ire of this bunch. The parents of a teenage boy who was killed while riding his bike, were castigated for not being better parents. People who a lucky enough to not experience the tragedy of losing a child, often mistake their good fortune for good parenting. So, the paper has had to resort to limiting comments on stories they think might attract the attention of these ignoramuses. It's kind of a sad commentary on civility. In other news, my pal Sneedlet One came over for the day. The poor guy was sick to his stomach this morning and slept for quite awhile. Right after puking on a chair. I don't know if this is residual from his virus or more of it. By this afternoon he seemed to be a bit better and we ran a couple of errands. I got another reminder that I am getting old today. I take two medications on an ongoing basis. Normally, I get them filled at Walgreens, and they cost me $25 each per month. My insurance has a $25 copay for drugs. I got something from my health insurance carrier reminding me that I can get a 90-day supply of these drugs by mail order for a $50 copay for each one. That means my $50 monthly cost goes down to $33.33. That's a lot to a guy on a fixed income. I think when you begin to order drugs via the mail, you have official reached the top of the hill and have one foot over it. Geez, I used to make fun of my old dad for the same thing. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky