Strange Times

I admit my blog is in a bit of a rut: when I'm not posting papers no one cares about it seems like I'm always talking about on-line communication and pointing out how surreal these times are. Yet, I continue to be astounded. I spent a few minutes at Kevin Ray Underwood's blog: futureworldruler.blogspot.com. This guy was arrested in Oklahoma and charged with killing a young girl. There are more gruesome details I won't get into here, but if you need the full story of how sick this guy is you can do a google news search on his name.

For the last three years he's been keeping a blog on blogger.com. At what point in history could we actually read the open diary of a psychopath? I guess it's not totally unprecedented: de Sade kept a diary and Hitler wrote an autobiography. Still, what is unprecedented is the unfiltered, unedited aspect of a blog, particularly the mundanity. The day after committing a heinous murder, this guy was actually linking to an article about fossils.

It's interesting that media reports portrayed Underwood as a bored antisocial loser. His blog indicates that even if he didn't get out much, he had an active intellectual life with plenty of interests. It makes me think that the cause of his criminality isn't so much environmental reasons as it is biological. He blogged about not taking his medication and struggling with "dangerously weird" fantasies.

Media reports also mentioned that he joked about cannabilism on his blog. One even mentioned that he posted a question about cannabilism on his profile. Strangely enough, he didn't actually post the question. Blogger.com picks random questions for your profile, and that is the one he ended up with. It's just another sign that these are strange times-- we've always had murderers and even cannibals, but for a real life cannibal to intersect with the pop culture-filtered post-Hannibal Lecter-esque world of cannibal humour-- this is just too much for my mind to wrap itself around.