When is twittering in bad taste? It depends.

Yes, it’s a debatable subject. The crux of the stroy is based upon a tragic death:

“Rocky Mountain News reporter Berny Morson covered the Wednesday funeral of Marten Kudlis, who died last week when a pickup truck careered into a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop in Aurora, Colo. But instead of waiting until after the memorial service to publish a story, Morson sent real-time updates from his cell phone to the Rocky Mountain News’ Web site using a micro-blogging service called Twitter…” Read full stroy.

Here are some debatable entries– this view , for example, that it is appropriate (when not done for ghoulish reasons), and this view that it is a misguided media experiment.

Why would a reporter “twitter” such a story? From what I’ve read there was a point to be driven home, and he wanted to dramatise it with a description of the grief surrounding the boy’s family as it unfolded. The point being that the “driver who killed several people, including the young boy, was an illegal alien with a long arrest recrod who never even had a driver’s license. “Colorado is supposed to have some of the toughest immigration laws in the country. Yet an illegal immigrant managed to be arrested nearly 20 times over the past five years and remain free until he allegedly caused a car crash last week that killed two innocent women and a toddler…” Read full story.

I believe the point the reporter was driving home was this, that though of course the boy’s death would be horrible no matter who was responsible, the fact is that this particular case would not have come about if the law had be upheld and followed through at least one time during those 20 arrests.

When grief rises to the–branches

I love trees too but, er… well, this is ridiculous.

This is the Earth First group; Though they’re radical enviornmentalists–anti capitalists, etc– I haven’t read where they’re into violent confrontations or arson or spiking (though I’m not entirely sure) as are some other such groups. I mean what they’re doing here, though silly, is more in line with New Age reclamation religious acculturation (huh?).

Here’s some related material: The last tree sitter comes down.

Scanning “mourning and melancholia” with an fMRI machine

Now it’s medically official: “The dead never quite leave us; they return in dreams and reveries, they inhabit the pictures on our walls and lurk in our cell phones and disk drives…Every day you’re experiencing yearning for the deceased, looking for them in a crowd, or expecting them to come home.” Continue reading article.