Facie’s Ramblings

Before I launch into some random thoughts, I first wanted to make a push for the latest Calamityware project on Kickstarter, the Classy Curse Kit . Each element of the Classy Curse Kit includes a colorful and typographically refined, all-purpose curse in a socially acceptable form—the euphemism graphic ($%*?&!, which starts off with a lightening bolt). The kit contains 2 mugs, 2 decals, 12 note cards, and 12 calling cards with customizable Banner-Hulk scale. I really hope it funds, because I look forward to raising my coffee mug during boring meetings where someone says something annoying. I especially want to place the decal on the back of my car with all the jagoff drivers in and around the Burgh. And it would be pretty nice to slip a calling card with a personal, pointed note underneath the windshield of a car that parked stupidly. If you are like some of my friends and most of my coworkers, $48 may be a bit steep. But I encourage you to talk to a friend and split the kit....

For the second Sunday in three, during the "Prayers of the Faithful" at mass, we prayed for victims of something. Two weeks ago, it was the Paris attack. Today it was for the shooting in San Bernadino. Each time, I find my eyes welling with tears. When will it stop? Pretty sure not in my lifetime, unfortunately. As with so many other arguments, I get both sides of the gun debate. But at this point, shouldn't we at least try to have stricter gun control? A gun can kill. I don't think it should be a big deal if someone has to wait in line for a couple of hours, take some tests (like a driver's license), and have their background looked into. As I write this, I think it is pretty clear that I have no idea what is involved in getting a gun. I realize my suggestion would make buying a gun at a gun show a little challenging and maybe impossible, but whatever we are doing now is not working. I also don't understand (and I have said this before, in this very blo...

Many people have blogged, tweeted, and commented on Facebook about the horrific bomb explosion at the Boston Marathon and the subsequent days-long manhunt, which included gunfire exchange and additional deaths. Mercifully and thankfully the tragic saga now appears to be over, at least the scariest part. Because there is so much information and misinformation out there, I won't bother to weigh in on the specifics. I don't think I can add anything new or insightful anyway. I do, however, want to respond to people who feel the word is a dangerous, sad place. You are correct; there is really no denying that the world is hardly all sunshine and lollipops. And I think I can speak for the majority of people around my age by saying that "back in the day" we did not have to worry about someone shooting up many people in a school, a movie theater, or at some event, or setting off an IED and injuring scores of people at a sporting event. (Of course I grew up in a small town,...

While on Facebook this morning, I noticed that WTAE-TV Pittsburgh posted a video reporting about a massive brawl that occurred among local high school students and some parents/adults near a school bus stop after school yesterday. At one point there were as many as five different fights going on. Naturally, someone took the video and posted it to You Tube, because that seems to be a requirement anymore anytime something violent happens. Apparently, there were two different videos posted; a brawl actually happened two days in a row. WTAE posted a few snippets of the fights, blurring out the people since some are minors. If you want to view the video, you can find it on the station's website or Facebook page. I am guessing the complete videos, with full-on fighting are still on You Tube. I, however, have little interest in watching the savagery of people anymore than what I already witnessed. And, quite frankly, it is stretch for me to call these fighters "people." As I...

I have been trying to come up with something to say about the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday. But even though I can normally "write" a coherent, meaningful post in my head, this topic has not allowed my brain to do that; my thoughts are all over the place. Even worse, this tragedy came about 12 hours after the mother of one of J's classmates died, so I was already sad. So I am pretty much just going to do a free-write, and we'll see what happens. One of my first reactions when I read about the shooting was the schools are supposed to be a safe place. If you read my last post, which I wrote about an hour before I heard about the shootings, I said school was the one place that I did not worry about when leaving my kid. You know what, after my initial shock and sadness, I still feel that way. I have also written about how I sometimes think about how easy it would be for a deranged person to walk into the church where I attend daily mass. Wh...

After my last gun-related post, you might think I would try for something more light-hearted. But, alas, you would be wrong. In the news around here lately have been a few somewhat-related subjects, at least to me. I have mentioned one topic before, the Western Psych shooting. Recently, things have come out that suggest the shooter was disturbed enough that something should have been done before the shooting ever occurred. Among other things, he went to UPMC Shadyside with a baseball bat twice in 10 days to threaten employees. But yet no one thought to call the police or refer him for a mental health evaluation. Did the employees just not take it seriously? Did it fall through the cracks? On the other hand, there are the oft-occurring-as-of-late bomb threat s on Pitt's campus, particularly at the Cathedral of Learning. Every time someone calls in or somewhere scrawls a threat, the police take action, which means everyone has to evacuate the building(s) while the building is ...

I am unsure how many times in my life I have questioned why people do the things they do. I have probably done it in this blog a half dozen times or more. I know I wrestle with this at least weekly. I get that people have free will. Any one of us can decide on any given day, hour, or minute whether we are going to do something good or something bad. Something that will help others or something that will hurt others. Something that is "right" and something that is oh-so-wrong. I realize that most of us don't generally do really good or really bad things; we just live our lives. Sometimes we perform a random act of kindness and we are hopefully mostly nice to our family and friends. Other times we say something unkind, are not truthful, and do things we probably should not. But the truth is, I grapple with those little wrongdoings as much as I struggle to wrap my head around the really heinous things people do. Yesterday a man walked into Western Psych, a hospital/ins...

I am not sure when exactly I started doing this, but for quite some time, I have pretty much refused to go anywhere without my cell phone. Not because I am afraid I will miss a call. Not because I am dependent on my phone (considering my phone is stupid, how could I be?). No, I want to have my phone with me at all times, including church, because you just never know. I don't consider myself particularly morbid, and more often than not, I am optimistic. But thanks to the information age, I can know, fairly easily and quickly, every time something bad happens. And although I don't think the world is a lot worse today than it was when I was a youngster, I think people feel more entitled, parenting has become lax, and some other things that I just cannot comprehend. But the end result is that although I don't obsess about something bad happening, I know that it can, and I want to be prepared. A little over a month ago, I started attending daily mass three or four days a ...

If you live around the Burgh, you have probably heard by now that some idiot apparently shot himself on Light-Up Night (as an aside, apparently there is no hyphen in the official Light-Up Night moniker, but I am choosing to put one in anyway). I had wanted to take Jordan to that event, but Brian thought it was too dangerous. I scoffed at that, but relented to his wishes, as much for the all the traffic as for anything else. It turns out he was kind of right. However, since Light-Up Night was actually a two-day event this year, I decided that we would go to the second day, during the afternoon. I was not about to let a little shooting and some fights stop me from heading downtown. Any time I read about what I consider an isolated incident at a place I would normally go to (or at least would considering going to), I make it a point to get right back on the horse or to try it out if I had never been there before. When there was a shooting at Boyce Park this summer, hours after we had...