With loads of famous people dropping dead this week — folks from a variety of cultural spheres — I felt it was high time I raised an all-purpose glass, in general, to the individuals who inhabit the personas that we call… “celebrities”.

Here’s a shout to the eternally fly, and a toast to those suspended in time.

Sorry you lost your lives, celebrities — you were probably pretty fond of living. Still, with your current selves out of the way, we can now focus on remembering your heyday. You were the greatest! Before we were forced to listen to those unfortunate details of your lives… all that stuff about your disease, financial ruin, and tragically broken soul.

Now we can finally move on to what was really important — what your lives meant to us!

Remember in 2nd grade, when everybody loved “Thriller” and tried to moonwalk? Oh yeah, I loved that, that was the shit y’all!!! Remember 1979 when I went to sleep every night with Farrah over my bed — that poster alone catapulted me through puberty! Remember I bought all those magazines because I got that letter from Ed McMahon that said I may have already won $10,000,000! Man, if I only I had the winning number, I could have won! Aw damn, OxiClean, hell yeah, remember last year, the time I was hung over and I woke up and that guy was on TV yelling at me about OxiClean and the TV was turned up super-loud and I said it gave me a headache! Oh man, that was hilarious!!! I loved that guy!!!

A Summary of Metro Alerts After the Crash - Get There - Washington Post

“7:01 p.m.: WMATA Alert: (ID 55699) Disruption at Fort Totten. Trains are turning back at Rhode Island Ave & Silver Spring due to a train experiencing mechanical difficulties outside of Ft. Totten. Shuttle service has been established.”

Pathetic, lying, non-human sacks of excrement — from management to the person who actually typed these messages. Two hours after a collision with confirmed deaths and they were still calling it “mechanical difficulties!”

Coincidentally, I posted a joke on twitter yesterday morning about the absurd linguistic constructions that pervade the Metro system — unlike London’s Tube, by the way. Truly, the entire Metro system is awash in euphemism.

I do not think it is a stretch to wonder if WMATA management felt better with their decision to forego that train’s brake job and not implement NTSB safety recommendations thanks to some soft, euphemistic bullshit bingo perpetrated in some management meeting. Did the habit of routinely LYING to riders about train delay TRIVIALITIES permeate the agency, to the point where it killed? At the least, it delayed first responders from ringing the 3-alarm bell for a few minutes.

Yesterday, while all this was going on, I sat calmly waiting in a stopped train at Union Station, still hoping to make it to a softball doubleheader. Our train operator made intercom announcements that there was a delay ahead on the line. A few minutes later, she said it was likely trains would be turned around. She repeatedly said she would give us more information as soon as she had it, and I believed her. However, I felt I could hear in her voice that something serious had occurred. My guess is her inflection of worry came from her own suspicion about the information central Metro control was broadcasting — from her own parsing of the euphemism within the environment of limited communication in which she works daily.

Metro has legitimate funding problems. I will save for later the details of my fuck you very much for those ideologues who think that “starving” every publicly funded resource in this country is a wonderful idea.

However, it costs relatively little to maintain effective communication and contingency plans. And the truth — in this case, honest alerts to riders and the general public that there was a “major accident” or better yet “train collision” — is free.

In his recent article, Dan Froomkin deftly reduced these Inquisition-era pro-torture arguments to a quivering bowl of jelly — with proper framing, reason, and facts — no “tortured logic” required.

Krauthammer’s Asterisks - White House Watch - Washington Post

Charles Krauthammer, in his Washington Post opinion column this morning, tries to find loopholes for impermissible evil.

“Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances,” he writes.

“The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.”

Actually, no. The ticking time bomb scenario only exists in two places: On TV and in the dark fantasies of power-crazed and morally deficient authoritarians. In real life, things are never that certain. And trained interrogators say that even in the most extreme circumstances, traditional methods are the most effective.

Metro made an announcement yesterday afternoon asking riders to report anything out of the ordinary.

Feeling moved to do my part, I immediately called and told them about the suspicious behavior I had just witnessed on the red line at Gallery Place. When the train stopped and the door opened, people ACTUALLY MOVED TO THE CENTER OF THE CAR to let others get on!

The economic royalists will never catch the pitchfork in the 2K9. What would we the people do without our heroes?