A: Watch last night's Frontline -- or as Videogum calls it, "That Amazing Frontline Everyone's Talking About".
You better go watch it before everyone makes fun of you.
Hint: Not like a tsunami.
A: I really enjoy Facebook's sponsored polls, for their delightful combination of the unscientific and the idiotic. Except for today's, which is riveting.
Sponsored by Durex, presumably.
Still, I'm sort of confused because my answer, "Getting syphilis," isn't even offered. So I'm sponsoring my own poll, right here on the T.A.M.S.Y. sidebar. Remember to come back Monday for the results!
(OH GOD!!!, that's exactly what Planned Parenthood says in all my night terrors.)
A: It's still early, and there's plenty of 2007 left to be infuriated by, but I doubt you'll come across a story more absurdly, pointlessly horrible than that of Genarlow Wilson, the African-American former honor student currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for having received a blow job from a 15-year-old when he was 17.
No, you didn't misread that. Wilson's been in prison two years already.
Journalist Wright Thompson has the whole story, currently parked front and center on ESPN.com (and getting the bejeezus dugg out of it on Digg -- for the second time in as many months). Read it and weep.
It's about time this story is drumming up the attention/indignation it deserves, and you have to believe/hope something will be done to grant Wilson his freedom, and soon. But until that day, all the coverage in the world can't possibly provide due consolation for a young man so ruthlessly hijacked by the justice system.
RELATED: I first discovered the Genarlow Wilson story last month in the New York Times, via this tangentially related Daniel Radosh post on the fascinating complexities of kiddie porn laws.
I've been meaning to bring these topics over to T.A.M.S.Y., but they're such a Pandora's box can of worms (see: the crazed long-windedness of my response to Radosh) that I kept putting it off. Misguided sex laws drive me absolutely insane. Now that I've brought this up, expect me to never shut up about it ever again.
A: While researching random-number generators government statistics on drug use/production, I came across some useful information for those among you who are hungry for meth1:
WASHINGTON, D.C.--Today, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced that, as a free public service, DEA’s webpage (www.dea.gov) will post locations in each state where known methamphetamine clandestine labs blah blah blah I stopped reading after this part.So yeah, I didn't get through the whole press release, but it's safe to assume that it's like the Gawker Stalker map, except instead of detailing where Brittany Murphy partied last night, it shows you which neighborhoods have the hottest meth.
"In a cruel twist of fate, people who have never used or manufactured meth have become some of its hardest hit victims after unknowingly buying property contaminated by chemicals and waste generated from a meth lab," said DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy.Say, that is a cruel twist of fate. You know what's even a crueler twist of fate, though, is what happens to some of meth's other hardest hit victims: meth addicts. Because of how, you know, they try meth and then have their lives ruined by addiction to meth. And how their faces fall off and they die, or they're arrested by the DEA and subjected to constant beatings and rape in the badly mismanaged US prison system. I'm not sure what my point here is, aside from that existence is horrible, and that you should not try meth.
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