Stickybuffalo.com

I check Yahoo mail a couple of times a day, and their splash screen links five or so AP headlines that seem to change throughout the day. For the last several days, there has always been at least one story up about the grad student who was murdered at Yale. Yesterday, there was also a story about a criminally insane murderer who escaped from his asylum day-trip to a county fair, and that he’s still at large. In a normal world, that would be fucking huge news, since an actual danger exists (he was believed to be heading toward his family, who were uniformly puzzled why he was allowed to go on the trip), and since it seems so much like a horror movie. Instead, the focus of the story was procedural: how such a person could end up at a county fair in the first place. The AP’s story, in other words, wasn’t that a crazy murderer was on the loose, but that the gubmint has failed yet again.

And, of course, that story is already down the memory hole, and there’s nothing about it on Yahoo today. After all, the woman the escapee killed was elderly, and we all know that it’s not news unless the victim was young and pretty.