Fresh Hare / All This and Rabbit Stew

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Some days, it’s really surprising what you can get for a dollar. Prairie’s long been a dollar store shopper, as it’s a convenient and cheap way to pick up little bits and pieces for around the home. Last Christmas as part of my stack of presents, she picked up a good-sized stack of dollar store DVDs. None of this is high-quality stuff, but that’s not really the point: it’s fun stuff. Old, bad movies make up a lot of it (we had fun watching The Lady and the Highwayman, an old TV movie featuring Hugh Grant in a mullet), but she also picked up a lot of compilations of old cartoons: Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, and quite a few others.

A couple of nights ago, we popped in Cartoon Craze presents: Bugs Bunny: Falling Hare, mostly a collection of Bugs Bunny cartoons, with a few other non-Bugs cartoons as well, and settled back for a fun evening of cartoon silliness.

What we didn’t expect to discover was that two of the cartoons on the disc are shorts that have been either edited or outright banned for many years due to racist content. They’re fascinating from a historical context, and I actually think it’s kind of neat to have them and be able to see them — but man was it a surprise when we weren’t expecting them to pop up!

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2006 Emerald City Comicon

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I spent a few hours wandering around this years’ Emerald City ComiCon today. Most of the pictures I’ve posted to Flickr are of the costume contest, but there’s quite a few from my wanders through the showcase floor as well.

Two things definitely stood out as I made my rounds.

Jetfire, Emerald City ComiCon 2006, Seattle, WAFirst was coming across what appeared to be a mint condition, still in the box version of Jetfire, my all-time favorite Transformer toy. Probably only as good as it was because it was a pretty direct rip-off of the Robotech Valkyrie, but I never cared. I’d have loved to have grabbed this, but at $225, it was a bit out of my reach.

Shel Silverstein's Different Dances, Emerald City ComiCon 2006, Seattle, WAThe second find was a copy of Shel Silverstein‘s ‘Different Dances‘, which I’d never heard of before. It’s definitely not one of the kids’ books that Shel is most famous for, as I quickly discovered when I started flipping through it and immediately found a four-page spread titled “The Deadly Weapon” (pages one and two, pages three and four, both Not Safe For Work if cartoon drawings of naked people fall into that category). While I couldn’t afford the $125 that the book was priced at, it turns out that Xebeth might have a copy that she could send my way. Neat!

The rest of the Con was pretty much as to be expected, with the usual Stormtroopers, Jedi, and other assorted oddities wandering around. Not at all a bad way to kill a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.

Saturday Mourning

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At about 3:30 Saturday morning, as the rave at Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC) was winding down, the young people who lived at 2112 East Republican Street scanned the dance floor for people they could invite to their afterparty. They made a habit of welcoming strangers—it’s how they had all met one another in the first place. They had almost finished with the invitations when Jeremy Martin, 26, spotted a hulking, solitary figure.

“Go ask him,” Jeremy said to his best friend, Anthony Moulton.

Another person who lived at the home, 24-year-old Jesiah Martin (no relation to Jeremy), remembers having seen the man that night—conspicuous not just for his 6’5″ 280-pound frame but for the fact that he wasn’t dressed up or dancing. “He was by himself mostly, fly on the wall style,” said Jesiah.

Anthony, who is disarmingly goofy in the way of most in their group, approached the man and said, “Do you know the difference between Scotch and beer?” Most at the party were drinking beer, but Anthony handed the man a flask full of Macallan. The man took a swig and grimaced. But he liked it. He even smiled, leading Anthony to say, “Hey, what are you doing after this? We have half a keg at our place…”

And that is how Kyle Huff came to visit the house on East Republican Street.

I’ve mentioned before that The Stranger has been consistently doing the best reporting on the Capitol Hill shooting. They continue with this feature story on the events of the night.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

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Aaron Kyle Huff's weaponry (photo (c)2006 Greg Gilbert/The Seattle Times)

  • A semi-automatic assault rifle.
  • A pistol-grip shotgun.
  • An aluminum baseball bat.
  • A machete.
  • Over 300 rounds of ammunition.

All but the shotgun were recovered from Aaron Kyle Huff’s truck after the massacre on Capitol Hill; the shotgun is one similar to the one Huff used during the shooting. Not pictured is Huff’s semi-automatic handgun, also used in the attack.

All legal to own.

For God’s sake, why?!?

NRA members and “right to bear arms” wingnuts, feel free to brand me as a gun-control nut. I’m fine with that.

There is NO good reason why this sort of weaponry (specifically, the assault rifle and pistol-grip pump action shotgun…obviously, it’s a bit hard to get worked up over a baseball bat, and while I personally find a two foot machete pretty damn creepy, it’s nowhere near the same league as the guns) needs to be openly available to the general public. You want to hunt? Fine, hunt. Buy a hunting rifle and go slaughter as many deer as you want. But this kind of stuff?

Seattle Chief of Police Gil Kerlikowske has it right:

As many as 30 people were in the house when the man approached, draped in bandoliers of ammunition and armed with a handgun and a pistol-grip, 12-gauge shotgun — a weapon Kerlikowske pointedly said was “not for hunting purposes, but for hunting people.”

What actually happened was bad enough. It makes me ill to consider what could have happened if a police officer hadn’t been in the area and on the scene after only five minutes of shooting.

Close to Home

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When Prairie came home last night, there were a couple police cars in our parking lot, along with a couple of large black SUVs. She wasn’t sure why they were there, but after an hour of them sitting in our parking lot, she got a little nervous and decided to come up and wander the mall until I got off of work.

Today, as more news about Saturday’s shooting in Capitol Hill was released, we found out why they were here.

A Seattle Police SWAT team and bomb squad raided a North Seattle apartment Saturday night looking for evidence that neighbors say is tied to the shooting on Capitol Hill that morning which left seven dead.

KOMO 4 News has learned that inside the apartment, police found guns, ammunition, and a hand grenade.

[…] Police came to search an apartment where twin brothers have lived for the past four or five years. When one of them came home, police put him in handcuffs and took him away.

“Well, they said it was in connection with the shootings down on Capitol Hill that happened,” said apartment manager Regina Gray.

The folks who run the apartments tell us police told them little else. But, we do know, officers evacuated the entire third floor of the complex where the brothers lived.

We’ve also been told, police collected weapons, numerous rounds of ammunition and a grenade out of the apartment.

Later in the day, more confirmation came out.

Seattle police believe the man responsible for Saturday’s Capitol Hill massacre is Kyle Aaron Huff, 28, who had lived in North Seattle since moving from Montana with his twin brother about four years ago.

The assistant manager at the Town and Country Apartments where the brothers lived said police told him that Huff was the suspected shooter.

Jeff Green, a dispatcher for the Whitefish, Mont., police also said that Seattle police contacted the department Saturday and told them Huff was the perpetrator of Seattle’s worst mass murder in 23 years. Huff previously lived in Whitefish.

[…] Police raided the apartment Huff shared with his twin Saturday evening. They arrived at the Town & Country Apartments in the 12300 block of Roosevelt Way Northeast with a battering ram and a shield, but they were apparently let in to the apartment by the suspected killer’s brother, said Jim Pickett, assistant manager of the apartment.

Police brought out three rifles and what appeared to be a grenade, Pickett said.

[…] During a news conference this afternoon at Seattle police headquarters, Whitcomb said police recovered a semi-automatic rifle, a machete and hundreds of rounds of ammunition from a Dodge Laramie pickup belonging to the suspect which was found near the Capitol Hill house where the shooting occurred.

[…] Pickett said the Huff brothers had never been a problem for him.

“They were very friendly, very friendly, very polite. They said ‘yes sir, no sir’ and they were always glad to help.”

So…yeah. It appears that the Capitol Hill shooter was a neighbor of mine. The next building over, and I don’t recognize him from the picture in the Times article, but still one of my neighbors.

Freaky.

Capitol Hill Tragedy

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So sad and terrifying.

Kleptones: 24hours

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For those interested in mashups: The Kleptones (producers of two of my favorite mashup albums of the past few years, A Night at the Hip-Hopera and From Detroit to J.A., though Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots just didn’t do it for me) have just released their fourth full-length album, the two-disc set 24hours. Torrents for split-track and full-mix versions are available, and there’s even a 6 to entertain you while you download.

iTunes “Stand and Deliver” by Society Burning from the album Shut Up Kitty (1993, 5:03).