Earlier today, I stopped by one of my favorite online cartoons, Alien Loves Predator, and was overjoyed to see that its creator has thrown in his take on the entire Cuddle Party phenomenon.

click image for Alien Loves Predator cartoon

I can only hope that my own blatherings, in some convoluted and barely significant way, had helped contribute to the mushrooming out of the mockery of this so-called movement to the point that it had appeared in a cartoon that I enjoy reading every week. In fact, i strongly suspect that it did; but to take you down that route would be even sadder and more pathetic than the fact I sniffed through the internet to find the possible connection. I only make mention of this because, other than me being a small and pathetic human being, I find it entertaining how you can write something, forget about if for months on end, your thought can influence other people’s ideas and imaginations, grow, and bud far more interesting and creative takes... or it can bite you in the ass. Either way, I was delighted to see Alien researching the internet to find information on Cuddle Parties. Let’s just be grateful that Cuddling is not one of the world’s largest religions... yet.

On a completely unrelated subject, I have been loving the Baltimore Crime Blog lately. I’ve known about if for ages, but always assumed it was just a centralized blotter, and it is a blotter, but it is also so much more. Never mind the fact that she is doing a better job tracking local crime than the Baltimore Sun, and that the Tribune Company is doing everything in its power to further dismantle the Sun’s local news department, she is also blotting the local news in such an entertaining manner. How can you not love a local crime blotter that phrases its coverage like this?

Four thieves stole a security vehicle and an ATM machine from Annapolis Mall ... says this story ... that has a lot of ellipses ... for no apparent reason ...

That killed me.

For the past few days she has been tracking the story of a woman’s body that was found off the on the I-95 695 interchange, and before the story was picked up by the Sun, announced:

The name of the woman whose body was found in Catonsville was Josie P. Brown of Buena Vista Lane in Hampden. The main suspect in the case is Christopher Gaumer, 22, who reportedly met the victim on Myspace.com.

I knew no good would come from that Myspace garbage. Of course, my take has always been that Myspace is annoying and lame, not deadly. I’ve always assumed that its most grievous detriment to humanity was that it forced you to listen to irritating sound files without first explicitly asking you if you were interested, never mind the infuriatingly contrived sexy self portraits and all the whorish self promotion.

I think there is very little chance that this story isn’t going to be picked up and blown way out of proportion by the national media tomorrow, and the stories are all going to read “Are your children safe from deadly Myspace predators?” It seems to me, from reading the details of this particular case, that this was more of an online date that went horribly horribly wrong than an example of a predator using the internet to find potential victims, but there is no way the media is going to treat it as such. As far as I know, this was the first known murder that can be tracked to Myspace out of something like 55 million users. 55 million users whoring themselves with sexy self portraits, invasive sound files, personalized layouts with quazi-blogs sharing user’s deepest thoughts? I find that a hell of a lot more terrifying than one online murder.