Around the blogroll and elsewhere

Even if you're not interested in parrots, Melina is fast becoming one of the most insightful commenters on Life in America as we Slouch Towards Armageddon. Like me, she has focused her attention to the Virginia Tech massacre on the mental health issue implications of a young man that his parents knew had problems since he was a small child, and what it says about us as a society that he was able to get to the point he did. Today she takes on the Big Questions that go far beyond whether NBC should have shown the killer's homemade videos.

Pierre Tristram has more on how engaging troubled students before they become killers accomplishes far more than turning schools and campuses into police states.

And ed_encho at My Left Wing on Cho Seung-Hui - The New American Idol, on how the carefully-constructed, made-for-television ravings of Cho Seung-Hui are the logical outcome of the American Idol culture.

And while we're on the subject, ModFab is the happiest guy in the world now that Sanjaya is history. I say it's a Sanjaya world, and we're just allowed to live in it.

Maginot Line anyone? West Bank? The Great Wall of Texas and Mexico? Cernig writes about the ridiculous proposal to construct a three-mile-long concrete wall dividing a Sunni district in Baghdad from its Shiite neighbors. Tristero thinks it's reminiscent of, well, another attempt to "protect" a despised group from the neighbors who despise it. Warsaw Ghetto, anyone?

Emily at Waiting for Dorothy on a gadget you simply can't live without, one that proves that George Carlin was right -- if you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you.

CE Petro on Mary Winkler, the pastor's wife who killed her husband after years of abuse.

And from the IOKYAR file, we have its corollary, Lawsuits Filed By Christian Conservatives Are Never Frivolous" as noted by Pam, who writes about the $20K in pain and suffering compensation a Bentonville, Arkansas man wants in compensation from his local public library because his sons were traumatized by the glimpse of a book on lesbian sex that they just happened to encounter while looking for books about military academies.

And if that doesn't keep you busy enough, perhaps you can give me some advice on how to get this song out of my head, where it has been lodged for the last three days: