Oliver cobbled together all of his giftcards and money received for his birthday and bought himself the new Simpsons' Kwik-E-Mart Lego set. He put the whole dang thing together yesterday and this morning, and I have to say it's enchanting. I'm not a Simpsons' watcher, have never really gotten into it, but that's mainly because I've never gotten into cartoons, even as a kid. I do appreciate the humor that I see every now and then, and I still remember the episode when Marge and Homer go to marriage camp and the counselor declares that "it's all his fault" when Homer fails to show up at a therapy session. The other episode I remember is when Homer finds himself on death row and then realizes that he's actually part of a reality show. When I looked it up this morning on Wikipedia, I saw that the title of that episode was The Frying Game, and shortly afterward, I saw on the news that the Russian guy who bombed the Boston Marathon got the death sentence for his crimes. While Oliver screwed together a few more tzotchkes on his set, I told him this news, and his response was Awesome! My stomach curdled, to tell you the truth, even as I continued to read about the verdict, including the words of Sister Helen Prejean who evidently spoke in Tsarnaev's defense. Here's the thing: the institutionalized killing of another human being is nothing but revenge. Let's call it like it is. Strapping a human being to a bed and then injecting him with poison in the dead of night while people watch is more vile than a pathetic excuse of a young man packing a backpack full of nails and dropping it at the finish line of a marathon, blowing off the limbs of innocent people and killing three people. It's more vile because it's a collective effort by an institution and carried out under the guise of justice. It makes me sick, and it's not a reality show.
