Thomas Hubert Parker Jr., of Bainbridge, was arrested on May 15, 2025, for allegedly shooting parts of the school zone speed cameras on Shotwell Street, according to investigators with Bainbridge Public Safety.
… Parker is facing 3 counts of “Possession of Tools for the Commission of a Crime” and “Interference with Government Property.”
… Parker is a Doctor of Anesthesiology…
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Shotwell Street LOL.
Here’s the new offending technology. The school district has pushed too far on this one — if you really make people in Georgia slow down, you can expect them to shoot out the school zone system.
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UD thought it might have, er, implications for his employment. I forgot it’s the southland. He’s been named Employee of the Month.
Trial coming up for one of the University of Alabama’s many gun-mad basketball players. Couple years ago a whole bunch of players went out for some fun and ended up shooting a woman to death. I mean, one of them, a friend of the players’, actually shot her, but one of the players provided the gun blahblah.
So the guy who actually shot her just got sentenced to life without parole, and things don’t look too good for the player who handed him the gun. Trial coming up.
Another player out with his teammates that night had already established a “pat-down” entrance whenever introduced before a game (this was a precursor to the much higher profile Ja Morant bit), and he kept it going even after he began to be investigated in connection with the murder. Straightlaced Deadspin considered the fact that the pat-down guy was allowed to play at all “quite shocking,” but c’mon. It’s ALABAMA.
Anyway, here’s a local opinion writer gettin all boohoo bout bloody Bama but really baby nobody gives a shit.
And he was returned to his original school why? Having wisely ejected an insane child now charged with terrorism, the school armed itself against him and took him back?
Interestingly, the focus of this article about him is not whatever rules, or whatever idiocy specific to this school, let him return with his immense, elaborate, killing gear; it’s his mother.
The mother of a [San Antonio] middle school student [that means the kid is 11 to 14] allegedly bought ammunition, magazines and tactical gear for her son, who had expressed a desire to carry out “acts of mass violence” at Jeremiah Rhodes Middle School, according to SAPD.
Ashley Pardo, 33, was arrested on Monday on charges of aiding in commission of terrorism, court records show. She bought the items “with knowledge” that they would be “used to plan and carry out” a crime.
On Monday, the student showed up to Rhodes Middle School campus “wearing a mask, camouflage jacket and tactical pants but left shortly after,” police said... [A family member had earlier] contacted SAPD about items found in the possession of Pardo‘s son, including rifle and pistol ammunition, black tactical gear and an improvised explosive device made from a mortar-style firework. The family member also stated they found three loaded magazines and a note that had several names of mass shooters written on it. Some of the items were inscribed with “14 words” and “SS” symbols – references to white supremacy language and previous mass shootings…
You can buy your kid all the guns and bombs and masks you want, but you can’t give him the guts to use them.
Look at this. A high tea for dogs. That’s not even funny. That’s just degenerate.
Where is it being held?
Cape Town South Africa. Speaking of which, how many dollars to three hundred rand? The tea costs 300 for your dog, 350 for you.
Five hundred dollars…?
[UD looks it up.]
Hahahahahaha you are so wrong. Try again. It goes the other way, doodoo.
Five cents.
Hahahahahaha $16.35.
[Later that same day]
UD: Tea for two South Africans at the Baccarat Hotel NYC costs 54,977.28 rand.
… at the same moment, California guv tells all state municipalities to get going on the removal of all homeless encampments, and the PM of GB announces the country’s becoming an “island of strangers,” and needs new severe crackdowns on immigration.
Civic life, national life – What do these mean? We can toss that around all day, but at the end of the day, big majorities of people living in most countries/regions want a successfully assimilated population of people who don’t inject in the street.
Most beach poems are sad. Most poems are sad. Most lives are sad. ‘The reason that there are so many depressed people,’ writes UD‘s guru, Adam Phillips, ‘is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery.‘
After a morning reading lots of beach poems, UD finds herself charmed by this old-fashioned one – strict end rhyme and pretty strict meter, written in 1913 by a guy you’ve never heard of – Ridgely Torrence – and titled “Santa Barbara Beach.” It could have been any beach – Nungwi, Sarandë – cuz almost no beach poems are specific to the sand where the poet happens to have sunk his/her feet. Poetic beaches are beaches whose vast uncontrollable deathless sublimity catalyzes thoughts of human frailty, brevity, fatality. On a big beach under a bright sun we stand out in dramatic relief in all our littleness against the massive depth and breadth of the ocean, and this evokes thoughts of our sweetness and poignancy, to be sure – we are drawn to the ocean’s shore because we are drawn to beauty, might, heat, majesty, eternality, which is a very nice thing about us qua humans – but it mainly evokes thoughts of our brief befuddled plunge into being.
I’ll interrupt your reading of this poem with commentary. Read it without interruption here.
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Santa Barbara Beach
by Ridgely Torrence
Now while the sunset offers,
Shall we not take our own:
The gems, the blazing coffers,
The seas, the shores, the throne?
[A spectacular sunset lights up a jeweled world of riches, possibilities, and the poet invites us to take our share. This feels like a world we own, and this is the moment to grasp it with joy.]
The sky-ships, radiant-masted,
Move out, bear low our way.
Oh, Life was dark while it lasted,
Now for enduring day.
[The rayed sinking sun is like a brilliantly lit ship, the rays the masts, and its lowness on the horizon feels like a generous bow toward us, the owners of the world, a bow that lights up our path along the strand. In an ironic reversal, the poet describes daylight life as dark, and sunset life as light — in the harsh light of typical day, we see and feel the paucity of our spiritual surroundings. But in the gleaming disseminated light of sunset, we feel our earth and ourselves emblazoned in a low enveloping flame, a flame that feels as though it will last forever.]
Now with the world far under,
To draw up drowning men
And show them lands of wonder
Where they may build again.
[Day is done, its world is subdued, and the spiritual light of sunset can now transport us from our “drowned” lives (We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.) to a higher world of new possibilities.]
There earthly sorrow falters,
There longing has its wage;
There gleam the ivory altars
Of our lost pilgrimage.
[This stanza elaborates upon the rich world of human and spiritual possibilities illuminated by the setting sun, a sun which puts the daylight world “under” and illuminates a new world of new life. Sorrow, longing, lostness – all that we feel in our daylight lives, vanishes in the brilliant promise of this moment.]
Swift flame—then shipwrecks only
Beach in the ruined light;
Above them reach up lonely
The headlands of the night.
[Sudden nasty transition here: Sunset’s mystic flame lasted only moments, and in its ruined light we see “what’s really always there” — the oncoming black of deathly night. Night is even darker, if you will, than day.]
A hurt bird cries and flutters
Her dabbled breast of brown;
The western wall unshutters
To fling one last rose down.
[These are images of beautiful natural things – the bird, the rose – in their last moments. The oncoming black wall at least lets one last petal down for us.]
A rose, a wild light after—
And life calls through the years,
“Who dreams my fountain’s laughter
Shall feed my wells with tears.”
[In life, we have epiphanies – moments of illumination, wild light, when in extreme beauty and meaning, the world calls to us.
But what does it say? We who love life and hear within it the laughter of joy and spirit, are doomed – post-sunset – to weep oceans of tears. The more we expect of existence, the more betrayed we will be.
“Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof in the end come despondency and madness.”]
A working class community (small homes with pickups in front of them) is bullet-riddled after a gunfight at an Airbnb party hits neighboring houses.
Showing a reporter the bullet holes in his house, one guy says this.
“There’s been a couple of times, maybe five times over the last two-and-a-half years, where there’s been some disturbances and these raging parties. Even on Monday nights until 2 a.m…. I don’t have a problem if people want to stay here, but it was less than quiet last night.”
What’s less than quiet in contemporary America? The bullets only pierce your refrigerator and not your kids.
