Bridges and Squares

There was an interesting article on trolling the other day in the NYT magazine, found here. I recommend it, but if you want the punchline without the effort, it turns out that if you sexually abuse a child who grows up liking computers and technology, they may end up being the type of unrepentant jackass who desecrates memorial MySpace pages of dead teenagers. They will also start whining and bloviating immediately if you, as a professional journalist, come anywhere near calling them out on their complete and utterbullshit.

Those of you who use XBox Live with any regularity are probably imagining the same voice that I am -- it's not just high pitched; it's tangibly desperate, with those quick little breaths at the end of every few syllables that gradually become more and more pronounced as the little bastard feels their finally-tuned sense of control slipping away. In the case of the uber-trolls described above, that would be the sexual abuse talking, since the Intartubez is a stand-in for the control that was stripped away from them as a child at the hands of a family member.

Anyway, the point is only that there a lot of jerkoffs out there, and it does sort of seem like the typical M.O. has drifted away from just being an asshole in regular conversation to a planned surgical strike that actively harms the quality of signal from other people, rather than just drowning out other contributions by volume alone.

Which brings us to this gem, posted on ESPN.com's 47-chromosome new community feature, "SportsNation." The story is about the latest development in the Todd Bertuzzi case in Canada. Bertuzzi, you may recall, punched another player, Steve Moore, in the back of the head after a play as retribution for an earlier (though legal) hit by Moore on the captain of Bertuzzi's Vancouver Canucks, one Markus Nasland. Moore was knocked out by the punch itself, but then collapsed head-first on the ice. Needless to say, he (Moore) hasn't played hockey since.