John Travolta used to be cool.

I had a HUGE crush on him when I first saw Grease. Like, gigantic. My mom was concerned.

Hard to believe that this is what Danny Zuko looks like now. (Looks like some one’s got a case of the Man Boobs!) And even weirder is how he looks in the upcoming summer movie Hairspray.

I mean, look at him. I’m embarrassed for him.

But worse than John Travolta’s outer appearance is his recent blabberings-on about the horrific events at Columbine and Virginia Tech.

Page Six reports that Travolta said publicly, that all of these tragic school shootings are not really the fault of those who committed the acts, but but on psychiatric drugs. “I still think that if you analyze most of the school shootings, it is not gun control. It is [psychotropic] drugs at the bottom of it,” he said.

This goes along with Scientology, of which Travolta is a devout follower; Tom Cruise, as we all know, is also a major figure in the religion…er…the science…er…belief? Basically, they all believe that all drugs – prescriptive or otherwise – are completely uneccessary and are the root of all evil. Read More »

Did The Matrix spur the Columbine shooters? Was the Paducah, Kentucky high school shooter inspired by The Basketball Diaries? Did Virginia Tech’s shooter Cho Seung-Hui kill because of what he saw in OldBoy (a violent Korean film made in 2003)?

In a recent Time.com article, author Richard Corliss wonders if it’s more than a strange coincidence that one of the pictures Cho took of himself where he “looks fierce and holds a raised hammer” is very similar to a shot in Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s film.

Just because he raises the question doesn’t mean Corliss actually believes there is any connection. In fact, he challenges anyone who thinks these movies are somehow responsible for the aforementioned shooting sprees to “explain why [everyone else] who saw Oldboy, and The Matrix, and Saw, didn’t do the same.” Read More »

As this tragic week for college students comes to a close, I have been pondering one large question over and over again: Should NBC have aired the footage of Cho that he mailed to them after killing two students and before massacring 30 more?

I am a journalism student at a large school of communications, and issues like this one are highly debated in our classrooms. We are constantly given situations in class that a news director or journalist might run into and asked to figure them out ethically. I understand that NBC receiving this footage was a ratings jackpot and it would be hard to keep it contained…But I have come to the conclusion that NBC betrayed fundamental journalistic principles.

Was it wrong for NBC to air Cho Seung Hui’s Video?

Read More »

“Cho was a loner and authorities are having a hard time finding information about him”

(Read the rest of the article here)

I’ve been checking CNN.com as much as possible these last couple of days, reading updates about VTech, wanting, like everyone else, answers. I want to know why. Who. Who does this sort of thing and why?

As of 2:00 pm this afternoon, nobody really knows. Authorities have his name, but that’s about it. They have his name and they know he was “a loner”.

I’m tired of that word. I’m sick and tired of hearing it attached to these boys who walk into their schools and shoot innocent people. When we’re grasping for reasons, grasping for solutions, this is word we keep slapping on the front page of every media outlet going to print. He was a loner. As if that explains everything.

It doesn’t. It never has. Not to me.

What does the word loner even mean? These killers had no friends? These killers never talked to anyone around them? They ate alone? They had no roommates? They never raised their hands in class? They didn’t interact with their families? They had social issues that everyone could feel? They dressed strange? All of the above?? Read More »