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.

So, what Travolta is saying, is that it wasn’t the freaking psychopaths who are at fault for their murders, but the anti-depressants the freaking psychopaths were taking – it was their fault. The pills. It was the pills’ fault. Riiight. So, anyone and everyone who is on an anti-depressant is capable of doing what the school shooters have done. Riiight.

I think these celebrities need to just shut the hell up. They’re in the public eye, they’re only actors and if they don’t have anything 100% compassionate to say about such terrible events that take place and may purposely say something that will, in any way, offend the people who were close with the victims, they deserve any public backlash that comes their way.

Now that Travolta has spoken out, it seems like he’ll be the one surrounded by controversy and this will give Tom Cruise a breather from all the hype that results in his verbal sewage. And, hey – if John takes Tom’s place as Mr. Hollywood Scientology, maybe this will happen again – at least Travolta can make an ass of himself while singing, dancing AND dressed up like a woman at the same time!

We can only be so lucky.

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.”

A similar article in the New York Times muses that a fellow writer who tried to connect Cho to the Korean action flick as well as John Woo films “was simply trying to make a guess as to the features of the killer’s mental world.”

As someone who is trying to make her living in the entertainment field, my opinions run strong on this issue. I agree with both reporters that blaming movies for acts carried out by disturbed individuals is ludicrous. I know plenty of people I would trust with my life who pay money to see horror films like Saw and Hostel and enjoy every bloody second. My brother and his friends played violent video games all through their childhood, and so far, not a single one has checked in their sanity card. I saw The Basketball Diaries when I was young, and all it did was make me decide I was never, ever, going to do drugs.

A movie can’t turn a sane person crazy. John Woo didn’t put the gun in Cho’s hands. The entertainment industry is a lot of things, but one thing it’s not is babysitter for the world’s youth. Every time a young person commits a horrible crime, we want answers. We want reasons. It’s too complicated to trace a person’s mental history or attempt to research his childhood. It’s too accusatory to blame the parents. But it’s real easy to find someone’s video rental log and draw a direct connection from screen violence to real violence.

Violent movies don’t instill a need for sadistic behavior in adept people. More likely, they are the preferred entertainment of a mind already warped by serious psychological and external forces.

Perhaps the Columbine shooters or the Kentucky teenager or Cho replicated images they saw in films during their killings, but it’s not the imitation we should be worried about—it’s the acts themselves, and the reasons behind them, that should be analyzed.

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?

According to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, one major duty of a journalist is to “Minimize Harm.” The SPJ states that, “ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.” I highly doubt that airing Cho praising the Columbine killers is minimizing harm. It only takes one more disturbed student to see that and gain inspiration from the videos.

Another point in the code of ethics is even more relative to the VTech situation:

“A Journalist should: Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects. Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.”

I personally feel that NBC did the opposite in this case by airing the Cho footage and no sensitivity was shown to the families. Apparently, the families of the victims agree with me. On Thursday morning, they were scheduled to appear on the Today show with Matt Lauer, but backed out after the footage was aired the previous night.

Coming to this conclusion was not easy for me, as I carefully thought through other journalistic reasons for NBC’s decision, but no matter what, nothing can outweigh the fact that they did not minimize harm and were insensitive to the families of this terrible tragedy. My heart goes out to the families of the victims and am sickened that their pain had to be magnified because of the choices NBC made.

(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??

We can’t possibly hold ourselves accountable for fixing our classmates problems, but how can one person be so mentally and socially isolated that they have the capacity to walk into classrooms and systematically murder everyone around them?

Virginia Tech, like Columbine 8 years earlier (to almost the day. Columbine occurred on April 20th, 1999) is a horrible, heartbreaking tragedy. But there’s another tragedy underneath these two killings. The tragic isolation of these so-called loners. We, as a peer group, as a nation, need to spend more time looking into this disturbing phenomenon. Students have been bullied, isolated, lonely, since the beginning of formalized education, why is it having such devastating effects now? What is different in the 21st century that is allowing anger, depression, loneliness, and mental anguish to erupt into cruel, full scale violence?

Instead of throwing around overused, vague labels, we need to ask these questions, and not stop asking, until something is figured out.