Breaking Bad coming back

Well, after an extended hiatus, Breaking Bad is coming back Sunday on A & E.

There was a murder in Oregon several years ago. Two guys murdered a couple, then fled to Mexico. It turned out that they had seen the movie In Cold Blood, the true story based on Truman Capote's "nonfiction novel" about Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. They murdered a family on a farm in Kansas in the 1950s. They thought there was a vast sum of money there. There wasn't. They hitchhiked to Mexico, were arrested, tried and hanged. Hickock became a criminal after a serious head injury caused a change in his personality. Perry Smith was horribly abused as a child.

It turned out that these two idiots in Oregon murdered a couple walking on the beach because they wanted to be like Smith and Hickock.

There's no telling.

Now we have this show Breaking Bad. It doesn't make methamphetamine production look very appealing, but I'm sure that, out there, there are people watching the show wishing they could be like Walt, the terminally ill chemistry teacher who goes into the meth business so he'll be able to leave money for his family. It's a grim, violent show.

But I know a young fellow who was telling me about his friend. He watched the Japanese movie, Battle Royale, about Japanese high school freshmen forced to fight to the death until only one is left alive. This guy was convinced that he would do really well at it. Wished they had that at his high school.

Personally, I always marveled at drug addicts. Years ago, there were people with two hundred dollar a day drug habits, at a time when you could actually live on two hundred a month if you had to. I always thought, if only you could maintain that drive to make two hundred dollars a day WITHOUT being a heroin addict!

Of course, it was later explained to me that they made their money through theft and prostitution.

Some people I saw on a talk show

I saw some Christians, maybe Mormons, on a talk show. They made an odd claim in the middle of this. They said that they had some friends. Their friends' thirteen-year-old daughter, they said, was so impressed by the movie Pretty Woman that she became a prostitute.

They made this claim in passing. No one questioned it. They didn't question whether it was true, but they also didn't ask for additional details which is a pretty good indication that no one believed it.

Was it something they heard somewhere---some urban legend circulating at their church---and they decided to give it added credibility by claiming it was people they knew?

There was the time on Geraldo Rivera's old talk show. It was during the Satanic cult hysteria. There was a woman who claimed to have been a victim of Satanists as a child, forced to participate in human sacrifices and so forth. She was surprisingly cheerful about it.

Someone in the audience asked why she didn't tell her teachers.

She answered that she didn't go to school. She attended the first grade, but her Satanist parents never sent her back.

The woman in the audience didn't seem to believe this.

The woman insisted it was true That she was taken out of school after the first grade, and, she added, she didn't attend school again until she was 18 and went to college.

"Huh?" I thought.

Was I the only one who heard that? Geraldo didn't seem to notice.