Today's farce: man almost burns down apartment building in attack on bedbug

No matter what actually happened, no matter whether the poor shmuck was really just trying some heavy-handed extermination or whether it was the result of a "heated argument" (!!), the events of Monday night in a Nashua, N.H. apartment building turned out bad for everybody.

Police have charged a 27-year-old Nashua man with arson, alleging he intentionally lit a mattress on fire that displaced several occupants of a Hanover Street apartment building.

Michael Fink, of 49 Temple St., Apt. 32, was arraigned Wednesday in Nashua District Court on the arson charge. During the proceeding, Fink told the judge that it was a "misunderstanding." He also said he was attempting to light a bug on fire, not the mattress.

Lt. Jeffrey Bukunt of the Nashua Police Department said Fink used a butane lighter to ignite a mattress on Monday in his girlfriend's lower-level apartment at 24-A Hanover St. ...

Bukunt said police stand by the charges, adding Fink was engaged in a "heated argument" with the woman during the incident. Once Fink allegedly lit the mattress on fire, he then tried to push the mattress through a window, but it became lodged and ignited the side of the building, according to Bukunt. Police said the fire quickly spread throughout the apartment and continued to damage other apartments within the multi-unit dwelling. ...

-- news story

The desperado fled the scene and was arrested at ... wait for it ... the local public library.

It doesn't say whether the apartment is now free from bedbugs.

Ostentation meets hype meets D&S

After some stranger followed my Twitter feed, I was led to this bizarre video in which the woman -- judging from the feed she works in promotions for some booze company -- is tutored by some aggressive British gent in the basics of enjoying some super-expensive whiskey. The British gent is so noisy, so controlling, so in-her-face that it's almost like watching a D&S scene. The woman's "What have I got myself into?" expression as the scene goes on and on is priceless.

technorati: live the lush life, whiskey

'Katastroika'

You know, by now, about collapsitarianism (and its cousin, a so-called "Transition" movement that was written about in the NYT Magazine Sunday).

Now comes a new word to address the Russian version of apocalypse: katastroika. The following is from a World Affairs Journal article titled "Drunken Nation: Russia's Depopulation Bomb":

A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism -- that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past -- but rather of depopulation -- a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing. ...

According to the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base for 2007, Russia ranked 164 out of 226 globally in overall life expectancy. Russia is below Bolivia, South America's poorest (and least healthy) country and lower than Iraq and India, but somewhat higher than Pakistan. For females, the Russian Federation life expectancy will not be as high as in Nicaragua, Morocco, or Egypt. For males, it will be in the same league as that of Cambodia, Ghana, and Eritrea. ...

Russia's patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance) are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. To go by its level of mortality injury alone, Russia looks not like an emerging middle-income market economy at peace, but rather like an impoverished sub-Saharan conflict or post-conflict society.

Clearly the 21st century is not going to turn out as a lot of people expected. But it will make for great material -- if there is still an entertainment industry and distribution network for the films, books and other media to be created.

technorati: Russia, zeitgeist, mortality