Shocked? Really?

When there's nothing important to report from a crime scene, you can always expect some local TV news nitwit to interview a neighbor who doesn't know anything about what happened.

Why do they do it?

Lord only knows. Maybe it's to have a soundbite of some sort when the cops aren't talking. Maybe it's just to stretch out the story and give the reporter more facetime.

"He was such a quiet neighbor," one might say. In fact, they all seem to say it when the guy next door is charged with something like an ax murder.

"Things like that just don't happen around here," another might say. Well, if "things like that" were routine in your neighborhood, we'd have a whole 'nother story to report.

"He was a nice guy, but I only saw him when he was taking out the trash. He didn't have much to say." Well, that was pertinent. You only saw him occasionally. He didn't say much to you. Yet the reporter felt it was really important for you to make that point.

And there's this old chestnut: "I was shocked. I was really shocked." That's not news. It would be news if the neighbor said, "I wasn't shocked at all." That's a story that would make me prick up my ears.

And then there's the comment that drives me up a wall. "I just hope his family finds closure soon."

Closure?

The very idea of closure is naive, a piece of unfounded psycho-babble with no evidence to back it up.

Sure, time helps to make awful events more bearable. You might go from thinking about it every waking moment to thinking about it only occasionally. But pain, loss and tragedy never completely go away. Not so long as memories last.

So whenever I see one of these soundbites on TV, I punch the fast-forward button on my TiVo. Closure is what I'm seeking: closure to this story that is devolving into the realm of the mindless.

On the other hand, for me it makes watching local TV news a much shorter process.

There are few geniuses in jail

My nephew Mike, who is a retired police officer, says the reason it's so easy to catch criminals is because most of them are stupid.

He's got a point.

I sat on a jury a few years back that heard evidence in a particularly gruesome double murder that happened not far from where I live. Our decision hinged on a damning series of cell-phone records that left little wiggle room for the defendant.

Yes, he had left his cell phone in the car in which he had shot and killed two people.

Yes, that was a dumb mistake.

I was reminded this week -- again -- of how dim-witted criminals can be. A handful of young people -- men and women -- have been charged in a series of thefts in Chesterfield and Colonial Heights in May and June. A Chesterfield policeman says it's one of the largest crime sprees by such a big group of young people he's ever seen.

They were caught when a cop stopped them because they were driving a stolen car. A friend of one of those arrested said he saw that she was trying to sell some of the stolen items on Facebook.

Unfortunately she has a baby. One can only hope that the baby's father passed on some DNA that counteracts the stupid gene. But don't count on it. The stupid gene is very strong.

Virginia seems to be rife with brain-dead criminals. I Googled "stupid criminals Virginia" and came up with one that takes the cake. Two men in a pickup truck went to a new-home site to steal a refrigerator. They snatched a fridge from one of the houses, creating considerable damage to the house in the process, and loaded it onto the pickup. The pickup got stuck in the mud, so these rocket scientists decided it was because the refrigerator was too heavy. They put their stolen refrigerator back into the house, and then realized that they had locked the keys in the truck -- so they abandoned it.

The pickup was easy to trace when the crime was discovered.

I suppose this just confirms what Albert Einstein once said: "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

Disconnected

It's good to have a working land-line again. It's great to have Internet access once more. Best of all, I now have my TiVo back.

I've been without FIOS service from Verizon since last Monday's thunder and wind storm, which, I mention in passing, was the scariest storm I've seen in Richmond since Hazel back in 1954. (I was 12, schools were closed because of the hurricane, and I watched from our family's front window as lawn chairs and trash cans sailed down the block, 20 feet in the air, at terrifying speed.)

In last Monday afternoon's short but surprisingly powerful storm, the lightning was continuous. The winds were relentless. For 20 long minutes. Then, the sun came out again. The tree you see in the picture above was felled by the wind. It blocked the street I live on for five days before the city got around to removing it.

A cheery Verizon technician restored my TV, Internet and phone service yesterday morning -- on the sixth day after the storm.

At least I didn't have to break out the flashlights and the kerosene lamps last week. I lost power for only about 10 minutes . (There must be something karmic and essentially fair about that. I was in the dark for 10 days after Hurricane Isabel. This time, I was lucky.)

The thing is, when we lose the basics, meaning electricity or connectedness to the world, so much changes. We have to figure out other ways of doing things, old means by which to meet our basic needs as well as our less pressing wants and wishes.

So I spent a lot of time reading. Or outdoors, cleaning up and doing yard upkeep.

And indoors, watching my tiny, portable, wide-screen, color, digital, backup TV, which I hastily purchased after the last big storm. The screen is about the size of a pocket pack of Kleenex tissues, but it'll do in a pinch. Or even for six days.

Not having a phone was merely an inconvenience; I used my cell phone. Not having Internet access meant I had to look up stuff I wanted to know in real books. I missed email.

But not having TiVo grievously disrupted my schedule. I had to watch programs I like when they aired instead of when I wanted to. I had to watch commercials. I had to watch TV on the local and network timetables, not mine.

I also had free time to just think. That was a good thing.

One of the things I thought about was infrastructure, how much I depend on it, and how fragile it is.

I thought back to the day right after Isabel, the costliest and deadliest storm of the 2003 season. Almost nobody had power.

On the morning after Isabel, I called my mother and asked how she was doing. She was then 89 and living alone in the house she and my father had bought in 1956. I asked her if she needed anything. She told me a cup of coffee would be nice. After searching far wider and longer than I thought I'd have to, I found a place that was open, had power, and was selling hot coffee.

My mom was happy to see that coffee, but she told me she wasn't otherwise bothered so much by the lack of power.

"I was a teenager before we ever had electricity," she told me. "Back in those days, we got up when it was light and we went to bed when it was dark.

"So don't worry about me. I'll do just fine."

What she said made me rethink the problem.

I did that again this past week.