Here's one for the ghoulish....

myspace_deaths

It's exactly what it says it is: a catalog of people on MySpace who are...well, dead now. The causes of death generally come down to three:

Automobile accidents
Suicide
Death by Iraq

The number of young people who die in automobile accidents--almost always involving booze--is staggering. As a comp teacher, I've read about a thousand papers written by students who've lost younger siblings, cousins, friends, and peers in drunk-driving accidents, and that alone is enough to make you realize that teenagers plus cars plus booze is almost invariably fatal. A quick look at myspace_deaths does more than confirm this--it bloody well screams it at the top of its lungs.

One of my students recently wrote a very, very well-done paper concerning raising the legal driving age to 18. She fairly loaded the paper with support for her thesis, and the gist of it was this: most teenagers are too goddamned stupid and reckless to drive at 16. Back in my day, everyone I knew--but me--ran out like mad to get their driver's permits the day they turned 16. Most of them had their permits for no more than the prescribed week or two before rushing in to take the driver's test and passing by the skin of their teeth. I don't recall anyone dying, miraculously enough, but I do recall how many times I heard the phrase, "Dude, I totally wrecked my car this weekend" recited on Monday mornings: over a hundred times. It nearly always involved booze. But it sure as hell involved stupidity 100% of the time--none of those accidents were ever someone else's fault: they were always caused by the idiocy of the driver, who usually took a queer kind of pride in his/her idiocy, bragging about how many times he/she flipped the car or how much rubber he/she painted on the pavement.

But that's the way it goes, folks....At least the idiots who take themselves out in drunken auto accidents are removing their faulty DNA and memes from the populace.