Bring back the classic freak, please

I am positively afraid. Occasionally, since I have nothing else to do with my boring life, I search for bizarre and twisted things in the news. Weird people doing unthinkable things are always amusing and usually make for great commentary. I am beginning to notice, however, that "the news of the weird" is the same as "the news of the normal". The people in charge are the ones that do the scariest things.

In December, MSNBC reported about police officers in France who placed plastic explosives in the side pocket of a random, unmarked passenger bag at Charles De Gaulle for a police dog training exercise. The problem? They lost the bag before they completed the exercise.

According to the report, the bag left the airport sometime in the two-hour window in which they were playing around. It left? Did it have legs? The police have assured everyone that it was ok that they let the bad bag escape as there was no detonator for the explosives. Oh, all right then. No biggie. What did that unsuspecting passenger think when he got home that night?

And, even scarier, how about the fact that school officials in Phoenix are using a fingerprinting tracking device to log when children get on and off their school busses? The fingerprint button tracks when a child boards and departs a bus and wirelessly sends that information to a local police department. Supposedly, this system helps reduce the rate of kidnappings.

My questions is this: How in the hell is this going to help? Children generally don't get snatched when they are on the school bus. Ok, sure, we'll be able to tell if a child made it to her school bus and where she got off the bus, but will that really help when trying to catch a kidnapper? You don't have to be a genius to know that the cost benefit analysis says to dump this program in a heartbeat. It is not doing what it is intended to do...unless the intention is really to get children so used to being tracked that they don't feel threatened when even more of our privacy rights are compromised.

This type of weird news is too scary for me. I'd love to read a story about small cults of leather clad freaks who want to fight for their right to hang themselves by using metal clips in their skin. Those people look like normal compared to the truly terrifying Big Brother.