Crip Memoir Resurrects Slain

...or, "It's Okay to Murder People if you Document it in the Form of Children's Books."

So, Stanley Tookie Williams establishes the Crips with the ill-conceived notion that it'll help his crime-ridden neighborhood. Along the way, he kills some people. In 1981 he is sentenced to death. Twenty-something years later, he is still in prison, waiting.

The crux of the recent insanity is that some "Hollywood stars" and 50,000 "non-Hollywood stars" (do those people even count?), in the form of a petition, declared that, "Williams had made amends during more than two decades in prison by writing a memoir and a series of children's books about the dangers of gangs."

There's far too much extraneous stuff in that sentence. It is far more entertaining in this form:

"Williams made amends [for murder] ... by writing ... a children's book...."

Riiiiight. And here is the definition of amends:

reparation: something done or paid in expiation of a wrong.

So, either that high-quality air they breathe in Los Angeles has finally taken its toll on literacy, or they're using some new fangled definition of the word amends where children's books fix dead people.

And I'll still go and give those Hollywood stars my $8.50 every time they manage to make a movie trailer that doesn't completely suck. Which is increasingly rare, actually. King Kong looks good, though.

Update: I can't believe it took me so long to realize a potential to profit on this. Amazon never lets me down. Behold, the Stanley Tookie Williams collection (Well, part of it anyway. He authored *a lot* of children's books. He wasn't entirely creative when it came to naming them, however. Gangs are Your Friends is my personal favorite. Oh. Oooh. Gangs AND your Friends. Never mind.):