COMMENTS MODERATED

Due to a number of trolls and the use of sock puppets, all comments for this blog are moderated for the time being.

This means that no matter who you are, no matter how many times you've posted, your comment will be held in moderation until I see it and approve it.

I make no apologies for this. Until people can behave like adults or a reasonable facsimile thereof, I'm riding herd on what gets posted on any of my blog entries.

I'm not changing my routine or the way I work, either. That means there will be lag times between your post and its publication. I have a life.

I am truly grateful to everyone who takes the time to discuss blog subjects with intelligence and civility, and to them, I do apologize for having to lump them in with the immature, obsessed, and just plain idiotic. Unfortunately, the commenting software I use with this blog doesn't discriminate between friend and foe when it comes to moderation. From those readers and commentators (they usually know who they are) I ask for patience.

I'll disengage comment-by-comment moderation once people have calmed down.

My Limit, and a Plug.

I don't know that I've ever expressed how flattering it is to have people request my take on a given high-profile crime. I've always appreciated it when someone e-mailed me to say, "hey, you haven't written about this, curious as to what you think."

Frequently, I go ahead and dive in.

Some things, however, show me my limits. The story of 6-year-old Christopher Michael Barrios, the little boy murdered by a family of pedophiles in Brunswick, Georgia, is my limit.

It is a story so hideous that I just can't say much about it. Yes, in a way, the murders and molestations committed by Joseph Edward Duncan III against the Groene family and children in 2005 were worse... but not by much.

Read the linked MSNBC article to see what I'm talking about.

My commentary on the case is this: every now and then you hear about a crime for which the death penalty would be too good. The rape and murder of Christopher Barrios is one of those crimes. If found guilty, Peggy and David Edenfield and their adult son George should be roasted slowly on an open spit, as far as I'm concerned. They are animals. Let them suffer the fates of pigs.

Go to the following links to see what I've been spending time doing just lately, and recall that I decided to take HuffCrimeBlog.com in a historic true crime direction. There is something to be said for the remove of history:

"Fame, Love, Murder and Frozen Music, Part 1."
"Fame, Love, Murder and Frozen Music, Part 2."

Historic true crime is a more academic pursuit, and sometimes that is comforting, to me. There is more room for letting prose flow, for reflecting in a way that is closer to poetry, once the gritty now of a story is removed. I'm proud of the new entries there at History's Miseries, and hope that if you're a reader needing a break, just as I was a writer needing a kind of break, you will be somewhat entertained.