Down on the Coroner

Recently, a retired coroner who had presided over some very high profile murder cases in Liverpool died in North Wales. This sad occasion prompted the following question: If the coroner dies, who gets called to examine the body? If it's a coroner from another community, imagine how self-conscious he or she would have to be while examining a colleague. Would the out-of-town coroner attempt to employ the same style of corpse examination used by the recently deceased coroner?

There is a reason coroner is an elected office in many parts of the United States. There may, in fact, be many reasons, but one of them is because under the old "spoils system" in political machines, city administrations often decided the best candidate for a high-paying was Cousin Fred, who learned everything he knew about post-mortem examinations from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. To combat this corruption, many reformers strove to hold elections for as many local offices as possible. At this stage, it often seems a bit unwiedly and superfluous. Does anyone really care what political party the coroner is? Has anyone ever employed the campaign slogan "The Dead Dislike Democrats"?

Here's what kind of person the world can do without: anyone who sits in the studio audience of a daytime talk show. And also daytime talk show hosts. These polygraph administering, paternity testing, conflict stoking, headline grabbing simpletons need to catch an airplane to Tuvalu and never, ever return. And all current citizens of Tuvalu are welcome either to move to the country of their choice or remain in Tuvalu and use the former talk show hosts as household appliances, such as doorstops or hat and coat racks. The former talk show hosts are not under any circumstances permitted to speak for the rest of their lives and should consider themselves fortunate to be living in a tropical climate in which they aren't mangled by Cape Buffalo.

As awful as the lying, cheating, deceitful guests on talk shows can be, members of the audience who boo, jeer, and taunt them are, if anything, worse people. The guests are merely guilty of being stupid enough to air out their asinine problems and pathetic lives on television, but the gawkers take delight in openly ridiculing others and that's just plain mean-spirited (and so are these words, but enough is enough!) Someone needs to open up a can of John 8:7* on these people? Not because it isn't human nature to sometimes be judgmental, even hypocritical, but because they are such hyperbolic nitwits about it. How about you tone it down a bit, Sir Laurence Olivier, and save the theatrics for your upcoming appearance in "The Iceman Cometh"?

Okay, so this comes across as a little bitter. What can I say? It's been a long winter!

*John 8:7 contains the passage "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", or some variation thereof.