Within minutes of last month's massacre at Virginia Tech, web domain names related to the tragedy were picked up by profiteers, hoping to make a fast buck.
Step up, Fred McChesney, 48, from Phoenix who within hours of the rampage, according to the International Herald and Tribune:
"... began buying dozens of names, including CampusKillings.com, VirginiaTechMurders.com, and SlaughterInVirginia.com. McChesney said he saw it as an opportunity to show his contempt for firearms by featuring anti-gun content on the domains he is selling, but he also saw it as an opportunity to cash in."
Meanwhile, there's political uproar in Australia over a game based on the Virginia Tech massacre. The controversial game, called V-Tech Rampage, was originally uploaded to Newgrounds.com, a host to a number of largely home-made games. Designed by American-born Ryan Lambourn, a 21-year-old based in Australia, it offers "three levels of stealth and murder" and is set on a facsimile of the Virginia campus where South Korean-born Cho Seung-Hui last month shot dead 32 fellow students.
The Sydney Morning Post reports that Lambourn fuelled further outrage after pledging he would suspend his "funny" game in exchange for $2,000 (£1,000) in "donations". He would apologise if another $1,000 is forthcoming.
Technology blogger Daniel Terdiman sums it up rather well: "It's hard to know how to respond to that. So I won't." The game has been suspended from Lambourn's own site, but is still floating around the internet.
Some teachers could also be accused of a lack of taste. Administrators at Emmanuel College, Massachusetts, sacked
one of their professors for having initiated a rather odd classroom tutorial about the shootings.
Nicholas Winset, a financial accounting instructor, received the boot for using a "dry erase marker" as a mock gun to dramatise the massacre, walking around his class and saying "pow" to five or six students. He then signaled to "a student he had prepped before class," who drew his own marker, pointed it at him and "fired". This demonstration was meant to encourage discussion. Exactly how gun ownership relates to financial accounting was not explained.
Winset has since taken his case to one of the highest courts in the land, the Supreme Court of Online Opinion, better known as YouTube, where he has fired back at his accusers with a four-part video rebuttal.
You really have to wonder if Marx didn't get it a bit wrong. Yes, history repeats itself - first as tragedy, then as farce. But then a third time as unbridled lunacy.
