Skip to main content

Hey, Jackass!

Hey, Jackass!, subtitled "Illustrating Chicago Values," is one of my favorite websites.

Twice a day, every day, Chicago's murder and gun shot statistics are updated by an editor "powered by sarcasm, stats, and booze" for all to see.  And states you see.  There are running totals for murders and shootings for the year, month, and week.  There are pie charts of victims and bar charts of violence.  They are informative, they are quirky, and they are fun.

That's right, Hey, Jackass! makes murder fun again.

Just look at the 30 day stupidity trend for today.  Not only do you get the daily totals of murder, gun murder, and non-fatal shootings over the last thirty days.  Not only do you get a pie chart comparing the number of homicides to the number of non-fatal shootings.  You get fireworks for the Fourth of July.

Other awesome charts include: Shot Placement, the Murder Matrix, and the Shot-in-the-Ass-o-Meter.  And some of these go back to 2012.

The commentary is irregular, except for the weekend totals.  But, when its there, the editor gives us the essence of crime prevention in Cook County.  Today's discusses probation for infanticide (again "illustrating Chicago values"), which is just as repulsive as New Orleans' usual penalty for murder, the sixty-day homicide (I'm sorry but I can't find the best article I read about them, however many years ago).  But I shouldn't discount the weekend totals.  In addition to the editor's snarky comments, every weekend he presents another show: Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday Morning Overtime are presented shooting-by-shooting, location-by-location twice a day.

It's fascinating.

The only problem with this site is that (as far as I know) there aren't copycat sites for New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Baltimore.  And so on.  Every city should have someone dedicated enough to track things like this.

--------

p.s., if you know of any sites like this for different cities, especially non-official, entertaining ones like this (but others are welcome): that's what the comments are for!

I want to know about them, and I want everyone to know about them.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sleeping Beauties in Theoretical Physics

Thanu Padmanahhan's book, Sleeping Beauties in Theoretical Physics is a great find.  It's reasonably accessible for a technical tome on theoretical physics, it has an interesting framework that makes the connections between chapters on very different subjects coherent, and it covers a number of interesting topics, including ones that I'd thought I'd have references to in other books but my knowledge of them must have come from papers. The feature that Padmanabhan uses to categorize physics is similar to the one used by Griffiths in his Introduction to Electrodynamics:  a cube has eight vertices, and each of these vertices is a type of physical theory.  Each of the eight vertices has one of three Boolean values: gravitation, relativity, and quantum.  If the effect is accounted for, the value is on, if not, it's off.  The vertex where they are all off is Newtonian Mechanics (without gravity) and the far vertex is a Theory of Everything (or somesuch, he calls it som

Vexed

Vexed was a nice find on Netflix. I won't say it is a great detective show, I won't say it is the best comedy, and I won't say it is the best British comedy, but I will say it's worth watching because it was the last funny thing to come out of England. England used to be a place where comedy could be irreverent, where radio programs and television shows poked fun at prevailing pieties.  Current television shows I'm seeing are either so tendentious to be unwatchable, or have an embarrassment-style humor that makes me feel like I'm watching Different Strokes. Vexed seems to have been written just before the UK went stupid. It has two seasons of very different character.  Both have the same male lead, Toby Stephens DI Jack Armstrong, a lazy caricature of a chauvinistic detective, and the female lead changes between seasons, but present two different kinds of competent woman.  In the first season the lead is Lucy Punch as DI Kate Bishop, an accomplished insp