When real is too real Part I

I was feeling sick to my stomach Sunday morning but I didn’t have the flu or some kind of intestinal bug. Either of those would have been preferable to the emotional turbulence that gripped me.

Saturday night after spending a leisurely day reading the paper, having a few beers and enjoying Sactown’s Santa Parade I found myself at my computer trying to track down a live broadcast of Sactown’s own Grant High School playing Long Beach Poly for the state’s football title. Grant won, congrats to them, and as it was 11 PM I decided to stay in and do a bit of Web surfing before turning in. I went to my usual virtual hangouts: Google News, Anomalist.com. Fark.com, LA Times and so on and read a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

I also checked in at BoingBoing.com, an off-the-wall technology blog that is informative and often good for a laugh. Featured was a story about a viral video that was making its rounds on the Internet. The cell phone video was supposedly taken by a group of Ukrainian youths as they were in the act of murdering a man. The story goes that these 3 rich kids had killed 21 people and documented their acts with numerous photographs and a few cell phone videos. One or possibly more of these videos had, of course, made its way on to the internet.
As I had never heard anything about this on any news site and there has never, ever been a documented snuff film (a video where someone is killed just for the sake of recording it) discovered, I was highly skeptical. No, that’s not the right word…I was sure it was a hoax and was instead a viral video for a gruesome new movie or some college kids testing out their special effects knowhow.

I read the entry and although the poster hadn’t actually watched the video he warned that he was led to believe that it was highly disturbing, vile and cruel. He highly suggested that the video be avoided but he did include a link, not to the video, but to a Google search of what the supposed killers called themselves. He did this to show that very little information on the video, killings and killers was available on English language Internet sites. I followed it.