St. Louis County PD: Sorry For Joking About How To Keep Us From Killing Your Kids

• On Thursday, the St. Louis County Police Department offered this super helpful advice to parents who might want to know how they can protect their kids from the St. Louis County Police Department:  

  

  
   Hardy har had! Kids will be kids, right? Playing with their toy guns, scaring cops who believe they have no choice but to shoot first and claim self-defense later. Kids! If only parents did a better job of understanding that toy guns look like real guns, and cops who have no business being cops in the first place are ofcoursegoing to shoot 'em dead when they feel threatened, well, those parents could really help the police out so they wouldn't have to be killing those darned kids all the time. The tweet has since been deleted. Too bad screenshots are forever! The Facebook post has also since been deleted, but really -- no, really -- it was intended as a community service that just didn't go as planned. 

  

  
   OK, we get the point that toy guns look like real guns, and it's hard for cops to know the difference. But using the example of Tamir Rice, with a little cop "humor," is maybe definitely not the right way to make that point. Not that it matters when there's video, but by now, we've all seen the video of the cops pulling up to the park where Rice was playing with his toy gun and shooting him dead two seconds later . Would Tamir Rice still be alive if his parents hadn't let him play with a toy gun? Maybe. Just like Michael Brown would still be alive if his parents hadn't -- oh, fuck it. You get the point. [Note: This post has been updated to indicate it was the St. LouisCountyPolice Department that posted and deleted the kids-will-be-kids tips, not the city's police department.]

• It's a miracle! 

  The Vatican's economy minister has said hundreds of millions of euros were found "tucked away" in accounts of various Holy See departments without having appeared in the city-state's balance sheets.

  In an article for Britain's Catholic Herald Magazine to be published on Friday, Australian Cardinal George Pell wrote that the discovery meant overall Vatican finances were in better shape than previously believed. [...]

  Pell did not suggest any wrongdoing but said Vatican departments had long had "an almost free hand" with their finances and followed "long-established patterns" in managing their affairs.

  "Very few were tempted to tell the outside world what was happening, except when they needed extra help," he said, singling out the once-powerful Secretariat of State as one department that had especially jealously guarded its independence.

• Have some updated e.e. cummings for the 21st century:  

  i carry your dick pic with me (i carry it in

  my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

  my phone goes it goes,my dear;and whatever is screenshotted

  by only me is your doing,my darling)

• And now how about something old school? 

  On October 5, 1981, Time magazine ran a story called “Software for the Masses”—a retrospective meditation on how computing became personal. [...]

  “Software for the Masses” might have been an otherwise arid tech story, buried and forgettable. But it ran with a warm, risqué photo of three brunettes in an outdoor hot tub, their breasts bobbing and nudging the waterline. This image was the promotional photography for the “computer fantasy game” Softporn, in which “players seek to seduce three women, while avoiding hazards, such as getting killed by a bouncer in a disco.”

• Are you aThe Walking Deadfan? Happy Nice Time People has some happy nice time news for you:  

  In keeping with the comic book TV show theme we have going today, AMC is throwing its hat in the ring once again with dark, apocalyptic, comic book-based TV series to accompany The Walking Dead—not to be confused with The Walking Dead companion series that’s not based on a comic book but is still dark and apocalyptic and being developed into TV series nonetheless.