1) These rumors about the Van Dams are likely true: at first I thought the "high-placed law enforcement official" sounded bogus, but if you look at the [source] of this it seems pretty solid.
2) I think sneakypete is right: who really needs to care just how wicked the parents are? It doesn't implicate them. Two days ago I saw a woman at the busstop with a three-year-old boy. She was swanning about and the kid was playing on the snowbank about two feet away from traffic, and he had the usual motor skills you find in a pretty active three-year-old. He kept picking up hunks of snow and flinging them into the road, where there was quite a lot of traffic. I kept thinking he was going to tumble into the road with each fling and get run over, so I said to this woman, "Why don't you mind the kid instead of pacing about five yards away from him?", and she told me to mind my own business, of course, so I gave her a swift kick in the pants. Well, the last thing isn't true. But my point is that lots of parents are dumb, dumb, dumb, and you can't do anything about it. They don't expect to have their kid run over or abducted by a maniac, and so they act as if that could never happen. Luckily it doesn't - usually. But I don't think there's much point in blaming the unlucky idiots.
It is quite likely that something really funny was going on in that household. I can't figure what, though.
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