(Illustration: Boston bombing suspects; white-hat guy still at large, the other, dead — found here).

If those two deranged clowns pictured above truly are the Boston marathon bombers, that photo will become an iconic-terror symbol, easily understood and to become another snapshot in how dangerously-strange modern life has become — cool, calm, collected and total whacked.
And unless you’ve been under a rock that last few hours (or asleep, maybe, like a ‘normal’ person), you know of the mayhem currently ongoing in the greater-Boston area, especially around the Watertown, Cambridge section, which includes the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — one MIT policeman is dead, another Boston Transit officer was wounded.
Just about every news outlet on the planet are right-now covering the event — read a timeline via ABC News.

This from Time  early Friday, which seems to sum up the picture:

Two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing killed an MIT police officer, injured a transit officer in a firefight and threw explosive devices at police during their getaway attempt in a long night of violence that left one of them dead and another still at large Friday, authorities said as the manhunt intensified for a young man described as a dangerous terrorist.
The suspects were identified to The Associated Press as coming from the Russian region near Chechnya, which has been plagued by an Islamic insurgency stemming from separatist wars.
A law enforcement intelligence bulletin obtained by the AP identified the surviving bomb suspect as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old who had been living in Cambridge, just outside Boston, and said he “may be armed and dangerous.”

I haven’t seen or figured out how this latest shit started, but apparently it came out of  MIT, where the campus cop was shot multiple times while in his patrol car — the two assholes then carjacked a SUV and went on the running gun battle with police. Watertown is in a lock-down mode with police conducting a serious, house-to-house search at the last report.
A big break in the case supposedly came from one of the Boston-marathon victims — Jeff Bauman looked into the guy’s eyes, the guy who tried to kill him.
From Bloomberg:

Just before 3 p.m. on April 15, Bauman was waiting among the crowd for his girlfriend to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon.
A man wearing a cap, sunglasses and a black jacket over a hooded sweatshirt looked at Jeff, 27, and dropped a bag at his feet, his brother, Chris Bauman, said in an interview.
Two and a half minutes later, the bag exploded, tearing Jeff’s legs apart.
A picture of him in a wheelchair, bloodied and ashen, was broadcast around the world as he was rushed to Boston Medical Center. He lost both legs below the knee.
“He woke up under so much drugs, asked for a paper and pen and wrote, ‘bag, saw the guy, looked right at me,’” Chris Bauman said yesterday in an interview.

I’ll be following this story at work via NPR — unless it’s interrupted by KSHU people on their week-long fund drive. I know it’s needed to keep them solvent and operating, but it sure dampers news coverage.
This in time for a week of shit.

In the gun-control battle, the sane lost. On Wednesday, the US Senate gunned down any immediate remedy for the dangerous firearm violence in this country, and displayed an asshole regard for anyone beyond the NRA.
An editorial in the Baltimore Sun didn’t parse the words:

Let’s get one thing straight about the Senate’s failure Wednesday to support a too-modest extension of the national background check system for gun buyers to cover sales at gun shows and over the Internet.
It has nothing to do with the constitutionality of the provision or of the creation of some phantom national gun registry.
Closing glaring loopholes that allow as many as 40 percent of gun sales to occur outside the background check system is no infringement on Second Amendment rights.
It wasn’t when Mr. Pierre gave that testimony in 1999, and it isn’t now.
The senators who claim otherwise are lying to themselves, their constituents, or both.

What this was about was a power play by the NRA, pure and simple.
It maintains its membership and its funding by inventing phantom threats to the right to gun ownership and defeating them.
When confronted by a tragedy like the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, its concern is not to find an adequate response to keep Americans safe and prevent future such attacks.
It’s not even guarding against an over-reaction, if indeed it is possible to over-react to the slaughter of 20 elementary schoolchildren.
The NRA’s sole interest is in preventing anyone from drawing a connection between a mass killing and the weapons that made it possible.

The note about way-chief NRA asshole Wayne LaPierre’s way-big support for background checks in 1999 reveals the ugly, mean-hearted way of the land.

And the pisser about that horrific mini-nuclear blast at that fertilizer plant in Texas: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration most recently inspected the Texas fertilizer plant that exploded Wednesday night in 1985.
Un-fucking-believable.

A week that sucked way bad is rolled up into a big bundle of tears by The Onion (h/t LG&M):

“Seriously, can we wrap this up already?” Maryland resident James Alderman told reporters, echoing the thoughts of all 311 million Americans, who have just about reached their weekly goddamned quota for carnage, misery, confusion, heartbreak, and rage.
“Because, you know, I’m pretty sure we’ve all had our hearts ripped out of our chests and stomped on enough times for one seven-day period, thank you very much.”
“Man oh man,” Alderman added, shaking his head.
“Can you believe this?
Can you honestly believe the kind of piece-of-shit week we’re having here?”
According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, when reached for comment on this week, 93 percent of Americans responded “Okay, enough’s enough here, you have seriously got to be kidding me with this week,” with 84 percent saying “Is it Sunday yet? What? How in the hell are we only at Thursday? What the hell is going on?” and 100 percent of Americans responding “No, no, go ahead, just pile some more horrific shit on this hellish shitshow of a week. Have at it.”
…
“Gotta hand it to this week, though,” added the entire American populace, laughing and crying at the same time.
“It’s a motherfucker.”

Another day ahead, however, and onward we go.