You’ve seen this on the news, so you won’t get much more new information from me here.  In fact, I really hadn’t been following it too much becuase news seems to sensationalize everything.

As background for those who didn’t realize, I grew up in “Amish Country”.  I was born in Lancaster, PA, grew up in Strasburg, and worked in Paradise for a summer Marketing internship.  My dad was Postmaster of our small town and knew a lot of the Amish personally, they fixed his leather mail bag quite a few times, and very well I might add - he never had to buy a new one.  I’ve seen the “fake” side of the Amish that is presented by the tourism board - my internship was with a tour company.

I’ve also seen the real side.  The devoutly religious and moral humans surrounded by a sea of sin.  Their children being slowly corrupted with the trapings of modern society.  You could drive around the farmlands at night (my friend Brant and I did this quite often) and hear the generators tripping on in the barns.  Yes, these kids that were supposed to live without electricity were watching TVs hidden in haystacks to hide them from the elders. Rumspringa became less a break from the “clan” and more a way to discover how to hide modern day niceties in a land of blandness.  An Amish girl on Rumspringa tried to pick me up when I was in high school - I was attached at the time.

What brings me to write this, what about the story touched me so much that I feel compelled?

This headline: “‘Shoot Me First,’ Amish Girl Said to Ask”

Would you have done this?  Would your kid have done this?  A 13 year old with more of a grip on the concept of humanity than anyone I know has or will have.  Despite the temptations that modern society pushes on the Amish, they ARE still surviving.  They ARE still continuing life as they always have.  They ARE more religious, devout, and moral than the rest of us.  I’m glad, because I always worried and doubted their ability to stay the course having seen what I did growing up.  This ONE story proves me wrong, and for that I’m glad.

This ordeal wasn’t a Weird Al song for the people or community involved.  They forgave the gunman before the police busted down the door.  They stood in line trying to protect the youngest.

Could you have done the same?

I whipped out a quick Wordpress plugin for accessing my Online Bookmarks database.

Online Bookmarks is a PHP/MySQL based system for storing bookmarks on your web server written by Stefan Frech.

I absolutely love it. I keep a quick link in my toolbars to access the add page and pop off bookmarks form home and work that go into the same searchable location.

The Plugin accesses the Online Bookmarks DB and pulls out any specified number (up to 50) of random bookmarks and presents them as links. The function takes any number of optional parameters:

display_OBookmarks($sTableName = “bookmark”, $iItems = 35, $bAdjust = true, $sContainer = “li”, $bAnchor = true)

$sTableName:The name of the table you used to install the Online Bookmarks system. It assumes it is in the same DB as your WP install, so keep that in mind. The default is “bookmark”.
$iItems:The number of items to show. I make this 1 for my header and 35 for my sidebar. The default is 35.
$bAdjust:Sometimes, bookmarks get saved with http://domain.com/directory/file or http–domain.com-directory-file as the title. This is bad news for use in a sidebar, so by default, this variable is set to true and replaces the “/” or “-” with ” ” so that the link properly wraps. I turn this to false for my header since I have more horizontal room.
$sContainer: By default this is <li>, but for my header I change this to be a <span> cause the radio buton looks just plain wierd there.
$bAnchor:Whether or not to place a <a> anchor just before the links. Defaults to true, but I turn it off for my header.

EXAMPLES FOR HEADER:
Random Bookmark: <?php display_OBookmarks(”bookmark”, 1, false, “span”, false); ?> { <a xhref=”http://www.blueneedle.com/wordpress/wp-admin/post.php#obookmarks” mce_href=”http://www.blueneedle.com/wordpress/wp-admin/post.php#obookmarks”>More…</a> }
EXAMPE FOR SIDEBAR:
<li id=”obookmarks”>Random Bookmarks
<ul><?php display_OBookmarks(); ?></ul>
</li>

Download the Randomosity WP Plugin.

Save it in your plugin folder, and then go to Plugins in your WP admin panel and activate it.

Made and tested on WP 2.0.1.  I just made this tonight, so consider it alpha/beta level.  Although I’ve tested it a bit, I haven’t taken the time to do character and boundary level testing on bookmark content yet.