Anyone else reading of the Colorado shootings (and sorry that “shootings” are starting to go so well with “Colorado”) thinking of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 movie Targets? That film, the director’s first (and like nothing he’s done since) ends with a sniper behind the screen shooting people in a drive-in as they watch a horror film, Roger Corman’s epically bad 1963 The Terror,  starring Boris Karloff.

There were many differences; Bogdanovich based his unhinged killer on famous sniper shootings of the time, most notably Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people (and wounded 32 others) at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. Whtiman stood on the observation deck of the campus’s clock tower and picked off most of his victims as they ran around on the grounds below.

Whitman was the perfect bogeyman for the time: a buttoned-down student with a crewcut and a genius IQ, a former Marine. His journal, discovered after he was killed by police officers, finds him questioning his building obsession to kill and he complains of “tremendous” headaches (an autopsy revealed an undiagnosed brain tumor). Reporters parsed his record afterwards: he had an abusive father, a problem with authority, marital issues. Of modern mass murderers he was one of the first postmortem celebrities.

As of this writing, not much is known of the Colorado shooter, James Holmes. He was a Phi Betta Kappa graduate student in neuroscience, kind of a loner, if you can imagine. “He was a little bit of a weird guy,” one former colleague of his told NBC News, “but we were honors students, so weird people were kind of common.” And he didn’t need marksman’s training: he was armed with two Glocks, a shotgun and an assault rifle (a Smith & Wesson AR-15) that could fire 50-60 rounds in a minute. And he had 3000 rounds.

With that kind of firepower, anyone could hit the side of a barn — hell, you shoot the whole barn down. And he had full body armor, just in case anyone in the theater fired back. (Colorado allows concealed weapons, though the theater had a policy banning them. Hard to imagine anyone checking their weapons at the counter, while buying popcorn.) And unlike most recent mass shooters, he allowed himself to be taken alive.

Now survivors are saying Holmes said he was the Joker, and had dyed his hair red. This makes you wonder how much of a fan the killer really was since any schoolboy knows the Joker’s hair is green. Still, the chaos the Joker embodies (especially in Heath Ledger’s gas-sniffing interpretation of the villain) may have spoken to Holmes. He certainly unleashed chaos.

Whitman’s killings were precise, if apocalyptic; they took place in a public space in the bright Texas sun. The Colorado shootings were confined, claustrophobic, people could not escape. A cellphone video of the theater lobby after the shooting shows one person coming out in a full Batman costume (it was a midnight premier, remember); pity the real thing wasn’t there to confront the real bad guy. That’s one difference between art and reality: in Targets the real Boris Karloff, at the drive-in for a promo, disarms the shooter. “I knew this would happen,” he says.

As grave as the dangers of city living are (why just last week some kids sitting on the stoop in my block in Brooklyn were robbed, at 11 pm!) there are dangers in country life too. Like the bear that jumped in our pond yesterday,

Okay, it was a hot day. And I don’t have a bear phobia, they have as much right to roam the hills below the Appalachian Trail as I do (more, some would argue). But after accepting the fact that we would not be driving back to NY from CT when our reasons for returning vanished, I decided to embrace the sense of entitlement that comes with a country house and head for the pond behind our house for a swim, with only my dog, my Kindle, my Android and the last of of the Patrick Melrose quartet (in paperback) for company.

Between dunks (the water was still a little too cold for actual swimming) I took a moment to feel the stillness of the environment. Bugs, birds, bees… broken by a splash big enough to be a dog. A really big dog.

At first I thought it was a beaver: it was big and black and wet and slick. Until it climbed out of the water, and kept coming. And suddenly I was looking at the California state flag, in 3D. Our dog, Riley, seemed quite blind to the happenings (being, I’m afraid, kind of blind now) but I grabbed his leash, started to assemble my  things and then did what any good city dweller would do: I called 911.

I got patched through to the parks department, eventually, and I confessed that I had not been paying attention the day in class when they discussed what to do when confronting a black bear. “Just make a lot of noise,” the nice man said. “Carry a big stick if you want to. But the last thing you want to do is startle him.”

Oh, great, now we’re worrying about me scaring the bear.

Armed with my tree club, carrying my bag of electronic devices and holding Riley on his leash (at least he could smell the bear now, and was very excited) I sang a version of “Finiculi, Finicula”: “Harken, harken! Music fills the air/Harken, harken! this song is for the bear.”

We made it back to the house in one piece, though we found the front door open. I made Riley go into each room with me, hoping he would smell the intruder before I saw him but we were alone. Beds were unmade, of course, and porridge all gone…

What links the viral reaction to the story of This American Life retracting its Mike Daisey story about Apple factory conditions in China and the news that Kony 2012 cofounder Jason Russell was arrested for public masturbation? The hope the often nasty tweets and messages held that people wouldn’t actually have to worry about buying iPads or helping children being kidnapped in Africa.

TAL host Ira Glass did what any good journalist would do with the Apple story, in which monologuist, author and (perhaps) bullshit artist Daisey is guilty of mashing up facts (and seemingly inventing characters) for a radio report based on his one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs: He made a whole new episode out of it, and it’s a must-listen for fans of journalism.

Glass himself seems beyond reproach, which is one of the reasons his retraction packed such a punch. As Kurt Andersen noted, the first line of tweets responding to his posting of the news was “Whoa!” Glass is like the Edward Murrow of the new new journalism; his popular program has always seemed a model of integrity and has never succumbed to easy irony. He tackles subjects others don’t, using novel approaches and refreshingly first-person reporting.

Which is maybe why he sounds so devastated in this weekend’s show. “The most powerful and memorable moment’s [of Daisey’s report] all seem to have been fabricated,” he says, a fact which Daisey doesn’t really dispute. “I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of my trip” he says, which, along with “I didn’t think I would unpack the complexities of how the story gets told” may live on as howlers of the Appalachian Trail variety when it comes to the art of dissembling.

In the end the monologist (and author of the inside-Amazon book, 27 Dog Years) seeks shelter with the idea that he was telling a theatrical truth in a journalistic setting (which doesn’t explain him lying to Glass and the fact-checkers of the show) while Glass counters that the old-fashioned idea of labeling stories “fiction” or “non” stands the test of time (and theater). Daisey makes it sound like they tried to take Death of a Salesman and put it in the 60 Minutes slot (against his will, I guess) while Glass understands that the question of Apple’s factory conditions is a different one for billions of consumers: “Should I feel bad about this?” they want to know, or, put another way, “Is their blood on my iPhone?”

In the third act of the retraction show, Glass poses the question to Charles Duhigg, who co-authored a report on Foxconn factory conditions in the NY Times, and it gets a complicated answer. But I can’t help but think a lot of people want an uncomplicated answer — No — so they can go back to tapping their screens without wondering if there’s a human cost.

So it is with Jason Russell, whose Kony 2012 video has been seen by more than 82 million people. The video, along with the organization Invisible Children, is meant to bring awareness to the Ugandan guerilla Joseph Kony, whose Lord’s Resistance Army kidnaps young children and forces them into conflict and prostitution. The video and the organization were already being criticized before his arrest — it was misleading, critics said, an over simplification, another example of a white man coming to save Africa. (Nicholas Kristoff did a pretty thorough job of answering those criticisms in his op-ed column last week.)

Now, after being caught (and caught on tape) screaming, naked, hysterical on the streets of San Diego, Russell has damaged the cause and certainly made himself a target for a lot of online humor. Friends and family members are already suggesting that Russell’s problems are a lot deeper than the haters suggest, and may end up proving the adage that just because someone is crazy doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Russell has made a cause of the thousands of children kidnapped in Uganda and neighboring countries, and has been fighting to bring it to public attention for ten years. His organization has enlisted the support of politicians on both sides of the aisle in DC (and what else can you say that about these days?) and helped convince Obama to send military advisors to Uganda to aid in the capture of Kony, who tops the list of the International Criminal Court’s most-wanted-for-crimes-against-humanity. The eagerness to write him off seems to mirror the desire most people have when faced with international injustice to go back to sleep.

I was saddened if not 100% shocked by the news of Whitney Houston’s sudden death in her room at the Beverly Hilton last night. The last I had seen of her was a glimpse of her performing in Central Park on Good Morning America in 2009, where she appeared torn and frayed after yet another comeback album. (“I’m gonna try and do this,” she said, before making a hash of the number.) She had been seen previously, gaunt and unrecognizable, in the reality TV show, Being Bobby Brown, and I remember thinking there was no rung below the celebrity rehab show. But there’s always another rung.

I had interviewed Houston in 1995 for Harper’s Bazaar. She was finishing her soundtrack for the film version of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale and was gearing up for The Preacher’s Wife, a gospel remake of an old Cary Grant-Loretta Young vehicle, The Bishop’s Wife. I remember reading McMillan’s book (a best-seller with a huge following among African American women) and watching The Bodyguard in preparation for my interview with her. But the more salient stories on my mind had nothing to do with her projects.

For the rumors already abounded: She was smoking crack cocaine; her marriage to Brown was a sham; she was an unstable and unpredictable talent on the best of days. None of these were the kinds of things one could talk about, of course: I can’t remember if her publicist had expressly forbidden such forays but I was supposed to write a soft and supportive story – she would “wear clothes,” as they said in the fashion mags, and grace the cover. No dirty laundry need be aired.

I was newly sober myself, counting days as they say in AA. I had found a number of interesting meetings in LA, filled with movie stars and crack whores, sometimes in the same place, and I was literally taking things one day at a time while preparing to talk to this woman who was supposedly deep in denial about her own addictions. I was more nervous than usual before meeting her (and frankly I always felt sort of sick before interviewing any celebrity, even though that was how I earned my bread and butter then) – an ex publicist of hers had already told me stories, off the record, about what a handful Houston could be.

I was allowed to sit in at a recording studio where she was working with Babyface and Cece Winans, and I tried to act like a fly on the wall (albeit one with a notebook) while the three of them went over something she had already recorded. She was doing a bit of overdubbing while I hung out with Winans and “Face,” as his friends call him. It was only after she had run through a few octaves and returned to chat with her friends that things got weird.

The topic was a country singer who had just sung, and sort of mangled, “The Star Spangled Banner” on Monday Night Football that week. It was not a big diss, as I recall; not many people can sing that song, and quite a few, pros included, have publicly died trying. But Houston had famously knocked it out of the park at the 1991 Super Bowl, and in the wake of the first Gulf War her cover sold millions. Maybe she thought, in light of her success, that she would appear petty making fun of someone else’s effort.

Seeing me in the corner, jotting down notes while the three of them joked, Houston suddenly rushed over and proceeded to push me out the door. Literally. “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to leave now,” she said and within minutes I was out on the street thinking I had been thrown out of better places than that, but not while sober. Her new publicist joined me before I could head back to my hotel, assuring me that the diva was just a little tightly wrapped right now and that I shouldn’t read anything into it.

The next day I had lunch with Houston at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She was on time and immediately apologized for her behavior the day before. I didn’t care; I knew it would make for interesting copy, which was always a challenge when writing what too often became puff pieces. I remember her being clear and present for the interview, defending Bobby Brown (who had just been accused, again, of punching out someone in a hotel) and extolling the virtues of Denzel Washington, who was going to play the Cary Grant role in The Preacher’s Wife. She seemed authentically curious about what I thought of McMillan’s book and if she looked a little pockmarked underneath the makeup, what business of it was mine? She had already made my job easier when she threw me out of the studio: She had given me my lede.