Okay, I'll buy that. I had been working from a broader definition of "mass murderer" being someone who had simply killed multiple people. Plus, when you write something this long, you don't want to keep using the same phrase over and over, so I went back and forth between those two a bit.

I think it's a combination of factors: the gruesomeness of the murders, the fact that he was never caught, and the fact that he was such a media sensation. Plus, because he was never identified, he has a colorful, universally-recognized nickname, which makes him easier to remember.

That's a great one. I'll have to work around to it sometime…

Sure, but you have to think about killing yourself some other way. That was @avclub-32b63dd70d870580128d83e930199e1c:disqus's whole point, that guns make it easy to kill yourself impulsively. And I'll add that they make it easy to kill someone else impulsively. Killing someone with a knife takes effort, proximity, and…

That counts on the "crimes that inspired completely useless legislative or legal remediation." When my younger son was 3 months old, they made me take his shoes off at airport security. His shoes were 4 inches long! You couldn't fit a roll of caps in there! But at that time they still weren't screening shipping…

My Onion headline I want to submit one day is "Old-Timey Criminal Arrested For Moida"

If brightly colored top hats are in fashion, can oversized plastic sunglasses and alarm clock necklaces be far behind?

Well, I think older men hung onto the old style, but after JFK (regardless of how much responsibility he personally had for the trend), no one grew up to be an adult and started wearing a hat everywhere.

Pretty sure novelty t-shirts got replaced by pants with something written on the ass. This is a dark time for America.

One of the perks of being the author of the piece. Of course, it comes with an extremely elevated risk of CancerAIDS, but danger is part of the job.

Sir Topham Hatt loomed extremely large in my kids' preschool years, but I couldn't find a way to work him in. Sometimes, Wikipedia gives me more than I can put in an article.

I couldn't find confirmation of this, so I didn't include it in the article, but in my youth, several music teachers told me that the half note and whole note rests in musical notation were modeled on top hats. Apparently there was a time when gentlemen would put their hat right-side-up on a table to indicate they…

Russia has to play defense! It's the only way to survive! The real-life strategy is still the best one — Russia just takes a pounding while the UK and US get their shit together. In the US' case, that means taking over the seas so you can start shipping troops over (although going through Africa is a heck of a lot…

I just threw that out there to see who would leap to the defense of Wendy's.

Rule of Acquisition #405: Free Parking isn't free!

Yes! And "The Machine" would be the other one! And instead of Chance and Community Chest, the cards would be "Stuff Walter Eats" and "Stuff Olivia Gets Injected With". There'd also be a stack of Astrid cards that the game's creators never got around to writing.

I prefer to have the hat perch on top of the car, or have the dog wear the hat. Alternately, the dog can eat out of the hat like it's his food dish.

Yes! It's Fringe Monopoly!

I couldn't find a place to fit this into the article, but Board Game Geek ranked it as one of the 20 worst games ever made. It's one of those things like the Electoral College, or Wendy's, where nobody likes it, but it's too entrenched and it's easier to just keep using it than to find something new.

If I ever end up with a newer edition of Monopoly, I'm throwing away the cat and 3d printing an iron. It's tradition, damn it! The Parker Brothers are rolling over in their graves!