Now (for now) we're down from three gunmen at the Navy Yard to maybe one, and the one—the certain one, the dead one—is on his second reported identity. He got 16 years younger between iterations, and is now a civilian contractor rather than a member of the Navy. Who knows where or what he (or they) will be in another hour?

So once again The Media fucked it up, as they—we—usually do. Remember the New York Post getting everything wrong about the Boston Marathon bombing? Remember Gawker picking up the wrong name for the bomber, and picking up the name of Adam Lanza's brother during the horrible confusion of Newtown? Obviously, whatever we were going to learn last time, we haven't learned. (Sort of like the gun problem, hmm. First/Second Amendment 4eva!)

Look, next time this happens, just Shelter in Place, informationally. The thing about the people on television, especially, is that they have no clue, zero, what's actually happening. Bloggers don't either, but at least we're not stuck trying to fill live airtime, staring out at an audience that wants to know the facts that we don't have, right now. Although that didn't stop BuzzFeed from tweeting out a link to "[i]intense and mesmorizing [sic] photos" that were useless and boring.

Nobody knows anything. A cop says something to a cop and somebody hears it from the second cop and it goes to somebody's earpiece and goes out over the air, maybe stopping on Twitter before or else after. Either way, once it's on Twitter, that's it. Then a cop will have heard it for sure, which means a "law enforcement source" is not unfamiliar with it, and off we go.

Seriously, just ignore us. Wait it out. We're wrong. We'll keep on being wrong. File "mesmorizing" with "igon values" in the lexicon of accidentally valuable terminology. We're all mesmorized. Those alarming yet tedious hours between something horrible happening and anyone figuring out what it was—forget about it, unless you're in the vicinity. The only positive development this time was that the Reddit investigative thread immediately turned into a forum for abusing would-be investigators, then shut down entirely. Who did it? Piggy Poopballs did it. Reddit wins the news cycle.

[Photo via Getty]