When I heard of their deaths on Channel Six's "Action News" Sunday night, the anchorman said that the fire apparently started accidently from candles used for light since the third floor apartment was without electricity. He ended his report with a familiar, and in this case, an obnoxious coda: "Chicago fire fighters found no working smoke detectors."

Why not add, "The family had no fire insurance because they hadn't paid the premiums."?

Six children dead in a fire started by candles because there was no electricity in a third floor tenement apartment and the BIG STORY on Action News was the lack of smoke detectors. Of course, they didn't have smoke detectors! They couldn't afford LIGHTS!

The Action News report was careful to mention "working" smoke detectors, leaving the unspoken presumption that those six children would be alive if precious nine-volt batteries hadn't been used for, WHAT? Flashlights? Popcorn makers?

Did anyone mention that Steve Irwin died because he was a complete nut? Did anyone suggest that he wasn't wearing "working" Kevlar body armor while showboating around a potentially, but usually timid, poisonous fish? You've seen him with crocodiles and cobras, imagine him with a big flat frightened stingray sailing past?! You've seen him bait crocs with his own infant child for the amusement of a crowd. Tell me Steve Irwin doesn't deserve a big fat, "We told you so," by a disapproving worldwide media.

But these six kids in Chicago. . .they get what? At first I thought it was a knee-jerk Philadelphia news media response written by reporters who don't understand that if poor people are using candals for light at night, or gas ovens for heat in the winter, chances are that their home's smoke detectors aren't working any better than the air bags on their parents' Lexus.

Poverty killed these kids, not the lack of smoke detectors.

Open flames due to lack of electricity killed these kids, not the lack of batteries in the smoke detectors. But do you know what Chicago Fire Commissioner Raymond Orozco said Sunday afternoon about this tragedy? "If the batteries went out in someone's remote control, how long would that last?" he told the Chicago Tribune. "But they won't spend a dollar on a 9-volt battery. God forbid you don't have a battery in the remote and have to get up off your couch."

You show me a battery, nine-volt or otherwise, that can change a channel in a house without electricity.

That's what I mean. Clearly, the chief wasn't thinking when he said that. He's as heart broken as the rest of the fire fighters in Chicago. Six kids are dead. Someone must be to blame. But it wasn't them.

I liked Steve Irwin a lot. He gave me a kick. Until the minute he got stabbed in the heart by a fish that normally hides from humans, I thought he knew what he was doing. Even though the whole time he was doing it while joking with 2,000 pound meat-eating dinosaurs and venomous snakes he picked up as casually as a new belt at Urban Outfitters, Steve Irwin looked like a big, earnest, goofy white kid about to get killed in a jungle he understood too well by half. He was invincible. Until he wasn't.

And the biggest difference between his passing and those six kids in Chicago who died screaming in the night is that he loved his life until the minute it ended. That, and of course, that everyone knew his name. Which is more than we can say for Vanessa Ramirez, 14; Eric Ramirez, 12; Suzette Ramirez, 10; Idaly Ramirez, 6; Kevin Ramirez, 3; and Escarlet Ramos, also aged three.