The Awl

Today's a Good Day to Delete Your Gchat archives

Choire Sicha — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:50:43 +0000

"There was his claim that he hated high school, and there were three files on his computer, written in July and early September, whose contents are unknown but whose file names are Gah.docx, sorry.docx, and Why is everything so painful.docx."
—It's hard to come away from today's Tyler Clementi story in the New Yorker and think that his webcam-spying roommate should go to jail for ten or more years. But mostly it will make you want to permanently delete all your IM archives. You really, really do not want the dumb, sarcastic garbage you say to your friends showing up in court.

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Jersey Mayhem: High School Music Teacher Caught Pawning Instruments

Dave Bry — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:40:57 +0000

As you would have been reminded by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band had you been listening to the radio 25 years ago, things are tough all over. And as Bruce Springsteen might have reminded John Cafferty, stop ripping me off, you Rhode Island poseur, things are tougher in New Jersey than they are anywhere else. Sad evidence of that today, with word that Toms River High School North music teacher Albert Crosta was arrested Monday after selling $1,300 worth of school-property musical instruments to a second hand shop. Clarinets, a violin, French horn and cymbals, everything.

The news seems particularly crushing considering that, just last January, an Asbury Park Press article entitled "Toms River North's Band Marches On" (opening sentence: "And the band played on...") reported that "The school has never given into some people's theory that rival school, Toms River High School South, eclipses it in spirit."

Come this fall, at the annual game known locally as "The Civil War," when North's cheerleaders do their best to rouse the crowd to a fight song played on a single Casio keyboard (not unlike the one used so prominently in that John Cafferty song, perhaps), well, we'll see whether or not "some people's theory" indeed proves true.

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Sady Doyle on the Tragedy of Laura Bush's Selflessness

Choire Sicha — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:00:27 +0000

"But abnegating her own beliefs in order to stand by her man-even as he did things that affected innumerable lives, things she apparently knew to be wrong-was exactly 'traditional,' and the worst kind of tradition. The really troubling thing is how much people liked it: How a woman publicly enacting lack of engagement, lack of opinion, lack of self, was met with such sky-high approval ratings and such wide applause."
-That's Sady Doyle on the secret life of Laura Bush, and it is all kinds of oof.

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New Jersey Sucker Birthrate Probably Double The National Average

Dave Bry — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:15:25 +0000

A woman named Karen Brown, of Randolph, New Jersey, is suing her former psychic counselor for fraud, claiming the storefront clairvoyant, Paula Lee, took her for $160,000. As the Asbury Park Press reports: "Brown became convinced that Lee 'had genuine psychic abilities, powers and the ability to influence future events,' the suit said. She claimed she could communicate with departed souls and convinced Brown she was under a curse and 'dark forces were obstructing her efforts to find happiness,' the suit said." While it's difficult to totally excuse the victim in such a case, Ms. Lee seems like a particularly predatory fake-psychic. Besides depression and marital problems, Brown was suffering from cancer. And Lee allegedly told her she would die without her help. That's just not nice.

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The Last of the Hot Summer Town Halls: How We've All Been Fooled By The Health Care Debate

Abe Sauer — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:48:29 +0000

Abnormally interesting town hall meetings have caused some in Congress to make their August events invitation-only. This tactic, a favorite of the Bush administration, has been bemoaned by the right as cowardice. Senator Byron Dorgan, who puts the D in the Red State of ND, went ahead and held meetings anyway. I went to a few to see what the fuss was all about. (Hint: It's not about health care.)

If our Congress can be measured on a scale of feces (and it should), Senator Byron Leslie Dorgan is closer to adorable rabbit droppings than, say, the diseased swine diarrhea that is Michele Bachmann (R-MN). A three-time senator, Dorgan is the author of Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America. One of only eight senators to vote "No" on 1999's financial deregulation, he is now famous for saying: "I think we will look back in 10 years and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past."

Despite his brave stand on behalf of his flock during a period of unchecked growth and dumdum optimism, many now say outright that they do not trust him. Also, he blogs for the HuffPo. Best of all, Dorgan is fit, nearly svelte, a graying, trustworthy John Edwards, a man for whom flat-front L.L. Bean slacks were invented. Because who wants to trust health care reform to some fatso?

My first stop was the Mayville Senior Citizen Center. It's a tiny ag town between Fargo and Grand Forks along the Red River. Not 20 miles the other side of the river is Minnesota's 7th Congressional district, represented by Collin Peterson (D-MN)-who you may have recently heard is in a bit of trouble after saying he doesn't do town halls anymore because "Twenty-five percent of my people believe the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the Twin Towers down."

All week here, during old people hour (i.e., the nightly news) on the TV, commercials from the Club for Growth were in heavy rotation. The commercial's gist: "Old people will be forcibly put down unless they oppose reform." During my drive to Mayville, Excellence in BroadcastingÃ‚Â® is on and Rush was giving "just the facts" on the H.R. 3200 bill.

On the way back, it was Hannity. Both mentioned "death panels."

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Who Knew Drea De Matteo Was A Bitch?

Choire Sicha — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 08:53:00 +0000

Obviously everyone everywhere is turned inside out by this week's Us story on Lindsay Lohan. Particularly because-wait, what? "'Everyone's turned on me,' says the actress. She tells the magazine that the night of the Chateau showdown, Nicole Richie walked by her and said 'Uck,' and Drea De Matteo said, 'Come at me, bitch.'" Okay, for one thing, Drea De Matteo 1) doesn't work any more and 2) has like a 15-month-old baby, and what is she doing out? Oh and third of all: "Joey"? What the hell?

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