It was just back at the end of August that the eighth foot was found. Now here is the ninth mysterious and Canadian severed foot. This one is in a boot! For the first time! And also has apparently been in water for a decade. And… “The autopsy did not show any toolmarks or impressions on the bones or any evidence to suggest the foot had been mechanically separated from the body. Like the others, it appears to have come off naturally as a result of having spent a long time in the water, the coroners office said.” I dunno, what does it mean?

Move over, cottage cheese containers, now Mike Doughty has tiny pills to use as percussion. Also he feels better.

Thursday, November 10

At San Diego -7 Oakland
If Philip Rivers
throws one more pick he wins a
bowl of booger soup. PICK: RAIDERS

Saturday, November 12

Manny Pacquiao v. Juan Manuel Marquez III (9–1)
Not another tie!
After 12 Rounds they should go
to penalty kicks. PICK: MARQUEZ

Sunday, November 13

Pittsburgh -3 At Cincinnati
The Bengals look good
but just not as good as Troy
Polamalu’s hair. PICK: STEELERS

At Kansas City -3 Denver
Tebow forgives sins.
Specifically the sin of
thinking he’s sucky. PICK: CHIEFS

Jacksonville -3 At Indianapolis
If the Colts don’t win
this weekend they won’t win til
Autumn 2012. PICK: COLTS

At Dallas -5.5 Buffalo
Whatever happened
to Debbie who did Dallas?
I will Google her. PICK: BILLS

Houston -3 At Tampa Bay
Arian Foster.
Nothing else needs to be said.
Arian Foster. PICK: TEXANS

At Carolina -3.5 Tennessee
Cam Newton comes back
from the bye week to pilot
my fantasy team. PICK: PANTHERS

At Miami -4 Washington
The Dolphins would blow
Their chances at drafting Luck
with another dumb win. PICK: REDSKINS

At Atlanta PK New Orleans
This is secretly
pro football’s best rivalry.
Falcons set to stun. PICK: FALCONS

At Chicago -3 Detroit
Bears will need some help
from Optimus Prime to stop
Megatron Johnson. PICK: LIONS

At Cleveland -2.5 St. Louis
Browns’ QB Colt McCoy
needs a pair of Drew Carey’s
corrective earwear. PICK: BROWNS

At Philadelphia -14 Arizona
Eagles are almost
as big a bummer as when
Mr. T killed Mickey. PICK: CARDINALS

Baltimore -6.5 At Seattle
Seattle has the
coolest public library
I have ever seen. PICK: RAVENS

At San Francisco -3.5 NY Giants
If you leave your heart
in San Francisco they will
bring it back for six. PICK: 49ers

At NY Jets -1.5 New England
Pats’ 4th Quarter D
is as sad as the ending
of Good Will Hunting. PICK: JETS

Monday, November 14

At Green Bay -13.5 Minnesota
The Vikings can win
if the Packers forget they’re
playing on Monday. PICK: VIKINGS

Last week’s Haiku Picks went 10–4. Season to date is 61–70–3. Why do I keep betting on the Browns?

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

New Year’s Day

My friend puts down his wine glass and
sighs that he’s the oldest person
in this noisy restaurant. If he suddenly
went up in smoke
then I would be the oldest person
in this noisy restaurant.

On New Year’s Day at the Poetry
Project, I look down the long list
of readers in the marathon, hours
and hours of readers. Where is
this one? Where is that one?
Dead, dead, dead or nearly so.

Am I the oldest reader? Wait,
there’s Taylor Mead.
Eat your broccoli, Taylor Mead.
I’m counting on you.

For Rose Pernick on the 100th Anniversary of Her Birth
and the Almost Immediate Arrival of Discontent

After she had finished calling every relative
who would still listen,
to tell them Sue and I had stolen all her money,
and when she was finished firing that week’s
domestic helper (who she thought was stealing),
Mother launched a new campaign.
She called everyone she could think of
to say that her life would be torment unless
she could have a white cardigan but,
alas, she could not afford to buy one
(since Sue and I had stolen all her money).
And my sister, a lover of family who would
never say uncle, heard this heartbreaking appeal
and was soon on a plane to Fort Lauderdale
with a fine white cardigan in her bag.
And when she arrived at the condo, after
the exchange of wary greetings,
she went into the bedroom, and there
overflowing on the dresser-top,
were piles of cardigans, towers
of cardigans, prodigies of cardigans,
a snow-capped Everest of
twenty-three white cardigans,
sent by the kindly and gullible,
and still virginal in their wrappings.
But Mom — all these sweaters,
what will you do with all these sweaters?
Ha, Mom replied, shiny-eyed
in her bottom-line glory:
Do you think I’d wear any of this crap!

Robert Hershon is co-editor of Hanging Loose Press. His most recent poetry collection is Calls from the Outside World.

Would you believe that we have even more poems right here, in The Poetry Section’s vast archive? You wouldn’t? You really need to work on your trust issues.

You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Emerson Beyer

Even if you didn’t finish all last week’s assignments, you have reason to be proud of yourself. You’ve started — if only mentally — getting ready for the high hosting day. As you face down these final 14 days until then, periodically repeat these affirmations:

• I am not a procrastinator. I am organized. I am both confident and relaxed, because I have a solid plan and a clean house.
• I give thanks for Thanksgiving. I am Thanksgiving personified. I am Squanto and Miles Standish rolled into one efficient thanks-giving machine.
• The grocery store is an oasis of inner peace. Standing in line is not a frustrating waste of time, but an opportunity to plan ahead for Christmas and to finally try those tea tree toothpicks.
• Every moment spent in preparation is a gift to my future self. I love you, Future Self!

Do you have your notebook out? Okay, let’s get focused, we have a big week!

A Bird in Hand
Your top priority this weekend is sourcing and ordering a turkey. There are lots of questions and options regarding the turkey acquisition, but here are some guidelines that will help with your decisions:

1. Do not buy a frozen turkey. Frozen turkeys ruin lives. They don’t thaw at the rate they are “supposed” to thaw, so they don’t cook predictably. Too-cold turkeys cause huge fires when you try to deep-fry them (not that you would do so). And, most importantly, the kind of turkeys that come frozen, shrink-wrapped and pumped with additives, are disgusting. Which brings us to:

2. Avoid mass-market turkeys if you can afford to do so. Freakishly proportioned albino mutants from polluting factory farms where workers have crazy rates of injury — ugh. You don’t need a lecture from me on this topic, just bear in mind that a little preparation will allow you to adhere to your values by getting a more sustainably raised turkey ahead of time, rather than settling at the last minute for what you find in the freezer case. With that said:

3. Don’t fall for the allure of the luxury turkey with his luxuriant plumage glamour shot in the marketing materials. Pasture raised, freshly processed poultry is delicious no matter its pedigree. Certain grocers, particularly online, market turkey as if it’s fine wine and would have you believe that there are nuanced distinctions. Turkey quality has more to do with farming than breed, and indeed the most trustworthy turkey sellers will explain that the farmer’s reasons for choosing a breed have more to do with conditions on the farm (weather, acreage, habitat) than with your palate. That’s why:

4. The best place to source your turkey is the farmer’s market. If you don’t have a good relationship with a poultry farmer already, it may not work out this year, because their supplies will be very limited. But it’s worth trying. Arrive to the market early this Saturday morning and start asking around. If the farmers at the market are out, you may be in luck online. Find out if any of the sellers at Local Harvest are near your home. You can also search the pastured-animals-only website Eat Wild for turkey farmers in your state. But before you place that order:

5. Figure out how much turkey you need. One pound per person is the traditional rule of thumb, but keep in mind that’s for a huge-breasted mass-market monster turkey, and a less beastly bird will have a different ratio of muscle to bone. Get at least 1–1/2 pounds per person. If this works out to more than 22 pounds, definitely consider getting two smaller turkeys, if you can fit them in your oven. Two eleven-pound turkeys can fit in an ordinary roasting pan (rectangle, not oval) with some rotating and flip-flopping. One added advantage to this, if you want the picture-perfect table, is that you can present a perfectly roasted whole bird in the dining room while carving (mutilating) the other one in the kitchen.

More Turkey Talk
Make sure you have the equipment you need to get this done, starting with the brining step. The night before Thanksgiving, you are going to need a cool, safe place to leave the turkey(s) soaking in a salt-and-sugar brine. This could be a large bucket or a cooler, but whatever you use must be clean. There are these fabulous brining bags that will help with the clean-bucket issue, but I don’t recommend just plopping a bird in a brining bag in the fridge — it still needs to be in something, such as a bucket or punch bowl, or else not enough bird will be in contact with the brine.

Even though we are keeping the Thanksgiving menu as simple as possible, you may not have enough room in your refrigerator for buckets of birds in brine. In most U.S. places, it’s cold enough to leave them outside, but make sure they are protected from hungry bears, invasive deer and chupacabras. So: make sure you have the containers you need and the space you need.

In your zeal for preparedness (good for you!) you can even prepare the dry ingredients for the brine now: two cups of salt, two cups of sugar, several bay leaves, and many peppercorns, to which you’ll add several smashed/peeled garlic cloves and two gallons of water when the time comes to actually do the brining.

When it comes to the roasting itself, you certainly need a roasting pan — the biggest one that will fit in your oven with the door closed. It’s great if the pan comes with a rack, but that’s not absolutely necessary. Rectangular is better than oval for several reasons, including that you’re going to use the roasting pan to make gravy, and it needs to fit comfortably over two burners. Finally, you’ll need something to flip the bird over and move it around. The forks that often come included with roasting pans are to me useless. I prefer to use these silicone oven mitts; even if they are a bit messy they are washable. Let’s go ahead and add a dark colored apron to the list of mandatory equipment.

Why Aren’t Dairy Farmers Richer?
If you haven’t finished making pie dough and turkey stock, try to do it soon — this week’s plan doesn’t involve a lot of new kitchen work, so you can catch up on those things.

If you still have butter left after making all the dough you need, it’s a good time to make some compound butter. You’ll need ¼ pound of herbed compound butter — make it with parsley, time, rosemary and lemon zest — for the turkey itself, and go ahead and make ¼ pound of black-pepper or brown-sugar butter for the table, especially for the Friday morning toast-and-omelet brunch.

Now that you’re out of butter, you’ll need to replenish your supply (and to think, the Wampanoag didn’t even have butter). Butter, butter, butter! While you’re at the grocery store (or farmers market, ordering turkey) pick up some eggs, too. You’ll need more of these than you think (calculate how many for that brunch alone), and there are no problems — indeed some advantages — to keeping them in your fridge for a couple of weeks.

The Ops Chart
How do you think the heroes like the Navy Seals and Martha Stewart get things done? No, not just firearms. Spreadsheets. Here is how to make sure you have the space and equipment you need to pull off all this cooking:

You need to have your menu written out, and a fairly solid idea how long things take to cook. You should also know what time you want to serve the Thanksgiving meal. Make sure you know which/how many pots and pans fit on your stovetop at the same time, and what baking dishes you can fit in your oven while the turkey is in there — adjust the racks so you can test for vertical space, too.

We’re going to make a chart so that we can work backward from your desired finishing time. Make columns that reflect the main constraints: your appliance resources and time points. Make a column for the oven, the microwave, and each burner on the stove. Also make a column for your serveware — it’s better to match the right bowl to the food ahead of time than to grab a wrong vessel in the heat of the moment.

Gravy is the last thing you need to make, so it’s the first thing you should allocate on your chart (just to get started). Use half-hour increments, even if you think some things will be quicker — allow yourself a more flexible timeline. Fill in everything as you think of it (if you do the dry run — yes, I said dry run — you can re-order then). Keep an eye out for time points when you are doing too much at once (starting a something on the stovetop while swapping other things in and out of the oven). Find the “down” times and move non-time-sensitive tasks (e.g., cranberry sauce) to those times.

The Rehearsal Dinner
If this is going to be your first time hosting Thanksgiving at your house or you are simply prone to worry, we can turn preparation up to 11 this weekend with a Dry Run. Sure, this is intense (and probably neurotic), but it has its benefits — it will allow you to relax in the certainty that everything is covered. Plus, rehearsals are fun — like putting on a play, but adding a digital timer and a glass of wine.

For the dry run itself, use the actual equipment, and practice all the transitions on your timeline, including moving food from cookware into service vessels. The service step can be surprisingly time-consuming and chaos-producing, so it’s good to test the flow of things. Make adjustments as needed, and make a list of any missing equipment — get on Amazon right away so you don’t forget to order these things.

Inedible Components of Hospitality
A little bit of decoration is really the icing on the cake, especially since there is no actual Thanksgiving cake. Keeping in mind that your table is going to be loaded with food, you don’t need a lot of floral design. Make sure you have candles and candlesticks — tapers over votives for this occasion. Rather than the tired old gourds and maple leaves, maybe place potted orchids on the table, or a few yarn “dandelion ghosts” planted in milk bottles.

I rarely buy a tablecloth at the store, because they are so unconscionably overpriced. To get something really festive for Thanksgiving, something that won’t get a lot of use, I just head to a discount fabric store and scan the sale racks, especially in upholstery. When I lived in New York I loved the Save-a-Thon up on Third Avenue, with its very cheap, often eye-popping selection. I try to go for an unexpected color or style, like faux silk in teal or lilac instead of the usual fall shades. Two or three yards are undoubtedly enough, and if the roll is wide it doesn’t even need to be hemmed, though you can hem the edges for added durability. If the roll is too narrow for your table, make a runner. Instead of sewing, just use iron-on fusing web.

Oh, and while you have the iron out for that, make sure you know what you’re going to wear on Thanksgiving. Give it a press, hang it up, and keep it in the back of the closet so you don’t accidentally wear it to work. You may find something needs dry cleaning or repairs; take it to the tailor on your way to work Monday morning.

Your final job for this week is to go over the guest room, guest bed, guest couch or air mattress once again to be sure everything is in working order and the linens are clean — if they’ve been in the closet since last Thanksgiving, please toss them in the drier or hang them outside for a day. Sated with food, wine and repartee into the wee hours, your guests should have no trouble sleeping, but fresh sheets will give them one last reason for a “thank you” on Thanksgiving.

K. Emerson Beyer, environmentalist and gadabout, lives in Durham, N.C. and tweets as @patebrisee.

Photo by Gordana Sermek, via Shutterstock.

The “Romenesko” blog (launched in 1999!) was a one-man shop, under the corporate parentage of the Poynter Institute, until fairly recently. It was quite successfully run by its founder, Jim Romenesko, though you could tell every once in a while he’d go through periods of advanced boredom in covering media day-in and day-out. People (well, reporters and editors) mostly loved it; the headlines were, unusually, out-bound links. So it sent traffic. Romenesko’s slight summaries were careful and sometimes sly. The “technology” of the site as such was pretty laughable, down to the ridiculous URL. He was super-fast, he was fair and he was, very subtly, often dryly funny. Then Poynter got whorey.

The headlines became permalinks to the site itself, so it stopped sending much traffic. The site became more “social” in orientation. The posts got longer. More Poynter-as-newspaper-sherpa crap crept in (“How will you handle graphic images or video of Gadhafi’s death?” Zzzz). Two years ago, Julie Moos, who’s been with Poynter for ten years, got her latest promotion and is now the big boss of publishing at Poynter. I have no idea what she’s like, possibly wonderful, but as a blogger and writer, she’s ham-fisted, at best, to my ear. The changes at the blog have been awful to watch. Let’s take a look at the new way things are done at Poynter’s blog — semi-rebranded as “Romenesko+,” which, let’s just pretend that didn’t happen.

And:

This is what it used to be like.

The site has grown increasingly more intolerable. Romensko himself is set to retire permanently from the site (for more interesting ventures) very shortly. And today Julie Moos dropped the bombshell: “I now know that Jim Romenesko’s posts exhibit a pattern of incomplete attribution.” Much handwringing follows; in some blog posts, “the words may appear to belong to Jim when they in fact belong to another.” (Can they “may,” really?) Romenesko offered to resign (ahead of schedule); she refused his resignation. (And he really should tell them to stuff it, but not if it hurts his retirement package in any way.) She concludes: “We are in uncharted territory, marked by uncertainty, which suggests caution. We will continue to evaluate this situation and to be as transparent as possible about what we learn and decide.” (Great, prolong this.) And: “To our knowledge no writer or publication has ever told us their words were being co-opted,” she writes. To my knowledge, no writer has ever, ever complained or even thought to complain about Romenesko, and I certainly have spent a strangely large amount of time talking about him over the last decade. (I have exchanged a few emails with him, barely, over the years.)

Romenesko’s entire practice was about giving credit, in ways that virtually no other blog has been, a position that “Romenesko+” does not embrace as strongly. Poynter has worked systematically to erode a fairly noble, not particularly money-making thing as it works to boost “engagement” and whatever other (highly transitional!) web “best practices” are being touted at the heinous “online journalism” conferences that regularly go on. Charitable with links and naming bylines, and producing even more links when grubby reporters would come emailing with “but I posted that memo just now tooooo!”, the intention underlying Romenesko’s work has always been directing readers to reported material.

To be fair to Moos, though I don’t particularly care, in her position I don’t think she has any choice but to publish about this. It’s the sort of media “process” stuff that is Poynter’s bread and butter (along with initiatives like “Writing Better Headlines and SEO Essentials,” an online class you can take in February!). Moos is also too coy. She learned of all this “thanks to the sharp eye of Erika Fry, an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review.” What she meant was that Fry is working on a story about Romenesko and attribution, and so Moos went to publish first. I found that attribution a little incomplete.

by Danny Gold

The word “hated” adorns Hunter Moore’s social-media bios. He has drawn the ire of the music industry, young people from all over the United States (as well as Canada, England and Australia), of privacy defenders — and, well, of many, many other people who happen to come across his website, Is Anyone Up?, and find it appalling. The death threats have not fazed him. Nor has the spectre of lawsuits; while many have been threatened, to Moore’s knowledge, not one has been filed.

The stabbing, though; that did get his attention. A young woman, unhappy to have had her pictures posted on his site, ambushed Moore one afternoon in March as he walked to his mailbox. The gash to his shoulder required a trip to the hospital. Moore now no longer posts pictures of anyone from his hometown of San Francisco on his site.

Is Anyone Up? is fairly simple in concept: someone anonymously submits nude photos to Moore through the site’s submission form. Perhaps it’s a jilted ex, or a recent hookup, or a vengeful friend. These days, the site receives many self-submissions as well. Provenance doesn’t matter. Moore uploads those photos and attaches identifying screen-grabs from the person’s Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter accounts — whatever’s available. He sometimes adds a pithy caption and a reaction gif at the end, usually from a television show or meme. And that’s pretty much it. Is Anyone Up? currently receives, Moore said, 30 million page views a month.

***

Moore has cleared up to $13,000 a month from the site, but that amount fluctuates and nearly all of it is put back into the site. The server bill alone is $8,000 a month. In addition, Moore, who is 25, must also pay his lawyer, a newly hired PR person, a server administrator, and two security specialists, whose primary responsibility is to age-check the submissions. I spoke with Moore at length over the phone several times in the past few weeks. While his conversation is peppered with “dudes” and “motherfuckers,” under all that seeming casualness he is clearly shrewd when it comes to business matters and the Internet. He’s aware he could be capitalizing on advertisements and bringing in a lot more money, but for now he enjoys the freedom that the lack of advertisers gives him.

Moore said he generally spends 12 hours a day, five days a week uploading posts to his site. There are different varieties of posts. One category is “band whores,” which include a list of all members of a band that someone allegedly slept with. There are “gnargoyles,” a term reserved for people Moore deems particularly unattractive. Other classifications include: “would” or “would not” and “gay” or “straight.” When Moore comes across a Facebook profile he likes, a “bounty” goes out for nude photos of that person. “Please get naked” and “just show the shaft” are also used to urge people to self-submit photos. Unlike many co-ed sites out there, Is Anybody Up? features just as many men as women, if not more.

Another of the site’s regular features is “Daily Hate,” outraged correspondence from people who have had their pictures posted without their consent (example — that link, like many others in this story, NSFW). Some letters threaten; others attempt to cajole him into removing the photos. Often times, Moore will post private chats between him and a postee, in which they insult him or agree to send him pictures for his personal use but not for the site. Sometimes he’ll add their pictures.

The bigger the reaction, the better the traffic.

“People threaten me with lawsuits every day, which is funny, because it fuels the site,” said Moore. “The people that get mad hate my site and want to take it down. They send me all this crazy stuff, but at the same time they’re just building content for my site, which just makes me more popular.”

When Moore tells you that he does not give a fuck, it seems like he actually means it. He regularly posts photos of himself naked, and even, once, a video of him drunkenly masturbating. His cellphone number, email address and Facebook page have been regularly featured on the site. Increasingly, he posts lurid stories from his personal life.

In roughly nine months of the site’s active existence, a cult of personality has grown up around Moore. An army of commenters reveres him and is quick to jump to his defense whenever he is attacked. I’ve seen a couple women offer up their virginity. Teenagers tell him that they will be submitting their pictures to him as soon as they turn 18. Many of these kids are “scene kids.” Swoopy hair, plug earrings, facial piercings, colorful tattoos. They listen to pop-punk and post-hardcore bands. They often have Tumblrs filled with earnest lyrics about love and love lost from bands that play on the Warped tour. And they leave hundreds of comments and responses every day to Moore on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

In these exchanges, Moore is much the same as he is on his website. When a 14 year old questioned him on Tumblr whether his site was going to be around in four years because she wanted to be on it, he replied, “Yeah, hurry up.” When people post to Tumblr saying they feel sorry for Moore, or calling him a drug addict with no future, he reposts it and adds a stock photo of himself looking sad.

In his conversations with me, Moore maintained that the site is all in good fun. But sometimes it seems like he holds a grudge, such as the situation with Emily Gimmel that took place a few weeks ago.

Gimmel, a D-list reality-tv star on a show called “Southern Belles: Louisville,” had some salacious photos posted on the site. She threatened a defamatory suit alleging the pictures weren’t her, and continued to lash out at Moore through social media. She then became the subject of a number of posts.

When I questioned him about it a week or so later, he claimed to barely remember the incident. “Oh yeah! She’s dumb. She told me the FBI was going to be on it. I’m like, ‘They don’t care about you!’” said Moore. “That stuff is just funny to me, but it got played out after a few days. Nobody cares about it now; it’s just another day.”

***

To some, the FBI investigation rumor might not seem far-fetched. After all, following a yearlong investigation by the FBI, Christopher Chaney was indicted on 26 counts for releasing nude photos of celebrities, including Scarlett Johansson.

Those photos, however, were stolen. Moore walks a legal tightrope that so far has him on the right side of the law. His pictures are all legally acquired. And he never assumes ownership. Yet, as dismaying as it may be for those behind the flurry of public inquiries about why Moore is not in jail, he is not breaking any law.

Indeed, as Forbes explored this summer, Moore has done a thorough job of guarding himself against legal issues. “I’m very careful of what I do. Sometimes I get fucked up and write defamatory shit and it gets taken down, but I’m not breaking any laws. What are they gonna file a lawsuit against?” he said.

As Aaron Messing, an information privacy lawyer at OlenderFeldman LLP in New Jersey, explained it, Is Anyone Up? is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The act provides immunity for Internet service providers — which is interpreted as including websites and blogs — who publish information provided by others. As long as Moore’s material is not illegal, such as child pornography, or copyrighted images, he is not liable. (Free takeaway lesson: file copyright take-down complaints, not defamation claims.)

“Mr. Moore, by only posting third-party content remains legally immune, even though he encourages people to send in pictures,” said Messing.

That’s why the submission form is so important. It is, essentially, a contract. “Anything defamatory, it’s not mine, it’s yours. You’re taking 100% ownership, I’m not taking the copyright,” Moore said. “With my site, I don’t want any of that.”

When pictures get sent in, and the sender has completed the submission form, the submission goes into a queue. Moore’s two security specialists then use a number of Internet-based research companies and a photo investigation system to verify ages to ensure that no pictures of anyone under 18 are posted.

This is Moore’s defense against claims that he’s posted child pornography. (Our conversation about this topic, by the way, was the only time during our interviews that Moore turned remotely serious.) While accusations are frequently lobbied against the site, Moore is adamant that he has never posted photos of anyone under 18. He also said that he’s worked with police agencies to help catch people who have submitted such photos, including one recent cooperative effort with the Virginia Beach Police, although he declined to give further details. “It’s the Internet. It’s horrible,” Moore said. “I will do anything I can and I will work with any police department so I can take you down.”

18- and 19-year-olds? That’s a different story. And Moore’s attitude toward the people who’ve had their pictures submitted without their consent seems unsympathetic at best, malicious at worst. “This might sound kind of shitty, but for me, I’m such an open person…. I’ve posted myself drunkenly masturbating, I’ve posted my phone number. I don’t really care. I’m mentally strong I guess. I can handle this shit, but I guess there’s some people who can’t,” he said.

***

A number of the people who’ve had their pictures on Is Anyone Up? without their consent have shut down their Facebook accounts and closed all other avenues of Internet contact, due to the flood of messages and requests they receive after a posting goes live. This can make it hard to get in touch with those who might have the strongest reasons to speak out against Moore. But some people have spoken publicly about it. This woman described the experience on Tumblr:

I was submitted to isanyoneup.com by my ex-boyfriend. I am confronted by friends, family and strangers that they have seen me naked online everyday…. You may think it’s funny but sometimes [I] don’t want to leave my house and go to the mall with my family because I fear somebody will come up to me while I’m with my mother and mention it. My sisters… are ashamed to be related with me and want to lie to their friends that they are my sisters. I am a disgrace to my family…. My self worth has gone out the window and I worry I may never get it back. This keeps me one step away from happiness every single day. I don’t know what to do anymore.

Here is what will happen if your pictures are posted on IAU: The site’s commenters will either harshly critique your body or compliment it. Your Facebook, Twitter and/or Tumblr accounts with be bombarded by friend requests and solicitations.

Some people I spoke to saw this as a good thing. Others I interviewed did not.

Twenty-year-old Sasha (names changed at request) found herself posted recently. She had been visiting the site for a while, and even submitted some people. “I thought it was kind of cool, until I realized that other people were submitting those [pictures] posted on the site, which I thought was a little malicious, but eventually I fell into the fray and began submitting photos of jerks I’ve encountered,” she told me.

Sasha, however, soon found herself posted, too. She had sought out Moore to “have a little fun,” and to ask why some of her submissions hadn’t been posted. She got into a risqué conversation with him that he posted to the site, and later someone else submitted nudes of hers she had sent out.

“At first I was devastated,” she said. A lot of guys and girls contacted her through Facebook, and also “a lot of really mean people were posting hurtful comments, calling me a slut, calling me nasty.”

She said it was tough, but eventually things calmed down — and she met a lot of people through the site, including her new boyfriend. “So now I’m a little flattered by all the new attention and I really enjoy the new company from all these guys and gals. It makes me feel like a mini-celeb.”

But shortly after our exchange, Sasha deactivated her Facebook account. When I asked her why by email, she said she needed a break from social media.

Krissy, a college student from Oregon is an active commenter on the site. While her photos have never appeared on the site, she actively communicates and trades pictures with a number of other commenters. “I like the voyeurism of it, the fact that these people’s private lives are exposed,” she said. “I like seeing Facebook profiles and knowing what those people look like naked.”

Now that Moore has linked the commenting system to Facebook, an extended network has formed, one that actively encourages participation and connections. Among many of the commenters and postees I spoke to there’s a strong feeling of community. They like IAU: They get to see members of their favorite bands naked and sometimes people they know. Twitter is awash with tweets about people bumping into someone from IAU, or seeing their cousin or former high school classmate on the site. People often check and re-check the site to see if pictures of anyone they know have been posted.

***

Moore makes no apologies or attempts to rationalize what he does. “What do I have to defend myself against? It comes down to, you’re fucking stupid and I’m making money off your mistakes. It might sound rough, but how else are you going to learn not to do this again? It’s like you’re playing Russian Roulette like, oh, let’s hope this doesn’t get out.”

He grew up in the Sacramento area and attended a private Christian school until he was kicked out in 8th grade. “I was shy as fuck,” he said. “That’s probably why I am the way I am now. In a way I’ve always wanted my voice heard. All these people wouldn’t give me attention, they blew me off all the time, and now in one month I accomplish more than they have in a year.”

He’d been building businesses since his early teens; by age 16, he had already started a clothing line and built a gaming forum. Around that time, he started getting into the club and music scene his website would eventually focus on and “dressing like a tranny.” After discovering social-networking prototypes Makeoutclub and LiveJournal he became convinced him he could put his Internet and networking skills to use and “do the Internet for life.”

“I’ve been networking since I was a little kid, pretty much. I didn’t know it at the time. It was like ‘Pokemon, gotta catch ’em all,’” he said. The list of contacts and friends he made during this period would later serve as the startup followers (and subjects) of IAU.

By then he had long since dropped out of high school. He bounced around a few jobs and then attended beauty school. While working a retail job, he filed a sexual harassment suit that left him with a hefty settlement. (He said that the terms of the settlement don’t allow him to comment further.)

From there Moore split time, first living in Williamsburg, before moving back to San Francisco and touring with the band The Millionaires as a manager of sorts. Convinced by a friend who was traveling the world and encouraged by some girls he had met on Myspace he moved to Australia.

By the time he returned to New York in 2010, he had lost every dollar and had to take a job doing hair styling for porn shoots. Moore describes this as a particularly dark period. “I’d never been so close to killing myself before. I had no money and was in serious debt. I went from the highest point of my life to the lowest, I just fucked up. No one that age should get that much money.”

Around this time, he had the idea for a website. In this first concept, Is Anyone Up? was going to be a travel guide dedicated to nightlife and traveling the world, a place for reviews of nights at venues as well as the telling of debauched stories. He bought the domain, but couldn’t focus his energy properly. “At that point, I was doing too many drugs, fucking randoms, and just generally out of it,” he said.

One night, while IMing with friends, Moore attempted to send a naked picture of a girl he was sleeping with. When it didn’t work, a friend convinced him to upload it to isanyoneup.com, then dormant. He and his friends started adding to the site, just for laughs, he said. A B9 forum poster somehow came across the site, and one day Moore checked the traffic and realized the site had gotten 14,000 unique hits the day before. That’s when things started to pick up.

Musicians became a fixture of the site. Many of the women Moore had met through the music scene had libraries of naked band member photos but no place to post them. “There was nowhere to go for these girls to look at straight, normal dudes naked,” said Moore. “All the girls I knew from the scene were like ‘post this guy.’”

He posted pictures of a member of a band he now can’t recall. It was reposted lots of places, and Moore, noticing the traffic spike, realized he had to include men in the site concept. With every newly revealed guitarist, the traffic picked up.

The site now gets roughly 175,000 unique hits a day, according to Moore. (Compete.com put September traffic at about 100,000 a day.) And it’s growing. Quickly. So far he’s added very little advertising, though he does make money through merchandise. It’s enough to cover that $8,000 server bill with a little left over. He still does hair on the side for private clients.

Moore said to expect bigger things in the future. “I have some crazy shit that will change the world. It will be on TMZ. Big celebrities have sent me bigger celebrities, but as of now I’m not going to do that.”

Definitely in the works right now is a mobile app that Moore calls a game changer as far as social networking. Moore wouldn’t get specific, but did say that the technology is “something so different, but so simple, even Facebook will be jealous of me.”

“It’s going to be ready in, like, seven weeks,” he said. “You’re going to love me.” Already Moore is compiling a list from the site of beta testers.

Besides that, he’s working on starting a nonprofit to combat underage sexting. He plans on organizing lectures at local schools about the damage it can do. “My site is already an education on technology, how people abuse it. I think it’s dangerous to give any underage kid a cameraphone,” he said. He seemed serious.

As for advice for those who’ve had their pictures posted and aren’t happy about it, Moore is his usual dismissive self. “Once you’re on page two, nobody gives a fuck anymore.”

Danny Gold is a journalist and filmmaker who lives in Brooklyn. He writes about crime, politics, boxing, culture and parties for a bunch of different New York newspapers.

Picture from Moore’s Facebook page.

1. Let’s dispense with the obvious: Jack and Jill is a vehicle for Adam Sandler, who plays both titular roles. The concept that Sandler is playing his own twin sister is, of course, the hook here to draw audiences, as well it should be: Sandler is one of our most under-appreciated performers, comedic or otherwise, and it’s been obvious since his debut as the lead in Billy Madison, where he actually made you feel his transformation from lazy, spoiled hotel-empire heir into energetic scholar who finally realizes the importance of actually believing in something. But Jack and Jill is about much more than a talented thespian at the height of his powers. It’s a meditation on identity.

2. The film opens with LA ad executive Jack Sadelstein dreading the arrival of his twin sister Jill for her annual Thanksgiving visit. While the pair were once quite close, Jack now finds Jill difficult to take. Once Jill shows up, hijinks, as is their wont, ensue. There is a series of crude if effective gags, and the humor is on the level that one generally expects from a Sandler film. But this time the comedy is more subversive. One gets the sense that Sandler and director Dennis Dugan are using farce to mask the more serious points they want to get across about who we are and how we define ourselves in a stark and uncaring world.

3. The fact that Jack and Jill are twins speaks directly to the dualities inherent in all of us. Sandler and Dugan want us to consider who we are on the most basic existential level, what we show and what we hide as we make our way through life. The very traits that Jack finds so irksome in Jill are, of course, extensions of his own nature, jagged reminders of what he’s repressed as he has chased success in his chosen field and attempted to create the perfect family life. (In an interesting bit of casting, Katie Holmes, whose own domestic relationship has been the subject of much analysis concerning public face v. private motivation, plays his wife.)

4. Even more transgressively, Jack and Jill are twins of different genders. What Sandler and Dugan are doing here is, to my mind, the most audacious attempt to encourage discussion about the fluidity of sexual classification in a major studio comedy since 2000’s challenging — if worryingly heteronormative — What Women Want. In an era where the dominance of the patriarchy is widely assumed to be in its twilight, Jill, and her contentious relationship with Jack, represents the anxieties many men are feeling when they think about the future. The fact that much is made of Jill’s unattractiveness is a knowing nod of the part of the producers to the barely concealed disgust with which men are confronting their increasing lack of relevance.

5. To make matters even more complex, Sandler and Dugan have convinced Al Pacino to portray Al Pacino, or at least a cinematic version of Al Pacino. The sheer genius of this exploration of mimesis in a film that is already concerned with the concept of individuality may be the movie’s most triumphant stroke: To have an actor who is so frequently accused of playing himself actually playing himself as an addled version of Al Pacino — one who falls for the feminine side of the lead character’s struggle in duality — could easily have been a step too far, but the depth of thought that Sandler’s creative team has put into the whole project makes the whole thing work on an entirely new plane of personal exploration.

6. Also there is a cameo by Johnny Depp. You should totally see this movie.

Jack and Jill, directed by Dennis Dugan, opens tomorrow. The running time is 90 minutes.

by Matt Langer

16. George H.W. Bush’s gallon of milk

15. Michael Dukakis’ ride in an M1 Abrams tank

14. Ross Perot’s claim that Republicans were going to ruin his daughter’s wedding

13. George W. Bush’s name-that-Pakistani-prime-minister

12. Joe Biden’s plagiarism

11. Mondale’s promise to raise taxes

10. Bill Clinton’s non-inhalation of marijuana

9. Sarah Palin’s reading of all the newspapers

8. Al Gore’s invention of the internet

7. Bob Dole’s falling off a stage

6. Ted Kennedy’s inability to tell Roger Mudd why he wanted to be president

5. John Kerry’s for-it-before-he-was-against-it

4. John McCain’s fundamentally sound economy

3. Rick Perry’s “oops”

2. Howard Dean’s scream

1. Gary Hart’s “Monkey Business”

Matt Langer quit his job in 2002 to run web operations for Gary Hart’s aborted third presidential run.

“Dear reader, if Jane Austen lived today, she’d be an avid blogger, she’d be on Facebook, and of course she’d also be tweeting away — but mostly about other people, not herself.”