I owe you guys some good posts. Much exciting stuff going on in my life, workwise and otherwise, but I shan’t go into too much detail. Random thoughts:
– Am I the only person who, when seeing Paul Giamatti in a movie, thinks of Wallace Shawn? And vice versa? Not because of physical resemblance, although there’s some there. Primarily because they’re both sons of men who you might imagine expected non-Hollywood careers for their offspring. (A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale, and William Shawn, legendary New Yorker editor and man quoted on this site’s About page.)
– I know I’m more likely than most to get excited about the release of 544-page, lengthily-subtitled history books about obscure moments in Atlantic Canadian history. But I’m really excited about next month’s release of A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland, by Yale history prof John Mack Faragher. I’ve been interested in the 1755 expulsion for years (for obvious personal reasons, since it was my ancestors who were expelled), but I really look forward to a historian of Faragher’s rank cutting through some of the self-serving mysteries that cling to the events of 250 years ago.
– Mac geeks like myself are always trying to figure out what’s coming up from our favorite company. That’s mostly done through rumor sites — a dozen or more sites that chronicle leaks from Cupertino on what new products are coming down the pike. The best of these has long been Think Secret, which seems to clearly have the best sources and generally nails its predictions — so much so that it’s currently the target of a trade-secrets lawsuit by Apple.
Anyway, I mention all this because it turns out the guy who runs Think Secret is a 19-year-old kid. Who has been running Think Secret since he was 13. Sign this manchild up, news organizations of the future! (By the way, Apple’s lawsuit is bullshit and will go nowhere. Journalists can’t go to jail in this country for asking questions, thank heavens.)
– Heartaches of Journalist Bloggers, in Wired. Exhibits A through L of why I don’t blog about what I write about (other than to link to my stories).
– MP3s of live Neutral Milk Hotel from 1998. Sound quality’s okay, but it’s hard to remember sometimes how amazing NMH was there for a while.
– Vaguely ludicrous covers of the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat by someone named Ergo Phizmiz.
– Random MP3s: Keleya, a kick-ass ’70s funk number from a West African James Brown disciple named Moussa Doumbia; The Muppet Show theme music sung in Hebrew; Bill Hicks railing on (the first) George Bush in 1992.
13 thoughts on “a bunch of stuff”
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I’ve e-mailed/called all of the website owners your Michael Pitts page has links to so they’ll be contacting you and asking you to remove them shortly. Of course, this is not illegal if the site owner has no prior policy about linking but after such policy has been made, aka the e-mails your about to get, further linking is considered trespassing. If you would like to look these rules up, heres a link:
http://www.amc.army.mil/amc/command_counsel/resources/documents/newsletter02-1/encl01.pdf
Climb back into your clown car, dumbass, and go away. And if you have more idiotic things to say, just send me an email so I don’t have to go through the bother of deleting your comments. I think I have some idea how the Internet works.
obviously
You didn’t respond to the last e-mail I sent, and furthermore, I thought posting where everyone could see would help ensure the “free flow of information.”
I didn’t respond because you made no sense and attacked my integrity. But fine.
Everyone, the other Josh you see here describes himself as “a very good friend” of Michael Pitts, a Toledo pastor.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote one post about Michael Pitts. I happen not to like Pastor Pitts all that much, as I believe is my right. You can read the post to find out why. They include charges of the good pastor exposing himself to strangers and masturbating in front of small boys in baseball stadiums. They also have to do with men claiming to be men of God and using that position to accumulate substantial worldly wealth.
Anyway, this one post from August 2003 has achieved a life of its own. Google found it, and it has become a strange forum for strange people to post their thoughts on Pastor Pitts. Over 140 comments at last count. Some of the posts are from this fellow Josh (not me), who posts both as himself and as the mysterious “Mr. X,” as if I can’t tell who he is. Others are from people pretending to be Pastor Pitts. I find all this amusing, so I leave it online.
So Josh, this fellow above, starts bugging me about how the comments (to which he has so vigorously contributed) are nothing but “utter uselessness,” that I’m not providing enough “insight into the truth,” and that he doesn’t “buy my story” that I put up the original Pitts post because I wanted people to know about the good pastor’s past run-ins with the law.
The next day, he wrote me to say I had an “obsession” with Pastor Pitts — this fellow I haven’t written word one about in over a year, mind you — and that he “question[s] the motivation of a reporter living in Texas” writing about a pastor in Toledo, where I used to live. I didn’t bother to reply.
Now our good friend Josh returns, this time saying that I’m “trespassing” (!) by having the gall to link to other sites on this page. Clearly, young Josh has done his research! Linking to a web site is apparently just like rustling cattle these days! Maybe I can get shot on sight, like in the Old West! Giddyup!
So Josh has apparently emailed a bunch of people whose Pitts-related sites I link to and told them to officially deny me permission to link to them. Maybe the po-leece will show up at my door! In fact, I just got my first of these emails, replicated here in all its all-caps misspelled glory:
Subject: UNATHORIZED LINKS…
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
WE HAVE NOT AND WILL NOT GIVE PERMISSION FOR YOU TO LINK WITH OUR WEBSITE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION CONCERNING THE FOLLOWING:
http://WWW.HGMIN.COM/TFRSPEAKERS.HTM AND http://WWW.HGMIN.COM/IMAGES/TFRMPPIC.GIF.
THANK YOU,
[name omitted to protect the typographically challenged]
HIGHER GROUND
Well, of course our friend Josh doesn’t know the Internet from an exposed pastoral penis. The right to link has been firmly established in law.
In other words, I ain’t takin’ down nuthin’.
I’ll repeat what I emailed to our friend Josh last time: If you don’t like my site, there’s a simple solution — stay away. I promise you’ll never read me saying mean things about Pastor Pitts if you don’t come to crabwalk.com.
Heres the e-mail I sent:
— Perhaps I
Benton is a fag
Queer!
Strange how the sudden flurry of “Benton is a fag” and “Queer!” comments posted this morning all came from an IP address suspiciously similar to the one our friend Josh uses. What a strange coincidence!
Hear that little noise? Oh, I think it might be the sound of all those comments being deleted. (I’ll keep the two above for old times’ sake.) And oh, I think that’s also the sound of the Pittsies’ collective “Christian” cred flying out the window.
One last thing. I rechecked the comments on that Pastor Pitts post from ’03. From looking at the IP address blocks, it looks like Our Friend Josh has posted no fewer than 43 comments to that post, under a variety of aliases. Sometimes he was dumb enough to leave the same email address attached to different names. Thank Pitts, er, God he’s not obsessed or anything!
I think it’s a safe guess that Our Friend Josh has the man-hots for Pastor Pitts.
josh of crabwalk.com, i just went over to the other josh’s house, ripped his mask off, and found that it was pastor pitts underneath! mystery solved. i gotcher back, man.
I should point out that the other Josh has written me an apparently sincere apology for his behavior here, saying he’d said some things he didn’t mean in his efforts to defend Pastor Pitts. I accept his apologies, so we should probably stop beating up on him.