From the “wonderful” city of Cleveland (home of the Browns if I need say more) comes a hilariously tragic story of a fat woman who crushed her boyfriend to death during an argument.
By sitting on him.
So I hear this story on the radio this morning and instantly get this picture of a big mama with a skinny as a rail man sitting in his recliner or laying back on the couch and she threatens him with something like, “I’m going to sit on you if you don’t shut your mouth!”
Turns out that I wasn’t wrong. She was estimated at 300 lbs at the time (how much has she gained since then?) and he was not much bigger than me at 120 lbs.
Because he was the baby daddy and they had 3 kids together (surprise!), said fat woman was sentenced to 3 years in jail, was booked, and immediately released to go home.
Who knew killing people was so easy?!
Source: Fox 8 – Cleveland
It’s always great when your college professor teaches you something they didn’t intend to, especially when it involves them making a complete idiot of themselves in the process. That happened about 2 years ago and some recent media events brought back that memory to my consciousness.
The class was a modern literature evening course, Junior level at USF, with a professor with tenure leading the charge every Tuesday night from 6pm-9:50pm. Great times, as you can imagine! The current assignment was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The main topics of the book were racism and imperialism in the British Empire in Africa back in the 1800s, which is always a great topic in a racially mixed class because some are “over it,” some are listening intently to a history lesson, some people are racists, and some people just want to get along and sing Kumbaya naked around a campfire.
In some strange shift of normal diversification (I guess bussing doesn’t work for college), there was only one lone black person: an older woman of about 45-50 who dressed and carried herself as an office or cubicle worker of some sort who was just getting off work like half of the rest of the class who doesn’t sleep until 2pm and come in their sweats and PJs.
The professor constantly looked over her way every time she mentioned something about how “African Americans” or “Africans” think, feel, remember, anything having to do with what was clearly being distinguished as “you/them” to the only person of significant skin coloring in the room. She was the de-facto black person to consult, of course, right?
Hehe!
After about 90 minutes of this crap, the professor finally posed one of her factual statements as a question by ending it with, “is that about right?” to our de-facto black person. After taking a second from her note-taking to realize the talking had stopped because the prof was looking at her, she responded in a thick accent, “I’m Jamaican. I am not like all of these people with these feelings of retribution. I am not “African American” nor do I identify myself with any racial movement by Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton.”
BOO-YEAH!
I’d love to see what she puts down on demographic surveys where the options are Caucasian, African-American, Asian, Latino. I hope she throws the book at them every time. I’ll bet Peruvian immigrants feel the same getting blasted by Mexican stereotypes.
I know I sure as heck don’t call myself “German-American” because 5-6 generations ago my people came over on a ship. The only people who can say that are the first or second generations coming over for each given family. Who’s my leader of the German descendants in the US?
There’s a little food for thought for your Tuesday.
Like anything that takes a while to catch on and then suddenly explodes in popularity, as if the media woke up one day and realized everyone knew something they didn’t, Twitter has an etiquette problem. There are very few true “rules” to Twitter usage, though there are a few limitations and application-based functions that users should understand.
There are two major problem types of users at this point:
- Pure spammers – dummy accounts with a photo or website or single update for the purpose of spreading information a manner recognized by society as spam.
- “Follow me” spammers – I’ve dubbed them “follow me” spammers because their methodology of spreading their agenda, product, website, or whatever is to follow as many people as Twitter will allow in hopes of reciprocating followers in a general 1:5 ratio. If they follow 2,000 users, they are betting that 400 people will follow them so they can annoy them.
Of course there is nothing wrong with a bunch of empty-headed tweets all day long about what you ate, what your dog barfed up, where you’re driving, or that you’re going to bed late followed by one that you’re tired; no one is going to follow people like that. They’re boring!
Here is how to NOT get followers:
- follow the 1:5 model of following, regardless of update frequency, but especially low updates (like 1 or 0)
- post the same tweet (or a set of tweets) over and over again with the same shortened URL
- use an auto-direct message service to EITHER spam the person who just followed you or thanking them; impersonal tweets are crap and will get you unfollowed or blocked
- be unoriginal: just re-tweet others’ content or send a steady stream of links about what you’re reading
- cuss & swear in your tweets and badmouth well-respected members of the Twitter community
- ignore @ replies to you
As long as you do the opposite of those faux pas, you should be a rather successful Twitterer. I’m available at @jpetersen if you’d like to respond on Twitter about this rather than using the comment form.
I’ve been a pushover for most of my life. There, I said it, now let’s move on. I have spent the majority of my life receiving sandwiches with mayo and onions when I said to leave them off, ice in my drinks after requesting the absence of ice, and a myriad of other service-related oversights and outright slaps. The problem was that I still paid and either didn’t enjoy my product or didn’t eat all, if any, of it.
That has changed, and it wonderfully started changing when I met my wife. I say “started” because it wasn’t too long ago that I still fell into old habits more than a man nearing 30 should. I started taking my food back to the counter or back to the kitchen. I discovered that returning an item at the store does not cause a rift in the universe. Did you know that you can return a toaster after 2 years? Inside family story, but true, nonetheless.
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