Risky Business

January 16, 2008 12:32 PM

There’s a new Corey in town and he’s getting rich because of a party he threw in which 500 kids, the police dog squad and helicopters showed up. The “journalist's” voice, intonation and overall attitude is more grating than Corey. His parents are pleading for him to come home, fans have started sites dedicated to him, and DJ Loc-a-Doc? has already remixed the interviews. Show your support or have him add you so you can get his next invite.
posted by gman (89 comments total)

It's interesting that without the internet, he never would have gotten this many people to show up, and wouldn't be getting this much attention, most likely.
posted by agregoli at 12:36 PM on January 16, 2008

It's interesting that with a shirt on and were he to not wear that hat and those glasses, I wouldn't think he's an idiot.
posted by Astro Zombie at 12:38 PM on January 16, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

gratingaccent? Aussies should be waking up shortly.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 12:41 PM on January 16, 2008

Getting 500 kids to show up to a party is enough to get rich these days?
posted by empath at 12:42 PM on January 16, 2008

gratingaccent? Aussies should be waking up shortly.

australians FINALLY woke up on november 24th.
and as a side note - did you fuckin' hear her?
posted by gman at 12:45 PM on January 16, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I predict he gets a spring break/summer job with Viacom and is subsumed into the reality-tv-reject F-list "actor" pool that MTV/VH1 create.
posted by polyhedron at 12:52 PM on January 16, 2008

AV, gman didn't say accent. And he's right anyway, her tone is grating. I couldn't watch that whole clip because it's the post-news bulletin shocktacular outrage show where patronisation and condescension are par for the course and I avoid it like the plague at the best of times. Meh. Cory can have his 5mins of infamy.
posted by peacay at 12:57 PM on January 16, 2008

Oi mates: get offa my fuckin' lawn!
posted by ericb at 1:06 PM on January 16, 2008

"I'm sorry. But, I'm not taking of my glasses!"
posted by ericb at 1:08 PM on January 16, 2008

*off*
posted by ericb at 1:08 PM on January 16, 2008

peacay, he did. in the tags. then he took it off.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 1:11 PM on January 16, 2008

Threw a party like that once back in high school. Loads of people I didn't know -- and who most definitely didn't know me -- showed up. Frankly, I had a terrible time, as I spent the whole night spraying air freshener over beer spilled on the carpet, and making sure nobody killed my dog. People ate absolutely everything in the fridge. A good friend of mine finished off an entire jar of pickles, which he then promptly vomited into the back yard.

In the morning, the police came by to pick up some random kid who failed to tell his parents he was crashing on my floor. Not sure how they found him.
posted by schoolgirl report at 1:15 PM on January 16, 2008

I'm with empath. Although most of my parties don't end up on Youtube... :(
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 1:16 PM on January 16, 2008

My glasses are also famous. Unfortunately I was not invited to their last party.
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 1:25 PM on January 16, 2008

CNN just had a segment on him.
posted by ericb at 1:26 PM on January 16, 2008

The very end of the interview is the best part.
posted by ibmcginty at 1:27 PM on January 16, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Save Ferris? ... not quite.
posted by Atreides at 1:35 PM on January 16, 2008

Ambrosia Voyeur: gotcha. Said woman actually has quite a nice speaking voice. It's just that when she gets the summer fill-in job on the current affairs show, she grows an attitudinal chancre called "for the public good" which allows her to browbeat and generally carry on like she's the custodian of the moral high ground. Or something.
posted by peacay at 1:38 PM on January 16, 2008

He's been on the BBC. He's world famous! The big dork...
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:44 PM on January 16, 2008

"In a bizarre and troubling turn of events, Corey was arrested yesterday, questioned by the police and then set free. The troubling part is that according to the Australian, Corey was charged with creating a public nuisance and producing child pornography. We're assuming this means taking pics of 16-year-old boobies rather than six-year olds, but with Corey you never know."^*
posted by ericb at 1:45 PM on January 16, 2008

"If you happened to catch Corey on the Opie and Anthony radio show the other day, ask yourself a question: What are you doing listening to Opie and Anthony? Then ask yourself if that was the real yellow-shaded babe? It wasn't. It was all a hoax perpetrated by a couple of Australian kids who think Corey is a total wanker."^*
posted by ericb at 1:49 PM on January 16, 2008

"Corey Worthington" aka "Corey Delaney."
posted by ericb at 1:53 PM on January 16, 2008

I threw a few like this in high school. Well, without the dog squad and helicopters, but a couple had several hundred people. Some of the best ones were where the party got busted up by the cops, so we'd take the keg(s) and all the people and go somewhere else, sometimes more than once. Although the parties were legendary, I was never offered a job because of them.
posted by krinklyfig at 2:04 PM on January 16, 2008

I think the media (and the public) are increasingly frustrated because the guy just appears to totally not give a shit. Every interview I've heard with him, he's laughing it off, saying it was an awesome party, saying people should hire him as a party planner. I get the impression he wouldn't have been running around spraying air freshener on beer stains on the carpet.

Man, all he did is post an invite on MySpace. Any other stupid little nutjob could do the same thing and produce the same result.

And his parents don't particularly seem to give a shit either, which I guess is part of the problem. But anyway, yeah, get off my lawn, all that.

The media exposure has certainly inflated his ego and made him "famous", but I think the media attention came out of the feeling that the police were pretty powerless (or claimed to be) to do anything at the time, and haven't done a huge amount since. The fact that for a while the entire punishment seemed to be "we'll send him the bill for the police helicopter" was a bit of a concern, although now charges have been laid things might calm down a bit.

A few hundred protesters turn up fight globalisation or whatever and the police almost outnumber them, with their shields and their horses, to protect that vital commercial property in the city, even though the protesters (or the vast majority of them) say they don't want to cause any trouble. But a few hundred drunk, aggressive kids cause a ruckus out in the suburbs, and the cops seem incapable of doing anything about the situation at all.
posted by Jimbob at 2:11 PM on January 16, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Alright, alright, alright. Heard about the party getting busted? Well not to worry, there's a new party happening down by the moon tower. Full kegs. You should come...
posted by uaudio at 2:12 PM on January 16, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

The hoax stuff makes it worthwhile.
posted by dobbs at 2:21 PM on January 16, 2008

Police said the boy's parents could be billed for the estimated $20,000 damage the revellers caused

I wonder how much of that is damage actually caused by the party and how much of that is damage and costs the police caused or incurred in making sure no one had any fun.

Though, when my friends and I had a party busted by the cops, we didn't get any fame at all. We did only have 100-150, but it was a Manhattan apartment - it gets hard to fit. Later we found out the bust was due to this one asshole guy calling us in solely out of a personal grudge.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 2:29 PM on January 16, 2008

I think the media attention came out of the feeling that the police were pretty powerless (or claimed to be) to do anything at the time, and haven't done a huge amount since...

Except for arrest him and charge him "with producing child pornography and creating a public nuisance."
posted by ericb at 2:35 PM on January 16, 2008

I wonder how much of that is damage actually caused by the party and how much of that is damage and costs the police caused or incurred in making sure no one had any fun.

As I understand it, that's totally police costs, which is shitty because apparently a lot of people on the street had their cars trashed, letter boxes torn out, gardens trashed etc.
posted by Jimbob at 2:36 PM on January 16, 2008

Yeah that's a recent development ericb - up until yesterday they still hadn't figured out what to charge him with and were still just talking about cost recovery for police attendance.
posted by Jimbob at 2:37 PM on January 16, 2008

I believe Spicoli and Corey were separated at birth.
posted by hubs at 2:42 PM on January 16, 2008

My Aussie mate suggested the cops, after there cars got smashed, would get the phone books out once they got him back to the station... but slapping a pedo charge on him is even more hardcore!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:43 PM on January 16, 2008

I just knew that this would find its way to the Metafilter front page eventually. I was hoping it wouldn't; that somehow we would follow Wikipedia's lead and not write about every dickhead who does something to grab the media's attention. I was wrong, though as I said I expected I would be. But now that it's here, let's discuss Corey.

The kid is 16. I personally dislike him very, very much, but only because he does look like a tool in those glasses and that stupid fucking hat. But despite that, I feel ever so sorry for him. Watching the kid get interviewed by our media, it is clear that the kid isn't too bright. It's clear that his friends aren't too bright. It's clear that he and his friends are victims of the consumer culture that western society has ingrained on our youth. What's not so clear, but what I suspect, is that he's also the product of a broken home. His dad up and left, he probably started doing badly at school, fell in with the wrong crowd and started rebelling against his step-dad and his mother who he felt betrayed by. Again, this last part is conjecture, but I suspect it to be the case based on what I have read and based on comments made by the step-dad.

And so here he is, a dumb, 16 year old kid using his My Space page to invite friends over to his party while the folks are away. He's dumb, so he doesn’t realise an open invitation could lead to trouble. Trouble ensues. And when the rabid, mostly right wing media hear about a dumb, peroxide blonde kid who caused damage to police property, they start interviewing the kid.

Naturally, his 16 year old attitude and fashion sense endears him to his peers and enrages tax paying adults. A 16 year old boy, with his parents away and on national TV, finds a way to be a smart arse to the nation on TV. The media succeeds in creating both a martyr and a pariah.

But beyond the faux outrage... beyond my idle speculation and the judgement of worldwide television audiences... beyond the stupid 16 year old kid who might yet grow up to truly regret what he did... beyond the phoney hysteria that has been whipped up over a teenage party (the same kind of teenage party we all threw, only writ large) gone wrong, there is only one indisputable fact that remains to be written by any media outlet, and this post allows me to write it, for it deserves to be written.

This is a total non-event. A total. Non. Event.

It never deserved the kind of media attention it has gotten and the fact that it got it, let alone the fact people are discussing this as though it is something worth discussing, is a depressing signal of the way in which our society is headed. It's just more of the usual lowest common denominator bullshit that the media thrives on at the expense of covering real stories.

When even Wikipedia, a website that writes about gnats, decides not to devote an article to this idiot, you know it's not worth writing about.

Let's move on, and leave this dickhead be.
posted by Effigy2000 at 2:49 PM on January 16, 2008 [14 favorites has favorites]

"[Since being charged [t]he boy, who has gained worldwide notoriety, can no longer be named for legal reasons, but police claim he has been granted bail to appear at a children's court on February 22nd."^*
posted by ericb at 2:53 PM on January 16, 2008

Man, all he did is post an invite on MySpace. Any other stupid little nutjob could do the same thing and produce the same result.

Yes. As a Melbourne Age letter-to-the-editor wrote,

Sixteen-year-old Corey Worthington throws the party of a lifetime in Narre Warren South and gains some global media coverage, not to mention huge kudos in the eyes of many of his peers. Wonderful. Fabulous. It's any adolescent boy's dream. I, for one, am slightly jealous as I recall my teenage years.

Indeed. The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that he was in a self-imposed exile, refusing to return home if his parents were going to cause any trouble for him.

Apparently, his exile was to hang out at the beach, surrounded by a bunch of girls.
posted by UbuRoivas at 2:53 PM on January 16, 2008

This is a total non-event. A total. Non. Event.

Actually, these things make the news the whole time. There was a "party" here in Darwin last year, a few hundred people turned up and trashed a street, "naked teenage girls urinating in people's gardens", all that stuff.

There were lots of stories coming out Adelaide when I was living there that were pretty similar, sometimes just huge parties, mostly gate crashers turning up out of some kind of lame "gang rivalry".

In the last few years, I remember there being three or four reports of parties-gone-wild coming out of Perth, kids throwing bottles at police cars etc.

These things get reported on, because it actually is news when 500 drunk people turn up somewhere and trash the property and act violently towards people just trying to have an evening at home, smash windows, all that.

This story has life beyond the usual because the initiator can be identified. And he's a complete fucking wanker, who for a while looked like he would get off scott-free. As I said, now that he's actually been charged with something, I think the story will die pretty quickly.
posted by Jimbob at 2:59 PM on January 16, 2008

This is a total non-event. A total. Non. Event.

I agree. It's so trivial, I'm not even gonna take off my glasses.
posted by dogwalker at 3:00 PM on January 16, 2008

i'd rather talk about the string theory with corey than party with the twat interviewing him.
posted by gman at 3:03 PM on January 16, 2008

I personally dislike him very, very much, but only because he does look like a tool in those glasses and that stupid fucking hat.

I'm sure you feel the same way about Michael Alig and the Club Kids of the 80s/90s.
posted by ericb at 3:06 PM on January 16, 2008

It never deserved the kind of media attention it has gotten and the fact that it got it, let alone the fact people are discussing this as though it is something worth discussing, is a depressing signal of the way in which our society is headed.

Yep. I also refer you to Paris Hilton, Nicky Hilton, Nicole Richie et al.
posted by ericb at 3:13 PM on January 16, 2008

Hey ... look at it this way ... at least Australia is getting some press this week.

What? With whales and partiers....and, yes, for some, cricket!

I keed. I keed.
posted by ericb at 3:19 PM on January 16, 2008

"These things get reported on, because it actually is news when 500 drunk people turn up somewhere and trash the property and act violently towards people just trying to have an evening at home, smash windows, all that."
posted by Jimbob at 8:59 AM on January 17

Yeah, police show up at teenage parties in large numbers late at night all the time. They pretty much always overreact. I remember as a kid I was at a friend's party when the police showed up. He went out to talk to them on the street and of course we kids all started to file out onto the lawn and around the street to watch what happened. And then a second police car showed up. And a third. And finally a fourth. At 2am in the morning. To this day I suspect that the police overreaction was due to two factors.

1) Lots of teenage kids.
2) My friend, and most of the kids there, were Vitenamese.

That's not to say I defend what Corey did, though. He was, and is, an idiot for issuing an open invite on My Space to his party. And with an open invite resulting in 500 revellers showing up, naturally there's bound to be people who decide to do something stupid and damage police property. But at the end of the day, police doing their duty aside, this is still a non-event and it, as well as Corey, deserve to be be ignored.

"I'm sure you feel the same way about Michael Alig and the Club Kids of the 80s/90s."
posted by ericb at 9:06 AM on January 17

I'd never heard of them before you linked to them but now that you have, my answer is an emphatic god yes.

"I also refer you to Paris Hilton, Nicky Hilton, Nicole Richie et al."
posted by ericb at 9:13 AM on January 17

Indeed. They are the prime examples of the kind of youth culture that Corey and his friends quite obviously idolise. Vapid, popular, leading a life free of consequences and full of snappy, smart-arse quips. And they are all the worse for it. Clearly.

Now get off my lawn!
posted by Effigy2000 at 3:21 PM on January 16, 2008

now that he's actually been charged with something, I think the story will die pretty quickly.

I predict something different: he becomes (more of) a MySpace hero, and if the prosecution goes ahead, it'll be immensely cool for teenagers to join some sort of "Justice for Corey!" MySpace group, if only for a week or two, before moving on to the next fad - aboriginals doing Zorba, a pole vaulter, or another Star Wars Kid.

Spinoffs, such as "Leave Corey Alone!!1!!" YouTube clips will abound, but many will be late for the show. The media will also turn up a bit late for the party, and report on the "Justice for Corey!" phenomenon after it has already become uncool & only the unpopular tryhards remain in the group (which actually continues to expand, since the uncool vastly outnumber the cool), with op-ed writers stuck for anything better penning pieces wondering if he inadvertently gave rise to a new generation of student activism, or bemoaning the loss of values like respect for authority, unlike the good old days of Ned Kelly.

Corey will ride the wave of his accidental semi-celebrity, and be invited to take part in the next Celebrity Big Brother. His stupid hat & glasses will by now have become his trademark, so he'll wear them all the time, but expand his range to include similarly ugly accessories along the same lines, in an attempt to prove his wacky personality. Unfortunately, because he's a git, he'll make for a bad housemate, but lingering remnants of his support base will continue to vote for him, until voting for Corey becomes the latest in cool irony.

He wins Celebrity Big Brother as a result & is given a recording contract. A handful of 14yo girls buy his awful lip-synched single (something appropriately about teenage rebellion), but by now his immense lack of talent & obnoxious personality will have overcome the final momentum of his 15 minutes of fame, and he will return to being a nobody in the celebrity stakes.

Not having written the song, he'll get nothing of the royalties, and realise that he's been cynically used by the media machine. He'll blow his Big Brother winnings on drugs & alcohol, and die of an overdose not long after, without ever having reconciled the tension in his own mind between "once I was somebody, a celebrity" and "why does everybody I meet have to keep talking about that fucking party & giving me their opinion about me?"
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:40 PM on January 16, 2008 [12 favorites has favorites]

Ubu for the win!
posted by Effigy2000 at 3:43 PM on January 16, 2008

Kids these days. In my time to have a proper high school party, you had to have a connection-- a female friend who was getting boned by a Bowdoin junior or senior. She would describe him as "her boyfriend" but you know he wasn't reciprocating when his friends or Bowdoin girls were around.

So you'd hand the Bowdoin kid a sack full of ones, change and the very occasional five. He would go over to Tess's Market and buy you a keg of the cheapest swill and then say that you still owed him 25 bucks for the keg rental, which he would collect at the party.

So after he forced you and your friends to take the keg from his Stanza wagon a block away from Tess's, you and your noodle-armed friends would have to lift it into your mom's SUV and drive it to whatever yard/garage/barn/railroad bridge was hosting the party. One nervous friend would ride "shotgun" and yell "COP!!!" every time he saw something that might be a Crown Vic. But you'd generally get the keg to the location without incident.

Cut to the party. Say for the sake of argument that it's in your parents' barn while your folks are in Nova Scotia. You had to stand around nervously with a red cup making sure that that the 20 grits you didn't invite but saw all the cars and dropped in didn't graffiti the barn. Then some cool dude would pull out a tiny bag of weed and you'd start to SWEAT. Never mind that you're seventeen and there's a keg of beer and gallons of hard liquor swiped from parents' cabinets all over town.

So what do you do when a girl you like pulls into your driveway in her grandma's Crown Victoria about three hours in? You yell "RUN!" based on the model of the car and 100 kids with red cups run into the basement of the house, the hayloft of the barn and into the woods. Well, the party's pretty much over after that, isn't it?

Kidsand their MySpace can bite me.
posted by Mayor Curley at 3:45 PM on January 16, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Mayor Curley writes " Kids these days. In my time to have a proper high school party, you had to have a connection-- a female friend who was getting boned by a Bowdoin junior or senior. She would describe him as 'her boyfriend' but you know he wasn't reciprocating when his friends or Bowdoin girls were around."

When I was in high school in the '80s here in the US, there would always be a kid who aged prematurely who could pass for much older than 21, as well as those with fake IDs, and of course the friendly liquor store with not very strict carding policies. Getting booze was very easy, and we had some huge parties, some of which never were broken up by police. I imagine some of that's changed since more and more localities are tightening up their liquor laws, at least it has here in NM.
posted by krinklyfig at 3:55 PM on January 16, 2008

Well said Effigy2000, but I'm further disgusted that the plod appear to be trying to cover their arses for their original failure to deal sensibly with this knobhead and his mates by slapping a child pornography charge on him, presumably for filming said mates shagging at the party. That's outrageous, would doubtless wreck his life, and irritating as he is, most likely undeserved. Perhaps the facts will prove me wrong and he's done something to justify such a serious charge, but I doubt it.
posted by Abiezer at 3:59 PM on January 16, 2008

I've run quite a few parties, never quite that big, nothing really out of control either. I think a lot of the reason was that we were inviting people to see avant garde music so the few creeps got bored and left. I only remember one person ever throwing up in the wrong place (and then he went on to try to play the drums at 5 in the morning).

The people you get to an event depends on how you advertise it -- mostly. Kraftwerk was always very surprised at the fact that they were so popular amongst the African-American community....
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:27 PM on January 16, 2008

The most police we ever had show up was seven cops in four patrol cars. Of course it was to kick me and four friends out of the tree house we had built in the vacant lot next door and were drinking in at 2am. They were a little sheepish, they had obviously had a complaint about a noise party and had images of hoards of drunken uni students destroying the neighbourhood.
posted by markr at 4:28 PM on January 16, 2008

It's interesting that without the internet, he never would have gotten this many people to show up, and wouldn't be getting this much attention, most likely.

Then again neither would Metafilter.
posted by jonmc at 4:35 PM on January 16, 2008

Yeah we often had the cops show up. So everyone quickly hid their bags of weed under the couch cushions, and a few vaguely more sober people would go outside to talk to the cops. Cops would tell us that they'd received complaints from the neighbors about the noise, and could we please keep people on the property and not walking up and down the street drinking.

So we turned down the music, and people moved indoors, and we fired up the bongs again.

Maybe we were really just a bunch of lame conformists.
posted by Jimbob at 4:36 PM on January 16, 2008

When I was in high school in the '80s here in the US, there would always be a kid who aged prematurely who could pass for much older than 21, as well as those with fake IDs, and of course the friendly liquor store with not very strict carding policies. Getting booze was very easy

That was before the rise of the Booze Nazis. If you'd been born less than ten years later, you would have encountered increased enforcement and insidious developments like the gold-printed lamination.

Of course, when I got to college in Western New York it was easy because everyone born in 1974 with a NY state ID could chalk it into respectable "1971".
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:36 PM on January 16, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Abiezer is right. Prosecuting a 16-year-old with producing child pornography for taking photos of naked girls of similar age playing Twister is beyond ludicrous. Fortunately, that kind of shit doesn't usually fly here, we like the idea of exercising common sense, especially when it comes to dealing with people who have none themselves.

If it does fly, I predict that it would rapidly cease to become a non-event, and could become a very important civil liberties case that could even reach the High Court. Hell, I'd donate to his defense fund for that. I do not want Australia to become the kind of society where sixteen year olds are charged with producing child porn for consensually taking sexually-explicit photos of each other. Americans doing that kind of thing horrifies and disgusts me. If 16-year-olds have the legal right to have sex, they ought to have the legal right to photograph it. (Perhaps not distribute it, but that's a lot more difficult to even detect, let alone enforce.) They're at least four years too old for kiddie-porn perverts to be interested in them anyway. I don't know how anyone would distinguish these photos, if downloaded from the internet, from photos of 18-year-olds engaged in the same activities, without actually identifying the people involved.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 4:38 PM on January 16, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I was all ready to hate this kid, for all the above reasons, until I watched that video:
"Corey, maybe now it's time for you to take a good look at yourself."
"I have. Everbody has. They love it."

Cocky little fucker, but damn...

Plus, he kind of has a point. E.g., When hockey fans go on a rampage during the Stanley Cups, do say the Vancouver Canucks or the Montreal Canadiens get fined for essentially 'hosting' the party?
Things got a little out of hand but you can hardly peg all that happened on him
posted by Flashman at 4:45 PM on January 16, 2008

Flashman, I can peg everything on him. Seriously, who else is going to pay for the damage to the neighbors' houses and any vandalism that occurred as a direct result of this party?

What I would like to see happen is for the courts to just take the expenses out of his profitable new business as a party planner, and forget about all the "child pornography" nonsense.

If he can get 500 people to show up for the party, he ought to be able to negotiate a few bucks for his parents to fix the place back up, too.
posted by misha at 5:00 PM on January 16, 2008

...as well as those with fake IDs...

All you need these days is a fake driver's license from Hawaii with the singular name McLovin!^*
posted by ericb at 5:05 PM on January 16, 2008

Corey is just some stupid kid. Alas internet fame. The only thing I wish, is that it was closer to Halloween... Best costume ever.
posted by orgvol at 5:21 PM on January 16, 2008

Seriously, who else is going to pay for the damage to the neighbors' houses and any vandalism that occurred as a direct result of this party?

Seriously? The neighbors themselves, and their insurers. If a perpetrator can be identified, a court might order them to pay compensation as part of criminal penalties, but we're talking about kids here. Essentially judgment-proof. It's annoying, but the consequences of making hosts liable for the actions of guests (and the "hosts" here, for legal purposes, were Corey's absent and unknowing parents) are far worse than the consequences of individuals having to occasionally suck it up and pay for the repairs of minor damage that jackasses do.

If it's a house burnt down, or something else more serious, then the resources of the police department can be put towards an arson/manslaughter investigation (and even in such a case, the insurer would end up paying). A couple of hundred dollars' damage to someone's lawn and fence isn't, under the circumstances, worth the police time.

Now in the interests of decency, young Corey ought to pay for the repair of his parents' house out of his first cheque, and he or his parents ought to give each of his neighbors whose houses were obviously damaged an envelope containing a cheque (amount to depend on how much he makes out of the event, IMO $1000 each to ten neighbors out of a $50,000 payment would be entirely reasonable) to be put towards repairs and a letter apologising for the unintended damage done by unauthorized persons whose actions were outside of Corey and his parents' control. Some might tear it up and spit in his eye; so be it.

I did like someone's point about it being John Howard's fault for making parents unable to afford kids without both having to work full-time. There's a grain of truth in that. Though the counter is, their lifestyles are way more expensive than necessary, and the counter to that is, well, expensive lifestyles and citizen debt were all part of Howard's plan too. YMMV.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 5:28 PM on January 16, 2008

If 16-year-olds have the legal right to have sex, they ought to have the legal right to photograph it. (Perhaps not distribute it, but that's a lot more difficult to even detect, let alone enforce.) They're at least four years too old for kiddie-porn perverts to be interested in them anyway.

Really? My impression was that the vast majority of paedophiles aren't actually interested in children, as such, but in post-pubescent youngsters - the 12yo to 16yo forbidden fruit. It's just that the ones who like the 4yos gross us out so much that we end up thinking of all paedos as being like that. /derail
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:57 PM on January 16, 2008

I don't know why everyone's so pissed off at him. I thought the kid was hilarious.
posted by nitsuj at 6:01 PM on January 16, 2008

Yay teenagers! Boo parents!
posted by footnote at 6:08 PM on January 16, 2008

Corey was charged with creating a public nuisance and producing child pornography.

They're going to ruin this dumbass kid's life because he acted cocky back at the jerk of a TV lady who shouldn't even have been interviewing him in the first place.
posted by Flunkie at 6:26 PM on January 16, 2008

I dunno, I can almost sympathise with him, at least when it comes to hiding out from his parents - I still shudder at the memory of bollockings I got during/after parties that had gone awry. The most memorable involved my mother screeching obscenities at me while kicking down the locked door of our loo, to rescue an acid-fried friend who was screaming that the walls were crushing him to death. (Top tip for teens: keep an eye on the clock. If your parents are only away for the night, make sure the party is finished before noon the next day.)

Whatever, this doubtless happens to some daft kid every weekend, and is standard slow news day filler: Rachael Bell's story from last year is exactly the same - party advertised on MySpace, £20k of damage, arrested after the fact, short-lived micro-celebrity, etc. (though she wins the dimwit teen race, by dint of the fact that she issued a heartfelt public apology to her parents and simultaneously boasted her arse off on the very MySpace every hack had bookmarked).

Effigy2000: ""I'm sure you feel the same way about Michael Alig and the Club Kids of the 80s/90s."
posted by ericb at 9:06 AM on January 17

I'd never heard of them before you linked to them but now that you have, my answer is an emphatic god yes."

Oh, come on, the Club Kids had some great looks. Who could fail to admire James St. James' fake nose phase?! And it's a rather unfair comparison, since Corey stopped far short of murdering and dismembering his dealer with the gleeful assistance of a famous New York Trilogy author's son.
posted by jack_mo at 6:38 PM on January 16, 2008

Oh, come on, the Club Kids had some great looks.

Club Kids are a walking embodiment of everything that's wrong with the world.
posted by jonmc at 6:45 PM on January 16, 2008

UbuRoivas Really? My impression was that the vast majority of paedophiles aren't actually interested in children, as such, but in post-pubescent youngsters - the 12yo to 16yo forbidden fruit.

Clinically, pedophilia means "the primary or exclusive sexual attraction by adults to prepubescent youths" and "the term pedophile is also used colloquially to denote an adult who is sexually attracted to adolescents or youths below the local age of consent, as well as those accused or convicted of child sexual abuse or child pornography related offences."

Adults who have sex with children who are post pubescence but below the age of consent are guilty of statutory rape, breach of duty of care, etc, but this is not by any means the same as pedophilia. Rape of a four-year-old is a far worse crime than consensual sex with a fourteen-year-old and to treat them as the same does a drastic disservice to the younger victim. The issue is a clear example of a moral panic, and the prospect here of a sixteen-year-old being charged with creating child pornography after photographing other naked sixteen-year-olds at a house party is a clear example of exactly why moral panics must be resisted for civil liberties to be preserved.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 6:58 PM on January 16, 2008

jonmc: "Club Kids are a walking embodiment of everything that's wrong with the world."

Aside from the ones into brutal murdering, I kind of liked them. Reheated Leigh Bowery, obviously, but the way they dressed was just so silly as to be endearing. And having met some of them years after their heyday, they've mellowed into nice people (by 'nice' I mean 'ridiculously bitchy queens', admittedly).

On preview: well said, aeschenkarnos. I thought UbuRoivas' comment was a bit off, but since I already seem to be defending murderous clown-people, I thought it best to leave the ephebophile thing alone...
posted by jack_mo at 7:09 PM on January 16, 2008

I wonder how much of that is damage actually caused by the party and how much of that is damage and costs the police caused or incurred in making sure no one had any fun.

Damn fucking straight TheOnlyCoolTim.

Did you see the Victorian cops' performance at the tennis the other night? That tool of a policewoman hiding behind a patron, spraying mace, and then slinking off into the crowd.

The only reason he's being charged $20,000 is COZ HE DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT. He's a smartass, sure, but I'd rank him 3rd behind the cops and media for causing all this fuss.

And did you see the MSM try and film the aftermath of this "rampage"? There was fuck all damage done to anything! Just a few close ups of broken glass. Quick! Call the Dog Squad!!!

And what law are the cops invoking with regards to this $20,000 invoice? The "not repentant enough" law?
posted by uncanny hengeman at 7:23 PM on January 16, 2008

Aside from the ones into brutal murdering, I kind of liked them.

Club kids represent everything I hate. This footage(.mpg link) of kids outside a Slayer show (at Studio 54!!) warms my heart.
posted by jonmc at 7:24 PM on January 16, 2008

a bit off? huh? seems to have been misinterpreted. what i meant to say is that media reports & public perceptions of a range of offences that end up under the umbrella labels of "paedophilia & child porn" tend to conflate (minority) kiddy-fiddlers with the (majority) *ahem* "barely legal" mob. i can't see how nuddy 16yos constitute "child porn" except in a technical legal sense. underage, yeh, but not child porn. that's all.

the club kids are cute. quite a few people like that in my neck of the woods; a lotta harajuku styling. whenever i see one i think, "aw, how sweet, what a kooky outfit. shame that nobody could or would ever put together an outfit like that or wear it unless they'd just spent the last 72 hours awake on meth"
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:27 PM on January 16, 2008

jonmc: "Aside from the ones into brutal murdering, I kind of liked them.

Club kids represent everything I hate. This footage(.mpg link) of kids outside a Slayer show (at Studio 54!!) warms my heart."

They warm my heart too! Seems we both like hedonistic young people who dress up in certain costumes as a means to identify themselves as part of a group allied by their taste in music/drugs/lifestyle in opposition to the tastes of wider society, &c. There's not much difference between Slayer fans and Club Kids. (Slayer played Studio 54? How peculiar.)

And sorry UbiRoivas, seems I read your earlier comment completely backwards and took you for a paedogeddon type.
posted by jack_mo at 7:51 PM on January 16, 2008

jack_mo: nah, it's more that i feel the fight against the *child* stuff is weakened every time something like this happens, like when that american 16yo was charged with child porn for emailing a saucy photo of herself to her boyfriend or whatever the story was.
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:54 PM on January 16, 2008

For sure, that's what I meant by paedogeddon: the conflation of actual paedophiles with ephebophiles, chicken hawks, barely legalists, whatever. Like I said, I completely misread your first comment on the subject.
posted by jack_mo at 8:09 PM on January 16, 2008

There's not much difference between Slayer fans and Club Kids.

Smile when you say that.

The club kids were about appearance and exclusivity and glamor and trendiness. (which seems more like a reflectiion of the larger society than a rebellion against it). The kids I linked to were all about rubbing the world's face in it's own ugliness and stupidity. and the music was better.
posted by jonmc at 8:10 PM on January 16, 2008

So the world is ugly & stupid, so to react against this we're going to make ourselves even uglier & act more stupidly? That's kinda dada, I guess. It's a shame that metalheads are so very conformist. As Jello Biafra quipped, "no gym teacher could get so many people to dress so alike". As for the music, de gustibus aside, Slayer just doesn't work with E.
posted by UbuRoivas at 8:33 PM on January 16, 2008

Yeah but Cradle of Filth are pretty listenable on acid.
posted by Jimbob at 8:38 PM on January 16, 2008

Perhaps, but the ideal drug for listening to metal is undoubtedly rohypnol.
posted by UbuRoivas at 9:04 PM on January 16, 2008

The kids I linked to were all about rubbing the world's face in it's own ugliness and stupidity.

That's pretty much the standard definition of "club kids" where I come from. The better ones, anyway.

We are comparing the best of each world, right? The worst would be waaay too easy.
posted by mediareport at 9:53 PM on January 16, 2008

Wow. Because of this, I found out that my deletion rationale for Arden Wohl got quoted in Radar Online. And isn't that what's really important here?
posted by dhartung at 10:06 PM on January 16, 2008

"He's been called a "brat", a "bugger" and a "turd" – but no one has added "genius".

His wild ride through the headlines this week marks the arrival of Generation Z. Corey Delaney's talent for showing up interviewers trying to trade on his vilification, while still looking like an extra from Clueless, has made him a pin-up for a generation of young Australians suspicious of the media and clued-in to the ways of modern marketing. "

Normally the comments at NEWS.COM.AU are on the kind of level that make Corey look like a Rhodes Scholar, but for once, at least one in response to this article is spot on.

"Genius . What a load. On the other hand if you wish to comment that the media that gave the self centered, anti social idiot airspace are naive, and only concerned with ratings brought about with little effort on their part you won't get an argument here. Susann
Posted by: not surprised 5:27pm today "
posted by Effigy2000 at 10:58 PM on January 16, 2008

He may well end up being Australia's Brent Bolthouse. Who knows.
I sure didn't expect Brent Bolthouse to end up as Brent Bolthouse.
posted by miss lynnster at 12:16 AM on January 17, 2008

The club kids were about appearance and exclusivity and glamor and trendiness. (which seems more like a reflectiion of the larger society than a rebellion against it). The kids I linked to were all about rubbing the world's face in it's own ugliness and stupidity. and the music was better.

I still don't see much of a distinction - trendiness aside, metal fans are about appearance and exclusivity too: otherwise they wouldn't wear a fairly strict uniform to show that they were members of the same gang, and that other people aren't. And as for rubbing the world's face in it, I'd say, eg. throwing a deranged party on a subway train full of commuters while wearing nothing but poorly-applied makeup and a tinfoil cockwrap does that rather better than - what? - wearing a leather jacket and flicking the V's at any passing cameramen. Both groups managed to cause tabloid moral panics by doing nothing more than dressing up and having fun to the music they liked (er, glossing over that murder bit again).

You're dead on about the music, though - always disappointing that the Club Kids were soundtracked by absolutely dreadful tunes, played by mediocre DJs.
posted by jack_mo at 2:30 AM on January 17, 2008

I'm with Effigy2000 on this, except I don't fully agree with ...might yet grow up to truly regret what he did.

I know the Corey archetype, they grow up to be fuckwits who can't use youth as an excuse.
posted by mattoxic at 3:31 AM on January 17, 2008

damn, thanks to this guy I won't want to wear my yellow sunglasses anymore. :(
posted by lastobelus at 1:38 PM on January 17, 2008

Until those criticizing this, or making grand pronouncements about this kids future, go on tv to change my mind wearing a parka and no shirt, i will side with the fact that this "non-event" was terribly funny.
posted by 8 Bit at 7:48 AM on January 18, 2008

This news anchor is like a Nancy Grace waiting to happen.
posted by moonlet at 11:04 AM on January 18, 2008

Until those criticizing this, or making grand pronouncements about this kids future, go on tv to change my mind wearing a parka and no shirt, i will side with the fact that this "non-event" was terribly funny.

You've obviously never watched Eskimo Gangbang 3.
posted by UbuRoivas at 1:58 PM on January 18, 2008

My only remaining question is... how does Corey feel about Japanese funk?
posted by miss lynnster at 2:40 PM on January 18, 2008

Oh comeon. Y'all knew I couldn't let this thread die Haimlessly.
posted by miss lynnster at 2:41 PM on January 18, 2008

Hey! Anybody want to slap him?
posted by miss lynnster at 12:16 PM on January 25, 2008