Dead on the job

December 10, 2005 8:12 AM

Myspace Deaths- many car accidents, some murders, suicides, Iraq
posted by growabrain (85 comments total)

Wow, labeling a picture "MURDERER!" is probably an awesome way to lose a defamation lawsuit (unless the guy was convicted of murder)... Oh well.
posted by shepd at 8:24 AM on December 10, 2005

The non serious graphics (skull and crossbones, stamped watermarks on the pictures) It makes it seem like they're making fun of these people for being dead.

Which is kinda funny, because you can't come back with anything, you know, being dead and all.
posted by delmoi at 8:27 AM on December 10, 2005

shepd, there's a linked article under the picture:

"Attorneys for the Lorentis filed the suit against three teenagers and four parents linked to the unsupervised keg party where the driver in the crash, 20-year-old Brett Kapteina, had been drinking before the accident, records show."

Different lastname spellings though.
posted by puke & cry at 8:30 AM on December 10, 2005 [1 favorite has favorites]

Oh wow, one DUI killed three people, I was having trouble understanding what the car icon with three skulls was supposed to know. How ironic is it that they got a photo of one of the victims holding a 1.7l botte of vodka. Heh.
posted by delmoi at 8:31 AM on December 10, 2005

Rough consensual sex? Killed freind by forcing him to drink too much water? How bizarre.
posted by sourwookie at 8:32 AM on December 10, 2005

Cause of death: alcohol + balcony.

Says it all.
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:36 AM on December 10, 2005

Yeah, this is a pretty horrible site. Nothing like minimizing the significance of peoples' deaths with campish cartoons. Sure, some of them did bad things that killed them, but I certainly hope than when I die it isn't used for some shitty webpage where death is trivialized by overly macabre douche bags.
posted by herting at 8:38 AM on December 10, 2005

sourwookie: yeah. Both of those are on the second page. I wonder if the boyfriend will be charged. Dying from rough consensual sex is pretty hard to buy.
posted by delmoi at 8:39 AM on December 10, 2005

God these are depressing.
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:40 AM on December 10, 2005

Well, that was depressing.
posted by easternblot at 8:42 AM on December 10, 2005

(jinx!)
posted by easternblot at 8:42 AM on December 10, 2005

(Yes, I should maybe learn to preview, I had the comment box open for at least 6 minutes before typing according to all the comments posted in the mean time.)
posted by easternblot at 8:45 AM on December 10, 2005

wow, the rapper that accidentally killed himself with a pen gun in on there. Everyone's on myspace!
posted by puke & cry at 8:46 AM on December 10, 2005 [1 favorite has favorites]

I like the ones where there is a guy/girl holding a bottle of alcohol and the cause of death states "drunk driving."
YO KIDS DONT DRINK AND DRIVE!!!
posted by j-urb at 8:49 AM on December 10, 2005

from a community website perspective, what do you do with these? if all these corpses have myspace profiles, how do you go about finding them? and then once you've found them, what to do with 'em, administratively? are there dead mefites? I'll bet there are. what do their user pages look like now?

how does a community weblog deal with the death of its participants?
posted by carsonb at 8:58 AM on December 10, 2005

Alcohol. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
posted by graventy at 9:02 AM on December 10, 2005

aw shit.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:08 AM on December 10, 2005

People over 30 who have a myspace profile are just asking to get murdered.
posted by I Foody at 9:08 AM on December 10, 2005

I Foody wins the thread!
posted by mcsweetie at 9:35 AM on December 10, 2005

So many youngsters die in car crashes! I am totally raising my hypothetical kids in a big city with public transportation so they never get a driver's license. It's just safer.
posted by jennyb at 9:39 AM on December 10, 2005

This is morbid.
posted by soiled cowboy at 9:44 AM on December 10, 2005

What really depressed me is that I didn't really like many of the dead people. When I was a teenager, it seemed as if everyone was really excited by the world, nature, art, music, literature, politics.

Perhaps I burned out on these people too fast, but I didn't find one reference to a book, one single mention of politics, little about art, and nothing on music except of course for endless references to the blandest and most commercial crap you can imagine.

Given that partying appeared to be a central focus of many of these young lives, it was hardly surprising that vehicular homicide under the influence of alcohol was far and away the number one cause of death.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:44 AM on December 10, 2005

What really depressed me is that I didn't really like many of the dead people. When I was a teenager, it seemed as if everyone was really excited by the world, nature, art, music, literature, politics.

As a 48-year-old, I'd be *really* curious to hear which decade you're talking about. I grew up in a radical counterculture-ish household in New York City, which is where you might expect that kind of intellectual curiosity to run pretty high -- but most teenagers, with rare luminous exceptions who deserve all the resources and attention we can give them, have been know-nothing TV-addicted dorks for as long as I can remember.
posted by digaman at 9:50 AM on December 10, 2005

I mean, I'm sure they're all beautiful glowing souls inside, but er... where was this politically savvy, artistically hungry generation that I must have missed? Even in the over-exalted '60s, when my junior high school class went on strike to protest the Vietnam war (imagine that), I didn't feel like most of our peers were striding through the woods reading Dostoevski and imagining how Cezanne would have painted the trees. Myspace just makes this nearly ubiquitous vacuity all too visible.
posted by digaman at 9:59 AM on December 10, 2005

digaman - The phrase "ubiquitous vacuity" has just made my weekend.
posted by brownpau at 10:08 AM on December 10, 2005

Phonemes are my business. :)
posted by digaman at 10:08 AM on December 10, 2005

if you can get past the stupid "murderer" graphics and everything, it's absolutely riveting to see these tragic stories that have just taken place.

lupus_yonderboy - what an appallingly rude thing to say. there are no standards for tragedy - a life cut short is a terrible thing without regard to how someone measures up on your culture meter.
posted by ab3 at 10:18 AM on December 10, 2005

a life cut short is a terrible thing without regard to how someone measures up on your culture meter.

I can understand what he is saying. How do you define a person? Is it someone who is just alive or is it something more than that? I'm sure he is seeing these kids as alkies without any purpose in life other than to consume and reproduce- which might not be too far from the case as appalling as that may be.
posted by j-urb at 10:23 AM on December 10, 2005

They somehow missed this recent one: Parents should watch closely when kids use Web
posted by SteveInMaine at 10:25 AM on December 10, 2005

there are no standards for tragedy

Oh and another thing. There actually is a standard for a tragedy. The word "tragedy" is often overused in today's society. For it to be a tragedy, the person has to have a stake in their own undoing... think Scarface or Shakespeare's King Lear.
posted by j-urb at 10:26 AM on December 10, 2005

THIS IS MYSPACE, PEOPLE! it's a SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITE and you're looking mostly at kids who died due alcohol related deaths, it's not likely to look like a chess club convention!

digaman, et al. - if you took a second to dig around a bit on myspace, friendster, livejournal - you'd find more examples than you can imagine of "politically savvy, artistically hungry", well cultured intelligent young kids out there. you're making judgements on a generation based on a very skewed sample here.
posted by ab3 at 10:32 AM on December 10, 2005

"Hahah, this is the best."
posted by punishinglemur at 10:33 AM on December 10, 2005

digaman, et al. - if you took a second to dig around a bit on myspace, friendster, livejournal - you'd find more examples than you can imagine of "politically savvy, artistically hungry", well cultured intelligent young kids out there. you're making judgements on a generation based on a very skewed sample here.

In fact, I have taken more than many seconds to do so, and I agree with you ("et. al."? there are a number of shades of opinion being expressed here.) I think the digital revolution has put tools in the hands of those rare luminous minds I mentioned earlier in a way that has augmented their creativity, and certainly their ability to build community. But I still think most kids out there still care primarily about about the pop music they listen to, the TV shows they love, and the relationships they wish they were having, and that that's very apparent on most pages in Myspace.
posted by digaman at 10:37 AM on December 10, 2005

Oh and another thing. There actually is a standard for a tragedy. The word "tragedy" is often overused in today's society. For it to be a tragedy, the person has to have a stake in their own undoing... think Scarface or Shakespeare's King Lear.

did you by any chance read the definition you linked? only the first definition here comes anywhere near supporting what you just said. (even going by your definition, i'd say 99% of the people on this page qualify. driving drunk, being a passenger in a car with a drunk driver, russian roulette, suicide, relationships with shady characters...)

trag·e·dy
n. pl. trag·e·dies

1.
___1. A drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.
___2. The genre made up of such works.
___3. The art or theory of writing or producing these works.

2. A play, film, television program, or other narrative work that portrays or depicts calamitous events and has an unhappy but meaningful ending.

3. A disastrous event, especially one involving distressing loss or injury to life: an expedition that ended in tragedy, with all hands lost at sea.

4. A tragic aspect or element.

posted by ab3 at 10:45 AM on December 10, 2005

So many hot chicks out of the dating pool. Sad.

*pours a 40 on the ground for the lost hotties*
posted by drstein at 10:48 AM on December 10, 2005

"Katrina Hutton" is a local news item. She's the 'babysitter' that was taking kids across some railroad tracks (in the middle of a right-of-way, not at a marked crossing) and somehow didn't notice a speeding Amtrak train. The 2yr old child that she was watching was struck and killed by the train. I think she's still in jail, charged with felony child endangerment.
posted by drstein at 10:59 AM on December 10, 2005

When I die want it to be a FPP on metafilter.

Then I want to see complaints of it being a double, newsfilter and a few people critisizing the web page design and for a good measure a few "mehs" and "lame posts".
posted by srboisvert at 11:16 AM on December 10, 2005

punish: there's bee several ytmnd's about this one.
NSFW?
NSFW?
posted by IronLizard at 11:20 AM on December 10, 2005

lest we forget how many deaths are caused by cars....
posted by deafmute at 11:25 AM on December 10, 2005

http://www.myspace.com/jloveb

With all those f***ing hot friends, I have no idea what this kid had sitting on his mind that he couldn't spill out to someone. the pain of first love lost? they should teach vulnerable male teens a mantra: "half the world is women... half the world is women..."
posted by Lectrick at 11:26 AM on December 10, 2005

forgot to mention- in my last post, that dude killed himself.
posted by Lectrick at 11:27 AM on December 10, 2005

Hmm, you're probably right, digaman et al -- my memories are coloured by going to a very good high school and having a lot of arty friends. And, to rephrase someone else's comments, we are seeing the losers in the Darwin lottery...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:30 AM on December 10, 2005

...and the other half of the mantra should be, "Don't worry -- those old fucks in the White House exploiting the bogus 'threat' of same-sex marriage for short-term political gain will die soon enough, and maybe then you and your future boyfriends will be treated as human beings."
posted by digaman at 11:31 AM on December 10, 2005

I hear ya, lupus.
posted by digaman at 11:32 AM on December 10, 2005

im not sure i buy this. there are way too many funny looking people on myspace and none of them here are. Are we to believe that fugly people are immortal? unless the fugly folks are the "no photo" people.
posted by Tryptophan-5ht at 11:33 AM on December 10, 2005

From the LiveJournal of the girl who allegedly died from "rough consensual sex":

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
001. Boys
002. Men
003. My dad
posted by languagehat at 11:33 AM on December 10, 2005

I found it instructive and heartening to visit the profiles of the dead myspacers and read the comments posted by their friends. It appears their myspace profiles are used as a way to mourn.

Sometimes I forget that kids use the internet the way I used to use the phone when I was a kid...

But, yeah, that's a pretty depressing site.
posted by Slap Incognito at 12:00 PM on December 10, 2005

ab3

you said though, and i quote " there are no standards for tragedy"

I just said that there actually is a standard for a tragedy.
posted by j-urb at 12:03 PM on December 10, 2005

It amazes me that these people can't even take the time to write properly even composing an epitaph.
posted by delmoi at 12:06 PM on December 10, 2005

im not sure i buy this. there are way too many funny looking people on myspace and none of them here are. Are we to believe that fugly people are immortal? unless the fugly folks are the "no photo" people.

Fugly people are more memorable, so your impression of myspace denizens is probably a bit off.
posted by delmoi at 12:07 PM on December 10, 2005

This is horrible. I'm amazed Tom (the myspace guy) hasn't deleted this account. And to all of you laughing and making fun of teens killing themselves or being killed: fuck off you're disgusting.
posted by ackeber at 12:17 PM on December 10, 2005

ackeber, buh? This thing is on LiveJournal, not MySpace. And as disturbing as I, too, find it, I'm not sure how it violates LiveJournal's terms of service (with the possible exception of calling people murderers when they haven't actually been convicted of murder, or taking copyrighted content from MySpace) to the point where it could be taken down.
posted by Gator at 12:23 PM on December 10, 2005

how does a community weblog deal with the death of its participants?

I'm the head mod over at the community forums at UserFriendly.org (about 2000 participating members, almost 20000 registered users). We've had a few people die , and it always shook the entire community. It's ranged from memorial pages to more specific events (also here) to help with the grieving and say goodbye.

So far it's been an accident, a suicide and a medical issue.
posted by Kickstart70 at 12:33 PM on December 10, 2005

I did mean tom deleting the myspace group.
LiveJournal will and has deleted accounts that were not in violation of their terms of service.
My friends had two accounts terminated by Livejournal. The first was called HateCrushes where they basically wrote retorts to conservitives livejournals, and another account where they re-posted peoples entries and replaced random words with 'poop'. They fought with livejournal who replied, then eventually said tough shit, we're deleting it.

This is ten times worse than both of those situations.
posted by ackeber at 12:56 PM on December 10, 2005

Not only do I agree wholeheartedly, ackeber, I'm going to your friends' apartment later this evening for the Christmas Party.

...

From the LiveJournal of the girl who allegedly died from "rough consensual sex":

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
001. Boys
002. Men
003. My dad

Wow. Sad. Wow.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:19 PM on December 10, 2005

What I don't get is how they actually know that these people died.

I mean, they have about three people listed who died in Iraq, but given that those people have no blog updates and nothing on the site that I am aware of where people would know that the soldier died / be able to point it out, how did they know?

I know how it might seem that if anyone should understand the concept of myspace, it's someone like me who has helped create an online community/blogging site, but I just don't get it. Can someone really explain what the hell it's good for and why so many people sign up?
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:41 PM on December 10, 2005

"We've had a few people die , and it always shook the entire community. It's ranged from memorial pages to more specific events (also here) to help with the grieving and say goodbye.

See... this makes sense to me. LiveJournal used to do similar things, make the individual's account permanent, etc. It's still tradition to turn the comments of a person's last post into a kind of memorial for that person.

But I think if anyone had done something like some kind of tasteless body count, we would've just banned their ass.

The last thing you want the parents of a dead 17-year-old to google about their kid is a site hosted on your service dedicated to making fun of them.
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:50 PM on December 10, 2005

So, I login to MeFi, looking to make my first ever post, maybe today's the day.

Click. Ouch...the face of the my daughter's friend from my town that killed my son's friend, labeled Murderer.

Weird.
posted by sfts2 at 3:17 PM on December 10, 2005

Are you serious, sfts2?
posted by jenovus at 4:25 PM on December 10, 2005

My first thought on looking at the first page was that the driving age should be raised to at least 21 for young men.

Yeah, I know it doesn't stand up to examination, but god all those boys are so young, and dead in accidents that are probably due to simple speeding and/or DUI. Horrific.
posted by jokeefe at 4:42 PM on December 10, 2005

jokeefe: I've been thinking about this for a while and realizing that the more we take responsibility away from youth, the more irresponsible they get. I'm not suggesting that 12 year olds drive, but perhaps a good start would be a 19 year old drinking age (to coincide with voting and joining the military). From there I'm open to suggestions on how to improve the maturity level of teens.
posted by Kickstart70 at 6:12 PM on December 10, 2005

With all those f***ing hot friends,

Seriously. Where were all these hot people when I went to school?

And the comments are just so wonderfully empty. Like the poorly-constructed adolescent ramblings in a yearbook:

How do i...say goodbye..to wut we had..goodnight ashley...have fun in heaven!!! thinking of u...xav

I don't want these kids to inherit the earth.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:17 PM on December 10, 2005

There was a site that linked to the LiveJournals of the deceased. The thing that blew my mind is how many "haha ur dead" comments there were on the journals. I confess, I was visiting the pages out of morbid curiosity, but, damn, "haha ur dead" is cold.
posted by Joey Michaels at 7:45 PM on December 10, 2005

insomnia_lj : What I don't get is how they actually know that these people died.

I mean, they have about three people listed who died in Iraq, but given that those people have no blog updates and nothing on the site that I am aware of where people would know that the soldier died / be able to point it out, how did they know?

As to soldiers killed in Iraq, there are RSS feeds. (LJ has one that I think is called iraq_casualties. )

As to the others, if you read the user info for the lj account, you'll see that they get their info from submissions.
posted by dejah420 at 7:48 PM on December 10, 2005

definitely jenovus
posted by sfts2 at 11:18 PM on December 10, 2005

Depressing link, in more ways than one.

Related to the above discussion: How many Mefites are dead?
posted by knave at 11:43 PM on December 10, 2005

Taylor Behl did not die from rough consensual sex, she was murdered and buried near property owned by the family of the last woman her killer Ben Fawley was cyber stalking. Pretty cruddy "fact checking".
posted by Scram at 12:03 AM on December 11, 2005

LOL.

Very cool.

(BTW, is it proper to put a period after 'LOL'?)
((Important issues))
posted by HTuttle at 12:34 AM on December 11, 2005

With all those f***ing hot friends,

But those are mostly just 'net' friends. About as valuable as looking forward to getting spam email to feel unalone.
posted by HTuttle at 1:03 AM on December 11, 2005

my memories are coloured by going to a very good high school and having a lot of arty friends

What a pity that neither your good high school nor your arty friends appear to have made you any more generous of spirit, lupus_yonderboy.

Was yours one of those stories that I see in the movies, where the unattractive geek kids fancy suffer at the hands of the popular children, or is there something else that explains your peculiar mean-spirited attitude to the deaths of so many young people?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:06 AM on December 11, 2005

A whole bunch of kids who don't get to grow up, have mortgages, suffer hair loss, erectile dysfunction....that's messed up.
posted by deusdiabolus at 5:09 AM on December 11, 2005

There's nothing more pathetic than people who go on and on about younger generations being dumber and emptier than theirs. Snobbishness and selective memory make an ugly combination.
posted by funambulist at 7:23 AM on December 11, 2005

I know of a few people who have passed away, who still have myspaces (or livejournal, friendster, etc). What gets me the most is that the people who rush to leave assinine comments ("i miss u thx 4 bein a pal.") are usually the same ones who didn't want anything to do with the person while they were alive.
posted by SassHat at 8:33 AM on December 11, 2005

SassHat: People do that because they want to be some of the ones that 'posted in a legendary journal thread' - just like the same idiots that scramble to get a 'first page post' when a new livejournal.com news item comes out.
Basically, they're attention whores.

The myspace_deaths journal is at least interesting because like I said, it puts more of a story behind the person. There's a recent one.. nice looking 16yr old white girl. Looks like a quiet church going girl. She died in a gnarly car wreck with a guy that called himself "Konvict." He was speeding and lost control of the vehicle.
From looking at the myspace profile and photos, you never would have thought that she was the type that would hang out with gang bangers.

So, at the very least, it's remotely interesting. I think that human beings are curious about the "Who were they? What happened? aspects of death. I guess I'm one of the 'sick people' that finds it interesting.
posted by drstein at 11:04 AM on December 11, 2005

I think that even a brief look at the overall journal http://livejournal.com/community/myspace_deaths would prove it offensive, distatesful, and indecent enough to warrent immediate termination. The graphics superimposed on the images are comical at best, and make a serious situation light and acceptable to laugh at.

here they posted a picture of a girl who was killed in a drunk driving auto accident in which she was NOT the driver. The picture selected to represent this victim is one of her holding a bottle of vodka, implying her responsibility of the accident and her subsequent death. The comments below state "fitting picture" with the mod replying "exactly! haha" and another reply "Haha, my thoughts too."

here is an entry of a teenage boy who committed suicide and his last words on myspace. The intent of his is obviously entertainment: The comment posted below reads "Hahah, this is the best." The moderator was not the author of the comment, but has taken no action to remove it from the community. The incident involved was a horrible tragedy, completely trivialized by the author of this post.

here is an entry with a picture of a girl with the title "murderer" photoedited onto the top. The girl has not been convicted of murder, she was the driver of a car that was hit by a train killing the child she was babysitting. She has not even been charged with murder, but reckless endangerment of a child.

here they have photoshoped the word 'suicide' and logo onto the picture of a girl whos cause of death has not been ruled as a suicide, but rather undetermined. This is complete defamation of the girls reputation and misrepresentation of her, and she has nobody to represent her because she is gone.

here they have again posted a picture of somebody with the words murderer over it. again, this person has not been convicted of murder, but of "vehicular manslaughter as well as felony drunken driving" according to the accompaning article.

The creator and maintanor of the community is lj user iyago, who has posted "We need to cut back anyway..." as the tagline for the myspace_deaths community.


I came across this journal and felt responsible to notify the LJ team. I do not personally know any of the people whose tragedy they are exploiting, but I cannot imagine how (much more) upset I would be if they had written about anyone I loved or myself should something happen. I also know that the LJ team would not support their services to be used in this manner, and will be as offended as I am.

Thank you for reviewing the information I've given you. I can be contacted at rebecca.*****@gmail.com incase you need to get intouch with me.


Thanks Again
- Rebecca *****, LJ user since 2001.
posted by ackeber at 3:11 PM on December 11, 2005

The response I got:


Dear LiveJournal user *******,



Thank you for your report. We have reviewed the links provided and have determined that there are currently no violations of our Terms of Service (http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos.bml).



While we agree that the material in question is upsetting, it is not against the Terms of Service to post such content. LiveJournal works hard to allow users to express their opinions, even in fashions that others may find offensive or objectionable. Although we sympathize with your anger, we will unfortunately be unable to assist you.



You can find more information about LiveJournal's policies of prohibited material at http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=107&view=full and you can find more about the Abuse Team's policies at http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/policy.bml. If you believe that there are posts present which violate these policies, please open a new Abuse report with specific links and we will investigate further.



Regards,

Marie

LiveJournal Abuse Team
posted by ackeber at 3:12 PM on December 11, 2005

ackeber, you forgot to add "Won't someone please think of the children?" to your "please censor this thing I don't like" letter. You can't expect purging if you don't remember your talking points.
posted by dejah420 at 4:00 PM on December 11, 2005

ackebar, even if she wasn't the driver, she surely knew the driver was drinking. Not that her death isn't tragic, they all are.

I found the site tacky, but at the same time seeing page after page of "drunk driving" and "automobile accident" linked to actual people and their actual writings was somehow grounding.

So often we just read about what a great and wonderful person the deceased was. This brings a human element that is missing from the average obituary.

Scram: I don't know much about the case. consensual rough sex sounds like bullshit, but that article you link to is full of some sloppy reasoning itself:

She left her dorm room at VCU after 10 p.m. On a school night.

On a school night!!
posted by formless at 5:03 PM on December 11, 2005

dejah- i don't support censorship, but i think its really unfair that these kids cannot defend themselves. the only reason i expected livejournal to take it down was because they have removed two my my friends journals/communities for being much less offensive than that.

formless- right, because scholars never get in drunk driving accidents.
posted by ackeber at 6:25 PM on December 11, 2005

but I think its really unfair that these kids cannot defend themselves.
the life one lives should be defense enough. the real tragedy is that most of these people didn't live long enough to realize that.
posted by carsonb at 8:25 PM on December 11, 2005

"here is an entry with a picture of a girl with the title "murderer" photoedited onto the top. The girl has not been convicted of murder, she was the driver of a car that was hit by a train killing the child she was babysitting. She has not even been charged with murder, but reckless endangerment of a child"

hey ackeber, hate to tell you, but that's totally incorrect. Take a look at an earlier post I made. She was *not* in a car, she was dragging 3 kids across some railroad tracks. She left the kids on the other side of the tracks and when she went back across to get the stroller that she left, the 2yr old followed her and was struck by an Amtrak train going over 60mph.
Just thought you might want to know a little more about that one before crying to Livejournal support with the "It's not fair!!!11! You guys took down my friends journals so you should take this one down because I don't like it!" bit.
If it's not violating the LJ TOS, they have a right to post it, and you most certainly have a right to ignore it.
posted by drstein at 9:32 PM on December 11, 2005

Dear Plume Publishing,

I am writing in breathless outrage over your book The Darwin Awards. There's nothing comical about those tragic deaths taken from real news stories. If you don't cease publication immediately I will be forced to whine even louder to my friends, family, and strangers on the Internet about the sadness and unfairness of it all.

Dear Owner of the Internet,

Ohhhh boy, do you have a lot of censoring to do. The attached 4000 page Word document is full of things that I request you delete immediately (abbreviated version: 1. porn 2. lies 3. gory images 4. Schadenfreude 5. goetze)


Dear USA Today,

Recently, to my shock and dismay, I have become aware of a false fact on the Internet! Rather than delete that fact, which this particular website allowed me to do, I am recommending that the Internet just be deleted. I think we can all agree that we will all be happier without the anonymity and lack of accountability that characterizes this lawless Old West-like communication technology.

curmudgeonly yours,

John Seigenthaler Sr.
posted by dgaicun at 10:55 PM on December 11, 2005

Just an update.. the journal has been deleted. I think it got a few too many complaints.

Lame. I actually enjoyed it.
posted by drstein at 9:14 PM on December 13, 2005

Hmmm.
posted by Gator at 9:19 PM on December 13, 2005

Further hmmm..
posted by Gator at 9:02 AM on December 14, 2005