A guy who tried to murder his wife is concerned that it’s interfering with his life, Lisa Provence writes for The Hook, so he’s demanded that the weekly help him scrub media coverage off the internet. You might remember the story of Kurt Kroboth, the Charlottesville guy who failed in his efforts to hire a hitman to kill his estranged wife, so he put on a vampire mask, snuck into her home, and attempted to chloroform her. That earned him six years in prison, a term that he completed recently. Now living in Arizona, he’s demanded that The Hook bar search engines from indexing stories about him, and threatened to sue them if they don’t do so. He says that the paper’s coverage of him is inaccurate, but refuses to say what, specifically, is inaccurate about it.
This is a classic example of the Streisand effect, wherein the attempt to suppress information online only makes it available more broadly.
With chloro-, instead of a knife,
The masked man assaulted his wife.
Six years in the slammer,
But now he does yammer,
His history’s encumbering his life.
Observer:
Dude, that is NOT BAD.
Didn’t someone try to get you to do something similar a few years ago, Waldo?
Wear a vampire mask? Or be an overblown tool demanding retractions.
It takes a pretty special lady to overlook something like this. Special in this case meaning the inability to get on the internet. Methinks he should get off the grid.
It took me a minute, too, Dan. :) Sean, yeah, it was something close to that. It was when that crazy chicken farmer sued The Hook and subpoenaed me for all information that I have about everybody who so much as looked at cvillenews.com—all e-mails, phone calls, etc. that I’d ever had with any of y’all. (I guess he thought I was part of some kind of conspiracy against him.) With the help of the TJ Center for Free Expression, the Virginia ACLU, and Public Citizen (plus a lot of individuals), I fought the subpoena. Eventually the guy just disappeared, IIRC, his attorney gave up, and that was the end of that.
There once was a farmer man
Who dreamed up a legal plan
He filed a suit
But the point was moot
So the shit never hit the fan
Limericks, like tatoos, are apparently more popular than I ever thought they would be.
There’s now a big trend that’s transpiring,
Although fitting some rhymes can be tiring.
Though some verse is perverse,
I’m averse to the curse,
And miss Barbara just stands there ad-Myer-ing.
I may regret saying this, but I will never get tired of poems as comments.
Also, the random photo that showed up when I loaded this page, appropriately enough, is the picture I took looking down the barrel of a shotgun.
It’s been decades since last a poem was aimed at me. And my name’s spelled correctly, too. Thank you, Michael.