The destruction of "These pants make my ass look great"

I thought just for funsies I’d start off this blog with the story of the destruction of my last blog*. It occurred to me that not everyone is familiar with the story, and even those who are, it’s been a long time, so a little refresher wouldn’t necessarily hurt. It’s even a mildly interesting story! **

* Technically, there was one in between, who’s remnants still exist at bigpoppasmurf.blogspot.com. Don’t bother checking it out, though I imagine some of you will anyway, there’s nothing there anymore. Anyway, that one faded out due to disinterest on my part. I also may have still been a little gun shy at that point given what happened with the first one. I’ve tried to find the first one online, but I think it no longer exists, since I took all the posts down.


** There is a very talented sportswriter by the name of Joe Posnanski who writes for the Kansas City Star, which is a shame because nobody cares about the Kansas City Royals. The Chiefs haven’t exactly been lighting the world on fire lately either. Anyway, he has a blog where he often goes off on tangents, and he doesn’t want them to interfere with flow of the narrative, so he uses asterisks and at the end of the paragraph he writes his tangents. I’m going to give that system a try, and see if it works for me. I have a feeling I don’t have enough irreverent tangents to make it worthwhile, but who knows, so far the extra notes far outweigh the actual post



The year was 2002. “Spiderman” was the top movie of the year. Kids were rocking out to Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” and Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” and we had just invaded Afghanistan (ah memories). Also, my current students were 8 (MIND FUCK MIND FUCK MIND FUCK). It was also the end of the senior year of high school, and blogs were starting to become popular with a number of my friends taking part. Because it was the end of high school, a somewhat tumultuous times, people’s blogs were filled with sadness, the whole what comes next, will I ever see my friends train of thought* (ironic how little has changed, how many of us actually knows what we’ll be doing in a couple of years from now?). Needless to say, reading these was often a downer, and I didn’t do it very often. So I decided to make a blog of my own, but being that I wanted to be different, as well as hoping to cheer my friends up, I decided to make a blog that was my ridiculous ramblings to the world (not wholly different from this one), and so my first blog “These pants make my ass look great” was born.

* One thing about blogs that baffled me, and something that is true in general with the internet, is what people were willing to say on them. They knew that their friends were reading them, yet they would say things that they would never say to the person to their face. They would also pour out their innermost thoughts, as if it was a private diary, only it was online for anyone to see. Very weird. On the other hand, it’s not like I would have said the things that got me in trouble to the person’s face either, but that’s getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, plus I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite.


“These pants make my ass look great” was very enjoyable for me to write. I used to love to write when I was a younger man in the prime of my life, and I didn’t really have the chance to anymore, other than papers which aren’t quite the same. I wrote on a variety of topics that I can barely remember now, I think I talked about my classes, I remember I had a two part post on my interesting time working at Bruegger’s Bagels, god knows what else, all with my somewhat skewed perspective on the world. I can modestly say that it was somewhat enjoyed by at least one or two people that read it. Whether it ever achieved it’s stated goal of cheering my friends up, probably not, but it was fun anyway.

Then high school ended and it was off to college. I didn’t write for a very long time as I got used to college life. The transition to college life was not a very easy one for me, as I had trouble making friends, and a difficult time with my roommates. There was Jeremy, the druggie musician with the spiky hair, and Brendan, the preppy jock with annoying friends and a MASSIVE alcohol problem. That boy, he’d put a few away by noon, drink 20+ on a weeknight, he was something else. So when I finally wrote my first post about college, it may have been a little bit darker that my previous ones. At the same time, I felt my clever lampooning of the hippie drug culture there was both incisive and witty. Man I’m modest.

One of the things I talked about in my college post (note how there’s only one post at college. This should tell you how well it turned out) was the hall staff. The two girls who were staff on my floor were very nice, but certainly not without their flaws, that I could highlight for the purposes of hilarity. I zeroed in on one in particular (who we’ll call RB), talking about her dalliances with drugs, alcohol, and her particularly amorous relationship with a friend of mine at the time. The number of times they had sex in a day had become fairly common knowledge, and it was surprisingly high. So I mentioned all of this, and in my intelligence mentioned her full name, as well as the college. I did this in about September, and completely forgot about it.

Second semester, I had been moved out from my forced triple into a double by myself, which was incredibly sweet. I hadn’t written in the blog in forever, I just hadn’t felt like doing it, and I had forgotten I had it. Then I got a phone call from my friend who was in a relationship with RB. Apparently (and I still don’t know how much of this I believe) someone from the college newspaper had done a google search of this girl’s name. Turns out that at that point if you googled that girl’s name and the name of the college, my blog was the third thing that came up. The person had then called RB and asked her for a comment on the story. She then read it, and flipped out. Fortunately, I didn’t make it too easy to figure out who I was. I just used her full name, the name of the college, mentioned she was on my hall staff, and the address of the blog was sastay. Yup, no way they could figure out it was me. So the friend told me that she was incredibly angry and was talking about suing for plagiarism*. Obviously looking back on that now, I realize there’s just no way that would have ever happened, but I was mildly perturbed at the time. So I took down all the posts, and hoped it would go away.

* For the record, and I’m not just saying this because one of her best friends almost certainly reads this (Hi Hillary!) but I certainly don’t blame her for being so mad. I’d be pretty pissed too. Threatening to sue for plagiarism seems like a bit much, but whatever. Such is life


No such luck. The head resident in my new dorm, who also happened to be a high ranking member of Residential Life asked for a meeting with me. Just what I wanted. So I met with her, and she was like ok, tell me what happened. And I explained about how I had made this blog to entertain my friends at home, and I came up with some incredibly convoluted excuse as to what had happened. Google had recently bought blogger, and I told her that before that, my blog was private and couldn’t be read, but since Google had bought it, now even private blogs showed up on Google. This is patently false, since you could find it on other search engines too, but I don’t think she really cared. She was then like, this is so dark, are you ok? I think she was worried I was going to shoot up the school or something and I was like uh yeah… kind of just a joke. So she said well, she’s really mad at you, but you took all the posts down and that’s what’s important, so if you do this again, just don’t use people’s names, and you’re fine. The craziest part was she mentioned that the entire hall staff at my old dorm had had a meeting and read through printed out copies of my blog. So weird.


And that is the magnificent story of the sad destruction of “These pants make my ass look great”. Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson, but I’m sure I’ll mess up again at some point. I’m going to some house party tonight of people I mostly don’t know, so we’ll see how that goes. I have no idea how to end this so, yeah, the end*.

* Any typos Jack? I really hope this becomes a regular occurrence. And “herre” doesn’t count