This Is Poverty.com - 08 Jun 05

08 Jun 05
Cutting Criticsm: The Blackmail Scandal
Tobias

It was a pretty average Sunday afternoon for me. I was just sitting around my house, writing the odd essay, watching the odd utterly atrocious pop-Bollywood movie based on Jane Austen novels and doing copious amounts of heroin, when I was given the best gift I have ever recieved - the gift of blackmail.

Now, before I go on, I'd like to say that I think we here at This is Poverty are a rather benign, unassuming bunch. We're not the type to offend anybody, unless we thought they were dicks. However, we also know that the only people who apparently read Canta are those who go through the various articles looking for something that might be deemed marginally offensive. In the spirit of that, the This is Poverty Collective fully condones kicking pregnant women in the stomach. So, when our website (www.thisispoverty.com) recieved this blackmail threat, which I suppose might be viewed as marginally threatening, we were understandably quite upset:

This is poverty alright: of wit, intelligence and any editing, although I
suppose if someone edited your "articles" all that would be left is the
byline.
Please, for the love of Michael Jackson, desist.
Yours,
Andrew FriedmaN
Misery, Canterbury

He then goes on to add -

PS. Will blackmail stop you? Here are some of your misogynist jokes from
coms 101 webct, wonder what would happen if I sent them to Canta?

Following this, he preceeded to copy and paste a large WebCT discussion involving my two This is Poverty colleagues, as well as various other classmembers of last year's COMS101 course. This discussion, as our blackmailing foe "Andrew FriedmaN" already stated, consisted largely of sexist jokes, the best of which I will list below:

[Women] can't do anything. Except cook. I hate it how Judy tries to be all funny in that ad where that little fat guy lurks in the background of the studio. Yeah, you're a real riot Judy. Go back to the kitchen.

Why do women have such small feet?
So they can stand closer to the oven.

A guy hit a woman with his motorcycle. Whose fault was it?
His. He shouldn't have been riding his motorcycle in the kitchen.

How mANY MEN DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB
none they can do the dishes in the dark (I have no idea what this joke means)

What do you call a woman with 2 brain cells?
Pregnant.

And so on. It should also be noted that a girl called Pearl Roy, who has absolutely no involvement in this case whatsoever, posted these "Pearlers" which "Andrew FriedmaN" also thoughtfully emailed to us:

How do you fix a woman's watch?
You don't, there's a clock on the oven.

What do you say to a woman with 2 black eyes?
Nothing, she's been told twice already.

I have pretty much no reason for implicating this "Pearl Roy" in our blackmail scandal at all, I just think it's awesome how she has a pirate name.

It's not just the fact that "Andrew FriedmaN" attempted to blackmail us that I find hilarious, but the fact that he appears to have saved an entire semester's worth of WebCT discussion "just in case" he has to blackmail someone with it out of their crappy student magazine humour column in the near future. Now, I consider myself a pretty normal person, and I'd like to think most of you reading are normal people too. But have any of you ever saved a bunch of mildly offensive conversations from a class discussion board purely for blackmail purposes? Why exactly did "Andrew FriedmaN" even consider saving every single thing my friends and I said on the COMS101 discussion board (which we did, admittedly, ruin)? We sent a squad of our crack This is Poverty commandos on the case.

Unfortunately, all our commandos retrieved was vital information on that guy from the 3M innovation ads, who says "if there's anything wrong with footy, AND THERE ISN'T, it's that you CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF IT," and then has a bunch of close ups on his bloody thumbs as they carefully drape football jerseys over the bannisters of his home. "Andrew FriedmaN" and his precious shoes were nowhere to be found. God, our crack team of commandos sucks.

It's highly possible that "Andrew FriedmaN" just wanted to be reunited with his fantastic COMS101 friends from the Internet, who loved him and comforted him like an ox comforts a husk, despite his glaringly obvious lack of footwear of any sort. Maybe he knew we'd post an article such as this in the Canta magazine, thus giving "Andrew FriedmaN" his precious 15 minutes of fame? I really don't know. But I really am worried that he would even attempt to portray my This is Poverty friends and I as offensive louts who get kicks out of abusing women - whereas in reality, we actually abuse all minorities, not just those of the fairer sex.

I don't know, maybe "Andrew FriedmaN" really enjoyed the jokes and saved them so he could memorise them and be a huge hit at parties. I know for a fact that these jokes work a treat with the ladies - if I had a penny for every time I approached a likely lady at a bar, and said "How maNY MEN DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB none they can do the dishes in the dark" and proceeded to "get lucky" I'd have at least fourteen pence. This doesn't really explain his blackmailing antics, however. I guess he's just weird.

While we're on the subject, what do you call a bunch of ethnic people in a letter box? Blackmail.

OH YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT.

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