Okay, Fine, Let's Talk About Casey Serin

Over the course of the past two weeks, I've paid far more attention to the goings-on at the brilliant Caseypedia wiki than I have the little fucktard himself. I love this site for two reasons: a few months ago, Casey Serin whined to the wikinazis about the portrayal of him in his wikipedia entry. They threatened to pull the plug on the entire entry, although much of what was said in those pages came directly from Casey Serin's own blog.

The other reason I love Caseypedia is that it is such a fabulous collection of so-called Haterz' writing. Proving that Casey Serin's critics are some of the brightest people online, Caseypedia is a highly accurate archive of Casey Serin's crimes and general stupidity, tossed with a light vinaigrette of dark humor and biting sarcasm.

In the chaos of the past two weeks, I'm still not entirely clear who initiated this wiki, so please step forward to claim your prize praise.

I haven't actually logged in yet to add to the mix, but want to thank Benoit for initiating an entry pour moi. And I really want to know who included the incredibly funny line about me in M. SINGH's entry. BTC has denied adding it, so I suspect either Benoit again or Akubi (who at the time of this writing, does not have her own wiki entry. I'll have to log in and remedy that!)

As I said before, I've paid only scant attention to Casey Serin over the past two weeks. But there were two things that I'd like to point out. After reading Casey's little meltdown toward Duane Legate during his talkcast-in-lieu-of-beg-a-thon, I wanted to physically shake the little fucktard.

The petulant tone and ensuing temper tantrum were totally out of line. Here's the bottom line, Casey--Duane LeGate has repeatedly offered significant help and resources to you, free of charge. And you have, frankly, fucked him nine ways from Sunday each and every time. You say you wouldn't post personal emails. Didn't you do just that with PRLinkScam?

Hasn't Nigel Swaby done exactly the same thing with your emails, time and time again, in an effort to pimp you out on his multiple blogs? Once again, you chose the wrong battle.

The other thing that struck me was that Casey Serin has begun to implement so many of the scams and plans that I predicted he'd pull out of his bag of tricks. He'd implemented his own version of "pay per post" in his blog, turning content over to basically writing about his advertisers and pasting in some hubris from folks who paid $100 to damage their professional reputations.

For the record, advertising on Casey Serin's "I Am Facing Foreclosure" reveals you to be an "any port in a storm" kind of person, regardless of your industry.

During this phase of Casey's blogging, he crows that he's recently taken an IQ test offered by one of his scamvertisers. And just as I've suspected all along, the results were less than stellar. A couple of weeks ago, Rob Dawg asked if his intuition might be off regarding Casey's intelligence or lack thereof.

But then Casey Serin actually revealed that he's got an IQ of 132 based off of some cheesy internet poll. I'm not going to waste time on determining whether or not this is an inflated number...I'll let the boy have his supposed "win" on this one.

This explains entirely why Casey Serin's critics lost patience with him so quickly. Because most of us regard that level of intelligence the way an average person regards a clinical moron. There's that large a gap between us and you, Casey.

Let me put it another way...one of the myriad admission requirements for my kindergarden was a minimum IQ of 150. And those were the "slow" kids.

So, Casey, you're just what we suspected all along--ill-equipped to make it into the Big Leagues. In this crowd, we'd probably open a vein and relax in a warm tub if we were as dumb as you. We assume that someone with that low an IQ has to remove their shoes and socks to count to twenty. You might have to go back and read that again very slowly to understand it, but it will eventually sink in.

Your 132 IQ earned you the ability to learn some business vocab off of the backs of flashcards. But your limited intelligence also means that you're not capable of applying that knowledge in any significant way.

So with no talent and not a heaping load of brainpower, you really did find your niche...carnival sideshow. What you achieved with IAFF is about the best you can do. And even then, you never quite found a way to push through any barriers and take even one segment of that website to the next level.

Whatever outage is going on with your site this time (yawn), you'd better hope you can find some way to live up to the promises you made to your advertisers. Because while I think they're a bunch of halfwits as well, they could very well take a great deal of pleasure in filing small-claims and other nuisance suits against you. By plastering their praise for you all over your blog, you'll prove them fools for doing business with you, and they could very well try to take your only legitimate resource--"I Am Facing Foreclosure" itself.

Casey Serin is the Smelly Car of real estate, the blogosphere, and the business world in general. By making the I Am Facing Foreclosure advertisers look like fools, they're just joining a list of folks who are learning just how hard it is to escape the stink.

Jackass of the Week Award

With Casey Serin hogging so much of the "public jackass" spotlight, it's often difficult to find someone who deserves the award more than him.

But as I was traveling last week, I was knocked in the head by the story of Dean Hancock, whose sense of entitlement gives Casey Serin a hard run for his borrowed money.

Dean's son Josh Hancock was, until recently, a relief pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. His five-year professional career ended at the age of 29, when Josh was killed in a drunk driving accident.

The details of Josh Hancock's death reveal that he did, literally, everything wrong. He was driving down a highway doing 68 in a 55 mph zone; blood-alcohol level twice the legal limit for Missouri; talking on a cell phone; not wearing a seatbelt; marijuana and a glass pipe were found in the car.

Unfortunately, he was driving down a stretch of road where a disabled motorist had called for a tow truck. Josh Hancock died when he slammed into the back of the tow truck, and investigators say there were no skid marks to indicate that he ever even hit the brakes to avoid the collision.

It's a sad and certainly untimely death. So why would his grieving father receive an Jackass of the Week Award?

Because Dean Hancock has taken the unthinkable step of initiating a lawsuit against every party involved in the accident caused by his son. He is suing the restaurant where his son ate and drank before the accident, the restaurant's manager; suing the tow-truck company and its driver; and even suing the driver of the Geo Metro that had the audacity to break down on the side of the road!

Restaurant manager Patricia Shannon Van Matre (who is the daughter of former Cardinal and restaurant owner Mike Shannon) has said in numerous publications that Hancock was offered a cab, but he told her that he was walking to the Westin hotel three blocks away.

Whether or not this is true, only these two will ever know for certain. But to place blame for a grown person's actions at the hands of a restaurant manager is beyond the pale. A 29-year old man knows when he's had too much to drink. And those who think that either his bartender or the restaurant manager should have intervened has never been in such a situation--particularly with a pampered sports personality who is surrounded by people who support his every whim.

It is interesting to note that, at the time of his death, Josh Hancock was driving a rented SUV. This is notable because the rental was a replacement for his personal SUV, which was being repaired from an accident that Hancock caused just three days prior, when he was clipped by a tractor-trailer at 5:30 a.m., tearing off his car's front bumper.

In that accident, Hancock was in Sauget, Illinois, just across the river from the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Sauget is adjacent to the crime capital of East St. Louis, Illinois and both towns share a reputation for their strip clubs, gambling and bars that serve until 5 a.m.

In other words, the only reason why a St. Louis, Missouri resident (particularly a white, affluent one) is leaving Sauget at 5:30 in the morning is because he's had a long night of hard drinking.

That particular morning, Josh Hancock almost killed himself when he nudged his SUV out into oncoming traffic to make a left-hand turn. His car was clipped by an oncoming tractor-trailer that was traveling at an estimated speed of 45-50 miles per hour.

While police were called to the scene, no citations were given. Was this because the officer gave the well-known baseball player preferential treatment? Because Sauget's only reliable income stream comes from bar and club-goers and police in that area tend to look the other way in these types of situations? Or because a trained police officer could not spot signs of inebriation in Josh Hancock, in which case, how could anyone expect a restaurant manager to do the same?

What is known is that Hancock was to pitch in a Cardinals game later that afternoon, but appeared to the stadium late and hungover. So if Dean Hancock is so interested in making the rest of the world responsible for his grown son's behavior, why not also sue the City of Sauget, its police force, and the officer who had the opportunity to intervene and take the baseball player's license, but failed to do so?

In that same vein of logic, why shouldn't the Cardinals and/or Major League Baseball sue Dean Hancock and his family for failing to intervene in this time-bomb's life? After all, they lost a pitcher in whom they have invested a lot of time, money, and training, only to lose him as the season starts.

The handwriting was on the wall, Dean. Your son came to the Cardinals after he was dropped by the Cincinnati Reds for violating a weight clause in his contract. Since this is a common side effect of heavy drinking, do you want to sue the Reds for perhaps acknowledging that your son was a drunk, but didn't want to bring public attention to the fact?

No, instead you're suing some guy from Collinsville who just so happened to have his car break down the night your son was so fucked up on booze and pot that he never even hit the brakes for a huge-ass flatbed tow truck. Hundreds of other, most likely sober, drivers managed to avoid the tow truck that night, but your son barreled into it like it wasn't even there.

And if that 26,000 pound truck hadn't been there, your son would have killed an innocent motorist as he sat in his disabled Geo Metro. But you want some sort of handout because, by some chance of science, your sperm met an egg and the product could throw a baseball, and now your family's trickle-down economics have come to a halt and you want folks with jobs and families and lives to pay you.

Dean Hancock's lawsuits represent the most odious sense of entitlement we've seen in the past couple of years. Not only should the defendants in this case refuse to capitulate to any settlement, this man should be ashamed to show his face in public.

You Guys are Great

I knew a lot of people who read these pages are pet people, but I typically avoid writing about pets. Like I said yesterday, I'm well aware of the fact that, for as charming and irreplaceable as we find our own pets, other people just don't care.

So thank you all for your encouragement. I've been in full-blown pout mode, particularly as the vet kept calling to report fever spikes. Luckily, for both kitty's sake and my own sanity, the monster finally came home this morning, after 3 days in hospital.

I'm now looking into human egg donation to cover the bill.

Vets all reported that the monkey was cute and loving toward them, even as they did hellacious things to his body. As I read through the his chart at home, I saw that they had taken to hand-feeding him and generally pampering him. One of them went so far as to include little smiley faces in his chart.

Of course, we get home and the cat is PISSED. First, he performed a thorough inspection to ensure that nothing in his domicile had been changed without his permission. Then spent most of the day alternating between blatantly ignoring me and accusatory slit-eyed stares.

To make matters worse, the vet sent us home with kitty antibiotics that I get to administer every twelve hours for the next week, and the first dosage was due just an hour after our return. The vet acted like shooting the liquid into the cat's mouth would be no big deal....HA! Had to resort to the cat burrito, where the monkey gets immobilized in a beach towel; still pretty sure that only about half of the dosage was ingested during the 45-minute tussle.

Since I'm the bad guy here, have only been able to do a cursory inspection of the furball, but see that he's been shaved in four places. I'm absolutely certain I don't want to know what happened there. But after spending the equivalent of a decent used car on medical care, I do think it would have been nice to be sent home with one of those lampshade collars, since kitty can't seem to stop licking his bald spots.

Just as he gets over being incredibly mad at me for taking him to the pet hospital, it will be time to load him into the carrier for a follow-up visit with a different vet. So that should be great.

And yet, it's so good to have the little jerk home...

??????????

One thing I've noticed is that I really hate the way pets smell when they come back from the vet. Then I realized that it's a similar powdery/floral/sweaty stench that you always smell on strippers and old women. I have no idea why that would be, and, much like the bald spots, am going to remain blissfully ignorant on this one.

Cat-astrophe

What a horrible week.

As you might have read in a comment post, last week was a jumble of twenty-hour work days in an attempt to finalize a huge contract that took me to three cities in as many days to meet with principals and shore up loose ends before the holiday weekend.

I was then assigned to touch base with a client in a fourth city, and arrived exhausted, prepared to do nothing more than enjoy some celebratory sleep and drinks over the holiday. But I arrived on Friday to discover that the central air in this property had gone kaput...unacceptable in this part of the country. So rather than dropping into a much-needed coma sleep, spent the day calling around for a repair person to come save me from the stifling heat.

That tackled, I regrouped and called some local friends to see if they wanted to meet up later in the day Saturday. That never happened, because as I was puttering around the house, I noticed the cat seemed out of sorts. At first, I thought it might be a combination of a bad attitude from my being gone for most of the week and his recent flight to rejoin me. But when I went to pet him, he actually growled (!!!) and hissed at me.

This was definitely a first. It was a stretch to think that the cat was pissed about the flight, because he typically defies all cat characteristics and actually is an awesome little travel buddy. When we take road trips, I belt his carrier into the passenger seat facing me and he hops right in and lays down. While I drive, I leave the carrier door open and he'll casually pop his head out every once in a while, check out the sights, then crawl back in and purr with pleasure.

I knew straight away that something was definitely fucked up this time, and stood frozen for a minute thinking about what to do. As I pondered, the cat managed to projectile vomit like a five-year old in a school play. Went to the fridge where we keep a list of local emergency numbers and rang the vet. The vet, of course, was closing in ten minutes and couldn't get my little monster in for a visit. But he did tell me that, based on the vomiting and other symptoms I described (I'll spare you the details) that kitty was definitely in distress and needed to be seen immediately.

Because of the timing, this meant a trip to the Emergency Vet. Now, if you're a pet owner, you're probably like me and live in fear of such a visit. Not necessarily because of the dire circumstances that will instigate such a trip--after all, thank God for the emergency vet--but because of the expense. Everything, and I mean everything, at the emergency vet costs two to three times as much as a trip to the regular vet.

Knowing this, I did a quick internet search on the possible causes of the cat's symptoms. They all pointed back to what I was told over the phone, and the damn cat needed to be seen straight away. Of course, every regular vet in a three-county region had shuttered their doors for the holiday weekend, off to drink margaritas on their porches and take their boats out for a weekend booze cruise.

So the cat was admitted for some emergency procedures. He's still being caged, poked and prodded as we speak. Again, if you're a pet owner, you know how ridiculously traumatizing this is for both pet and pet owner. Not to mention the fact that the emergency vet in this part of the world does not fuck around when it comes to payment. They would not begin treatment until they had a four-figure deposit in hand. Many, many people who came before me must have burned them hard, because as I was at the reception desk trying not to have a stroke over the deposit, another young woman was being refused treatment for her dog because she couldn't pay.

I returned to the house that evening after a very long day at the vet and couldn't get over how empty and quiet everything felt without el grande gato. I thought about going out, but decided I was shit company for anyone to be around, and realized that my checking account probably couldn't handle much more than the impending vet bill. As this reality caused a small series of panic attacks, I got a phone call from an inconsolable relative, absolutely crushed from a broken heart.

We've all been through this one...the heartbreak that happens sometime in your early twenties. It's gut-wrenching and life-changing. It's the heartbreak that strips away that last thin veil of innocence that we managed to still carry into early adulthood, and the moment it's gone, the world feel foreign and cold. We wonder how we'll ever pick up the pieces and move on, and more importantly how--or even if--we'll ever fall in love again.

It feels like a death, yet even when we're going through it, we know that it's just too disgustingly common to get the recognition it deserves. It's all too similar to a trip to the emergency vet--you may be reduced to tears and palpable dread, but no one else really gives a damn. "Oh, I'm sorry," is about the best that can be mustered. For those in the midst of a heartbreak that actually produces physical pain, it's a reality that seems impossible to reconcile.

So I've been alternating phone calls between emergency vet updates and a girl who I'm sure is currently unable to even muster the energy to brush her hair or teeth as she cries over the destruction of an unspoken future with someone she now loathes with every fiber of her being.

I don't know about you, but I truly feel like this particular holiday weekend can't be over fast enough.