Today’s Moron: Gary Moody

I have 10 questions for Gary Moody of Portland, Maine, who has been nabbed (again) hiding in a campground outhouse. You may remember this guy; he was arrested a few years ago for the same offence, and told police he had dropped his wedding ring into the pit. This time, he said he’d dropped his shirt.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have nothing but sympathy for people with psychiatric or psychological conditions that make them want to do these strange things … until those compulsions intrude into other people’s lives. Imagine yourself sitting in that outhouse — already an unpleasant enough experience — only to discover a face looking up at your privates. Imagine it’s your mother, or wife, or child.

If I were still a crime reporter, and I had the chance to meet with Gary and ask him a few questions, this is what they would be:

1. How did you fit through that narrow little poo-hole?
2. Have you ever gotten stuck halfway into an outhouse?
3. Have you ever found anything interesting down there, like an old comic book, or a cellphone, or a bag of smuggled heroin?
4. Assuming you really did drop your wedding ring, how much do you love your wife, and is getting the ring back really worth crawling into human poo-waste?
5. Assuming you really did drop your shirt, how much do you love that stupid shirt? Did your wife give it to you?
6. What does it feel like to sit in poo?
7. Assuming, as you say, that you have “an outhouse problem,” and you’ve done this many times before, how do you clean up afterward?
8. Why the hell would you do this?
9. Why? For the love of God, why?
10. Do people call you Mr. Smells Like Poo?

I used to know a guy who was hired to pump out portapotties at campgrounds. He quit after a few weeks because he could never get rid of the smell on his skin. Imagine what Gary’s wife must have to live with …

Here’s an article about Gary, with a smelly-looking photo.

Weather Station 1: Year One

Today marks the first anniversary of the launch of Weather Station 1. Over the past year, I have written 700 posts about stupid people, rock bands, movies, politics, television, my kids and myself. Some of them were pretty good. Others made me wonder why I’d ever written them. And in that time, I’ve had readership that has now stretched into six figures. That’s pretty cool.

My top five posts, in order: The Killer Power Ranger, Crystal Defanti, Colin and Jane Moyle, Jason Leroy Savage and Meh. I don’t get that last one. There are posts on this site that took me hours to compose, and they’ve attracted a handful of readers. That one about Meh was a five-minute knockoff, and thousands have read it. I guess I just don’t understand modern readers.

Wait, of course I don’t understand modern readers! I’m in the newspaper business! Well, I was.

I began blogging in the mid 1990s via a service called Delphi, which is now gone. I was working as a newspaper reporter and columnist, and I wanted an outlet for the things I wanted to write about, not the things I was paid to write about. For a couple of years, I maintained a sarcastic web journal called just Weathereye. When Delphi shut down, so did my journal (the word “blog” hadn’t been coined yet). A while later, I had a Geocities page which served the same function, but I didn’t stick with it. Life got in the way, and it was a couple more years before I launched a new blog, this time via Blogger, called The Waystation. Then I joined MySpace and did some writing there, calling the blog The Weather Station, and then Facebook, until last year, when I decided I wanted one central site for the all the crap I had on the go.

When Weather Station 1 launched, it was on a really bad site called Blogdrive. See, I’m the kind of guy who likes to explore alternatives to the big guns, so I automatically said no to WordPress and Blogspot and LiveJournal. I spent a day formatting the blog and setting it up, discovering along the way that Blogdrive requires blog names to have both numbers and letters in the title (which makes zero sense). What the heck, I decided, and The Weather Station became Weather Station 1. Because of the alliteration.

I lasted about a week on Blogdrive. It was horrible to use. One night, bored, I opened a WordPress account and started playing with it, and realized how much easier it was. So I closed down Blogdrive, imported some old posts from earlier blogs, and on Sept. 2, 2008, Weather Station 1 was launched with one little post and a lot of bells and whistles, most of which have been pared away.

My stats for that day show two visits, and I know who those two people were, and so do they. A few days later, I told the world about the site, and I’ve been having fun with it ever since. On the down side, a lot of people found my site by Googling “topless weather.” Sorry to disappoint. On the plus side, a lot of my friends read it, and a lot of strangers. I sometimes wonder if the people I’m writing about in the Today’s Moron series read what I have to say about them. In fact, I hope they do. I’ve also had certain of my posts featured on trekmovie.com, The Huffington Post and other fine sites, and there was even a plagiarist a few weeks back who lifted my work for his own site. That’s flattery. And also stupid, and I let him know that.

I should point out that I am no prize myself. I have made some serious boneheaded mistakes in my time. But I still love writing about other people’s stupidity, because I think we all need to smarten up. If I can draw attention to the ridiculous things other people do, maybe someone else will learn how to behave, and our world will be a better place. See? One man CAN make a difference.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you keep coming back. Year Two promises to be even more fun.

Music Review: F*cking Around With Oasis

Wow, Movies You Should See was right:
some people DO look like they smell.

Please forgive the cuss word in the title today, folks. I don’t usually use foul language here at the Weather Station, but sometimes it just works. Anyway, I was thinking about Oasis this morning, because apparently the band has broken up, which I don’t care about. Like a lot of you, I didn’t even know Oasis was still around.

They had their day. In fact, you can look it up: it was in 1996, when Wonderwall became the band’s top-selling single. After that, I don’t know much about what happened, and I’m a music guy. Maybe some of you out there remain big Oasis fans, but really, I never got the buzz.

I do like Wonderwall, though. Great song, great lyric. It features one of the best drum performances of the 90s, and works on every level as a solid pop performance. Not a bad legacy, really; the bands of the 1990s tend to be remembered for one great song, and while sometimes it’s Glycerine or Lump or Pretty Fly For A White Guy, other times it’s Wonderwall. So there’s that.

But I find it fascinating that Wonderwall lives on as a subject of uncountable mashups. For those of you who don’t know what that is (in other words, my mother), a mashup is a DJ-created piece of music that takes two or more songs and merges them. They work best when the song choices are wickedly similar, but nobody ever noticed (like this one, my favourite). Sometimes they don’t work at all. But Wonderwall seems to be at the heart of a lot of them.

What does this say about the song? Is it deceptively simple? Or corny and unoriginal? A bit of both, I’d say. It’s easy to play on guitar, and it’s easy to sing. It’s easy to remember and hum. But it still has an emotional core that’s unique — in other words, it’s a solid pop song.

It also says that when it comes to mashups, a lot of people like fucking around with Oasis.