In coming up with the topic for this week's SNLC, it occurred to me that, in spite of the name of this diary series, on very few occasions has the subject actually been about a individual loser, as such (besides your humble loser diarist, of course). However, tonight, I buck that trend. No, it's not about the Florida State University alum scumbag who pretended to be Paul Krugman, as rec'd here. Rather, it's about a different scumbag, one across big pond east (which is undergoing massive stresses affecting the US East Coast, as you all know), exposed by a source I normally wouldn't cite. More below the flip....
The UK scumbag in question is named Martin McCann. His act of scumbaggery was to register the domain name Amywinehousefoundation.com, in the wake of the July 23 death of the singer Amy Winehouse, just hours after Mitch Winehouse, Amy's father, announced plans to establish a charitable foundation to assist drug addicts. McCann was exposed by Emily Nash and Gordon Smart of (brace yourself) The Sun (sorry) here. (Yes, The Sun is a Murdoch-owned paper, but Nash and Smart got this one right, so credit where credit is due.) The report starts also that:
'McCann also paid £160 to register the Amy Winehouse Foundation Ltd with Companies House on August 2, despite having never met her or Mitch.
The Sun tracked him down after ex-cabbie Mitch revealed how he was forced to return donations to fans because he was unable to set up a bank account in that name.
He tweeted: "We have to put pressure on this d***head who stole our foundation name. Our solicitors are all over this but it takes time."'
It may be of amusement that The Sun report omitted 3 letters from the one word, but The Guardian, which is where I first saw this story (and which has the link through to The Sun's article), left the missing letters in the full quote, which are "ick", of course. (Or maybe it's not so amusing, if one regards this as a right-leaning paper vs. a left-leaning paper.)
To show what a loser and a jerk McCann is, read this bilge from him, cited by Nash and Smart:
"I'm not exploiting anything yet. I've just bought some domain names. Anybody could have....I'm not ashamed or embarrassed. Detach yourself from emotions and think business.
"He is making every effort to hijack this charity to satiate his own needs for the charity. She's not the only Amy Winehouse in the world."
Please note McCann's use of the word "yet". But McCann isn't the only jerk out there regarding similar domain-name squatting, as reported by Sean Michaels in The Guardian here:
'Mitch's trouble with names and pranksters is evidenced by existing website registrations. Amywinehousefoundation.org.uk is currently registered to a "sghuk", of Cheshire, who bought it on 16 August 2011. Amywinehousefoundation.com has also been purchased, and amywinehousefoundation.org was registered by Hertfordshire's Anthony Webb-Jobes on 31 July 2011.'
Of course, none of this would be an issue if Amy Winehouse had taken better care of herself, so that she'd still be alive now. But things didn't turn out that way, of course. And likewise, from a detached, legalistic point of view, what McCann did was not illegal. Immoral, cruel and hurtful to Winehouse's family, yes, undoubtedly. But that's not the same thing as illegal, of course. The tenor of the comments, however, shows that the population at large, or at least those who bother to comment on either The Guardian's site or The Sun's site, is clearly overwhelmingly against McCann.
So there you have it, namely two recent cyberspace losers who have recently tried to exploit famous people:
(a) the FSU liar out to swiftboat Paul Krugman,
(b) Martin McCann trying to make a £ off of Amy Winehouse.
I'll leave it to you to vote in the poll (all 8.6 of you) to judge who's the bigger loser. However, hypothetical question: how many of us, if given the opportunity to do to Br--tb-rt or B-ck the Bigot what the FSU-grad slimeball tried to pull on Krugman, would say no, or denounce a left-leaner who would try to do that? And, here's a sad prediction: the FSU grad will get hired by a wingnut think tank, or one of the teabagger bigot organizations, with a fat salary. Right-wing lying has its benefits, sad to say. No progressive who did what the FSU-liar did would be able to get a job anywhere.
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week.....