Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Katie Kerfuffle Kaput.

Seriously.

Dr. Crazy says she's not "Katie." We will take her at her word.

Fab



22 comments:

  1. I read that whole exchange on her blog and I feel kind of icky afterwards. Dr. Crazy has a mouth on her!

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  2. She sounds like a great party guest...Daaamn.

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  3. Am I alone in thinking there's a reality TV show in here somewhere? Survivor: NYU would almost have to be better than the original...

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  4. "I did not have sex with that woman... Miss Lewinsky."

    "I am not a crook."

    "Absolutely, 100% not guilty."

    "I am not Katie."

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  5. The responses to CM from "Dr. Crazy" and her followers on her own blog Tuesday was seriously the most entertaining shit I've read all summer. What an appropriate pseudonym she has chosen.

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  6. Well, one person's sycophants are another person's discerning and supportive friends, I guess.

    I propose that in a very medieval way we should refer to the actors as Crazy and the Pseudo-Crazy.

    Anyway, if someone were doing to me what Crazy says the Pseudo-Crazy is doing to her, and from within my own department to boot, I'd sure as fuck want to know who that person was. Revenge would be served appropriately chilled, but in the interim I'd want to know. Because you can't protect your back if you don't know who is standing behind you with the knife. What if the Pseudo-Crazy is someone she thinks is her BFF, or BSE, or whatever?

    So I guess it is her lack of interest in figuring out the Pseudo-Crazy is that I find baffling (or perhaps suspicious).

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  7. "The responses to CM from 'Dr. Crazy' and her followers on her own blog Tuesday was seriously the most entertaining shit I've read all summer."

    Were seriously. Were seriously. Were seriously.

    Subject-predicate agreement, dammit.

    I are a teacher of English.

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  8. But Archie, from what I saw on her blog, she made it clear that she didn't think that anyone in her own department is attempting to sabotage or mock her; she thinks this is all CM's doing, that someone here is simply lifting her material and re-posting it here for reasons of their own.

    For those not in the know, she uses the word "plagiarizing" (plagiarizing!) in the title of her post that addresses this, and she writes, "Old mean-spirited fans of mine who’ve stolen my blog posts in the past, kids, they’re not defunct: they’ve just moved on to greener pastures."

    Mean-spirited fans who have stolen her blog posts in the past. The space inside her head must be fascinating.

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  9. Reality check.

    I've followed the Katie/Crazy thing for a while, and fairly early on I was clued in to the link to her own site.

    If you read her texts from yesterday and from past times when she's pulled work from this page, it's obviously the same person, the same schtick.

    Whoever said it earlier that she likely got caught by her loyal readers and then decided she needed to blame somebody - well, that's my read, too.

    She's not busy turning the IT department over to find the colleague who has been sending her posts out for THREE YEARS. She's all, "Let's move on."

    Guilty, right? And I don't give a shit. but when she maligns this site and the poor sad sack who runs it - sorry, Fab, but I picture you perpetually slumped over the keyboard - then it's time to say bullshit.

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  10. Hold on, I'm confused. Does this mean that only three people write all the posts for this site?

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  11. Bravo Ben...

    Now that Katie has given up the ghost, there's Fab, Yaro, and, well, I'd bet the third is you!

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  12. Yes, now that the Pseudo-Crazy is no longer writing for us, we'll need to recruit another person here at Miami to fill that fourth slot.

    Damnit!

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  13. Yes, she really seems to think that someone at CM (and I'm not sure whether she understands the blog's procedures well enough to realize this, but it would have to be the moderator, or at least someone with access to the moderator's account) is picking on her. That is, indeed, a third explanation (other than Crazy is Katie is crazy, or Crazy is being stalked by someone crazy calling herself Katie, and Crazy), but that would involve accepting at least two premises (1) that Fab is crazy, obsessed not only with activity on/traffic to CM during the summer doldrums, but also, for some reason, with taunting Dr. Crazy, and (2) that at least one of the old RYS moderators is willing to back him up.* I've seen no evidence of Fab/the moderator being a conflict-stirrer; in fact, I've seen a lot of evidence, including over the last two days, of the opposite (which is exactly what you want in a moderator). Nor have I seen any evidence of interest, let alone obsession, with Dr. Crazy (leave aside the very few Katie posts, which are a drop in the bucket of the totality of CM posts, and, compared to the old RYS ones, have been pretty lame to boot). I suppose it could just be that Fab/the moderator is obsessed with traffic, and disturbed by the summer doldrums, but that would require us, I think, to accept a third premise: that he couldn't think of any better way to liven things up. There's also ample evidence against that (and if he wants to draw old colleagues into the fray, why not ask Leslie to cook up a successor prank to the Great Strelnikov Takeover, which was far more entertaining than this?)

    *or, I suppose, that Fab has been sock-puppeting Compound Calico all along. Many conspiracy theories about CM eventually lead back to some version of the Ohio 4, or maybe the Arizona 1 -- interesting that Katie briefly claimed to be in Arizona. Because this is cyberspace, and everybody, including the moderator/moderator function, is pseudonymous, there really is very little that we know for sure. Those of us who post and/or comment here have one advantage over those who simply read: we know that there is at least one actual poster other than the moderator/Fab/the wizard behind the curtain -- namely us -- and that whoever's behind the curtain allows us quite wide leeway in what we say. It seems logical to me to conclude from that that the blog structure works as announced, and there are others in the same position, but of course I can't know that for sure; I'm just inclined, indeed, to apply Occam's razor, and conclude that things are as they seem -- and that, among other things, Fab is not crazy (or Katie).

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  14. Dammit!

    I dated her in college. She broke my heart. I started Rate Your Students, College Misery, the Huffington Post, and Perez Hilton.com in order to win her back.

    When it failed, I began to sockpuppet her postings, taking exactly what she wrote and putting the fake name "Katie" on it. I assumed this would be seen as a love offering. (Better that than the Omaha Steaks I kept sending and she kept returning.)

    I then created Archie, Ben, Cassandra, Yaro, even Compound Cash and Wicked Walter. I created DRAMA; I'm a closet Aaron Sorkin freak.

    I wanted all of this to end with a youtube video of me and her at the altar.

    It hasn't happened yet...but I'm hopeful.

    I hope I've straightened it all out.

    Now I must log off and comment to myself about: a) my brilliance, b) my stupidity, and c) (just to throw people off) plagiarism among my students.

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  15. Cassandra, if you go fully Cartesian on this one, the only thing you know for sure is that you are real. The rest of us... who can say?

    And Fab, I think I've got a guy over in catering who can take over the Pseudo-Crazy's writing duties. Best of all, he can bring free coffee and donuts to the editorial meetings.

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  16. (My comment above was written in response to Greta's 10:22 post; the others came in in the interim. And now I'm following Fab's brilliant comment -- or maybe I'm Fab, calling myself brilliant; as I pointed out above, only I can tell that I'm not also Fab. I'm pretty sure I'm not an alternate personality of Fab's. At least I think I'm not. Do alternate personalities *know* that they're alternate personalities? I don't have blackouts, if that's any help).

    Since the above leads me to conclude that the craziness is coming from outside CM, almost certainly from a certain cluster of IP addresses in the midwest (or, I suppose, from someone who knows how to spoof quite specific IP addresses, and which ones to spoof, which also seems a bit far-fetched), I too am more than a bit puzzled by Dr. Crazy's response. If I were Crazy (and not crazy), I would, indeed, be asking for an investigation by the IT folks on my campus, and quite possibly the campus police (or whoever else deals with potentially threatening folks; as Darla pointed out, this long-running campaign would take considerable time, determination, and energy -- enough to be a bit scary). I would probably not be mentioning it or otherwise reacting in public (because experts on the subject say that stalking is fed by any detectable reaction), but, by the same lights, I wouldn't be continuing to mention the subject on my blog. In fact, I'd probably write a couple of perfectly normal but especially bland posts, at my usual pace, whether or not I felt like it, just to show that taunting me via CM won't work (I'd probably also complain privately -- in person or virtually -- to friends; maybe part of the problem here is that Dr C has become so accustomed to conducting so many of her private conversations in public -- and not just on her porch, which makes for an interesting metaphor. If you hang out, drinking and conducting long personal conversations, on the porch, you have to assume that you'll not only make friends you might not have had otherwise, but also have to deal with the occasional intrusive passerby whom you'd prefer not to have met. And there are times when the better part of wisdom is to go in the house, lock the door, and call the police, while not providing any more evidence than that of just how disturbed you are). I thought Dr. Crazy was heading in that direction with the glasses post yesterday, but this morning's "feeling all put upon" post scotched that theory. She got some good advice from Dr. Virago (applicable whoever has been writing the "Katie" posts), and it sounds like she plans to follow it; that strikes me as positive.

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  17. @Archie: at this point, at least in cyberspace, I'm not even sure I can be certain of that. In meatspace, I appear to be ready for lunch, so I think I'll go with that.

    And I meant to say that, like Terry, I once again find myself expressing my regret that the gift of creating and running this blog also makes Fab a target for craziness, from whatever source. At least he's having some fun with it.

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  18. Honestly, I've gotten better at compartmentalizing the bullshit.

    I know some people criticized it, but when I turned over the blog to Leslie K for a few months, I was just baffled by the job. I took a lot of the complaints personally, and had no experience in the blog world to teach me how to react to the occasional nuttiness.

    When Leslie got attacked by a very small number of folks, I felt horrible. She didn't. She just said, "I love College Misery, and had such a good time. But, seriously, I do it just for fun, and being targeted like this - even if it's by such a TINY percentage - makes it not worth my energy and worry."

    At that point I thought, well, I could take it back and keep it going, or just crash the fucker into the side of a tiny hill outside Oxford, Ohio. (Oh, the Miami U joke always works.)

    Since then I've had a better attitude about it. I let the acid rain roll off my back because there's so much other great stuff that goes on.

    So, not to worry. Fab is, well, I'm fab. Are you kiding? I am as cool as the other side of the pillow.

    Cheers,
    Fab

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  19. @Greta (way the fuck upthread), she has indeed made that clear. And she and her readers seem to think that Fab's pointing out the common origins of both Crazy's mail and the Pseudo-Crazy's Katie posts, constitutes a "bullshit non-apology" instead of what it is: a clear and loud "the phone call is coming from inside the fucking house, get the fuck out of there now" type warning.

    So she is either crossing the thin line that divides brave from stupid (in the wrong direction I'm afraid) by choosing to "move on" and just ignore the fact that there is a potentially dangerous stalker who works in here department or another department in her building on campus. Or, she is totally unafraid because she knows that person doesn't exist, like the person who burns his SUV for the insurance money and then tells the cops some dark-skinned guy car-jacked me.

    I sincerely hope that it is the latter, and that she is just a self-regarding weasel who wants to save face in front of her fans (her word, not mine). Because if she is, in fact, sharing a building with some unhinged fuckhead who might one day decide to move his obsession from cyberspace to meatspace, and hoping it will just go away if she ignores it hard enough, then she is truly courting the kind of disaster that no one should ever have to face.

    Cassandra: hey, that sounds like a good idea. I'm off to the fridge.

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  20. You know what? I just spent an hour reading a BUNCH of old posts from the past year.

    This is a funny and wonderful place.

    Long live the misery.

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  21. My favorite part is she's convinced CM "stole" her stuff because the moderators were desperate for the awesomeness of her perspective. The lack of self-awareness and inability to read sarcasm is truly awe inspiring.

    Fab, I think you should accuse Dr. Crazy of plagiarizing Katie! It would make more sense than what Dr. Crazy is currently claiming. FREE KATIE!

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  22. Hm, I think my comment got et by Blogger.

    Well anyway. Katie's post this AM on her blog was the most narcissistic sulkage I have ever read. We are so desperate for content that we plagiarize her site!

    Oy. I hope I don't know her in real life. What a piece of work.

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