Recently I posted about coming second in a local magic competition. Obviously I tried to make it interesting but I thought it was quite fair to the winner. Maybe too fair. Anyway, imagine my surprise when the secretary of the club called this morning to ask me to edit it slightly. Normally I resist this kind of censorship, but I did it as a favour to him, and the winner of the contest, since we are technically all friends.
Anyway, the only change he wanted was to take down the photo, which apparently wasn’t public and remove the name of the winner, as the club secretary is apparently a scared little piss baby who doesn’t want a local competition squabble to follow the winner around in case he gets famous. Reminds me of the time this happened before, about 20 years ago, when I posted a very unflattering review of my ex-girlfriend’s academic rigour. My livejournal apparently followed her around for about a decade hindering her medical career because I had written “if you ever find your self with a doctor called S******* N********* the two words which could save your life are Second Opinion.” Seems her name was so rare and her internet presence was so tiny that my blog questioning her future competence was the first thing that came up in a Google search. The last time she called was after I had shortened her name to a four letter nickname and made the page private, because Google’s cached page was still the #1 result for her full name. Really there wasn’t much I could do at that point, so I just told her to take it up with Google under the “right to be forgotten laws” which had come in recently. Obviously what I wrote about the competition was nothing like “this doctor will kill you” but if he does make it big, the tabloids will mine anything for a scandal. Now I’m not saying I’m holding back specifically so that I can cash in like a parasite when the papers are desperate for dirt on this guy, but if I was going to do that, I’d probably do some acrostic shenanigans to hide his name in this post. Good thing I’m nowhere near smart enough to pull off a thing like that.