Jody Schwann? Give Me a Break

There are some weeks that I am forced to spend hours and hours to come up with a suitable “Get Out of Town” target. This is not one of them. In fact, the first part of what you’re about to read pretty much wrote itself.
The story begins shortly after I got off work Monday night. I headed home and just seconds after hitting the bachelor chair for my nightly nap the phone rang. And then it rang again. Then my cell phone rang.
I logged onto the computer and found a handful of emails from friends, relatives, and even a former city council member. They all wanted to know the same thing – have I heard the news?
Obviously, the news wasn’t that, to quote a classic 50’s rock and roll song, “there’s good rockin’ tonight” (although there was probably some boots knockin’ in one local household). This was a different kind of news – an announcement so obscenely silly that nobody, and I mean nobody, would have dared predict.
If you haven’t figured out what I’m talking about, I have four key phrases: Dave Munson, Jody Schwann, Chief of Staff, $98,000.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
What the fuck is our moronic mayor thinking? I guess maybe it makes sense for the man who talks out of both sides of his mouth to hire a person whose mouth doesn’t move when she speaks. No, it still makes no sense.
What exactly are her qualifications? Idiotboy said on the news last night that her so-called expertise with government-related stories was what attracted her to him. Uh, right. I guess compared to her predecessor, John Bachman, that may be true.
It seems to me that the way to get a job with the mayor is to throw the most softballs. Through every controversy concerning the mayor, it was only her channel that he would use, and she was the only “reporter” to get the elusive “open-door” leader to chat. Inevitably, the softballs she lobbed were so easy to hit that even the Canaries could have reached base.
And she gets a salary of $98,000? That’s more than the sum total of her four years at KELO! Hell, I’d kiss Munson’s ass for that kind of change…and I’m more qualified!
Before I get carried away, I have something more serious to discuss today. As many of you know, I’m a big fan of the Opie and Anthony show on XM radio. Earlier this year, they hooked up some cameras in their studio, and one could watch their broadcasts on a program called Paltalk.
The Paltalk experience didn’t end when the show was over, though. The O&A fan room was a 24-hour room where fans of the show hung out and drank, argued, laughed, and did everything else that friends would do.
And that’s exactly what we had become – friends. Any time I was bored, I knew that a hundred or so of my friends would be hanging out online – some just communicating in text but a good percentage of them also speaking on cam. Since the show’s home base is located in New York, quite a few of these new friends lived in cities such as Boston, New York, and Philly.
Because of their proximity to each other, there have been many get-togethers, and they have also been broadcast on Paltalk. This past weekend people from all over the country gathered in New Jersey for a softball game. Included in this group was a beautiful young woman from western Canada named Jen, who had saved money for months to make the trip.
The night before the game, Jen and a couple of others gathered at the home of a woman named Brand, who had started dating Bobby, another Paltalker, a couple of months earlier. I checked in just before going to bed late Saturday night, and they were having a great time.
I checked in on the softball game the following afternoon, and these five people hadn’t shown up. Rumors had been floating around all day, but most people figured they had just overslept.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. At around 5:30 a.m., Brand and Bobby had an argument in her driveway. He pulled out a gun, and after shooting her a number of times, put the gun to his own head. Jen witnessed the entire event.
Obviously, the room was devastated when the news came down. It may seem hard for anybody who is not a part of this room to understand, but although we see each other in one-inch square cams, we really are friends. I see and talk to these people every day, and both Brand and Bobby knew me as well as anybody.
The big concern right now (besides the well-being of their surviving family and friends) is that the media may turn this into a Myspace-type scandal. This wasn’t a pedophile stalker situation like we hear about on the news everyday. The fact that these two people met on Paltalk has no bearing on the events that occurred early Sunday morning. They could have just easily met at the supermarket; or a bar. Hell, they could have even met at an Opie and Anthony event. It was a real relationship that had a tragic ending.
Those who have come into contact with me in the past couple of days can no understand why I’ve been so subdued. While plenty of people in my life have died over the years, none have died in these sort of circumstances. I’m just thankful that I had other online friends such as Casey, Catherine, Lucci, and three beautiful ladies named Jamie to help cheer me up. Too bad all of these beauties live thousands of miles away. I could use some extra special help to get over my grief.