An internet safety program presented by John F. Gay, III at a high school in Windsor, Colorado has outraged parents by singling out students' MySpace pages for criticism. According to the DenverChannel.com:

A police officer giving an Internet safety course sparked criticism for calling student MySpace pages "slutty" and telling one student a sexual predator in prison masturbated to her photo.

[ . . . ]

One female student was told by Gay that he shared her online personal info with an (sic) state inmate who said he gratified himself with her photo and would "tear her apart."

The student, who was singled out, left the assembly in tears. That's when Gay showed her telephone number that he got from the Internet and called her. He hoped to show how easy it is for anyone to track down someone posting personal information on MySpace or other social-networking sites.

[Full Story]

Labels: cops behaving badly, crime, education, free speech, internet, police, sex, Sobriquet 45, technology, websites

The Gaddis Annotations
(www.williamgaddis.org)
This post is the first in a series of Sobriquet Magazine weblog entries to highlight some of the best resources we have come across online. We start with a quasi-scholarly site devoted to an oft-overlooked giant of postmodern American letters, William Gaddis.

Although The Gaddis Annotations rather humbly describes itself as "[n]otes, sources, references for the works of the great 20th-century novelist," the website proves to be one of the most comprehensive single-author reference works online. In addition to comprehensive annotations for each of Gaddis's novels, the Annotations site offers a detailed scholarly bibliography, full-text critical essays and books devoted to the author, biographical information, interviews, reviews, and obituaries, as well as fan-oriented features such as a selection of reader-submitted reminiscences dubbed "How I Discovered Gaddis" and a list of Gaddis's appearances in fiction. In so effortlessly combining the fun with the academic, The Gaddis Annotations easily joins The Modern Word as one of the most impressive resources for students and lovers of postmodern literature to appear online.

Labels: literature, Sobriquet 35, websites, William Gaddis

The good folks over at Operation Phoenix Records have set up an archive of old punk zines that is well worth checking out. With freely-accessible PDF files of old, out-of-print copies of Flipside, MaximumRockNRoll, HeartattaCk, and Suburban Voice, the archive proves to be a wonderful resource for those of us interested in the heyday of American DIY punk. The website also archives scores of columns and interviews with punk luminaries as well as a number of concert fliers.

Labels: fanzines, punk, Sobriquet 34, websites