Results tagged “assholeoftheweek”

So this week's asshole is coming not from Philadelphia, but from the internet. After last week's delve into the personal, we're taking it out into the tubes.

Normally our Asshole of the Week has done something to wrong groups of people: children, charities, whole cities—or, sometimes (actually, many times) they wrong poor defenseless puppies and kitties. But our socially contentious moralista Miss Erica M has the day off today, and I'm steering this wagon right down selfish hill. So, douche-monkey fuck-tard who swiped my bag at the Electric Factory last night, you're right up there with kitten torturers and SEPTA. Feel good about that, do you?

As promised, we hate TWU Local 234 now. The folks of TWU 234 have thoroughly established themselves as villains, and we'd like to recognize them for being bastardly sleazes out of a Medieval morality play. And now, the tour of vice!

We love to hate SEPTA. It may be one of the best public transportation systems in the country, but that's cold comfort when your bus doesn't come, or the driver curses you, or when the people on board are doing convincing renditions of the elusive hyena-werewolf-zombie monster. But, that said, we depend on it. We depend on our trolleys, buses, and subways to go to work, school, the doctor, and the World F'ing Series.

This week, we have a real set of winners. You know how on the Titanic, as it was sinking to its cold, watery grave, women and children were protected first? Because that's how the disaster cookie crumbles. In times of need, society moves to protect those who are deemed the least able to provide their own rescue.

Bloody hell, what is going wrong? Didn't we say to stop doing this?

The courts say, if you get screwed, it's on your own dollar. At least that's what they're saying to John F. Peoples, a blind Delaware County resident who sued his lady visitor (or prostitute, if you will) and Discover for overcharging him for his biweekly sessions. Because he can't see the slips she printed for him, she frequently charged more than the negotiated standard rate. Peoples signed them.

What a week for the morally bankrupt—get out your human hamster balls—the jerkface warning this week is in red alert. We're less shining city on a hill and more festering, partially drained swamp sinkholed between two slime-pollutant-intoxicated rivers.

Back from last week's detour on the sunshine train is your regularly scheduled hot jerk injection.

Instead of running our normal Asshole of the Week column today, we're taking a break from enumerating things that go wrong in the world. This week, we're going to tell you about the Awesomest Most Awesometastical Thing of the Week.

We know it's Labor Day weekend and all, but man, there's some bad juju going around the Philadelphia area today. Our Asshole of the Week was just the tip of the iceberg.

This week, our asshole's plans were foiled. This does not make him any less of an asshole, not even a little bit, but it does make his victim more fortunate than so many others in the city. Our TV-ready story goes like this: On Tuesday evening, around 7:30, a man with a black SUV parked at 16th and Market called to a young woman, a Temple student, passing by to help him get his baby tucked into the car-seat. She stopped to assist him, and he shoved her inside the car and locked the door. Once she's trapped inside, he threatens her with the handgun resting on the center console. The baby was just a doll. Then traffic stalled at the end of the block, and the woman forced the door open and escaped safely at 16th and JFK, to make it home unharmed.

You know how Bill and Ted finish their history project and make the future better? Sure, there's all that traveling back in time to grab So-crates, and the part where Joan of Arc leads an aerobics class, and George Carlin in those weird sunglasses, but there's one more part us eighties kids remember: be excellent to each other. (And keep a close eye on Napoleon.)

I have a sort of Medicare attitude toward robbery. A lot of people I know have been held up for their wallets or had things lifted out of their apartments. For some, it was like an almost friendly business transaction--one fellow asked if he could get his driver's license back so he wouldn't have to stand in line at the DMV, and the thief acquiesced because nobody should have to suffer that hell. For others, it was simply terrifying.

This week really isn't short on assholes. Whatever your take on that "Philly-related sports story," there is no denying that the internet is just about exploding. Whenever that happens, we get visited by the jerk-face fairy who turns everyone we know into raving lunatics. But that isn't what this story is about. You already know that story.

Lucky, lucky.

Dear Philadelphia Regional Area:

In yet another stunning display of blatant disregard for the economic plight of his constituents, the City of Philadelphia, and the state of Pennsylvania, Republican Minority Whip Frank Rizzo, Jr. (son of the ex-mayor depicted in the statue at right) is the lone City Council member intending to accept his cost of living raise this year. Other members—wiser, more informed, more considerate members—are planning to give the money back to the general fund, or to various city charities. They're primarily doing so in order to show solidarity with union workers who are shit out of luck being asked to decline pay raises for 4 years.

This is a big week for bad behavior and well deserved bad press. As reported approximately, absolutely, everywhere, sixty-five children were booted from the pool at the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley for the terrible crime of skin pigmentation. As they jumped into the pool, white children were called out of the pool by their Jim Crow throwback parents. One camper, Dymire Baylor, overheard one woman say, "Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?' She's like, 'I'm scared they might do something to my child."

This week, I am sick of death—of good men dying of cancer, of the dimming of the stars. I don't care that I didn't personally know any of these people. I watched Charlie's Angels when I was home sick from school, and I tried over and over again to learn the Moonwalk without ever succeeding. I am deflated by these deaths.

Though robbery hasn't been charming for a while (it has been a long time since "The Highwayman"), these two unknown gents seem determined to make it as awkwardly lame as possible. The police are currently searching for two young men on BMX bikes wielding Uzis who began a crime spree on Tuesday. BMX bikes and Uzis? Really? Is that necessary?

This week we salute the rampant stupidity of 18 year old Donta Cradock and 20 year old Ivan Rodriguez, two young men who obviously got their guidebooks on how to be an asshole at an early age. No strangers to law enforcement, Cradock and Rodriguez's combined 13 prior arrests stretch back to the tender age of 12. Wednesday night this lousy duo decided it would be a grand plan to steal a motorcyle at gunpoint. That fantastically idiodic idea ultimately cost 4 people in Feltonville their lives.

This Phillyist would like to know who thinks feeding children is bad. Who, precisely, would look at a group of kids coming to school without lunch, and believe that it is okay for them to remain hungry?

To be clear, Pennsylvania has banned same-sex marriage. So far, the courts have not done anything to put us on track with Connecticut or Iowa. So it is in a grand act of bigotry that State Senator Eichelberger held a rally in Hollidaysburg to announce his proposed amendment to the state constitution to "define marriage."

Harold Jackson and Brian Tierney. You win.

SEPTA: Not this week's asshole. This time the story is not about stranded passengers, or surly drivers, buses driving into people willy-nilly, missing your job interview, missing your optometrist's appointment, being trapped underground for an hour on the trolley for no reason and with no explanation, having your bus rerouted into nowhere, service going up in price or service ending. Not any of those things. This time, SEPTA, or at least a SEPTA driver, was the wronged party.

This week's dishonoree reminds this Phillyist of fictional tragedies from Shakespeare's Lavinia to the can full of dead women from The Wire. If our world and city were slightly less screwed up, then that's where these stories would safely remain—trapped on the page, stage, or screen—safe from our real lives. Instead, we get this guy.

Sometimes, this Phillyist wishes she could reach out through the grand tubes of the internet and strangle (deliver to traditional, state-sanctioned justice) the weekly round-up of jerks and lowlifes recognized here. This week's winners deserve an especially thorough strangling.

This week's award-winning terrible people hatched up a plan in Uniontown for babymaking far worse than what anyone could complain about Octomom. The couple, Shana Brown and Duane Calloway, were unable to have children on their own. Instead of considering one of the normal and upstanding options—adoption, fostering—they thought they could use Shana's thirteen year old daughter (apparently from back in the days when Brown could have children) as a baby incubator. First, they asked for her permission, saying she could marry Duane once she became pregnant (what a fabulous reward!), but after she turned them down, they decided to move forward with the plan anyway.