Enjoy the Metaphor

Yesterday, the staff here at JTTS received an interesting email that sparked some controversy. It was an apparent cease and desist and it took issue with a little story I wrote entitled “The Cruise Story: A Tragedy in 3 Parts”. The email is pictured (without permission) below:

We were unsure as to whether this was legitimate or just a prank, and after reading the email you can see why. First, the sender of the email doesn’t identify the party or parties that he or she represents. So, how is one expected to determine about which photos, names, and links to personal websites the sender is concerned? Second, the sender cites illegal use of “names” as a complaint. Only knicknames are used for the duration of the story, with the exception of my own name, a stage name included in an image of an album cover, and two other names (first names only) that were relayed to me by someone else. So, unless the sender has “Mostly Retarded” or “Old Face” trademarked he or she simply didn’t read the story very closely. Third, the sender refers to the story as “slanderous”. Unfortunately, the sender doesn’t realize that slander is spoken while libel is written, so the story is libelous, not slanderous; this indicates that the sender is not a lawyer. Last, the email is signed “In Da Hood Entertainment”, which doesn’t indicate any sort of legitimacy.

At first, I thought that this was just a prank because I candidly stated in the first paragraph of the story that we would most likely receive a cease and desist regarding its content. So, I figured that someone had read that and sent the email as a joke. Also, I googled “In Da Hood Entertainment” and found this link as the first search result. I figured that the owners of that myspace page and the girls who were the subjects of the story didn’t have much in common.

However, I decided to google the email address from which the cease and desist was sent, and I was surprised to find an old website from the highschool that Old Face attended listing that email address as a contact for Old Face’s mother. Apparently it’s the real deal, glaring flaws and all.

In response to the cease and desist I removed all information that could ever indicate the identity of Old Face or Mostly Retarded, and tastefully censored their faces out of all photos; I also removed some photos entirely when I got tired of censoring. The story still exists, you can still read it and refer your friends to it, but it’s not the gleaming beacon of storytelling gold that it once was; the images are pretty badass, though. Click here to view the decrepit shell of “The Cruise Story: A Tragedy in 3 Parts”.