I was reading an article about Ice-T doing the Grammy show and how far rap has come over the last 50 years. I agree and it made me consider my own memories.

I remember the first hip-hop song that got me hooked on the genre – Wipe Out by the Fat Boys. I have always loved The Beach Boys, so the mashup was awesome but strange. I think even then though, I was aware The Safaris originally sang wipeout and I was initially confused by the collaboration.

The thing is, while there are better earlier hip hop/rap songs – beyond the rare appearance of The Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers Delight – rarely was rap played on any stations my parents listened to. That meant my exposure was very low, but this crossed over to being played everywhere because of The Beach Boys’ connection.

I attended a birthday party where it was played over and over – and I wanted it for myself. I had my birthday money and really wanted the cassette. My father, who only had exposure to the band through this one song, stated the music wasn’t for me and wasn’t going to allow it. My mother on the hand stood up and said it was my money and I should be able to buy what I wanted. In the end, my mother won the argument.

I was taken to Hill’s in Amherst and purchased the cassette. When we arrived home, I went straight to my room and started listening to the cassette. I loved the whole thing, but the language and themes in the rest of the songs meant that I knew I wouldn’t be able to listen anywhere in earshot of my parents. This broke me because I loved it. I just didn’t want it ripped from me.

I ended up doing the logical thing and told my parents I didn’t like the album. Even though I had and would continue to buy albums just for a single song – I asked if we could return it. I was 11 and this was 15.00 (50.00ish today with inflation). My father took me back to Hill’s and handled the return (he gave the I told you so speech on the drive). Dejected I spent the return money on a lego set I believed.

This is a landmark moment in many ways. Not just because of what the music was, but, because I had purchased music instead of a toy. It was that cusp of growing up, and I went back to being a kid (which could be why I still buy toys today). It also dealt with awareness of perception. If my parents had heard the music I was listening to, the next thing they would have done was paid attention to the books I was reading. It was all self-preservation. It was also the only time I ever returned music for a refund.

Time would continue t march on. The genie didn’t go back into the bottle. I still loved the music. I could point out songs here or there – but it wasn’t until my sophomore year that I made it past things on the level of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Let’s be honest though, parents wouldn’t have been a fan of every song on To The Extreme – which would be my first majorly played and owned hip hop album.

I joined the marching band. For every away game and band festival my friend Jeremy brought along his boombox. There was quite a bit of harder (non-parent approved) rock played – but in the regular rotation were Beastie Boys and NWA. I was back to being fully in and most of the cassettes I would purchase for the rest of high school would be hip hop and rap.

Even then in my town, with my friends, I was an outlier overall. Most didn’t enjoy the genre unless it was a top-ten hit. Others had stricter parents paying attention to their music – so didn’t own the albums. They mostly stayed with rock. I would like to say that after graduation I purchased my first CD – Tag Team, Whoomp There it is. It was 30.00 in 1994 at Fisher Big Wheel. Also, not a great or deep album – but for the second time in my life – the first time I purchased music in a new format for myself and once again the same genre.

Outside of all of that though – even as a preteen – I was confused about why rap was nominated for Grammy’s or on the Billboard charts in the R&B category. MTV awards acknowledged the genre was distinct and separate, but everywhere else just lumped all black music into R&B. today though that has all changed.

Growing up rock was the dominant genre of music. Then we had the dark ages for years where country became dominant (thank god that is over). Then for the last decade rap/hip hop became the dominant genre – with rock selling so low they dropped the TV time for most rock awards from the Grammy’s last year. The genre is getting its proper recognition and place finally.

Between friends stating it sucked or my father stating “it wasn’t music for me” – it seems, with time, both were wrong. People can still dislike it – I suffered through farm emo being the dominant musical genre – I can’t say it sucked – it just wasn’t for me.

Congratulations to hip hop/rap for its life and evolution over 50 years. I’m glad that I was there for most of it.

I was looking through my draft posts, trying to clear off the cobwebs of antiquity and readdress the things I started and never finished. I came across one post which was personal, but I just don’t think I can get into the mindset this particular post needed to continue as it is. This is not a normal thing for me though. I can normally capture the mindset and voice I had at different eras of my life. Granted you don’t want to see my third-grade writing mindset, I mean it’s painful.

This piece though needed a time, place, and moment to write about it for its particular voice. Anything else is a complete and utter rewrite. So I am working through the thought process of why. I have the same interests, and the same unabashedly sharing of personal stories. The writing in the piece was even fine. So I’m looking over what part of me has changed.

I shared this sentiment with my Facebook friends, in slightly more detail – but in a more off-the-cuff manner. Writing that I think it’s the tone that throws me. Because the original article was written in 2016. Between the changes in the world. The changes in society. The changes in the country. It has been so much change. While I feel I’m the same person, the rotation of the globe has moved me without permission. Which is strange.

Nothing is less or more meaningful to me compared to what it was five years ago. I still have the same beliefs neither stronger nor weakened – but more expressed. This may actually be the key since the writing I was addressing had a key function that dealt with expression. I’m at a stage for those things that are important need to b expressed differently. This is likely why in the last year I’ve been writing significantly more again. Obviously not on my website, but significant long-form writing has been done.

Between data-basing and cross-referencing everything I’ve written in my life to working on a project to record each and every childhood story – it’s a matter of expression. If we disregard the world and just look at personal changes in my life in the last five years, it’s been a lot. I don’t however share what I’m going through in the present tense. It’s easier to relay the building blocks from twenty or thirty years ago that echo forth to how I got here. My own therapy.

Now some people think we should leave the past in the past. That doesn’t help you deal with who you are today. Granted at some point every story I tell, it might be the last time. Last week when recording my own personal memories I stumbled across one in the grey matter that I haven’t thought about in one to two decades at least. It was how I got my blanket when I was two. Now the pathway there was recording other memories and working them out to record a different story. Without chasing it down, that would have been lost. Is it important? No, and at this point, I can tell you the end of my blanket has more to do with my personality than the beginning of it. It was a fantastic memory to revisit though.

For those that know me, I obviously have boundaries that I won’t discuss openly. I’m open about so much, yet we guard certain aspects that just make us whole as we share most of the pieces with the world. It is how I deal with issues. I take the approach that Mister Rogers gave us growing up.

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.” – Fred Rogers.

Obviously many people didn’t get that memo. Because they just won’t talk about their issues in public. They won’t share random thoughts or deeper meanings. That’s fine also though, some people are guarded and find their own way to make things manageable. I’m more personally worried about those that don’t

So here we are talking about things like I always have, on the same subjects I always have. Why does it feel like I’ve changed? If anything in the last five years (granted on Facebook) – I’ve been much more open about things I’ve gone through growing up. The good things and the bad. I’ve shared things that some others don’t discuss. Granted my profile is locked down so it is a fake pseudo-privacy. Yet, I always write so I’m fine with whatever gets recorded or shared – I can stand behind it without issues.

I don’t know what it is. But I feel it, I feel that I’ve stayed the same a very core has shifted. I can contemplate many reasons for this, but nothing definitive that I thought would color my writing. I’m still the same flawed and optimistic human being that suffers through joy and tragedy – just a different joy or tragedy of the week. I don’t know.

I just thought like discovering that story from when I was two in my brain that writing all of this out would shake things loose. To help with a self-discovery that I might be missing by letting it stew as words on the page instead. Chasing down the thoughts as they escape out of the fingertips. Here we are, almost a thousand words later, and with no clear answers. Maybe this has helped me and I just don’t realize it yet. Regardless, I’m still the same, yet I’ve changed.

I know looking at the title you are thinking to yourself, but I just saw Gobstoppers in the candy aisle at the local big box store just the other day.  That these are the Gobstoppers that you remember and have loved your whole life.   But that life is a lie.  I don’t mean the crazy-shaped Gobstoppers from the movie that have weird ends coming out of them.    Those were never made and sold to the general public – if a candy version of those were ever made at all.    I’m talking about the Gobstoppers that you could buy in a two-pack for a dime or a quarter (depending on where you got them).

You see kids, back in the 80s dime and nickel candy was an actual thing. Sometimes we bought tootsie rolls three for a nickel. Lemon heads and such were a dime a box. And Gobstoppers sat right alongside them in a two-pack. Like many other candies in my young life, I bought Gobstoppers by the truckload. You would buy them and suck on them for 5-10 minutes until you get to that satisfactory moment that you could tell would release the Sweet Tartesque center. It was fantastic.

However, those don’t exist anymore.   The Gobstoppers that are sold under the brand name today were originally Gobstopper minis.   The new Gobstopper minis the size of a pea would have been considered Gobstopper micro. Part of the Gobstopper legend is how long they lasted, so the current versions actually less than the two packs I used to get. That’s some false marketing. Another bonus was you could choose which two colors you wanted to start with, which seemed to influence the overall flavor as you could get to the continuing layers below.

From a first-hand perspective, I, unfortunately, have a pretty good idea why the original size is no longer available. Choking hazard, plain and simple. Having twice in my elementary school life swallowed an almost full-sized Gobstopper, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. It was similar to a time I accidentally swallowed a quarter (why did I have a quarter in my mouth – I was a kid – who knows). The experience and after-effects were the same. I had some pain and I assume bruising inside my throat. I’m working under assumptions here since I didn’t tell my parents – there wasn’t a medical diagnosis. The pain lasted a few days though, reminding me to think twice before accidentally doing it again.

The one thing to note about all three experiences (quarter, gobstopper x2) is that I applied kid logic to the problem. I was breathing, so I wasn’t choking. I did freak out because of how the pain was that it might be stuck somewhere between my mouth and stomach. I went into the bathroom and stuck my head under the faucet and started downing as much water as possible to make sure it didn’t fill up my throat. These incidents were between the ages 6-9 if you were wondering. Why did I use the bathroom sink? Well, otherwise I would have to explain to my parents why I was drinking glass after glass of water all of sudden. The bathroom sink removed those possible questions.

Even out of that momentary youthful trauma, I still want the originals back. There are generic ones the same size. Of course, you’ve always been able to buy the fist-sized jawbreakers that are more of a trophy than an edible treat. None of these experiences are the same, because I was fairly Wonka Candy loyal in my youth. They didn’t taste the same either.

Maybe one day – some special retro release.

Last night I finally managed to watch The Last Blockbuster on Netflix. Of course, being the age I am, I have video store nostalgia. I won’t say that I was a huge fan of the Blockbuster company. I was more of a small video store person. When my family purchased our first VCR a friend of the family gave us a bootleg copy of Gremlins. That movie was watched so many times over and over – it’s probably one of my most watched movies that aren’t in the regular re-watch rotation. The other bootleg we had was Robocop, also watched many times, but not as many Gremlins.

Then a video store opened right near our house. A world of movies opened up. Now I know we went there regularly, but not being a family that spent tons of money there – I’m going to say it was about once or twice a month. However, there are a couple of specific experiences I remember with the store. The first was when my father allowed my 5-year-old brother (I would have been 10) to rent Rambo First Blood Part 2. That went down as a family legend of a story that managed to get brought up time and time again. There was however no blowback about me, a 10-year-old watching it (because of course my friends had all seen it). In the grand scheme, it was fairly amusing.

I do think this whole thing came around because when I was a teenager my father (who once again rented Rambo for a 5-year-old) had an issue with me (once again originally I was a 10-year-old during the Rambo incident) seeing R-rated movies. Down so far that even when I was 15 he had a major issue because I had seen People Under the Stairs at the movie theater, which in all fairness is a fairly soft R mid-budget horror movie. It was, however, the first R-rated movie I saw in the theater.

Back on topic though, video stores. The other cherished memory of the video store near our house was when I had chicken pox. The Friday or Saturday of going through infected my parents were going out on the town and my grandparents came over to watch us. As part of this, my parents rented us a couple of movies. While I don’t remember the second one – the first was Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark. That movie has since become a constant companion in my life – and all thanks to that video store.

Now in Amherst on Leavitt Road there was another video store near my grandparent’s house. I refer to this as the “good video store”. While the one near me was the size of a cell phone store, this one was about 3-4 times as large. The best part about it – it had an updated printed pamphlet that listed all the videos in stock. 10 year old me always wondered why they never changed the typo and or why Flash Gordon was listed twice. Right there it is listed as Flash Gordon and beneath it Flesh Gordon, 10 year old me thought this should have been an easy thing to catch and correct. Whenever I managed to twist my parents to go to the good video store – I looked over that pamphlet on the whole drive over. While it was a much better selection, I had to make sure it wasn’t something I could have just gotten at the smaller store. I also had to have second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth choices planned out just in case movies were out of stock. That moment in Clerks where Randall goes to the good video store – that’s how 10-year-old me felt going to this one.

Then my family moved to Vermilion when I was 12. One of the new experiences was being able to take off on a bike all over the town. Which did mean I go to the local video store (called The Movie House) on my own. It was an interesting mixture. The selection fell more in line with the good video store from Amherst – but it was the size of the small video store where I lived in Elyria. The best part about the store was that they sold movie posters and cardboard stand-ups once they were done with them. My bedroom was plastered with movie posters from this place – some movies I hadn’t even seen like Circuit Man – the poster was just awesome. There were other places to rent in town, but this was the best place to go.

Then as the mid-90s occurred gone were the independent video stores. Chain video stores started creeping in. All those smaller chains mostly were taken over by Blockbuster by the early 00s. The good thing about independent stores was that if you had late fees you could balance them around between stores and decide if it was worth paying back fees to see some new movie. Sometimes you could have late fees at a dozen different stores, but that kind of financial teenage/early twenties juggling disappeared when there was only one business in town. So blockbuster and I played the late fee game and I only caved when I really wanted to watch something. I would pay my late fees and new rental fees – and start the cycle again.

I would say this type of financial irresponsibility lead me to prefer the independent stores, but I played the same game there. I just wasn’t a fan of the sterility and lack of personality that defined the chain stores. It was what it was. I had an easier time getting a copy of a movie – at the price of a soul (sorry Blockbuster, just how I feel). I was more likely to go in and buy a used VHS or DVD than I was to actually rent. They became retail outlets for me. I could rent it for 3.00 or own it for 6.00. Factoring in possible late fees, it was mostly cheaper to buy. I ended up owning hundreds of VHS tapes and DVDs.

Then along came Netflix, not the streaming Netflix – the DVD Netflix. We had the 3-movie plan where you could have 3 movies out at any given time. Now knowing that it took about 2 days to get there, I was good at returning them almost immediately after watching by dropping them in the mail. We had new movies 3-4 times a week in the house. Life was good and I paid around 15.00 a month. I was fairly done with renting from blockbuster anymore – though I still shopped there for used movies from time to time.

Of course, by the time Netflix started streaming, I was fairly done with purchasing movies. This was around the same time Blu-Ray arrived on the scene. I do have Blu-Ray movies, but my collection is only about 10% of what my VHS or DVD collections were at their peak. I pay my monthly streaming subscriptions – paying more a month than I paid for video rentals in the past – but less than half of what I paid for cable in 2006. For me renting was over (with the exception being the random rent to watch Amazon movies).

The documentary though, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it though more for the lost art for the lost mecca of the video store. Blockbuster itself doesn’t really hold a large nostalgia for me. The celebrity cameos and personal stories were fantastic. If you are looking for video store nostalgia or Blockbuster kicks – it is definitely worth watching. I think this will be the best of breed on the subject.

As the movie was winding down the end of it was finished in 2019. Over the last year of the pandemic and Covid, I had to google. Did the last Blockbuster, the most fragile of creatures, survive 2020? I’m pleased to announce they did. They also mention this during the end credit clips. One day though, it will close its doors for good. I know another video rental chain in Ohio, Family Video, recently went out of business. I’m guessing the Blockbuster store in Bend, Oregon may actually end up being more than the last Blockbuster. It may end up being the last member of any video rental chain. It may actually survive long enough to be the last rental store on the planet.

Who knows – but as far as endangered creatures go – this one is beautiful with its blue and gold plumage.

About DM Cruelty

There are times when you can just be cruel as a DM.   This isn’t about the scenarios where you make elaborate traps to either kill or dissuade your party into following the line you have made.  This is solely the fact that you take petty revenge that makes no sense in the mechanics of the game.  As long as it isn’t a constant every time you play with that type of behavior, it doesn’t make you a bad DM.  It does however show that you are having a tantrum because it is a game where people think and follow their desires.   You can set up the stage however you like, it doesn’t mean players will follow. Over the years I’ve played with quite a few DMs in different games.   Some were good, some were bad, and some were cruel.   I’m more freeform when I run a game.   I have a couple of things that may or may not happen, but I’m ready to just go off on the fly.   The reason I run games this way is that most of the DMs I have played with have taught me that the game is an adversarial process and not a collaborative one. It becomes a chess match between the player and the person running the game.   This has turned into a game where the DM must control the players and the players attempt to do things that the DM doesn’t want them to.   It becomes game theory where the players are working together to win a game that the DM isn’t quite sure he is playing.   They are doing this trying to follow the constraints that the DM has put forth.   The DM on the other hand is trying to tell a story in a grand sweeping world, however, what he wants to do is run it like a dungeon crawl.  If they wanted a dungeon crawl, they shouldn’t open up other options. I’m doing this in a multi-part post to go over some of the cruelties I have dealt with playing roleplaying games.   Maybe you’ll be inspired to be better, or maybe you’ll have no ideas to be crueler.   To be fair, it really matters what works for your gaming group.  Different people need to be handled in different ways.   When you start a new group though, you can steer how the game is going to be played in the long run.   It’s hard to steer the direction a different way once things are in motion.

The Laser From Orbit

We all have gaming sessions that we remember years and decades later (for those under 20, the decades will come eventually).   There is one session that I complain about.  It happened around 1996 and we were playing Top Secret SI late into the night. In the game Top Secret SI you play as a James Bond Spy type.  There is a good spy organization and an evil one.   We always played as the good guys trying to destroy the evil Web organization.   Just like Bond though, quite a few of our missions didn’t revolve around the opposing organization at all.   We had many side missions that went off and just saved the world. Instead of something like a D20 system or classic Dungeons and Dragons THAC0, Top Secret SI used a percentage system.   So if you had a 5% chance of shooting a guy, you better roll a 5 or less on 2 d10s.  If you have a 95% chance of doing something, roll a 95 or less.   For someone starting out this game is a piece of cake to understand.   It was one of the first RPGs I mastered.   It seemed so much easier than Rifts which I had played a few times before.  We had regular gaming sessions and the storylines were enjoyable. One day after the main mission had been taken off a co-conspirator and I decided we were going to do a get-rich-quick scheme in the game.  While we were always looking for an angle, there was something in the mission that triggered this.  I wish I could remember what the original mission was. We were on our side of the table sketching out a scheme that basically was a Salami Attack.  I didn’t know it had a term back then, but a Salami Attack is where you take pennies or fractions of pennies from thousands or millions of accounts.   The goal is that these small amounts will go unnoticed and be considered rounding errors.   The account that receives this money will have an aggregate amount that leads up to a large mass.  While I may have read something similar before I did this, when I worked it out, it was a textbook example of the attack. When we did our write-up to explain to the DM we took the rounding error method in the electric company’s billing practices.   At the end of the day, it would take any percentage of a penny ($0.009999999 or less) and put those fractions into an account.  The plan was to have this as a reoccurring program that would run for a few months and trust fill up the bank account.  I would say my co-conspirator and I laid all this out in about 15 minutes. The DM was going to make us roll for it.   This was fine since my character had been built with very high computer skills.   However, during each stage of the plan, the DM required us to roll the dice.   I think we went through at least 20 rolls on this.  The DM was really hoping that I would fail at some step just so he could put an end to this nonsense.  Unfortunately for him, I aced every single one of the rolls.  The plan kept progressing. At this point, of course, we still do not trust the DM.   To make sure we crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s our characters went through and double-checked everything.   This in turn caused us to go through all the rolls again.  We had written this process up as a very tight process that the DM didn’t have much wiggle room.   He had agreed it was solid and should work if my dice rolls were successful before we started this whole evening of skill checks. The process was laid out, the program was written, and there was only one thing left to do – run the program.   I announced that I was starting the program and hitting enter.   Then a satellite in orbit above the earth shot down a laser.  This blew up the warehouse where my co-conspirator and I had been. The DM used this point to explain to us that we weren’t away from the detection capabilities of the US government and we triggered an automatic defense mechanism.  This is what caused us to blow up.  Being in the IT field, I knew we didn’t have these capabilities.   When I worked at NASA a decade later we didn’t have any sort of laser defense as an auxiliary attack if our IT infrastructure was compromised.   It was just him going along and wasting hours of everyone’s time to use his hand of god to show you can’t win.

Why Was This Cruel?

We can use this as an example of how to make your players follow the path.  However, there were much better ways to handle the scenario.  The internet could have gone out, bad guys could have set up a drug meeting in the building we were attempting this from, the fact that it ran successfully for a week and then was discovered.  If we had netted a small amount from it, that would be fine and fair for the amount of work we put into it. The DM just wanted to apply his superiority to the situation.   Money was meaningless in the game. My character was a millionaire through family money.  I think most of the other players were rich over time.   Our organization would give us whatever we needed, so money wasn’t an obstacle the DM was using within the game anyways.  If it had been, this would be a different issue.  Money was really meaningless. Since there would be no tangible gain for the characters that would adjust the plot.   That is what makes this cruel.   It could have been this interesting side evening game where the DM made all these logic traps to stop us and we rolled the checks to get by, but instead of a mental dungeon crawl – it was just wasting time.  That’s why it is cruel. Next time I do one of these articles, I’m going to talk about how a DM killed everyone because they had prior real life commitments.

Not the actual teacher

Since you have read the headline I will say that the investigation is still ongoing. That I have no idea if the teacher in question is guilty or not. However, I have my doubts about the whole thing. Let’s go back to the beginning though. This week it was announced that there was going to be a press conference on the Amy Mihaljevic case. This of course has caused a large amount of interest to resurface. One of my friends on Facebook linked to a story from 2012 that called a teacher that many of us had. Since I don’t pretend to be an investigative journalist, I’m not calling out the teacher by name. His name is polluted enough in the Google database thanks to the author that keeps the case in the public consciousness by maintaining a blog called Finding Amy’s Killer – http://amymihaljevic.blogspot.com/. You can look over there to see the name of the prime suspect. I read about this teacher and the connection a few years ago when it was in a local paper. I read it, I absorbed it, and I moved on. I had nothing to add to it. While I remember this teacher, I remember him as a substitute. I remember his name and his face tied together, I don’t remember much else. I can’t tell you if he was a good guy. I can’t tell you if I think he did it. From personal experience, it was someone I meant who is just a face in the crowd. Yet, what an irony that I crossed paths even innocently with him. The Amy Mihaljevic case was the story of the boogeyman to parents across Northern Ohio. A girl was abducted in the middle and just up and disappeared for months. Four months after her disappearance her body was found in a field halfway between my hometown and where I currently reside. I’ve driven within at least a mile of Amy’s discovery site at least a thousand times. I have never stopped to see it, and likely never will purposely seek it out. My mother was scared for my sisters growing up at this time. My one sister was two and the other was a newborn. For years it scared my mother to let the girls play in the front yard of our fairly solid middle-class neighborhood. I would always have to keep an eye on them, which I’m sure you can imagine is every teenager’s dream. Yet, my parents moved to Vermilion from Elyria so their children could go to a better school system. They wanted a safer environment than where we were living. So we moved to a small lakeside community. Sometime during my school years, I had a teacher who allegedly was the one responsible for the fear that struck this part of the state. I use the word allegedly very strongly. Most of the accusations come from the writer that has written the book on the case. He complains that his theories fall on deaf ears with the Bay Village Police Department and the FBI. He seems to have solved it in his mind and he is smarter than everyone else involved. The writer has become judge and jury, and he seems so determined – even executioner if the teacher is found guilty. I read through most of his blog, he uses conjecture and allegations just as much as fact. The police don’t trust the sketch of the suspect since it was done the day by two 10-year-old children. Yet, he uses the sketch as absolute proof. While he does write a convincing yarn there are holes in the theory. The largest one was offered up by a Redditor. Since this teacher taught in Amherst, and the abduction happened about 20 minutes after school in Bay Village – it makes an unlikely timeline. The teacher from the stories was admittedly strange. He did give up his teaching license instead of getting fingerprinted – but then again the writer points out there were allegations of impropriety of the teacher. These allegations started an investigation by the school. Depending on what happened, he may have been asked to leave. Yet, he wasn’t convicted of a crime. If you start looking at the conjectures that are made you will see more questions. There are rumors that the writer treats as fact. I can say that there were many rumors of the “less than acceptable” nature by many teachers in schools. From drug use to sitting girls in the front and looking up their skirts, to full affairs between teachers and students. Anyone with a brain knows that these rumors happen in about every school. That you need to separate what he said/she said with something more. Especially coming from Vermilion where rumors run wild. The largest evidence is the theory that the teacher met Amy and other girls who received phone calls from a local nature center. This is a theory that only the author takes seriously. The Police and the FBI haven’t publicly added any weight to these claims. Then again the authorities had a press conference twenty-seven years later to ask the public to identify a curtain. If this piece was so crucial, it should have been released at least twenty-six years ago. I was hoping the press conference today would announce a suspect in this cold case. Maybe the curtain will add to a new lead – or it might be the end of this case. No matter who the guilty party is, we have to make sure we don’t go on a witch hunt. We can’t throw names around for years and smear them across the internet without proof. I just suggest you go and read for yourself. Don’t read a single article this writer has put out there, read the breadth. He is convinced many people are the likely killer – the teacher though is still at the top of his list. Don’t get manipulated into hate and fear just because someone said so. The police questioned the teacher years ago – and nothing came further of it. Maybe someday we will get answers – but all we have today is rumor and speculation…