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Hall of Shame

Reading Keith's post about the Burger King employee who took a bath in his workplace's sink and uploaded footage from it onto his MySpace profile got me thinking. Moreover, thinking about the time in 1994 when some of my fellow ninth-graders decided to film themselves blowing up mailboxes and setting fire to air conditioning units around Kingwood.

(If you're thinking this is a far-flung connection, let me explain: Keith found the article while reading through his hometown's paper, the Dayton Daily News. Reading the post this morning, along hearing about the story on the radio and TV, I thought about another case of stupidity caught on tape, but from my hometown.)

The specifics are hazy now (and details are kind of hard to find on the Internet), but a few Kingwood high-schoolers got into some major trouble after a tape of them vandalizing neighborhood houses came into the possession of local police. Keep in mind, this was 1994, the time when Beavis and Butt-head was on MTV, and really popular. So seeing some teenagers commit such B&B-like things was an outrage to some locals. To me, seeing those guys willfully incriminating themselves was kind of funny and stupid.

The memory that does stick out for me is seeing the Hard Copy van drive up one afternoon. Apparently they interviewed a bunch of students about the incident, but all that ended up in the final piece was a five-second bit about how the guys that did the acts were much more popular now. That's where I said "Hold it." I had never heard of the guys who did this, didn't recognize them, and did not hear about them being popular after the tape got played on the local and national news. As much as I was an invisible guy in high school, I couldn't avoid hearing about the popular and the infamous. I never heard anything more about these guys. Now I wonder what these guys are up to now.

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