Oh No, Another Story About Butt Plugs

This is Kevin Brann, a 41-year old man from Hobe Sound, Florida. He was recently arrested for DUI, an infraction that happens way too much in this country. His circumstances merit special attention, but we'll get to that a little later.

While in college, I roomed with a couple of newspaper reporters from the Syracuse Post Standard. I was enrolled in the Newhouse School of Journalism and it appeared I was headed for a career writing newspaper articles. Like my roommates.

The problem was these guys lived like paupers. They never had a dime to their name, they drove old shitty cars, they ate a lot of top ramen, and they dressed like homeless men who happened to have some proximity to a laundromat.

The other problem was that for the life of me I couldn't pass the mandatory Journalism school typing test. I breezed through college, stoned most of the four years. Who am I kidding? I was stoned ALL four years. Nevertheless writing stories, whether for journalism class or creative writing class, was never a problem. But when it came to time to bang away on the IBM Selectric II,  well hunting and pecking and laughing did not always produce winning results.

There was no way I could meet the 25 words per minute requirement.

So I switched to broadcast journalism and fell into the much more lucrative world of advertising. The difference between newspaper reporting and writing ads: I still dress like a homeless man, but now I own the top of the line Kenmore KZ7000 Washer and Dryer with the automatic Sock Sorter.

So you see I have no regrets about my career path. But thanks to my friend Robert Chandler, I stumbled onto a piece of journalism that gave me pause. It is, if you haven't already guessed, the story of Kevin Brann, the man who according to the headline, "Rear-Ended A Car With A Sex Toy In His Ass."

A headline like that does not come along everyday. I can tell the writer, Rapheal Orlove, exercised a great deal of restraint when committing this story to type.  And for that he deserves our respect. But Orlove, and his editor, deserve a little something more.

Because with the addition of one little line, 9 somewhat minor words, the picture of Mr. Brann's arrest and his excruciating exercise in humiliation is complete, nuanced and utterly visceral:

He was wearing flip flops at the time.

Someone alert the Pulitzer committee.