My city's mayor (Deeetroit!) is in a whole-lotta trouble. But before I get to what's bothering me about this sitcheation, let me throw out this quick explanatory timeline for my national and international readers:
2002 to 2003ish: Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick exchanges 14,000 hot, steamy, and dreamy Boys-II-Men-"I'll-Make-Love-To-You"-like text messages with his chief of staff Christine Beatty... on their city-issued CrackBerrys.
August 2007: Kilpatrick and Beatty, at a police whistle-blower trial, both testify, under oath, that they are "unfamiliar with each other's private parts." (Actually, that's not the real quote, but I thought it would be cool if it was.)
Yesterday: The Detroit Free Press publishes a PG-13 sampling of the 14,000 text messages. And the mayor runs off to his $400,000 home in Florida with his family, all while his fate is being determined back in the Motor City. OMG!!!
OK. So now that you know the story, you're probably going through the whole "What were they thinking?" phase, and once you get past that you'll go into the "Seriously. What were they thinking?" phase. But once you get past all that, you'll want to start breaking this thing down into specifics... that's where I'm at. I'm over the whole affair thing and the lying and the wasting of city taxpayer dollars and all that; what I'm more concerned about is their ignorance or laziness when it comes to using text message shorthand. LOL! LOL! That's all they got!
LOL is used 14 times in the small sampling of texts pictured in the image, above. And sometimes twice in a row. Think about it. Who laughs out loud twice in a row after reading a text message? They must have been having some pretty hilarious love-making sessions for it to be so funny to read on a CrackBerry display. "She said, 'boobies.' Ha Ha Ha! ... Ha Ha Ha!" "He said, 'balls.' Hee Hee Hee! ... Hee! Hee! Hee!"
If these two would have spent less time laughing out loud and more time studying text message shorthand, they wouldn't be in this mess. Let's do a little exercise here and take a couple of the text messages and see if we can't convert them into something that would be a little more difficult for authorities to translate:
Actual Message Exchange
Beatty: "And, did you miss me, sexually?"
Kilpatrick: "Hell yeah! You couldn't tell. I want some more."
Shorthand ConversionBeatty: "&, did u miss r 121 1174?" That actually translates into "And, did you miss our one to one nude club?" But it pretty much gets the same point across, right?
Kilpatrick: "ADIH. MTF." Which translates into "Another day in hell. More to follow." Again, it's not exact, but much more difficult to trace than their over-wordy, literal exchanges.
Let's try one more.
Actual Message Exchange
Kilpatrick: "I'm madly in love with you."
Beatty: "I hope you feel that way for a long time. In case you haven't noticed, I am madly in love with you, too!"
Shorthand Conversion
Kilpatrick: "LUMTP." Translates into "Love you more than pie," which I think works better anyway because if you've seen the mayor, he's a pretty big guy, so that's saying a lot.
Beatty: "ATSL. ILYPT." Which spells out "Along the same lines. I love your pie, too."
See. That wasn't so hard. I think the lesson to be learned here is: If your loins are burning for a 14,000-text romance, just stick to the KISS (Keep it shorthand stupid).
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