What's Hot?: Kwame Kilpatrick and Anarchic Hand Syndrome

I'm proud to say that Detroit holds four out of the five top spots on Google Trends at this hour (2:25 p.m. EST), all thanks to our mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who will become the first Detroit mayor to be charged with a crime while in office.

The other spot goes to the search term, "anarchic hand syndrome," which is also known as the Dr. Strangelove syndrome. It's an unusual neurological disorder, a form of apraxia in which one of the sufferer's hands seems to take on a mind of its own...

Wait a second? Maybe that's not unrelated to our mayor. Maybe he'll be using that as a defense in his upcoming trial. Maybe Kwame will argue that he suffers from the Strangelove syndrome, and that he had no control over the hand that sent those sexy text messages to his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty.

Kwame: "Your honor. This hand has a mind of its own, and when it gets a hold of my BlackBerry, there's no telling what it will do."

Mayor of Detroit Caught Hot Tubbing With a Turtle

Who is Carmen Slowski? A turtle? And is the mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, having an affair with this turtle?

That was my take on an article I read in the Detroit News today, where Kilpatrick is described by sources as being seen (Or heard? It doesn't really say.) sharing a hot tub and a glass of champagne with the slow-moving reptile. This comes just after the local papers released records of saucy text messages he exchanged with his chief of staff Christine Beatty, who is a human... although she does kind of look like a giraffe.

Below is the excerpt about the turtle sex from the newspaper, highlighted in a turtle-friendly text color:

Investigative reporter Steve Wilson of WXYZ-TV said his sources told him the woman at the hotel resort was definitely not the mayor's wife, Carlita.

According to Wilson's report, the woman identified herself as Carmen Slowski at the spa. The name "Slowski" is similar to the name of the Slowskys, husband and wife turtles featured in several Comcast Cable commercials promoting high-speed Internet.

So, yeah, my take from this is that the mayor is hooking up with a female, cable TV mogul turtle. Now, as to how serious the relationship is, I'm not sure. He might just be in it for the free high-speed Internet.

LOL! LOL! Detroit Mayor's Sexy Texts Lack Shorthand Skillz

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 Conversion
Beatty: "&, 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).