Ex-O.J. friend: Simpson admitted killing his wife

Leaving aside the small matter that the source would be better described as “O.J. ex-friend”:

It is irritating that ESPN regularly refers to “his wife” rather than “his ex-wife”. The distinction isn’t trivial, and muddying that distinction has been one of the ways that some of Simpson’s more repellent defenders have sought to manipulate emotional response to the case.

But it is doubly irritating when ESPN takes care to refer to the source as an ex-friend, yet still refers to Simpson’s victim as his wife.

I knew I might need to come in to the office, so I prepared. I have twenty-two beloved Mingus albums digitized to my mp3 player, and I’m playing them all on shuffle now. This makes me very very happy.

I knew that he was in trouble for taping himself having sex with a minor. I knew that he married Aaliyah when she was fifteen. But I hadn’t any notion of the documented extent of Kelly’s history with teenagers. Eleven separate allegations of sex with minors have been reported. Some of the details, as Wyman notes, are “a little bit barfy”. For example, a year after he’d settled out of court for $250,000 with a fifteen year old girl, the first sex tape emerged:

…showing Kelly having sex with a young girl. The girl’s aunt identified her, and Kelly. In the tape, the singer called her by her first name; she called him “Daddy.” Besides a variety of sex acts, the girl urinates on the floor at “Daddy’s” direction. “Daddy” then urinates into her mouth.

The girl was fourteen at the time. In the reporting surrounding the case, it emerged that Kelly had settled out of court with two other teenage girls.

Th details surrounding the marriage to fifteen year old Aaliyah are creepy, too:

…she was a singer and a protege of Kelly’s with whom, associates have said, he was having an affair. Without telling her what was going on, Kelly arranged an impromptu wedding at a suburban Chicago hotel and then swept her toward a plane. Fortunately, the girl called her parents. They came and got her and, articles have said, the pair never saw each other again. As rumors surfaced about the union, Kelly lied about it. But then Vibe magazine found a marriage certificate, on which Haughton’s age was listed as 18. The union was annulled a short time later.

There are several more allegations. I’ll just mention one more:

Many of Kelly’s associates have been quoted saying they thought he was sick, or had an uncontrollable compulsion to have sex with young girls. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is that, while already under indictment for filming himself having sex with a child, he was found to have in one of his houses a digital camera with new photos of him having sex with an underaged girl. … The search that produced the camera was later disallowed by a judge, so Kelly was never prosecuted for those photos.

R. Kelly has been subject to a certain amount of mockery for what has been generally seen, so far as I can tell, as celebrity peccadilloes, maybe a little further over the line than most. I think the record Wyman has compiled makes a compelling case that Kelly is a genuine sociopath. Why he has not been held more accountable by the media and the entertainment industry, I don’t understand. Read the whole thing and see if you don’t agree.

* Actually, he still hasn’t exactly been fired; he’s been relieved of his coaching duties, but is still being kept with the organization in an undefined capacity.

All hail the young King from Caracas.
His eminence never should shock us.
When he mixes his pitches
He leaves batters in twitches
And our cheers can be heard in Secaucus.

But then I discovered he’s actually from Valencia. You can’t rhyme much with Valencia (or Venezuela) in English, so I came at it from a different angle:

A Valencian monarch named Felix
Has an extra-high-powered double helix.
Hitters flail at his flings
And their once-mighty swings
Are reduced to limp, impotent wee licks.

Happy Felix Day!

You can’t beat that for a cancellation excuse. Also: ouch.

“De Música Ligera” on YouTube.

Pretty excellent power pop, eh? The lyrics aren’t hard to find online, but damned if I can find an English translation. AltaVista tries valiantly:

She slept, to the heat of the masses, and I woke up, wanting to dream it. Some time back I thought about writing to him that I never drew for the traps of the love. Of that love of slight music nothing frees nothing to us but it is. I will not send ashes to him of roses nor I think to avoid secret rubbing. Of that love of slight music nothing frees nothing to us but it is. . . . Of that love of slight music nothing frees nothing to us but it is left nothing but nothing but is left nothing but it is left nothing but it is left nothing but it is

That first sentence is great and I hope it’s accurate. “Avoid secret rubbing,” on the other hand, sounds like the small type that might have resulted if Dr Bronner had branched out into hand creams.

Anyway, I’d never noticed till today that “De Música Ligera” bears some resemblance to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. But more than that, I swear it sounds like some classic power pop song that I can’t put my finger on. It’s going to make me crazy till I figure it out.