23 Tracy Circle
To: amherstac@aol.comSent: Mon, Jun 6, 2011 5:39 pm
Subject: [Only in The Republic of Amherst] New comment on Party House repeat offenders.
So Larry as you can see, this is matt. i just want to ask you in a civil manner to please take down the names and home addresses from you "second offense" page. Yeah, we were arrested, for watching the bruins play the flyers in game 4 if you need more facts about loud tv and yelling. but please, im asking you refer to us as "residents" "children" or any of you other nicknames youve given us. i understand that the information was probably in a police report or something you research. but when a family member puts my families home address in google and sees this, i get questioned clients, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles all have to hear about it without knowing the facts.
i realize that some of the members in our house may not be the most mature people in the world, but that is why were in college now and you once were. stupid things happen to people by circumstance too so dont be so quick to judge.
i will answer anything you have to say privately and not on this blog if you want info to write about. get back to me
ill be watching the bruins
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Matt,
Yes, I was a UMass student once and strangely enough I worked as a bouncer at 'The Pub' in downtown Amherst to pay my way, dealing with rowdy UMass kids.
And yes your name was indeed on a police report--which is a public document. Perhaps why if you Google yourself you will also pick up the Amherst Bulletin article that came out a few days after mine:
"xxxxxxxxx, and Emerson E. Rutkowski, 19, and Michael H. Upham, 20, both of Swampscott, were arrested on charges of violating the town's noise bylaw and violating the town's nuisance house bylaw, police said. Each charge carries a $300 penalty, meaning the three men could be subject to $1,800 in fines."
Have you asked Scott Merzbach to remove your name and address from the Amherst Bulletin website?
Larry
i realize that some of the members in our house may not be the most mature people in the world, but that is why were in college now and you once were. stupid things happen to people by circumstance too so dont be so quick to judge.
i will answer anything you have to say privately and not on this blog if you want info to write about. get back to me
ill be watching the bruins
###############################################
Matt,
Yes, I was a UMass student once and strangely enough I worked as a bouncer at 'The Pub' in downtown Amherst to pay my way, dealing with rowdy UMass kids.
And yes your name was indeed on a police report--which is a public document. Perhaps why if you Google yourself you will also pick up the Amherst Bulletin article that came out a few days after mine:
"xxxxxxxxx, and Emerson E. Rutkowski, 19, and Michael H. Upham, 20, both of Swampscott, were arrested on charges of violating the town's noise bylaw and violating the town's nuisance house bylaw, police said. Each charge carries a $300 penalty, meaning the three men could be subject to $1,800 in fines."
Have you asked Scott Merzbach to remove your name and address from the Amherst Bulletin website?
Larry
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Sent: Tue, Jun 7, 2011 5:33 pm
Subject: Re: Party House winner
Actually Larry i have asked him too.
his article is in archive and not a direct link so it doesn't return a page when searched
cant you just respect my wishes as being enough? i feel like you're taking swings at me here for no reason. all i want is the names off, is that really too much to ask?
################################################
Well when I Google your name and town I do indeed come up #1, but Gazettenet and the Amherst Bulletin come in at #2 and #3--and the Bulletin is free so a paywall would not interfere with folks pulling up your offense.
Have you paid your fines?
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yeah i paid my fines. fun story though the town of Amherst screwed up yet again. i paid my fines; they took my money and, luckily, gave me a reciept but never acknowleged it in their books. i then get a call from a friends in high places saying there is a warrant out for my arrest. as steve miller would say they took the money and ran. i went to the courthouse today. and for the second time the judge, 2 different judges, laughed at the charges blamed the town for yet again another mistake dismissed the warrant and charges and wiped my record completely.
just take it down
################################################
From: amherstac@aol.com
To: xxxxx@student.umass.edu
Sent: Thu, Jun 9, 2011 10:06 am
Matt,
Chief Livingstone just confirmed that you paid $600 for the most recent noise violation and a previous nuisance house violation. So I'm going to bend the rules of journalism and delete your name but not Emerson E. Rutkowski, 36 Puritan Park, Swampscott, MA age 20 and Michael Upham 53 Sherwood Road, Swampscott, MA age 21.
I'm tempted to demand you write a letter of apology to your Amherst neighbors and the APD as well as remove the term "Zoomass" from your Facebook page, but then I would run the risk of being called a "bully".
Tell your friends that my friends in high places confirm that an arrest warrant will be issued in August if they do not make good on the fines. And until then, if anyone should Google their name and hometown…
Larry
29 comments:
You would think Matt might want to include some punctuation, capitalization, etc in these emails...
Yeah, as I said to my journalism adviser "obviously not an English major," to which she responded, "Or journalism major."
I thought the same thing.
What the young man is telling you, Larry, is:
"What happens in Amherst stays in Amherst."
Going to college is like going to Vegas, man.
And if we can't accept that, then WE'RE the ones who have to move out!
He has one more year left at UMass, and I'm not going to cut him any slack if he screws up again.
23 Tracy Circle is on the watch list.
That cannot be written by a college student! I am shocked. Those emails look like a sixth grade level of literacy.
So now that he has used gutter language to insult us, has insulted the reputation of his and our university, there's pretty much nothing left for him to do but graduate. Wait a minute, can he graduate?
And if we can't accept that, then WE'RE the ones who have to move out!
You choose to live in a college town, knowing the college is here, you have chosen to live in a college town....
You're shocked that someone isn't using standard English grammar and punctuation in writing email?
WAKE UP!
Most of the planet writing in email and text has been in free form writing for quite some time.
Written lanaguage is changing as we speak and there's really nothing anyone can do about it.
Relax and enjoy the ride. You are in the midst of an evolutionary moment in human communication.
Oh, Matt and any other college students who are so ashamed of your behavior that you don't want your family to know about it:
Maybe you should grow up and stop behaving like rowdy drunks in the middle of a quiet family neighborhood. Going to college doesn't give you the right to act like assholes whenever you want.
If you want to get drunk, move into the house next door to your mother or your grandmother and then drink and puke and swear to your heart's content. Let them see the real you.
If you think the town rules about noise are unfair, then move out of town. Go back to your own town and act this way. I'm sure they will love it as much as we do. In fact, try to find any town that will put up with this shit.
Maybe you should give your family members the facts: Hey Grandma, here's the real reason I got arrested at college, several times, ...
I wonder how many times your family members got arrested at college?
Oh, and just an fyi: there are police officers who live in your neighborhood, so I doubt your trouble with the law will stop if you keep acting like jerks.
Matt was also worried about "clients" who patronize the family-owned business he works at when not attending the University in our little town.
Well at least Matt is starting to learn there are ramifications for this type of behavior. I think it is great that he is taking the initiative to try and clear his name the best that he can before graduation, because any higher level employment he seeks after graduation will do a internet search on him. In this economy he will be applying for jobs that a potential employer will have a huge canidate pool for and will deep six any resume that even looks like potential trouble. It costs lots of money to train people and employers don't like to waste the time or the money on someone that has characteristics for failing. Learn from your errors Matt and you will have a much easier time in life.
It is scary how college students like Matt and others put comments and content online that everyone (EVERYONE!) can see, and not think at all of the ramifications of such. Once it's on the internet, it's hard to stop it from disseminating further, and some students don't even try to limit access in any way. Yesterday, for example, I got an email from a Smith student who was interested in babysitting for me. I put her name and "Smith" in google and came up with some very personal postings that included much more than I would ever want to know about anyone, especially someone who might be taking care of my kids. Any future employer could have done the same. ... of course, it's not just students who make this mistake. Every time I see the name in print of a certain Pelham resident who not long ago viciously attacked a former school committee member on a online blog, I think about that attack more than anything else. The internet has a long memory.
OK -- "entitled to quiet" -- well, damn it *I* am entitled to quiet in the damn library, aren't I?
Nothing makes more noise than a gaggle of menopausal feminists....
But that is different, somehow -- and when the earplugs don't work -- well, some folk are more equal than others, aren't they?
Ed said "Nothing makes more noise than a gaggle of menopausal feminists...."
Sheesh, Ed. What is your problem? Do you ever think before you hit send? Why do you post such nasty things? Your comments are way over the top inappropriate and just plain mean-spirited.
Ed,
I thought your message to us Amherst residents for the past months has been that we AREN'T entitled to quiet, not even in our homes late at night. And now you want some quiet, on campus? Ah, sweet....
On a more serious note, I second Anon 5:16.
To Matt,
I hope you can rehabilitate your image. Do a good job, with selfless acts and volunteer work, and we'll probably see it on this website. But I doubt that Larry Kelley will hand you a clean slate without you demonstrating that you deserve it. Good luck, but behave like you mean it.
We moved to a college town so deal with it? I moved to Amherst following a good job offer. Unlike college students who follow the party around the nation and select the school with the best reputation for puking, I actually take the best job offer - which, quite honestly, has nothing to do with where that might be located.
A college is not a bar, as far as I know. Why would someone even question moving to a town where teenagers - largely underage - visit nine months of the year to study full-time? The logic fails me.
Actually his writing isn't bad compared to what is typical these days. Subjects and verbs agree and arguments are coherent. As Anon 9:58 pointed out it is hardly unreasonable for someone to use texting-type punctuation, etc in online communications. Let's hope (and assume) that he does know how and when to use standard English.
I see this exchange as maybe being a happy ending to the whole incident: the guy seems to have learned a lesson and is contrite about it (or at least a few hundred bucks poorer) and perhaps a quarter century from now when he sends his own kids off to college he will use this as a parting lecture topic.
Larry, I hope you will let this drop and not perch on the telephone wires across from 23 Tracy Circle for the next year waiting to hear an objectionably loud sneeze. This has been taken far enough. Lord knows that in Amherst you will have no shortage of other such cases to pursue and in the meantime there are other issues more deserving of your investigative and journalistic skills.
Yeah it sucks to be surrounded by occasionally obnoxious students (we've called the cops more than once to silence parties) and I am glad you and some others make the effort to push back, but come on, it isn't really the end of the world. Wait till the gangbangers really get going in town, then we'll forget all about some kid from Billerica or Taunton puking on the lawn.
The logic is that students believe that a "college town" is, by definition, a free-fire zone for misbehavior, and that we, by moving here, have assumed the risk for that misbehavior.
It's another example of the self-absorption and narcissism that apparently is part of what it means to be young and privileged in America.
In this country, you're never smarter in your own mind than just after you pick up that college diploma and just before you start your first full-time job.
The gangbangers are already well-established one county south.
I thought your message to us Amherst residents for the past months has been that we AREN'T entitled to quiet, not even in our homes late at night. And now you want some quiet, on campus? Ah, sweet....
I was writing on three levels to an audience apparently unable to comprehend beyond the literal. So let me explicitly make the two higher points that most were too obtuse to make on their own:
Point two: Yeats wrote "and the middle shall not hold." Intolerance and disrespect begets more of the same, the more people demanding that others not interfere with their lives, the more everyone else is going to do the same. And this, inexorably, leads to the situation where those who are demanding quiet wind up having others demand it from them in other contexts. It winds up where you have the Taliban prohibiting anyone from having any fun....
Third, the event that was disrupting my studies was to celebrate what now-retired women did as college students in the 1970s and 1980s. As UMass students. As they complain about UMass students who (as a group) are far better behaved and far quieter than those of the ZooMass era...
Now I don't have all day to pedantically point out my points, so perhaps C.A.N.s might be able to just accept the fact that there is a word, "hypocrite", which applies to many in this town....
If you think the town rules about noise are unfair, then move out of town. Go back to your own town and act this way. I'm sure they will love it as much as we do. In fact, try to find any town that will put up with this shit.
Actually, increasingly, UMass students are doing exactly this. The good UMass students are doing this because Amherst is so unfriendly to us -- and thus, perhaps, those who don't commute are disproportionately spoilt rich jerks.
In less than 20 years, we have moved from a society where kids wanted to go away to college for freedom to where they want to escape the college town and go back to their high school town for freedom. Seriously -- and why do you think we have the traffic jams we do in town -- which are getting worse and worse...
Maybe you should give your family members the facts: Hey Grandma, here's the real reason I got arrested at college
And Grandma remembers what Daddy did when he was at UMass in the '70s or '80s and wonders why on earth her grandson got arrested for what -- by comparison -- was chickensh*t.
Increasingly the parents, when told explicitly what their children have done, are siding with the students and wondering why UMass is making a fuss about it. Gargano wanted to rename all the dorms in Southwest so that the parents couldn't compare what they had done to the far lesser infractions of their children...
Go through the yearbooks -- say 1975 through 1985 -- and then compare THAT to what you see today... Anyone remember the kid who made a strafing run with SGA campaign literature and neglected to anticipate the wind and instead leafleted the residential neighborhoods of town?
Anyone remember the now-late-50ish people who used to go home (DRUNK) from the bars chanting "power to the people"? Anyone remember when the APD was so student friendly that a UMass student named Jack Luippold became an APD intern?
Folks, you are hypocrites -- YOU did far worse (as a generation) than the current one ever could dream of doing...
I wonder how many times your family members got arrested at college?
For what the current generation is arrested for, or for what folk got arrested for back then?
Oh, and just an fyi: there are police officers who live in your neighborhood, so I doubt your trouble with the law will stop if you keep acting like jerks.
Three words: State Ethics Commission. Even saying something like this can get you into BIG trouble....
I moved to Amherst following a good job offer.
And if it truly is a "good" job, then you can afford to live in Belchertown, or Northampton, or Longmeadow, or somewhere else that isn't right next to 25,000 college kids.
You chose not to. You could have chosen to live in Chicopee and then be complaining about the C5s lumbering into the air (makes me proud to be an American to see those things actually get off the ground -- the Wright Brothers could have had their entire flight inside one of them....).
A college is not a bar, as far as I know.
Young people have been abusing alcohol (and doing stupid things after having done so) since Biblical times. I kinda think your generation did too...
Why would someone even question moving to a town where teenagers - largely underage - visit nine months of the year to study full-time?
Three points. First, the drinking age is like the speed limit -- you set it at 55mph knowing that everyone is going to be going at least 60 and the cops stop those going 70 -- the problem with the drinking age being 18 was that the *real* drinking age was 15 -- it was raised to 21 in hopes of having the actual age be 18, of keeping the alcohol out of the high schools.
Second, many of the problems (and Larry's "party houses") exist because of the drinking age. If these kids instead were drinking in bars (with people like Larry as bouncer, remember...) then a lot of the stuff that happens now would never progress to the point it does.
Third, there are real issues with academic rigor -- the more multicultural garbage you put in, the more real stuff you take out, the less the students have to study...
The logic fails me.
Agreed. You can afford a car, you have a driver's license, why did you decide to live in Amherst and not South Hadley????
One more thing: An interesting article in the New Republic:
http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-energy/89377/poverty-escape-psychology-self-control
If one buys this thesis -- that self control is finite and when used for one thing it isn't there for another -- and when one realizes that UMass ranks third nationally in "long lines and red tape" -- and when one realizes the self control each UM kid has to use not to just punch the obnoxious administrator or professor -- then .....
I am just tossing this out for speculation....
Also of note is this:
http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-energy/89377/poverty-escape-psychology-self-control
If self control is a finite ability, the more of it used during the day in dealing with an increasingly unfriendly university, the less remains at night....
Isn't it amazing how we can intellectualize a simple request to treat one's neighbors with basic decency?
Isn't it amazing how we can intellectualize a simple request to have a community (and its police department) treat young people with basic decency -- or if not that, at least obey the law?
What goes around, comes around, and it is coming around right at you folk -- wasn't it better when all the problems were confined to Frat Row???
Tell the folks on Fearing Street how they have disrespected students over the years.
Is it too much to demand that it quiet down in a neighborhood after a certain hour, say, 11 p.m.?
Or after the cops have come out ONCE and asked you to quiet down?
Come on.
Or after the cops have come out ONCE and asked you to quiet down?
Back when the cops were reasonable and respected, or now when they are considered fascists to be defied?
The price of "in-your-face" policing is that a show of force is always required because actual respect has been |/dev/null --- with the safety of the individual officer going that way as well...
Wow. Ed needs a life.
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