This past weekend, I attended Order of the Arrow training at Broad Creek. In between sessions, and, yes, sometimes during a session, I looked at email and other online doings. I've followed the twitter account known as "@BaltoSpectator" for over a year, ever since I saw the man's bio listing his occupation as "urban combat correspondent". He's shown himself to be complex, confrontational, and, yes, wanted to make a spectacle of himself.
We had a spirited, intelligent discussion about fire station closings (and site locations) in Baltimore City, after I piped in about computer models used for public service spending decision making. It's not an easy topic, and breaking things down to simply numbers can turn life-and-death decisions into mere budget line items.
Saturday night, @BaltoSpectator used my name to tweet a link to one of his blog posts (see image below), and it was interesting enough that I re-tweeted it. I knew at the time he wasn't just sending this to me, since it came out of the blue, yet as with many memes, it had a great hook. Little did I know how many people got similar messages (nor have I researched it), but apparently his volume of posts during that time window got his account temporarily suspended for violation of Twitter rules.
Not long after my retweet, I got a DM from the good doctor, thanking me for, well, I'm not sure what. I could sense something was happening, but I wasn't clear what.
I'll include a few links below, for those who stumble on this story without the background. As I occasionally viewed the succession of messages on the topic (searching Twitter, and other web places, while still at camp), I could see the possibility of a bad ending, as we've seen with other cases where a citizen exhibits unpredictable behavior in the context of a police setting. The Doctor is wily, though, so I held out hope he didn't to anything to martyr himself, which one could derive from some of his posts.
http://www.afro.com/sections/news/Baltimore/story.htm?storyid=76865"He is reportedly being held without bond." - the Baltimore Afro
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-12-01/entertainment/bal-barricaded-man-tweets-broadcasts-police-standoff-from-basement-20121201_1_jason-yerg-tweets-web-radio
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bal-video-live-blogger-being-taken-into-custody-20121202,0,7174579.htmlpageDo I feel used? Yeah, a little. Do I feel this man should be in jail? No, I don't think so.
Did he plan a sensational confrontation? Yes, but it was entertaining. Not too educational, in my books, but definitely a distraction from life's little problems.
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