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Jean-Michel Connard

24 Feb, 13 tweets, 3 min read

Ok I'm going to tell the ESPN story and hope someone provides the video. Some of my friends can at least corroborate this one. You know how there's always a movement around big football programs to fire their head coaches as soon as they miss a prestige bowl game?

I grew up a Golden Gophers fan and I decided it would be funny to start a campaign to fire whoever they hired to replace Brewster BEFORE they were announced. Don't even wait for them to put on the hat, literally start calling for their firing as soon as rumors about them started.

There was a brief false start when I started a FIRE MARC TRESTMAN campaign when he was rumored to be the head coach, but as soon as it was clear Jerry Kill was going to be the guy I seamlessly switched gears and started attacking a guy I knew nothing about.

Keep in mind I didn't really watch college football, I didn't care about college football, I just found the whole bit funny that there was some passionate Gophers fan out there demanding accountability from a program that hadn't been relevant since the Hoover administration.

It was doubly funny to me because I knew nothing about the people they hired, I was just arbitrarily and unfairly dumping on them constantly. To me it was all just some big dumb joke, but it seemed to get under people's skin.

The University of Minnesota's college paper contacted me and wanted me to go on the record about Kill's extension, and of course my biggest moment was when they brought up my campaign / site on College Gameday with Lee Corso in a cold rage about how shameful it was.

Lee didn't seem to fully understand what it was, and was kind of ranting about "social media", which is funny because 99% of Gopher fans were all on board with Kill. I was the one completely insane person attacking him for no good reason.

Eventually the site got out of hand. It got way too big and I started getting crazy hate mail, especially from Aggies of all people. I made fun of them a few too many times and one guy wrote me a multi page essay about how he was going to track me down and kill me in my sleep.

Eventually it stopped being funny and just became tiresome, so I redirected the domain to farmersonly and moved on with my life to the next dumb joke, but I'll never forget Lee Corso staring into space enraged with me.

That was my last real foray into trolling. After that I decided it wasn't really healthy, and that no matter how funny making people mad was, it's just toxic for everyone involved. I took a long break from the internet after that and I've been much more boring and sincere since.

Hey! Here's the video.

But yeah, not a super proud period of my life. Some of the stuff was really funny, but a lot of it was also just really dull shock value humor. Things I've fortunately grown out of.

There are things out there I wish I could delete, but I can't, so all I can do is be better going forward. Thems the breaks kids.

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More from @torriangray

Jean-Michel Connard

@torriangray

24 Feb

I understand, and even share, the distrust of government involvement with healthcare. The problem is no one is offering any alternative solutions to the massive problems we see across our system as it works now. All we get is fear mongering about death panels and care rationing.

And let's be honest, insurance companies are already rationing our care while costs to consumers spiral out of control. Am I convinced single payer is a solution? Not totally, no. However I am convinced the status quo isn't working.

My brother's hospital bill for a few days was six figures. Yes, he has insurance, but what a ridiculous system we've set up for ourselves. It's a shell game built on pretend numbers that almost no one pays. God have mercy on you if you actually get stuck with one of those bills.

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Jean-Michel Connard

@torriangray

24 Feb

Back in High School there was this giant orange giraffe of a man who hung around my friend group. He was a year older than us, dressed in a style I called Garanimals Big and Tall, was creepy as hell, and had no redeeming qualities, but he did have a car.

After he graduated he would still come back to school to hang out with my friends at lunch. That seemed illegal somehow, but he just cruised in with his big pedo vibes and no one questioned him for some reason. It was a different time.

Around that time he got a job at Incredible Universe, which was later gobbled up by Fry's Electronics. Basically the same store, but the whole thing had a Hollywood / Entertainment theme (e.g. you weren't customers you were stars, there wasn't a warehouse, it was backstage).

Read 14 tweets

Jean-Michel Connard

@torriangray

24 Feb

One last thing I'll say about shock humor and dark humor? I think a lot of it comes from a depressed place. When I was putting out some of my worst stuff I was severely depressed, and I think producing some of the meanest, dumbest jokes was a way of coping, but it wasn't healthy.

I see a lot of the same behavior on here from people and it hurts to see, because I suspect I know what they're going through. People go to these awful, dark places because they're in a dark place themselves, but it's not going to make them feel better. It never does.

You get this temporary dopamine hit from saying something really awful, or getting a good laugh from crossing a line, but ultimately it just makes you despise yourself more. If you find yourself in that place it's time to seek out therapy.

Read 4 tweets

Jean-Michel Connard

@torriangray

23 Feb

Brother is out of surgery. This is medical information that’s gone from a doctor to my SIL to my mother to me, so who knows how accurate it is, but as I understand it they’ve “scraped” out the vein in his leg and put on a sheath with a drip. He’s back in the ICU now recovering.

The clot in his leg was massive so they were trying to break it up prior to removal. I’m not sure if this surgery fully removed or or just broke it up more, but it sounds complicated. And he still has the clot in his lungs to deal with. Poor guy.

to improve his chances, here's a prom photo of him he'd kick my ass if he knew i posted. lmao.

Read 5 tweets

Jean-Michel Connard

@torriangray

23 Feb

Since people keep asking me about making up family stories (I don't!), I'll tell you about one time I did make up a story. In 8th grade my English teacher asked us to write a personal narrative about a loss we'd endured. I couldn't think of anything.

I told her I didn't have a subject, so she suggested writing about a loss someone I knew had endured as if it had happened to me. Ok, easy enough, so I wrote about a kid at my school in California who died of Leukemia as if he was my friend.

She loved my essay. She told me it was an excellent piece of work and well beyond my years, and unbeknownst to me she submitted it to a state competition--and it won the best personal narrative in the state.

A personal narrative of something that didn't happen to me.

Read 7 tweets

Jean-Michel Connard

@torriangray

23 Feb

I think whatever gene my eldest brother has was passed down from my mom's uncle. Famously he managed to shoot his big toe off while cleaning a hunting rifle. They rushed him to the ER, but he absolutely pulped the thing so there wasn't much they could do for him.

Once he got back home someone in his family asked him, quite rightly, how the hell he managed to shoot his toe off cleaning a gun. So he demonstrated the maneuver with his other foot and, hand to God, proceeded to shoot off his other big toe.

So this poor bastard spent his life wobbling around like one of those inflatable punching clowns because he'd managed to shoot off both of his big toes. You'd think that would sour him on guns, but it didn't, he kept hunting until the end and that's how he met his demise.

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