Have you ever posted a picture of yourself that you later realized was embarrassing? Have you ever sent an angry e-mail to someone that you regretted once you hit the send button? If so, don't feel too bad; Democratic state senate candidate Rick Shriver can sympathize with you!
Shriver, who is running for the open 20th District seat against Republican Jimmy Stewart and Green Party candidate Tim Kettler, is an associate professor of communication at Ohio University-Zanesville, as well as an avid musician and audiophile. On his former personal Web site, www.rickshriver.net, he regularly posted podcasts, which he encouraged his audience to enjoy
share and credit the source. One such podcast, titled How I got even with Howard Kochs has sparked a great deal of controversy for the candidate whose Web site says he wants to take our values to Columbus.
In the podcast, Shriver recounts a tale of how he got even with a man who refused to trade seats with him on a flight from Las Vegas in 2000. Shriver said he made a mental note of the man's e-mail address and proceeded to sign him up for every penis enlargement program that I could find [G?] every bizarre fetish
porno website that I could find: bondage and discipline
gay
foot fetish
animal fetish
young teen boy fetish
underage girl fetish. And so I took a real morbid delight in knowing that the number of e-mails would expand exponentially in 'Howard Kochs' inbox. Shriver specifically said that Kochs was not the real name of the victim of his childish vengeance.
Wednesday evening, I spoke with Dan Farmer, Shriver's campaign manager. Farmer emphatically denied that Shriver was being serious, saying, it absolutely never happened
[G?] if Stewart wants to keep on talking about a bad joke that was made 10 years ago
no one is going to benefit. Rhetoric and issue-dodging aside, after the Athens Messenger covered the story on August 19, several items disappeared from Shriver's Web site, including his tale of revenge against Kochs. Thank God for Google Cache, or else it'd be down the ol' memory hole.
For an associate professor of electronic media, Shriver seems to have trouble keeping politically embarrassing and disastrous gaffes off the Internet. There is no doubt whatsoever that he made the statements in question and uploaded them to a Web site that he converted into his campaign Web site. Despite his campaign's claims to the contrary in The Post's Tuesday story about the issue, there is ample evidence that the Kochs podcast was intended for public consumption, and was not in a private-access area of the Web site [G?] where he and his unnamed writing partner could share materials
