I don’t understand this story at all.*
Not THAT Larry Storch! That Larry Storch made sense to me.
Larry Storch is no relation to the late comedian of “F Troop” fame, but is a defiant, uncivil 89-year-old scofflaw who insists on driving around his North Carolina community with his sound system at eardrum-popping levels. “They’ve been giving me noise tickets for years,” Storch said. “I guess they thought their tickets would deter me, but every time I paid off a ticket I’d stop by the speaker place on the way home and add a little more boom to my zoom.” Good for you, Larry; by the way, you’re an asshole. His latest arrest for breaking noise ordinances brought him before a judge who was ready to throw the book at Storch, but who had a peculiar way of doing it. Lenoir County District Judge Robert T. Ironside—who is no relation to the wheelchair-bound Robert T. Ironside played by post- “Perry Mason” Raymond Burr in a CBS detective show—told him:
“You’ve come before this court many times over the years Mr. Storch. In the past I’ve fined you, sentenced you to community service, and at one point even forced you to watch the fourth hour of the ‘Today Show.’ Since none of those punishments have done anything to curb your jackassory behavior, I’ve decided to get medieval on where your butt — if you had one — would be.”
Whereupon he sentenced Storch, proud owner of a 1976 Aston Martin Lagonda, to blast “I’m A Little Teapot” out of his car speakers for 45 days.The noise-happy senior citizen received a CD featuring 37 different versions of the song as he left the courthouse. He is appealing the decision.
No!!! Not THAT Robert T. Ironside! That Ironside was a competent professional!
Let me get this straight, now. This idiot intentionally disrupts the peace with his loud music, so the judge sentences him to keep disrupting the peace with loud music, but just loud music that the judge thinks the offender doesn’t like. How does this enforce the law? How does this serve the public? How is this a reasonable punishment, when it requires the law-breaker to keep breaking the same law? Why do the people in this story both have the names of TV figures from the Sixties? WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?????
I don’t know, but I would put Storch in jail, take away his license, and tell Judge Ironside to find another line of work. The are both unethical, menaces to society, and silly.
*P.S.: Everyone seems to think this story is a hoax, and perhaps it is. Probably it is, if one reads the nonsensical comments of Storch’s girlfriend, which Rick Jones quotes below. I also can’t find any record of a judge named Ironside.
The guy who wrote the story is Jon Dawson, who you can contact at 252-559-1092 or jdawson@freedomenc.com. Tell him for me he’s an unethical jerk. There’s nothing in the website or his column heading to indicate that he is writing humor or satire. I read crazy stories all week long, and this is far from the nuttiest, or the funniest: I don’t have time to check all the sources on every off-the wall story I read. The so-called new media, which already has bloggers blatantly misrepresenting facts on a regular basis, doesn’t need this junk to further degrade its credibility. Thanks, Jon, for wasting my time, and everyone else’s. If the Free Press won’t fire you, then we know how much it cares about its readers.
_______________________________________
Pointer: Fark
Facts: Kinston.com
Graphic 1: PDXRetro
Graphic 2: Free Ring Tones FYI
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack, you’ve been had.
Are you guessing this, or do you know?
Clues:
1) no such address: 667 Calamity Lane, La Grange, NC (no such road either, plus 667 is, in some calculations, the number of the Beast, a “Calamity)
2) The “famous” names
3) The girlfriend of “27 minutes” who also dated rappers, conveniently influenced by I’m a Little Teapot
4) Judge using term “Jackassery” and “butt”, with prior sentence of 4th Hour of Today Show, all also being unlikely
5) Picture is not of an 89 year old man
6) No such place as “Miller Monty University”, nor would a clinical psychologist be as mean
7) No one would ever do that to a 1976 Aston Martin Lagonda
1. Though stranger addresses exist.
2. Most people wouldn’t recognize them.
3.Yeah, I”l give you this one.
4. Judges say worse every day. Not good judges, but you know.
5. I assumed it was an old photo.
6. Mine is!
7. Good point.
Calamity Lane would have been my tip off.
You have been convicted of murdering the victim while yelling “Die, nigger! Die!” Therefore, I sentence you to murder some white people while yelling “Die, cracker! Die!”
Thanks, tgt..You took the story seriously too–now I don’t feel completely stupid.
From the linked story:
“I think it’s kinda sweet, really,” said Storch’s girlfriend of 27 minutes, Paulette Burroughs of La Grange. “I’ve dated many a rapper in my day, and they all cite ‘I’m A Little Teapot’ as the joint that got them started in hip hop. 50 Cent was weaving ‘Tea Pot’ into his rhymes when he was still 16 Cent.”
Uh huh.
To be fair, this is a column in a small-town newspaper. It may well be that everyone there knows that Dawson’s columns aren’t really “news,” the same way Andy Borowitz or the Onion don’t necessarily proclaim loudly that they’re intended to be humor/satire. It may never have occurred to Dawson or his editors that Fark would pick up the story, and that people not “in the know” would be fooled into believing the story was true.
Other columns by Dawson include, “Seven-fingered man still loves fireworks” and “Former PETA member brings bacon-themed restaurant to Kinston.” I’d say the chances that we’re supposed to take any of this seriously is about nil. The locals know that. You didn’t.
Then it shouldn’t be on the internet. Drew, like me, sees weird stories all day long—this was far from the strangest. Dawson’s a jerk-plus, and his excuse to me proves it. YOUR mitigating circumstance was better than his.
The most unbelievable part for me is that the police actually did their job and cited somebody for a loud stereo.
I find the most unbelievable thing is the thought of a 1976 Lagonda with a functioning electrical system, let alone one that would support a loud stereo. The thing had a CRT display and electronic control designed by Lucas.
I apologize for being so behind on this, but I only read about this story a week ago, and at the time wondered about the “F Troop” Larry Storch — must they not be around the same age now?
Yes, as it turned out. The very same age, for he was born in 1923, according to Wikipedia.
But it was only today that I learned that F Troop’s Melody Patterson’s character on the series — the rather petite and sexy “Wrangler Jane” — was a character based upon Calamity Jane.
The movie “Calamity Jane” happened to be Melody’s favourite movie when she auditioned, she claimed:
http://www.nndb.com/people/948/000050798/
Calamity Jane…667 Calamity Lane.
Just too many outrageous coincidences, as you all have been pointing out.
Yet, as you say, who has the time to be wasting any on background searches every time we come across a news article in which we may notice an odd detail or two that seems a bit quirky?
Life is indeed quirky, after all!