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By Mark D, November 17, 2011 12:25 pm

So when I got into high school you HAD to choose a language class. In one of my all time brilliant moves I decided to take Italian. On the bright side, unlike my best friend, I did not get stuck in French. But for all that I learned of Italian I might have well taken a French class. I struggled my Freshman year, and ended up staying late twice a week with a few other students to get extra lessons from my teacher. I managed to pull through and pass the class, but nothing could have prepared me for Frances Misciagna’s Italian class the next two years.

The first thing was that voice. It was nails on a chalkboard. It was the kind of voice you would hear in a nightmare that would cause you to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Her son was a year ahead of me in school, and I always felt bad for him for having to wake up to that voice nearly every day of his life. Plus she had to be near 60 when I had her as a teacher and was out of touch with humanity, I’m sure having her as a parent when your a teenager was no more fun.

The second thing was the ability of the class to distract her. I swear I heard about her vacations in Italy, or her life growing up in Italy more then I ever needed to. She was probably somewhat senile, because somehow she could never remember that she told us the same god dam stories every other week. Since no one in my class really cared anyway, they would just make a game out of how quickly and how long they could drag her off topic. I probably would have done better on tests about her life then actual Italian.

The third thing was that she was a teacher who was out the door at 3, so don’t expect any extra help if you actually needed it. So you got a class full of her talking about her life, and then the next day she would just move on to the next subject. She also called my parents so much that they started feeling bad for me and realized that she was pretty much insane. She must have called my house and gotten my brother on the phone when my parents weren’t home. Thus she decided that I had him lie to her, and she proceeded to call my house at 11 PM. She then kept one of my parents (who both woke up early for their jobs) on the phone for nearly an hour bitching about me. One time my mom picked me up from school, and saw her coming down the hallway and she proceeded to run the other way.

How out of it was she?  During my Junior year she was so upset at me that she got the school to put my real scores on my report card. You see my school realized that if you scored low enough below 50 that it would become almost impossible for you to pass. So anything below 50 would just get a 50 rating on your report card. I abused the hell out of this by working hard to begin the year, and then slacking off cause no matter how bad I did I would pass anyway. Well it was possible for teachers to request the real grade go on report cards and she did. So my Italian 3 grades went 50-22-18-12-8 before I passed the regents and passed for the year.

During the time when I had a 12 average she kicked me out of the class during a test. I had only signed my name to the test, and my friend thought it would be funny if he filled out the rest of the test. So she hands me back the test with an 82 score on it and congratulates me on working hard and finally starting to turn it around. She of course conveniently missed that the handwriting on everything but the signature wasn’t mine. The signature didn’t even match the rest of the page. My friend was laughing so hard he nearly fell out of his chair, and she never realized why.

I’ve mentioned the Regents, you see in NY the Regents tests replace some Finals. This means that for those classes if you passed the Regents tests you passed for the year automatically. For language classes it was the 3rd year (Junior year) class that got the regents test. At the time I was the only student in any of her classes that might fail. The way the school had it set up was that if you failed the class and there wasn’t enough students, you went to summer school at a different school. I did this the year before following Italian 2. Well when it involved failing both the class for the year and the regents test you HAD to go to summer school at that school. That meant she would have had to cancel all her plans for the summer to spend 5 weeks teaching just me in summer school. But since she graded the tests, it was in her best interests for me to pass. I was one of the few people to get a perfect score on the spoken part of the test. Which meant all I had to do was get the multiple choice on the rest of the test half right.

My families run ins with her didn’t stop there. My one cousin was struggling with Italian and since she was a brat and they were loaded they got her a tutor. Well they mention in passing that they are paying for this tutor and all she does is talk about growing up in Italy and going on vacation in Italy. So I say “That sounds a lot like Ms Misciagna” and they want to know how I knew her name. I just laugh and my mom even tells her sister to just fire her cause she’s a horrible teacher. I don’t know what happened after that though.

I just remembered all of this after reading her reviews at ratemyteacher.com, as most of them are hilariously right on spot when it comes to her.

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By Mark D, October 12, 2011 1:45 pm

I really, really thought I was done with the incredible downfall of Bubba The Love Sponge, AKA Bubba Clem or BTLS. But my last post actually got the attention of BTLS executive producer (and candidate for St. Petersburg City Council) and he took time out of his busy day to comment on my blog.

This is Brent (for real). This post is a flat out lie. I’ve never asked anything about me be pulled, EVER. Only libel will be pulled and we have attorneys d

- attorneys that handle libel. This op/Ed is a complete LIE. SFN has their own mods. BTW, only government can censor. Read the Bill of Rights. Plenty of false, malicious things are said about me and my family. I wouldn’t have the time to police such foolishness! Save the wishing for our death. We’ll be here f

For many years to come…So keep on Hating, it’s all your good at!!

So you could imagine my shock today when I went to SFN and discovered that the BTLS forum was missing. I took a quick look around the forums and found this message from SFN Owner/Admin Mutt

The Bubba the Love Sponge Show has requested that I close the Bubba forum so don’t get all shitty w/ me saying how I abandoned the show or something. They wanted it down, so it’s down. and before you say nobody posted in there anyway, it’s true that compared to the Howard forum it was slow but compared to other places on the net, it was actually pretty active. To those of you that posted there, sorry. I’m sad to see them off Sirius & sad to see the darkside close down.

The problem in all of this is that Bubba and his crew should be above all of this. Brent found my blog, and instead of realizing it was totally inconsequential to them decided to fight back. Since I made that post originally in July it’s been seen by a total of 117 people. It averaged 1 hit a day for the last 3 months, and is averaging 3 hits a day for this months. No one really cares what I say. No one wants my opinion. Hell I have barely 100 twitter followers. Bubba himself has 75K followers, Brent 10K. Just for reference I was recently celebrating this blog getting over 3,000 views last month. For comparison all of last year I only totaled 5K views. On the year I barely have 22K views.

It’s obvious no one can control Bubba at this point, and he is out of control and stupid while on social networks. He recently flipped out on Twitter and bashed his wife for having lunch with someone critical of the show. That someone was the infamous Ludlow Lebron. Now there’s not even any proof that she actually had lunch with him and it was possible that she just said that to get a rise out of him. But after attacking her and threatening people, Bubba claimed that his twitter was hacked and the tweets disappeared. The tweets though continued to stay on Bubba’s facebook which he has brilliantly linked to his twitter. Lud has been very critical of Bubba, but hasn’t stepped the line as far as anyone can tell. That didn’t stop Bubba from posting an edited business card of someone from the Florida Cybercrimes Unit.

A quick google shows that there is a Cybercrimes unit in Tampa, but it’s a Child Predator Cybercrimes unit. As anyone that’s been on the internet for an amount of time knows, the last thing you do is threaten to involve the “Internet Police” with someone. But Bubba doesn’t get that he’s too big to be arguing, replying and listening to Ludlow Lebron and the SFN Bubba forum. Because in the end, the truth hurts. Bubba isn’t attacking/taking down criticism because it’s libel and slander, but because what people are saying is true. He can’t handle that he is his own worst enemy. That spending time doing anything but paying attention to your wife is never a good idea.  Especially when she’s so far out of your league.

The other truth that Bubba can’t stand is that he basically got conned by his agent. Someone mentioned recently that Bubba’s IO deal is almost totally in stocks. He owns such a large amount of IO stocks that if he tried to sell them, it would depress the price of the stock even more. So it’s no surprise that despite being on the board of IO and being the premier talent, Bubba treats the show as a bastard child. Even worse was the con job he and Tom Bean pulled on the Early Enlisters, getting them to drop 300 bucks for a lifetime subscription and now there’s nothing to be subscribed too. Bubba or IO or both of them finally figured out that no one was going to pay extra for him and made it free. They also offered EEs a pro-rated refund, but good luck getting that back considering the last IO financial report said they would run out of funds by the next quarter unless something big changed.

The more Bubba attempts to be a big shot, the more he proves he’s out of his league in almost every way. Look, I’m not even anywhere near as popular as him, but when someone shit talks me I either ignore them or laugh at it. You need to have a thick skin, and it’s obvious now that Bubba doesn’t.

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By Mark D, July 17, 2011 10:50 am

Actually, this isn’t so much Bubba but Brent, according to the people over at the Stern Fan Network. You see, a few days ago someone from SFN linked to my Stupidity Overflowth rant and posted it over there. I can tell when this happens because WordPress his this nice little stats thing that tells the user when someone follows a link to their page. I added a few comments to the post before I fell asleep that morning. A few hours later I noticed the post was gone. Thankfully Google still has a cache of it here to prove it existed.

Well the user who originally posted the link to the Stupidity Overflowth blog and has written a lot of other stuff about Bubba is now in SFN purgatory labelled as a hater. In a thread discussing it, users mention that Brent, the BTLS show producer actually watches the board and gets stuff pulled down. The user who got tagged as a hater had made a post calling out Brent which magically disappeared before he got tagged. So basically the BTLS people are so desperate as to care what people say about them on a near dead message board and call in favors.

It’s amazing how far they have fallen. I mean they aren’t even on the Howard channels at all and they are calling in favors to get stuff deleted and removed. Maybe instead of surfing SFN for any negative comments, they should be working on the show. Especially since all signs point to Bubba being busy burning yet another Bridge, as it seems like Cox won’t renew his contract at the end of the year.This is probably the last time I even bother to write about him. Given a second (and most likely 20th) chance in radio, he continues to do what he does best: Burn Bridges. It’s always everyone’s fault but his own. When he’s in his bunker, broadcasting to a handful of truckers on RadioIO, right before the Feds bust in and shut it down for being a pump and dump stock scam, I wonder if he’ll have any regrets. Most likely he’ll just blame Tom Bean.

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By Mark D, May 10, 2011 9:01 am

You know, I’m infamous for making bad life decisions. I think I should admit this, considering so many of you read this. I say this because I am just as much an idiot or a moron as anyone else. My genius decision this time? I woke up and wasn’t able to open my eyes. When I finally was, they looked like this:

Now isn’t that special? In a flight of genius I thought this might actually cure itself after sometime. Yes, wonderful decision if I do say so myself. End result? 3 weeks later my nose had constant muckus, it was work opening my eyes in the morning, I had something wrong with my throat, both my ears have infections and I might have been getting a chest cold.

So that’s where I’ve been and why I’ve been on and off with the blog recently. It’s also why I haven’t been doing the podcast because I can barely hear. So half of it would have been me asking Keith “What?”. Yes, I do realize typing is easy and I should be able to do it when sick. I’ve just been really drugged up and sleeping a lot, so anything I’ve been posting hasn’t been making as much sense as it could.

I’m about 90% better, I just keep waking up and feeling like I’ve taken a step back. I’m still on a few different medicines and hoping to get the rest of the way there. But for future reference if my eyes do look like this I am definitely going to see a doctor sooner. I might recommend the same to you, but your probably already infinitely wiser then me in this regard. Even writing this post I somehow managed to fall asleep three different times. But then again I probably shouldn’t start writing in the middle of the night when I’m tired anyway.

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By Mark D, April 5, 2011 9:35 pm

For those of you coming from SFN, I was a member of the Bubba boards. But I got banned from SFN for speaking my mind about Bubba and talking back to Heatherwiz. I find it funny now that basically everything I argued with Wiz about, I was right about. I could probably return to SFN now, and no one would care. But once I get banned enough from somewhere I get the point.

I’ve mentioned Bubba The Love Sponge before, basically he screwed over all his fans on Sirius two years ago in order to get a new deal. It’s been two years, and Bubba’s contract (which simply consisted of them rebroadcasting his over the air morning show) wasn’t renewed. Supposedly Sirius was only offering him 200K for the show, which was half of what they had paid in the 2 year contract. Bubba meanwhile wasn’t exactly negotiating in good faith, as his website had a countdown to the “Next Evolution” whose end coincided with his contract being up.

Bubba has now signed with RadioIO, a company almost no one has heard of. But it isn’t exactly surprising, given that his agent Tom Bean is the CEO of RadioIO’s parent company. One must question if Bubba even got fair value, given that his agent was negotiating with himself. Tom Bean doesn’t exactly come off as the most ethic person, given his status as a personal injury lawyer. He’s also infamous for being a member of a lot of Pump and Dump scams relating to stocks. Interestingly IO World Media (RadioIO’s parent company) was a penny stock for most of last year, until rumors started circulating that Bubba was going to IO in late October. At around the same time Tom Bean filed papers to issue 200K more shares.

IO then reached a 52 week high on January 11th of 68 cents. Meaning if somehow had bought shares when it was still a penny or even up to 5 cents they would have made back 10 times what they spent at the least. IO spiked again at about 50ish cents in late Jan, and has been downhill ever since and is at roughly 28 cents lately. Even the 28 cents is a pretty big gain for a relatively unknown company that was trading for pennies.

Here’s where it gets a little more interesting, Bubba was offering “early enlisters” who paid 300 bucks would get 3 years of service, a discount on Bubba Raw and a “Golden Ticket” which would make up the real difference for the early enlisters since if you just paid the monthly fee of 9.95 it would come out to about 350 bucks. His fans quickly figured out that the Golden Ticket would be stock, which might explain the sudden upswing in Jan.

Even more amazing though is that RadioIO offered Bubba’s show (he broadcasts for 2 hours after his radio broadcast is over) for free until March. Multiple times during the free preview Bubba said that the show was not full on everything it could be, including one reference to the show being a 2/10. But he assured listeners that as soon as the free preview was over the show would be a 10/10. So basically you had to show faith that someone who phoned it in for his last 2 years on Sirius (since most listeners would be coming from Sirius and not have him locally) and then proceeded to purposely have half assed shows for 2 months was going to turn it on once you had to subscribe to him. I gave him a listen, and there was still almost no reason to listen to him. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be as crazy as possible while it was free so people would want to continue to listen?

People on the Stern Fan Network Bubba board have been able to view the server stats for RadioIO and it’s not looking pretty for most of the live shows being broadcast. People just don’t care that much about him or the crew of people he has doing shows. Ironically most of the shows other then his are done by his friends. Remember this is Bubba who complained that Sirius wasn’t bringing in professional broadcasters, now letting his friends on the air most likely due to them working for free.

So Bubba left Sirius, joined his shady Agents shady company and might be involved in pump and dump stock deals. I think if he had half a brain in his head he would have kept doing live shows on Sirius and making money off the merch. But hey, when you spend almost as much time bashing a company as you do working for them, you can’t expect to get a raise. I don’t think anyone has done more in their career to literally cut off their own nose to spite their face.