OGHC- The Unforeseen Consequences; Good God, What Have We Done?

When I started this blog, I thought about many scenarios in which the content could be portrayed as hurtful to others, depressing instead of funny, or even dangerous to my family and I've tired fairly successfully to avoid any nastiness.

I didn't anticipate, however, the damaging effect our now beloved title "Old Grandma Hardcore" would have on the general population. The blog has been run through many language translators since its creation last June, and I often wondered about the retention or the semi-pornographic silliness of the title. We've received funny stories of folks walking in on someone laughing at the blog, looking at the title and immediately weeping to their mothers that the love of their life wouldn't share their most intimate fantasies, no matter how unorthodox. All these stories have had a happy ending where Ctrl+H and five minutes of reading confirm that they don't in fact have a geriatric fetish to worry about.

One story, unfortunately, doesn't yet have a happy ending, and I've agreed to help out a bit for a few reasons. First, because- hey, man: anything to help a reader! And second because stuff like this just writes itself.


Let's all give a big hug to J____ from Florida. I've agreed not to print the kid's name so it doesn't pop up in conjunction with all the other various off-color search terms that bring a small percentage of readers from MSN and Google each day. We'll call him "Jay." Jay needed a quick OGHC fix Monday, and was excited to find out that Grandma would be coming home from the hospital. He chose to load the page from his high school library.

I'm sure you can guess where this is going.

Jay was spotted by the ever present gaze of the librarian reading a page titled "Old Grandma Hardcore," and reported him to the disciplinarian bodies that be. Jay has now been given an "In School Suspension" and won't be able to access the internet at school for the rest of the year for viewing "questionable material" using the school district's equipment (which, by the way, runs an old version of Safari, which doesn't make the site look that pretty anyway.) The most important element of this "internet tale of woe" is now the boy has the words "accessing pornography about old people" on a document somewhere in his permanent record. You know there have to be kids working the offices at this school that hear about this mess thinking "well, that's a hell of a rumor..." I don't want this guy to be a granny-porn-pariah for his remaining years of high school angst, so I drafted a letter to those who hold power over his life to request mercy. Here's the letter:

To whom it may concern-

It has come to my attention that one of your students was issued a punishment for accessing our website (http://oghc.blogspot.com, hereinafter "OGHC") using the school's computers. I submit that his perusal of the site was merely for academic reasons, thus our website's classification as "questionable material" should change and his disciplinary record over this matter cleared.

Contention #1: OGHC is a daily chronicle of the life of Barbara St. Hilaire, an older woman with a heart of gold and a passion for video games of all types. Often she becomes frustrated at certain obstacles within these games that cause her to use a fascinating post-cold war American vernacular that shows not only the human condition in times of extreme emotion, a status not easy to replicate in labs and impossible to fully understand in such tests as the Stanford-Binet or the MMPI-II, but also the product of years of technological evolution from the popularity of the radio to the implementation of a complex global network that is the internet manifested in a string of vulgar exclamations.

Contention #2: Many authors of books no doubt contained within your library were also considered obscene and "questionable" within their date of first publication. We beg you to research the condemnation and subsequent censorship of authors within the Elizabethan, Romantic, Modernist, and Post-modernist periods, and try to empathize with future literary scholars to find your own definitions of "questionable" antiquated, thus expanding your view of this matter.

Contention #3: OGHC may have a title of "Old Grandma Hardcore," but that title is meant not only as a "gamer-specific" technical term to be understood within the community of video game enthusiasts, but also as ironic. The use of irony is an often misunderstood matter within classroom discussion, and our site may better illuminate this term for your students. OGHC does not contain pornography of any kind.

I hope we can exchange correspondence to better our understanding of this situation, and I thank you for your patience and your time. I regret that I had to write under these unfortunate circumstances and am sure that rationality will prevail in the end.

With thanks,

-Timothy St. Hilaire
Creator, Writer:
oghc.blogspot.com

I asked Grandma about it, and she said her letter would be something like this:

Dear Assholes,

It's not a porn site. I don't do porn. Leave the boy alone. Good God, didn't you even look at the site? ...Poor kid.

Thanks for nothing, fuckers.

-Grandma

If anyone needs us to patch something up for you because of the site, don't hesitate to ask- we'll do our best. Most of our readers are of drinking age, so I don't imagine this will happen very often, but we're here if you need us.

--More updates on the way!--