Gay Grindr Murder/Rape

I posted about a young man from Canada who was raped and robbed in the Philadelphia area a few weeks ago after he hooked up with someone through Grindr  and now there are two more incidents in the Philadelphia area to report that are even more frightening. This time an adorable, talented young guy was murdered, and a public prosecutor was arrested for allegedly raping a sixteen year old boy…all allegedly through Grindr.

Here’s the incident that involved the murder:

It was awful. I don’t think there are any words that could actually describe what I felt or even my family,” Dino’s sister Una Dizdarevic said.

Dizdarevic, who lived on North 13th Street in Spring Garden, disappeared Wednesday.

On Friday, his body was discovered with blunt force trauma to the head on Parker Street near 9th Street in Chester.

His sister, Una, came in from their home state of Kentucky.

“He would just light the entire room up itself. He was so intelligent and so many people cared about him,” Una said.

Police sources say it appears Dizdarevic met up with someone on the social app, Grindr.

You can read more here. Chester, PA, where the body was found, is about a twenty minute drive south on I95 from center city Philadelphia where the victim lived. It’s also one of the most dangerous places in the Philadelphia area.

And this next piece about the male public prosecutor allegedly raping a sixteen year old boy he met through Grindr happened in the Wilmington, DE area, not far from Philadelphia.

New Castle County police say 34-year-old Daniel Simmons faces four counts of fourth-degree rape. Simmons is a deputy attorney general assigned to the county’s Misdemeanor Trial Unit.

Police say Simmons met the boy through a social media app called Grindr and not during the performance of his public duties.

The attorney general’s office says in a statement that Simmons has been placed on administrative leave. The office approved warrants for Simmons’ arrest on Friday. Attorney General Beau Biden did not make any comments.

You can read more here. For those who don’t know, good old Beau Biden is the son of our esteemed smiling Vice-President, Joe Biden. I don’t know if that statement about this creep meeting the kid through Grindr instead of while on duty is supposed to make this better somehow, and frankly I don’t even know why they would make that comment. It makes no sense. But then good old Beau wouldn’t want to be associated with something like this.

In any event, you guys who are out there working the net with Grindr and other hook up sites like it should really pay attention to things like this. We’re living in a very dangerous world now and the Internet is the old wild west where anything that can happen will happen. Don’t assume anything. And never trust anyone you meet online. You just can’t be too careful. All that hope and change and happy dance stuff you’ve been hearing about online is not going to help you out when you meet up with a sociopath who doesn’t care whether you live or die.

Yelp Review Controversy

I’m not linking now because I’m too lazy, but I have posted about Yelp reviews several times, with respect to fraud and fakery and all kinds of gaming. But this is the first time I’ve seen something like this in public. Business owners are now claiming that if they don’t pay Yelp to advertise on a monthly basis their reviews dip from five star to one star, and it hurts their businesses tremendously.

“We do get a lot of traffic from out-of-towners,” Bevilacqua said.

Bevilacqua says a big part of his business was driven by positive online reviews – that is, until last year.

“I went from being 4.5 stars to 1 star,” Bevilacqua said.

Multiple glowing reviews on his profile were suddenly hidden, filtered in a hard-to-find section Yelp says are “not recommended” The reason, Bevilacqua believes, is he turned down advertising pitched to him by a telephone salesman from Yelp.

“It was a lot of money; it was like over $300 a month just to do advertising,” Bevilacqua said.

Brian Dunn from Dunn and Danese Insurance in Drexel Hill has also been battling with Yelp after he stumbled across a negative review, the only one on his site from a disgruntled customer.

None of this surprises me. I once had a bad experience at this shop, in Doylestown, PA, and I left several reviews in several different places letting people know just how bad the experience was. One of the places where I left my review was Yelp and they didn’t even put it up. At the time, this led me to believe that the business was paying Yelp to advertise and to balance reviews in their favor and I stopped leaving reviews on Yelp altogether after that.

So I guess it works both ways, and just like on Amazon or any other place where reviews are being left you can’t trust a thing anymore. I know I’ll never bother wasting my time with Yelp after my own personal experiences there as a consumer. But I would like to know where the FTC is?

Don’t. Trust. Any. Online. Reviews. Anywhere. People who are in business for themselves and who aren’t getting a weekly paycheck depend on a certain amount of business in order to survive. They aren’t getting government handouts. They are working seven days a week in most cases to survive. It’s the same thing with authors and career writers. And I know that I wouldn’t want to be responsible for hurting someone’s income because of a corrupt review system. It’s bad luck to hurt people that way. It’s bad karma. You could wind up going broke yourselves, or you might even drop dead the next day. Karma works.

Penis to Rooster Leash

A performer was recently found guilty of exhibitionism in Paris because he did something that involved hooking a leash to his penis, and then hooking the leash to a rooster. Doesn’t that sound artistic?

South African born performance artist Steven Cohen has been found guilty by a Paris court over a September 2013 public performance in which he danced in platform shoes in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower with a rooster tied to his penis by a leash.

The 51-year-old Artist danced for around 10 minutes before being arrested by police but maintains the performance was not intended in any way to be sexual.

You can read more here. There’s a photo of him in a headdress, but nothing with the penis tied to a cock. The comment thread seems to think he’s either an idiot or unhinged. You know how I’m always talking about those gays on the fringes getting the loudest voices, and how they often make the rest of us look bad, well this guy is the perfect example.