The Words Of A Madman

Before today I didn't have the slightest idea who Colin Cowherd was. I wish it was still the case. Sadly, I found out this afternoon that Cowherd is an ESPN Radio "personality" who went out of his way to attack one of my favorite websites, The Big Lead, and resulted in TBL's crashing and being put out of service. TBL was cool enough to drop me a nice comment when I ripped on something they wrote about the upcoming draft crop and has been cool enough to link to some stuff I've written in the past. They do good work and shouldn't get fucked with by assclowns like Cowherd. The site's still down as of 7:15 in New York, a full day essentially, and I feel terrible for TBL because they are good people who use their site as a way to make a living.

For someone who writes a blog and spends a lot of time on the web I'm woefully ignorant of the nuts and bolts of what Cowherd did so I will pass the baton to Will Leitch of Deadspin who explained what happened as part of a righteously indignant rip of Cowherd.

However: Today, upset with something The Big Lead had written about him (or someone, or something, imagined or otherwise), Cowherd told his listeners to unleash a DNS attack on the site. One of the tech people here at Gawker Media tells us: "When someone floods a website with so many fake hits that the servers get overloaded, the site, essentially, goes down. A programmer could write a script to load the website once a second." That appears to be what happened; The Big Lead was down for about half an hour after the announcement, though it's up and running again now.

If there's any doubt about Cowherd's intentions, Every Day Should Be Saturday has a transcript of what he said.

“You and I are straining the system, that what I heard…We occasionally, once a week…we’ll mention a website, our listeners will flee to it, and we’ll shut it down. We feel bad about this, we don’t mean to do it. It usually forces that young guy or young gal to buy more bandwidth and can be expensive. I don’t know that…but wouldn’t it be great if every day we gave out a new, young website and blew it up? If I told my audience every day–just one that’s annoying–and we could give it to them, and our audience would blow it up?

I want everyone to go to it as fast as you possibly can. When I say go, go….it’s three words. THE BIG LEAD dot com. THE. BIG. LEAD. DOT. COM. Go now.”

What a douchebag. And what a bunch of douchebags he's got as an audience to go out and do that on his command.

I've read here and there that it is potentially illegal to intentionally attack and cripple a website but it's even worse that Cowherd acted to shut down a smaller voice that may have said something that upset him. As I said Cowherd's a new name to me but to others in the blogging world his brand of shitcadettery is old hat. Cowherd stole some content from The M Zone, my maize and blue brothers, over a year ago I learned today. So I guess that blogs are fine so long as they provide Cowherd with free content and don't criticize or antagonize him. Or maybe not, Cowherd may have just been a big enough dick to do this for no particular reason. Either way it's worth noting that he did it to The Big Lead who, as I mentioned above, went out of their way to send me a compliment on something I wrote that took them to task. Cowherd could learn something from that rather than attacking someone that, I'm guessing, is a lot fresher and smarter than he is. What a fucking creep.

A lot of other sites have joined the outraged voices above, kudos to Kissing Suzy Kolber, Pacifist Viking, With Leather and Yelling Louder, though I'm sure others have raised their voices and fists. Good on ya boys and the same to The Big Lead.

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