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Tag: memoirs

  • Melissa Joan Hart’s Memoir Exposes Drug Use

    All of us know Melissa Joan Hart from Clarissa Explains It All, her days as the innocent spellcaster in Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, and her most recent sitcom Melissa And Joey, but is she really innocent as we perceive from the media? Her new memoir Melissa Explains It All may expose more than we know.

    Even though Hart’s memoir has not hit bookstore shelves yet, Hart discussed some of her book’s content with Life and Style Magazine. One of the biggest confessions that Hart explains to the magazine is provided below.

    “I experimented with weed, Ecstasy, mushrooms and mescaline for about a year and a half.”

    Hart continues telling her confessions to the magazine, stating that she had used Ecstasy multiple times. One of these instances where she had continued to use Ecstasy was in 1999, when she was at the Playboy Mansion, and continued to remain high en route to a Maxim photo shoot.

    While discussing her drug use to the magazine, Hart exclaimed to the magazine that she never became addicted and that she was “kind of running with a bad crowd.” Hart concluded her drug confessions “I just didn’t enjoy taking drugs. I don’t like the loss of control.”

    Later in Hart’s exclusive with Life and Style Magazine, she confessed about her make-out sessions with various celebrities, such as Jerry O’Connell and Nick Carter.

    Hart’s memoir Melissa Explains It All will be released to booksellers on October 29th, 2013. Various Twitter users have reacted to the release of her memoir:

    [Image source: Twitter (@ABCFmelissajoey)]

  • Apparently, It Sucked To Be A Woman Working For Facebook, Circa 2005

    Apparently, It Sucked To Be A Woman Working For Facebook, Circa 2005

    As the now-famous story illustrates, Facebook sprung out of the minds of college boys, in the halls of Harvard University. According to the story proposed by the Oscar-nominated “based on real life” movie The Social Network, you can track the entire idea of Facebook back to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s feelings of inadequacy – in terms of the Harvard elite as well as with women. Whether or not you believe all of that is, well, up to you.

    The point is that it’s not too much of a stretch for people to believe that Facebook may have started out as quite the boys club. And according to one former (female) employee, walking into the newish Facebook headquarters in California in 2005 was like walking straight into the great room of every frat house you’ve ever seen.

    The woman, Katherine Losse, has a book coming out on Tuesday. It’s called The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network. In advance of publication, the Wall Street Journal ran a little snippet from the book in which Losse details the misogyny she witnessed when she joined the Facebook team as employee #51 back in 2005.

    Here are some of the highlights:

    • The office was “boyish” to say the least.  She describes first seeing “a cartoonish, zaftig woman with green hair who floated above an ominous cityscape” painted on the wall.  Apparently, most of the walls featured graffiti of big-breasted women coming out of their clothing, “mimicking the proportions of female videogame characters.”  Think Lara Croft, I guess.
    • Losse claims that she attended a big drunken weekend in Tahoe thrown for all the Facebook employees in the winter of 2006.  After everyone was sufficiently sauced, she said she donned the bearskin rug as a suit – an action which Zuckerberg found absolutely hilarious.  He made her continue to wear the costume, and other employees began to snap photos where “Mark is gesturing at me haughtily like an emperor as I stand doubled over in laughter with the bear suit draped over me.”  She said it was all in good fun, but you can see how something like this might look to someone who lacked the proper context.
    • Losse recounts a senior managers at the company who made a habit of requesting threesomes with the females around the office, as well as a lead engineer who, when approached with a report of poor attitudes toward female engineers, “somehow twisted things around and called me a bad feminist.”

    She says that Sheryl Sandberg came along and really did take up the cause of women on the team:

    In response to those two aforementioned male employees:

    I had heard nothing about it. “You see, I’m so good that I make things happen and no one even knows about them,” she said with a smile. Sure enough, the manager who propositioned employees had been subtly demoted and the aggressive engineer moved to another team.

    While some may argue that there is still a bit of a boys’ club vibe at Facebook, this woman paints a pretty vivid picture of what life at the company was like seven years ago. Do you believe it?

  • Kindness Hitchhiker Admits to Shooting Himself

    The “kindness hitchhiker”, also known as the guy who was shot by a complete stranger during his hitchhiking tour across Montana, has admitted to police that he put a hot chunk of lead in himself as a method of self-promotion. According to the Associated Press, Ray Dolin, 39, confessed everything to authorities while recovering from the self-inflicted gunshot wound at Miles City hospital. The case, however, is still under investigation.

    Dolin, who hails from West Virginia, hopped on a bus to Montana in order to write his book about how genuinely nice people were during his adventures. When he was allegedly popped during a random drive-by shooting, the story quickly spread.

    This, of course, has to be good news for Lloyd Christopher Danielson III, 53, the man who was charged with opening fire on Dolin as he was preparing dinner on the side of the road. Those charges were dropped on Thursday. However, since Danielson was apparently intoxicated at the time of his arrest, he’s still being held for driving under the influence. Still, a DUI is probably a lot easier to stare down than felony assault.

    At the time of the shooting, Dolin was in the process of writing a book entitled “Kindness in America”, a tome which chronicled his experiences with the positive-minded individuals he encountered during his travels. It was the irony of the situation — man writing book on kindness of strangers shot by, well, a random stranger — is what initially caused the story to make headlines. How, unfortunately, Dolin is nothing more than a product of his own bizarre hype machine. If nothing else, he may get a book deal out of it.

    Below you can find a sampling of reactions to the news on Twitter. Not surprisingly, most people are a little shocked by the revelation, while others are simply in it to make a few jokes.