Tony's Bro breaks ground with his blog

My bro is at MU doing graduate work. He has a blog but instead of writing stories about how I used to beat the shit out of him, lock him in the closet and find the thing he loved most in the world and then destroy it he makes videos about his life in the middle of Missouri and writes about whatever current events catch his interest.

However, my family has a tendency to piss people off and recently he was involved in a bit of a controversy over the content he decided to post and what role the University had in dictating what he could write. None, thankfully.

Recently, the Columbia Tribune did a story about his vloggy activities along with some other people in the area and what they're doing on the Internets.

The story is the second article to detail the incident and provides a great recap of the situation but what they don't tell you is that my bro was under a lot of pressure as all of this went down during the end of the semester and he was forced to defend his right to free speech, study for finals and entertain bitches during the whole dust up.

Thankfully, my bro doesn't back down and I heard he did a pretty great job defending himself against a number of faculty members that were definitely going after him with bad intentions.

Tony's Bro, an MU graduate student, didn't think there was anything objectionable about one of the eight videos he has on YouTube, but MU officials didn’t agree. Titled "When girls get guns," Tony's Bro 46-second video featured three friends shooting each other with plastic dart guns, laughing and cursing.

After it was posted, the Hispanic American Leadership Organization, an MU student group Tony's Bro and his friends are active in, requested the video be removed because the girls were clad in HALO T-shirts and the group worried about public perception.

Tony's Bro discussed removing the video with the girls, but the group refused, citing that it contained a disclaimer, it was free speech and that the video was out of the group’s jurisdiction because it was on a personal, non-university site.

"I think it went downhill from there," Tony's Bro said.

Tony's Bro met with an MU official about the video and then posted a parody of the conversation on his blog. Although the parody did not contain names, officials saw it and convicted the 26-year-old from Kansas City of violating the university's standard of conduct against "disruptive or disorderly conduct or lewd, indecent, or obscene conduct of expression."

"I thought 'You've got to be kidding,' " Tony's Bro said. "There was this underlying absurdity that anyone was upset over an online diary."

After organizing a 135-page rebuttal that cited MU's policy for off-campus conduct and lack of policy for blogs, Tony's Bro took the conviction - which would have involved writing a research paper, a fine and an official warning - to the Student Conduct Committee this month.

It was overturned.

A phone call to the Department of Student Life was not returned Wednesday.

"There is a new creative medium that nobody knows how to regulate," Tony' Bro said. "I think this is something that gives that creative control back to mass bodies of people, and I think that's awesome."

Despite Tony's Bro tiff, the university isn't against YouTube - Michelle Froese, a spokeswoman for the University Bookstore is embracing it. Of the more than 100 million videos the site showcases each day, users can find one from the Brady Commons shop.

Like I noted previously, I'm very proud of him and glad that he didn't get kicked out of grad school for something as silly as a blog. Lord knows there's only enough room in my mom's basement for one of us. To show him how impressed I am with his recent trials and tribulations I'm thinking that I should refrain from questioning his sexuality and making fun of his expensive clothes but then again, it wouldn't be X-mas if I stopped doing my best impression of a Chicano Grinch.