Sutton Foster released her first solo recording last week. If you don’t know her, it probably means you’ve managed to avoid paying regrettable amounts of money to see some bad Broadway musicals. Yay for you. On the other hand, unlike most of the shows she has done, she is worth seeing and hearing. She has an extraordinary voice, and she’s funny enough to warrant being absolutely indispensable in the plays that she does.
I’m hoping that when she negotiated her contract for her current show, she made sure to collect a hefty percentage of the profits. ‘Cause if her last two shows are at all predictive of how this one will go, after the initial hype sales die down, she’ll become the only real audience draw and the only thing to keep the locals from showing up with pitchforks and torches to burn the evil outta the building.
Sutton Foster is actually playing a Disney princess now. (Disney shows have converged in Broadway theaters, alien podlike, to the horror of decent theater-going folk everywhere. That's because when Rudolf Giuliani became mayor of New York, he sold off Midtown Manhattan to the Disney company in short order. Make no mistake, if the man had become president, we’d all be wearing mouse ears by now. And if you think you might have resisted, revisit Rudy’s record on civil liberties and think again, mein Liebling.) Now even though I regard Disney princesses as Satan’s primary agents of evil in this world and the sworn enemy of all three-dimensional humanity, I’m willing to give Sutton Foster a pass because at least she’s not doing it in a movie where it will infect the culture in epidemic proportions. And also because she is apparently, Disney’s first farting princess. That makes me no more inclined to see the show, but I’m hopeful that it’s a step in the right direction.
For my full review of the new album on Amazon, JUST CLICK HERE!
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Seven Eazy Mealz in Minutes!
Because when you spell it with a “Z”, it soundz fazter! (Or German. Or Spanish if you opt to pluralize a word that ends in “e”. Like “Minutez”. Which is not recommended because it’s too confuzing then.)
If you, like I, find no comfort in those 30 minute meals hawked so incessantly by that coked up TV girl, if you can’t be bothered to dial the telephone and order a pizza, if you haven’t the creativity or problem-solving skills that God awarded to even most houseplants, or if you’re just paralyzed by clinical depression and cannot bear to haul yourself out of bed for more than five minutes or, God forbid, face other people, then these are the conveniently numbered tips for you! How can you be sure these tips are for you? The exclamation points! That’s how!
1. Take a pre-packaged hot dog and place it in boiling water until heated through. Remove from water and place in a bun. Voila!
2. Break up several lettuce leaves or the greens of your choice into bite sized pieces. If desired, combine with other vegetables, such as chopped or sliced cucumbers, broccoli, tomato, or mushrooms. Top with salad dressing. A salad!
3. Spread mayonnaise on one side of two slices of bread. Stack atop the mayonnaise covered side of one slice of bread two or three pieces of pre-sliced deli meat and the deli cheese of your choosing, cover with the remaining bread, mayonnaise side down so that no mayonnaise is expose on the exterior. Pair with a bag of Chee-tos. A nice lunch!
4. In a skillet, melt a little butter. Break two eggs into a bowl and stir vigorously with a fork or any convenient utensil. Pour eggs into hot skillet and stir them while heating until they cook through. Remove eggs to a plate and add salt to taste. Delicious!
5. Using either an electric or manual can opener, open a can of tuna. Draining optional. Mmmmmmm!
6. Place two slices of bread in a toaster. Press down toasting mechanism and retrieve bread slices when they pop up. Top each slice with mounds of peanut butter. Smooth or crunchy, your choice. San Frantastic!
7. Open a microwavable container of beef-a-roni. Heat it up. Don’t heat it up. What do I care? Eat, damn you!
If you, like I, find no comfort in those 30 minute meals hawked so incessantly by that coked up TV girl, if you can’t be bothered to dial the telephone and order a pizza, if you haven’t the creativity or problem-solving skills that God awarded to even most houseplants, or if you’re just paralyzed by clinical depression and cannot bear to haul yourself out of bed for more than five minutes or, God forbid, face other people, then these are the conveniently numbered tips for you! How can you be sure these tips are for you? The exclamation points! That’s how!
1. Take a pre-packaged hot dog and place it in boiling water until heated through. Remove from water and place in a bun. Voila!
2. Break up several lettuce leaves or the greens of your choice into bite sized pieces. If desired, combine with other vegetables, such as chopped or sliced cucumbers, broccoli, tomato, or mushrooms. Top with salad dressing. A salad!
3. Spread mayonnaise on one side of two slices of bread. Stack atop the mayonnaise covered side of one slice of bread two or three pieces of pre-sliced deli meat and the deli cheese of your choosing, cover with the remaining bread, mayonnaise side down so that no mayonnaise is expose on the exterior. Pair with a bag of Chee-tos. A nice lunch!
4. In a skillet, melt a little butter. Break two eggs into a bowl and stir vigorously with a fork or any convenient utensil. Pour eggs into hot skillet and stir them while heating until they cook through. Remove eggs to a plate and add salt to taste. Delicious!
5. Using either an electric or manual can opener, open a can of tuna. Draining optional. Mmmmmmm!
6. Place two slices of bread in a toaster. Press down toasting mechanism and retrieve bread slices when they pop up. Top each slice with mounds of peanut butter. Smooth or crunchy, your choice. San Frantastic!
7. Open a microwavable container of beef-a-roni. Heat it up. Don’t heat it up. What do I care? Eat, damn you!
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The Most Useless Neighborhood in Chicago
Whenever my family makes incredulous noises about how I can possibly live in a major city, I remind them of two things: First, I don’t make enough money to support a car-driving habit and would therefore quickly die in the suburbs. Second, if going out to dinner might mean eating an entire deep-fried onion, however cleverly marketed and packaged, death could not come quick enough.
Not that I don’t enjoy visiting the suburbs. The driveways, the backyards, the star-drenched skies viewed from outdoor furniture in a backyard deck, the alcohol that someone’s father or brother-in-law paid for—it all makes me kind of giddy. But I’m always relieved to return to the city. After all, I tell myself as I see the skyline emerging over the Eisenhower Expressway, the city is rich with conveniences. There’s something to do 24 hours a day. You can get anything you want when you live in a major city.
Unless, that is, you’re in the Bermuda triangle of my neighborhood. My neighborhood kind of sucks. It’s not really even a neighborhood. It’s an awkward convergence of neighborhoods where no one appears to feel entirely comfortable. Except for the one armed troll-like man with the untrained pit-bull at the end of the block. He looks comfortable. But he’s another story. A creepy story.
True enough, the residents are a delightful mix of ethnicities and socio-economic strata. And yet we are unified by one thing. Apparently we are all expected to be preternaturally voracious consumers of cupcakes.
What happened was, last Sunday afternoon, I ran out of soy milk. (I didn’t run out, actually. But rather, I came to that last quarter cup or so at the bottom of the carton that isn’t enough to fully saturate a bowl of grape-nuts and so I let it sit there long enough to become convinced it’s probably turned bad by now. I’m not sure I have ever truly run out of soy milk.) So I went out to pick up some. My neighborhood is one of those little business districts where most streets are lined with storefronts. So you’d think this errand would be lickety-split, right? Just the kind of convenience I’m supposed to enjoy as part of the divine right of being a city-dweller. But if you look behind the fronts of those stores, you’ll find nary a splash of soy milk. On a Sunday afternoon in my neighborhood, you can buy a bicycle. You can rent any number of DVDs in Spanish, Arabic, and at least two African languages. You can buy a back-pack be-weighted-down with bedazzling. You can buy cheap wine at a madly inflated price. You can buy all manner of candy with names and slogans that appear to actually be written in Pidgen English by the characters that comprised the extras on M*A*S*H (and I wish I could recommend more highly the “You Make Super Happy Crack Honey Bar” but it tastes oddly tangy). Or you and you can armor the tips of your fingers in long, dangerously encrusted with jagged stuff, fake fingernails. What you cannot do is buy things you might actually need. That is, of course, unless you prefer to subsist on a diet primarily composed of boutique coffees and Cupcakes, Cupcakes, Cupcakes!
The problem crystallized as I waited to cross the street and walk too, too many blocks to a fully stocked grocery store. A couple stood at the corner nearby, one of them on a cell phone. They were trying to explain to some friends where to meet them.
It’s right between the occult magic shop and the day spa… no not THAT occult magic shop and day spa. If you’re looking at an occult magic shop and day spa that are right next to each other, you need to go down half a block and look on the other side of the street. Do you see that store with all the lingerie and Sponge Bob alarm clocks in the window? Just past that, there’s a cupcake place. Next to that there’s a tanning salon, but not the tanning salon with the big banner that says they do teeth whitening…Yes, that’s next to a cupcake place too, but the tanning salon I’m talking about is directly across from the cowboy boot store that sells small electronics. If you look just past THAT tanning salon, you’ll see another occult magic shop and day spa, and we’re at the board game place between them!
I should have stuck around to see if the couple managed to successfully connect with their friend. Instead I got preoccupied with counting the magic shops in my neighborhood. Maybe the owners of these occult shops are thinking we can just buy a book that will tell us how to conjure soy milk. But then, only in the last couple of years have soy milk manufacturers been able to rid the stuff of the lake of fire aftertaste. I fear the conjured version would just set us back to the 1997 version of soy milk.
And ya know—you’d think when the occult shop competition heats up, those guys would be hexing each other right and left. Heaping bad luck and whatnot upon one another. It honestly makes me wonder why there aren’t more inexplicable sulfuric smelling explosions in my neighborhood during, say, the witching hour. But so far, nothing. Just the predictable holiday gunfire out back in the alley. (Which I’m pretty sure is the doing of the one armed troll-guy at the end of the block.)
I griped about the soy milk dilemma to my mother last night, who currently inhabits two of America’s finest suburbs, depending upon the season. Not knowing what soy milk actually is or why in Heaven’s name, anyone would need to drink it, she was unimpressed with my suffering. She cannot imagine a world without big restaurants with parking lots and high-school girl servers and remarkably similar menus among them. And she thinks I should be more appreciative of the cupcakes.
Not that I don’t enjoy visiting the suburbs. The driveways, the backyards, the star-drenched skies viewed from outdoor furniture in a backyard deck, the alcohol that someone’s father or brother-in-law paid for—it all makes me kind of giddy. But I’m always relieved to return to the city. After all, I tell myself as I see the skyline emerging over the Eisenhower Expressway, the city is rich with conveniences. There’s something to do 24 hours a day. You can get anything you want when you live in a major city.
Unless, that is, you’re in the Bermuda triangle of my neighborhood. My neighborhood kind of sucks. It’s not really even a neighborhood. It’s an awkward convergence of neighborhoods where no one appears to feel entirely comfortable. Except for the one armed troll-like man with the untrained pit-bull at the end of the block. He looks comfortable. But he’s another story. A creepy story.
True enough, the residents are a delightful mix of ethnicities and socio-economic strata. And yet we are unified by one thing. Apparently we are all expected to be preternaturally voracious consumers of cupcakes.
What happened was, last Sunday afternoon, I ran out of soy milk. (I didn’t run out, actually. But rather, I came to that last quarter cup or so at the bottom of the carton that isn’t enough to fully saturate a bowl of grape-nuts and so I let it sit there long enough to become convinced it’s probably turned bad by now. I’m not sure I have ever truly run out of soy milk.) So I went out to pick up some. My neighborhood is one of those little business districts where most streets are lined with storefronts. So you’d think this errand would be lickety-split, right? Just the kind of convenience I’m supposed to enjoy as part of the divine right of being a city-dweller. But if you look behind the fronts of those stores, you’ll find nary a splash of soy milk. On a Sunday afternoon in my neighborhood, you can buy a bicycle. You can rent any number of DVDs in Spanish, Arabic, and at least two African languages. You can buy a back-pack be-weighted-down with bedazzling. You can buy cheap wine at a madly inflated price. You can buy all manner of candy with names and slogans that appear to actually be written in Pidgen English by the characters that comprised the extras on M*A*S*H (and I wish I could recommend more highly the “You Make Super Happy Crack Honey Bar” but it tastes oddly tangy). Or you and you can armor the tips of your fingers in long, dangerously encrusted with jagged stuff, fake fingernails. What you cannot do is buy things you might actually need. That is, of course, unless you prefer to subsist on a diet primarily composed of boutique coffees and Cupcakes, Cupcakes, Cupcakes!
The problem crystallized as I waited to cross the street and walk too, too many blocks to a fully stocked grocery store. A couple stood at the corner nearby, one of them on a cell phone. They were trying to explain to some friends where to meet them.
It’s right between the occult magic shop and the day spa… no not THAT occult magic shop and day spa. If you’re looking at an occult magic shop and day spa that are right next to each other, you need to go down half a block and look on the other side of the street. Do you see that store with all the lingerie and Sponge Bob alarm clocks in the window? Just past that, there’s a cupcake place. Next to that there’s a tanning salon, but not the tanning salon with the big banner that says they do teeth whitening…Yes, that’s next to a cupcake place too, but the tanning salon I’m talking about is directly across from the cowboy boot store that sells small electronics. If you look just past THAT tanning salon, you’ll see another occult magic shop and day spa, and we’re at the board game place between them!
I should have stuck around to see if the couple managed to successfully connect with their friend. Instead I got preoccupied with counting the magic shops in my neighborhood. Maybe the owners of these occult shops are thinking we can just buy a book that will tell us how to conjure soy milk. But then, only in the last couple of years have soy milk manufacturers been able to rid the stuff of the lake of fire aftertaste. I fear the conjured version would just set us back to the 1997 version of soy milk.
And ya know—you’d think when the occult shop competition heats up, those guys would be hexing each other right and left. Heaping bad luck and whatnot upon one another. It honestly makes me wonder why there aren’t more inexplicable sulfuric smelling explosions in my neighborhood during, say, the witching hour. But so far, nothing. Just the predictable holiday gunfire out back in the alley. (Which I’m pretty sure is the doing of the one armed troll-guy at the end of the block.)
I griped about the soy milk dilemma to my mother last night, who currently inhabits two of America’s finest suburbs, depending upon the season. Not knowing what soy milk actually is or why in Heaven’s name, anyone would need to drink it, she was unimpressed with my suffering. She cannot imagine a world without big restaurants with parking lots and high-school girl servers and remarkably similar menus among them. And she thinks I should be more appreciative of the cupcakes.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Some Letters to Famous People
Dear Barack Obama,
I have one of your hats. It is the warmest hat I have ever owned.
Love,
Mazeppa
Dear Jay Levine,
I saw you in the CBS-2 news van yesterday on Michigan Avenue. I waved but I don’t think you saw me. When I waved, I said “Hi, Jay!”
Love,
Mazeppa
Dear Tom Hanks,
I saw the trailer for your new movie. It looks weird.
Love,
Mazeppa
Dear Rachael Ray,
You are so frenetic. You are the most frenetic person on television.
Love,
Mazeppa
I have one of your hats. It is the warmest hat I have ever owned.
Love,
Mazeppa
Dear Jay Levine,
I saw you in the CBS-2 news van yesterday on Michigan Avenue. I waved but I don’t think you saw me. When I waved, I said “Hi, Jay!”
Love,
Mazeppa
Dear Tom Hanks,
I saw the trailer for your new movie. It looks weird.
Love,
Mazeppa
Dear Rachael Ray,
You are so frenetic. You are the most frenetic person on television.
Love,
Mazeppa
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
What I Learned at the Library
I’ve discovered the library. To be more specific, the Harold Washington Library, the behemoth flagship branch of the Chicago Public Library. True, I’d actually been there once before, nearly twenty years ago when the building first opened. But I didn’t really explore it the way I have in the past several days. Circumstances have conspired to force me out of my home during my days off from the aerosol cheese factory. And a good friend suggested that I go get lost in the library. So I have.
Did you know you can take all the books you want? For free? And this particular branch has, I have discovered upon thorough perusal, every book ever published. It has the dishy theater/moviemaking memoir by Josh Logan that I owned when I was about ten, but was too young to appreciate the context of most of the anecdotes contained therein. It has multiple copies of Suzanne Somers’ book of poetry published before she rocketed to the success of Three’s Company. It has a bunch of cookbooks. And unlike at the bookstore, they don’t frown upon me taking one aside and copying a recipe or two. It has the score of every opera and most musical comedies I could think of. It even has a complete stock of the New Yorker, enabling me to sit down one day and read every brilliantly rendered film review Pauline Kael wrote in the 1970’s. All this for free.
I may never have to buy anything ever again.
Then there’s the computer word processing and internet access. I thought this would be a prime opportunity to resume my writing habits just like at home. Only at home, I don’t have anyone else sitting at either elbow, muttering curse words and gigglin. Responding, perhaps, to voices that other people cannot hear, smelling of that telltale combination of urine and… well, okay just urine mostly. But then again, conditions down at the aerosol cheese factory can be similar in terms of close quarters and olfactory overwhelm. (True, the scent of artificial cheddar-bacon-flavor may be heavenly when you first pop open that spray can of cheese product, but after a while, it wears on you.) What eventually got to me was not the experience of snuggling up between two people who were off their meds and inattentive to their hygiene. What was really distracting was the pornography. Each monitor is equipped with a privacy screen that effectively blocks from view the content of screens to your left and right. But the screen ahead of you, in the next row, is fully, dare I say, exposed.
I asked a librarian about the policy. She looked embarrassed and apologetic, wincing a little, and told me people are free to look at any misogynist, obscene, pornographic allowable by law.
It turns out, the Chicago Public Library has one of the most liberal policies in the country regarding using the internet to access porn. And I just don’t know what to think about that. It’s not as though I was traumatized by the site of it. It's not like I'm sitting here adding up the dollar amount to match the emotional distress I’m gonna sue them for. Rather, it’s the combined revulsion at the idea that my (not many, I’ll admit) tax dollars are helping to defray the cost of letting gross guys do gross stuff in the Public Freakin’ Library. There’s a bit of seediness about looking at porn in general, and I shudder to think how much seedier is the person who wants so very much to look at porn that they’re willing to make a trip to the library for it. These are not your average porn viewers. These are guys willing to sit elbow to elbow among rows of perfect strangers while watching their porn. These are people for whom watching porn is so important, they have decided it’s worth it to toss aside any scrap of dignity to which they might have been clinging, and sit in a public place, essentially announcing their creepiness to the world.
I’ve always been under the impression that there’s more or less one objective being pursued when people look at porn. But I’m pretty sure, however liberal the CPL’s policies are, they’re not likely to permit any one-handed typing. So ya gotta wonder how someone is getting much of a thrill under library porn-viewing conditions.
I advise you: Don’t wonder too long. You’ll soon realize, as did I, the logical conclusion that watching porn in close proxemity to you is a central part of the thrill for these guys. See? You’re grossed out now, aren't you. You thought about it too long, didn’t you? Now you have the same sick feeling that I did, don’t you?
The thing is, having internet access to porn at the library does not invite your average porn-watching guy into the fold. They are appropriately ashamed of themselves like good, healthy Americans. No, the CPL policy inadvertantly invites the guys who think a lot like sex offenders. Guys who choreograph their sexual behaviors to include others as tools (objects) in seeking their own gratification without regard to the impact of their behavior upon others. Now, I’m not saying the guys you can find at any given time watching porn at the library are necessarily child molesters. I’m just saying they think like them.
But what are we to do? It is perhaps the stickiest among sticky wickets, ain’t it? Should we put filters that prevent viewing porn on library computers? Other major libraries have done this. But then we get into that whole dilemma about what’s obscene and what isn’t, and I, for one, don’t want to march down that road. We might cordon off a certain area for unfiltered internet viewing so us decent folk don’t have to look at it. But that smacks of a social quarantine that could essentially limit freedoms by creating untenable stigma, the internet access equivalent of a poll tax meant to exclude some people. Besides that, it would likely force some art student to sit among the creepy porn guys in order to access information about some controversial modern art thing or other. And I ask you, would you want to be the librarian stuck with the job of monitoring the porn room? Would you want to be the custodian who cleans that place up at the end of the day?
I thought not.
So even though I’m loathe know think about what better uses for the library budget there might be than to support the habits of creepy porn guys, I have accepted that it’s the painful cost of freedom for the rest of us. And I have decided upon my own policy. Just as the First Ammendment should protect right of some behaviors I find objectionable, it should also protect my right to walk up behind them and say, “Hey! That’s my cousin, Myrna!” and proceed to detail the ups and downs of Myrna’s difficulty keeping a job, inability to collect child-support, and her struggles with crystal meth addiction. I may not have a choice about being used as an object whose presence may facilitate creepy sexual behavior, but I can sufficiently humanize Myrna (and her three to five friends) to rain on the porn parade for at least a little while.
Did you know you can take all the books you want? For free? And this particular branch has, I have discovered upon thorough perusal, every book ever published. It has the dishy theater/moviemaking memoir by Josh Logan that I owned when I was about ten, but was too young to appreciate the context of most of the anecdotes contained therein. It has multiple copies of Suzanne Somers’ book of poetry published before she rocketed to the success of Three’s Company. It has a bunch of cookbooks. And unlike at the bookstore, they don’t frown upon me taking one aside and copying a recipe or two. It has the score of every opera and most musical comedies I could think of. It even has a complete stock of the New Yorker, enabling me to sit down one day and read every brilliantly rendered film review Pauline Kael wrote in the 1970’s. All this for free.
I may never have to buy anything ever again.
Then there’s the computer word processing and internet access. I thought this would be a prime opportunity to resume my writing habits just like at home. Only at home, I don’t have anyone else sitting at either elbow, muttering curse words and gigglin. Responding, perhaps, to voices that other people cannot hear, smelling of that telltale combination of urine and… well, okay just urine mostly. But then again, conditions down at the aerosol cheese factory can be similar in terms of close quarters and olfactory overwhelm. (True, the scent of artificial cheddar-bacon-flavor may be heavenly when you first pop open that spray can of cheese product, but after a while, it wears on you.) What eventually got to me was not the experience of snuggling up between two people who were off their meds and inattentive to their hygiene. What was really distracting was the pornography. Each monitor is equipped with a privacy screen that effectively blocks from view the content of screens to your left and right. But the screen ahead of you, in the next row, is fully, dare I say, exposed.
I asked a librarian about the policy. She looked embarrassed and apologetic, wincing a little, and told me people are free to look at any misogynist, obscene, pornographic allowable by law.
It turns out, the Chicago Public Library has one of the most liberal policies in the country regarding using the internet to access porn. And I just don’t know what to think about that. It’s not as though I was traumatized by the site of it. It's not like I'm sitting here adding up the dollar amount to match the emotional distress I’m gonna sue them for. Rather, it’s the combined revulsion at the idea that my (not many, I’ll admit) tax dollars are helping to defray the cost of letting gross guys do gross stuff in the Public Freakin’ Library. There’s a bit of seediness about looking at porn in general, and I shudder to think how much seedier is the person who wants so very much to look at porn that they’re willing to make a trip to the library for it. These are not your average porn viewers. These are guys willing to sit elbow to elbow among rows of perfect strangers while watching their porn. These are people for whom watching porn is so important, they have decided it’s worth it to toss aside any scrap of dignity to which they might have been clinging, and sit in a public place, essentially announcing their creepiness to the world.
I’ve always been under the impression that there’s more or less one objective being pursued when people look at porn. But I’m pretty sure, however liberal the CPL’s policies are, they’re not likely to permit any one-handed typing. So ya gotta wonder how someone is getting much of a thrill under library porn-viewing conditions.
I advise you: Don’t wonder too long. You’ll soon realize, as did I, the logical conclusion that watching porn in close proxemity to you is a central part of the thrill for these guys. See? You’re grossed out now, aren't you. You thought about it too long, didn’t you? Now you have the same sick feeling that I did, don’t you?
The thing is, having internet access to porn at the library does not invite your average porn-watching guy into the fold. They are appropriately ashamed of themselves like good, healthy Americans. No, the CPL policy inadvertantly invites the guys who think a lot like sex offenders. Guys who choreograph their sexual behaviors to include others as tools (objects) in seeking their own gratification without regard to the impact of their behavior upon others. Now, I’m not saying the guys you can find at any given time watching porn at the library are necessarily child molesters. I’m just saying they think like them.
But what are we to do? It is perhaps the stickiest among sticky wickets, ain’t it? Should we put filters that prevent viewing porn on library computers? Other major libraries have done this. But then we get into that whole dilemma about what’s obscene and what isn’t, and I, for one, don’t want to march down that road. We might cordon off a certain area for unfiltered internet viewing so us decent folk don’t have to look at it. But that smacks of a social quarantine that could essentially limit freedoms by creating untenable stigma, the internet access equivalent of a poll tax meant to exclude some people. Besides that, it would likely force some art student to sit among the creepy porn guys in order to access information about some controversial modern art thing or other. And I ask you, would you want to be the librarian stuck with the job of monitoring the porn room? Would you want to be the custodian who cleans that place up at the end of the day?
I thought not.
So even though I’m loathe know think about what better uses for the library budget there might be than to support the habits of creepy porn guys, I have accepted that it’s the painful cost of freedom for the rest of us. And I have decided upon my own policy. Just as the First Ammendment should protect right of some behaviors I find objectionable, it should also protect my right to walk up behind them and say, “Hey! That’s my cousin, Myrna!” and proceed to detail the ups and downs of Myrna’s difficulty keeping a job, inability to collect child-support, and her struggles with crystal meth addiction. I may not have a choice about being used as an object whose presence may facilitate creepy sexual behavior, but I can sufficiently humanize Myrna (and her three to five friends) to rain on the porn parade for at least a little while.
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