Nobody's Business

"Wow! Whatta Dorcus!"

OK, gang, as you were. This post is not devoted to any assaults on liberty, for a change. This being Friday, I thought I'd draw your attention to something that's both thigh-slapping and disturbing: men's fashion from the sixties and seventies. You'll be happy to know you'll still be tsk-tsk-ing and shaking your head and going "un-fucking-believable," just as you normally do when you visit here.

Today's destination is the inimitable James Lileks' web tribute to that epoch's monstrous menswear. I just spent ten minutes taking in his 'Selections From the Dorcus Collection' and I don't honestly know what hurts the most:

My jaws from the grimacing and laughing;
My throat from the involuntary shrieking;
My eyes from viewing the truly fiendish fashion photos.

Nothing I write could top Lileks' superior wit (two parts David Sedaris, one part eighties-era Joe Queenan, back when he was still funny), so I'm just going to give this over to James himself:

What's the well-dressed professional assassin wearing nowadays? Clothes that reflect his essential traits of cruelty and ugliness, his abberant values and dead black heart — that's what! You might not be a hired killer, but with the Dorcus line of Jackal jackets you can stride onto the tarmac with a look that says: Women fall at my feet. Granted, they are usually bleeding heavily from the exit wound, but that's your style, tiger.

Whole Dorcus collection here. Don't miss the Dorcus He-Skirt, capable of inducing spasms that will tax your brain and body as badly as the neighborhood louts beating your sissy ass if you ever showed up in one.

FCC Lawyer: "This Time It's Personal."

The two people behind the very neat website PopularityDialer received a nastygram from the FCC recently, a citation that ordered them to cease operations. Reluctantly, they did, although they don't quite understand what law they are alleged to have broken, or how they broke it, or why the FCC claims to have web jurisdiction in the first place.

It seems that an FCC lawyer who was the victim of a third-party prank involving PopularityDialer (some nogoodnik had abused the phone-dialing site to schedule repeated robo-calls to the lawyer's home) went a little nutso and decided to go nuclear on the first target she could think of. Never mind that she could have simply added her number to the site's do-not-call list, right there on the home page, to solve the problem.

"I don't see how a Web site falls within the jurisdiction of the FCC or how it would cause TCPA violations," conceded an FCC official contacted for an explanation. Writes the New York Times' David Pogue, not without reason:

So let me get this straight: The same F.C.C. that sent the citation has no idea why it sent the citation?

It's pretty obvious why: An overreaching government employee with a law degree has abused her power by intimidating and harassing a legal website operation that she had a personal beef with. On her employer's time, too (your tax dollars at work!).

FCC, FU, indeed.

'Teddy Bear Teacher' Convicted

A Sudanese court has just sentenced Gillian Gibbons to 15 days in jail and deportation. Gibbons, an English teacher in Khartoum, was found guilty of having insulted Islam. The accusation came after she asked her class of indigenous six- and seven-year-olds to name a teddy bear she'd brought to school, and they settled on Mohammed.

Her lawyers have reported receiving death threats.

"I am threatened, that's why I'm carrying a gun in court," defense lawyer Abdel Khalig Abdallah said, opening his coat to reveal a revolver during a break in the trial.

Around the time of Gibbons' arrest, according to the principal,

"There were men with big beards [in the school] asking where she was and saying they wanted to kill her."

All Hail Mo, My Next Dog

When I get a dog again, I'm going to call him Mohammed — Mo for short — in honor of Gillian Gibbons.

Please note, however, that Mo could also be short for Moses, so that'll give the Christians something to get their (possibly holy) undergarments in a bunch about, too (although I somehow doubt that any modern-day Christians would want to cut off my head for my supposed blasphemy, as throngs of their Muslim brethren happily would).

Wait, there's more. Read my pet's name backward (popular among Satanists, I'm told) and he's clearly some kind of Hindu / Buddhist half-deity (if cows and elephants can be revered as holy creatures, why not a cuddly golden retriever or a bright German shepherd?).

And of course, you know what you get when you read 'dog' backwards.

I'm just sayin'.

Nanny State Keeps Kids and Parents Guessing

You never know with the Nanny State. Junior might be forcibly taken to a mental institution for eating too much and not exercising enough; or those in power might instead threaten to fine him for running and playing in the local park, just like these kids were:

In recent weeks, the kids and parents have been meeting at the park after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The energetic youngsters have been running a lap of the three-oval park and play games after school twice a week. Dad Grant Cohen said they were approached last week by a Glen Eira local laws officer who told them organised groups weren't allowed on the grounds.

"It's ridiculous — we're just three families who all live five minutes away," Mr Cohen said. "We started coming down here because the kids would be getting home after school and playing computer games... We wanted to give them a chance to run around. This park should be full of kids doing exactly that."

Now the kids have gone from running around to being on the run — forced to be fitness fugitives.

"We rang the council and they said that ... as long as we were in a group we'd still be fined," Mr Cohen said.

New Jersey's Epic Battle Against Twofers

Jerry Fischer, director of the New Jersey Alcoholic Beverage Control agency, oversees 22 investigators. These state employees have been dutifully cracking down on happy-hour-type twofers in bars. Fisher proudly explains that his undercover sleuths, late one recent night,

...found signs on tables advertising a two-for-one sale on kamikazes, drinks that typically contain an ounce of vodka and an ounce of triple sec liquor. Such a promotion is illegal because "it's designed just to get people drunk," Fisher says.

So at double the advertised price, the bar owner would have been golden. But providing a discount to his customers, hey, that's no longer his prerogative — that's a crime.

It's enough to drive a man to drink.

NYPD: Driving Down Crime By Creating It

Plainclothes New York City police officers have a new hobby: leaving wallets in public places such as department stores and fast-food eateries, then staking out the spot. The idea is that maybe someone will pick up the wallet and not turn it in right then and there. In that case, the cops pounce and arrest the freshly-minted criminal (a solid majority of those nabbed have no prior arrests).

I'm no law wiz, so I couldn't say if this scheme meets the legal definition for police entrapment.

It's asinine regardless. That's partly because it's specifically designed to do disproportional damage to the alleged perp.

The earliest decoy operation, last year, involved purses and wallets stuffed with a couple of hundred dollars at most. If you tried to make off with one, you'd get charged with petty larceny, a misdemeanor, though you might still be looking at a year in jail. Now the NYPD, obviously pleased with its fine handiwork, has upped the ante. The new decoy wallets contain at least one credit card in addition to some cash. What's the difference? This:

Because the theft of a credit card is grand larceny, a Class E felony, those convicted could face sentences of up to four years.

To its credit, the Manhattan District Attorney's office has begun dismissing last year's cases, perhaps in part due to a ruling by a Brooklyn judge who reminded the NYPD that people are in fact by law allowed 10 days to turn in found property.

Unfortunately, the local cops must be hard of hearing, or maybe they believe they're the final arbiters of what the law ought to be, because they're still at it, creating interesting cases such as this one:

Aquarius Cheers, a 31-year-old Manhattan man who said he was on a shopping expedition with his wife, spotted a Verizon shopping bag with a cellphone and iPod inside at the 59th Street station of the No. 1 train. As he was looking in the bag, a train arrived. Mr. Cheers said he and his wife boarded, rushed past a uniformed officer, bringing along the bag with the intention of looking for a receipt. Undercover officers then grabbed him. After his case was reported by NY1, the prosecutors vacated the charges.

Mr. Cheers, at the very most, might be guilty of having a name too unlikely for even a T.C. Boyle novel.

Considerably more bizarre than his name, however, is the fact that New York's finest have such obscene amounts of time on their hands that they must go out and create crime in order to fight it.

I Smell Like a Rose, You Stink to High Heaven

It's not often that I nod in happy agreement with a code enforcement officer, of all people, but Dan Wellington seems like a guy with a good head on his shoulders.

Wellington, who works for the city of Bangor, Maine, was called to the scene when a recently opened, perfectly legal cigar parlor, despite its double air filtration and exhaust system, began to get on the (olfactory) nerves of the pizza-joint owner next door. Philip Nadeau of Spanky's Pizza claims that he and his customers can smell smoke wafting in from the lounge, and that the odor is "atrocious. It's more than atrocious, it's horrible."

It's more than horrible, it's unpleasant! It's more than unpleasant, it's not altogether lovely!

But anyway, Nadeau demanded that the city come sniff out the problem. Code enforcer Dan Wellington did the honors, shrugged, and kindly gave his professional assessment to the local paper:

"You can smell it both ways. They're getting the smell of the pizza in the smoke shop."

Spank that, Nadeau.

Smoker? You Must Be Mad.

What should a patient with severe mental problems expect from the doctor he sees for help?

If it's up to University of California professor Steven A. Schroeder, that patient, if he uses tobacco products, needs nothing so much as a lecture about smoking. And it's urgent that all mental-health facilities ban smoking, not only indoors but outside, too. No more smoking breaks for people who are a little funny in the head.

Schroeder seems to claim he's advocating such a solution out of perfectly selfless solicitude (never mind that he earns his salary by helming something called the "Smoking Cessation Leadership Center"). But underneath the faux-humanitarian varnish, his little newspaper essay fairly crackles with nastiness and innuendo.

[S]moking is concentrated among people with mental illness, often compounded by substance-abuse disorders such as alcoholism. ... The facts about smoking and mental illness are stark. An estimated 44 percent of the cigarettes sold in the United States are consumed by people with mental illness. This is because so many people who have mental illnesses smoke (estimates run from 50 percent to 80 percent, compared with about 20 percent of the general population) and because they smoke so many cigarettes a day.

This veers very, very close to planting the suggestion that people who smoke are by definition mentally ill, or might as well be. Certainly Schroeder does nothing to dispel that notion.

And consider this tell-tale cri de coeur:

Why did [mental] patients, their families and clinicians do nothing to help smokers quit? One reason is well-intended but uninformed compassion. The reasoning goes something like: "Poor Joe is suffering so much from his illness and gets such pleasure from his cigarettes that I don't want to take them away from him."

You'd expect some riposte at this point, some explanation — however cursory — of why such a sympathetic weighing of pro and cons, risks and benefits, must be considered out of the question, but Schroeder doesn't provide it.

I shouldn't be surprised. In the world of the Tobacco Taliban, no gray areas exist, no ethical or humane conundrum could ever present itself when the subject is as clear-cut as smoking. Even thinking about such ambiguities, much less actually discussing them, would be an affront to the new orthodoxy that smoking is always bad, no matter how good it makes people feel.

Mitt Romney's "Three-Card Monte"

Christopher Hitchens sinks his recently overhauled British choppers into the Mayor of Stepford, a.k.a. Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney appears to think that, in respect of the bizarre beliefs of his church, he has come up with a twofer response. Not only can he decline to answer questions about these beliefs, he can also reap additional benefit from complaining that people keep asking him about them. In a video response of revolting sanctimony and self-pity last week, he responded to some allegedly anti-Mormon "push poll" calls in Iowa and New Hampshire by saying that it was "un-American" to bring up his "faith," especially "at a time when we are preparing for Thanksgiving," whatever that had to do with it. Additional interest is lent to this evasive tactic by the very well-argued case, made by Mark Hemingway in National Review Online, that it was actually the Romney campaign that had initiated the anti-Mormon push-poll calls in the first place! What's that? A threefer? Let me count the ways: You encourage the raising of an awkward question in such a way as to make it seem illegitimate. You then strike a hurt attitude and say that you are being persecuted for your faith. This, in turn, discourages other reporters from raising the question. Yes, that's the three-card monte.

So the question whether Romney wears the special Mormon undergarments propagated by his kooky cult has yet to be answered. Or asked. We wouldn't want to be seen as insufficiently respectful of religion, now would we?

Whole thing here.