AH-ha.

Many several years ago by now, my wife (who was, back then, my girlfriend) was babysitting for two children belonging to this family who lives nearby. She sent me a text message earlier in the night saying that she was craving a pickle, and that there were none in the refrigerator in the house occupied by the two children belonging to the family who lived nearby.

So, I procured a pickle from a local establishment which trades in such things, and I brought the chick who was, at that point, my girlfriend, a pickle.

She was elated. She invited me inside and, although we didn't have sex in these people's master bedroom as I'd been lead to believe we would by Hollywood, we did have an enjoyable conversation. At some point during my visit, my wife left me alone in these folks' living room so she could go do something babysitterly like put children to sleep or fold up the Twister mat or whatever. While she was gone, I was left to eyeball the immense, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf belonging to these people who lived nearby.

Philosophy.

Cooking.

History.

Theory.

Humor.

Literature.

Biography.

While the subjects and the heights and spines and the colors and the ages of these books all differed, one from the other, there was a common element that united all of these published, literary works, or unified most of them, at least.

Jewish.

Jewish authors.

Jewish themes.

Jewish titles.

Jewish slants and bents and perspectives.

My eyes narrowed and moved to the music collection, which I only had a brief moment to study before my then-girlfriend now-wife returned from upstairs.

Jewish composers.

Hebrew lyrics.

Jewish singer-songwriters.

Israeli orchestra.

Irritated, I abruptly cut my visit short and left the house, noticing, as I walked out, the "Evil Eye" hamsa by the front door as I passed.

I would qualify the rest of this post by saying, "I don't have a problem with being Jewish" but, clearly, that would be a lie.

I do. I do have a problem with it. In fact, I kind of can't stand it. I reek of Jewishness.

"I've got a friend who's Jewish, but he doesn't look Jewish," a coworker of mine said to me recently, "but you really LOOK Jewish."

That might sound horrible and inappropriate and offensive, but he ain't just whistlin' Hatikvah.

In Dublin, my wife and I arrived at the departure point for our tour bus on Friday, August 5th. There was an elderly lady standing in front of the steps to the hostel, her bags packed, her slicker on, her teeth-- well, I don't know where her teeth were. Probably in her suitcase. But her eyebrows were drawn on and she was ready to go. We made superficial smalltalk with her about Ireland before my wife said, "I need to go get breakfast, do you want to come with me?" I said no, because this lady was starting to get entertaining, I thought. She had just checked her watch (which read five minutes of nine) and announced, in a thick German accent,

"Ah. Zey are late."

There was no way I was going to miss an opportunity to hang around this woman, I thought, so I said to my wife, "No thanks, you go on ahead. I'll stay here in case the bus shows up."

My wife rolled her eyes at me, thinking she was trying to rescue me from this woman's clutches, and disappeared around a Dublin street corner. The woman, who I silently named "Gerta" chatted amiably for another couple minutes until a natural silence interceded between us. She broke it with,

"You are from Israel."

Notice the distinct dearth of any interrogative punctuation mark. Another silence, this one less natural, took its place before I replied with,

"Uh-- no. We're... I'm-- we're American."

"Oh," she said, "AH-ha." She peppered her conversation with "AH-ha's", making sure to really emphasize the first syllable. "But," Gerta said, "that is where your people are from. Israel."

Again-- no question mark.

"Yes," I said, suddenly wishing I'd gone for that croissant with my wife as sweat trickled into my asshole hair-forest, "my father is from Israel."

"AH! AH-ha!" she ejaculated, with a satisfied smile, indicating "Got one!" on her face. "Your nose, though, your nose," she continued mercilessly, "is Persian. You have a very Persian nose."

Yes, I thought, and you have no teeth or eyebrows. Did you lose them in the war?

Instead of saying that, I came up with, "Well, my father was born in Iraq."

"AH-ha."

I spent a good healthy portion of my 55 minutes in the chair yesterday talking about what it means to me to be Jewish, both at home and abroad, about what it's like having the map of Israel (or Persia) tattooed onto your face, about being perceived as weak, nebbishy, schmecky, cheap, stuck up, intellectual, a nerd, a schdork, a minority, with a big nose. And kinky hair. In 1993, "Frasier" first came on the air, and introduced the world to Niles Crane, the hopelessly pedantic, more hopelessly romantic brother to Frasier. He was always dressed in a suit, and had a head of beautiful, flax-colored, thin, soft, WASPish hair.

When I was thirteen, I went into the barbershop owned by the man who, many years before, had given me my first haircut.

"Bob," I asked, "can you do something to my hair to make it look like David Hyde Pierce's."

He looked at me with a mixture of sympathy, confusion, and despair.

"I don't think so," he said. "But you've got beautiful, thick hair. You'll appreciate it some day."

I'm still waiting, Bob.

It's Friday, Fuckers.

People get so excited about the fact that it's Friday. Not just that it's this specific Friday, but Friday in general. They can't wait for the week to be over. The feeling that I think a lot of people get is like they've been holding in their doodie all week long and then, on Friday, they finally get to take this mongantic dump all over the place and they get to walk listlessly with that rapturous, cathartic feeling all day long as they drift effortlessly into the weekend.

I'll bet more people, statistically, shart themselves on Friday than any other day of the week. I have absolutely no research whatsoever to back up that assumption, just my good ol' gut, but if you're wise, sista, you'll put your paycheck on my gut. You know-- like a shot of... um... alcohol, that people put-- you know, they drink it out of peoples' navels. Not when they're standing, obviously-- I mean, if I understand it correctly. It's, like... They-- nevermind.

I don't get particularly sharted up about Fridays anymore, and I suppose part of the reason that's true is the fact that I work every other weekend: Saturday and Sunday, 7a-3p. So, Friday takes on rather a different flavor to it. The nice thing about my work schedule is that my paycheck gets automatically deposited into my checking account each of the Fridays of the weekends that I work, which definitely serves to soften the blow that I'm spending half of my weekends on-duty at a psychiatric hospital.

But only just so much. Because, let's face it: that's a pretty hard blow. And, yeah-- she said that. While wearing knee-pads and a goalie facemask.

While, as I admitted, I don't have any research about Friday shartings, I do have research that backs up a believe that I've long held, and that's that nobody (or hardly anybody) reads my blog on Fridays. I don't know what it is-- at first I thought, Jesus, I must have a lot of Orthodox Jewish readers, but I sort of kind of doubt it-- but the rate at which my weekly readership/click-throughs/hits declines on Fridays is as alarming as it is regular. Each week, it's always the same-- pretty much ever since I started this ridiculum.

So, I was thinking to myself, as I sit here absolutely stewing in hog's anus 102-degree heat, if nobody's reading this on Friday, I can pretty much say whatever I want, and it won't really matter a Goddamn. Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Apron-- don't you pretty much say whatever you want no matter what day of the week it is?"

And the obvious answer is: No.

No, I don't.

Sure, I say a lot of shit, and some of it is what I want to say, and some of it is offensive, to someone, probably (remember when I royally pissed off that chick with diabetes? And what about when I maligned that asshole singer Sean Hoots? That was awesome.) but do I really let myself go, totally unrestrained by the conventions of grammar, style, and, yes, propriety? Of course I don't. Because I have an audience, however small and skintimate it may be, and I have a lot of respect for you. I mean, not for your taste in literature, obviously, but I have a copious cumbucket-loads of respect for the fact that you choose to read this, instead of or amongst tons of other online detritus that you could be using to rot your synapses.

You're choosing to be here. And that's, frankly, unbelievable-- to me, at least.

I love you. I wouldn't love you more if you were covered in bacon and chocolate sitting on top of the hood of a 1963 VW Beetle playing the oboe solo from the overture to the "Yeomen of the Guard".

You're here.

Why are you here?

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself that question?

Meh-- on second thought: don't.

I had this idea that today's post would consist of every offensive, hateful, disgusting, perverse thought I could dream up and put down, because, really, if no one's reading it, what does it matter. Sure, it'll get picked up and read eleven months from now when some racist masturbator types "cum-nig" into Google while, Anchluss, his German Shepherd is licking precisely-placed peanut butter out of his asshole, and I'm okay with that.

Seriously, this post was just going to be a list of terrible, awful, nasty things. But I thought taking a minute to let you know how thankful I am for you would be a better way to spend my time. And yours.

Besides: it's Friday, Fuckers. Let's all shit ourselves or whatever.

The White Birds Did It

No doubt you've heard by now about the 5,000-or-so dead black birds who died, inexplicably, on New Years Eve.

Inexplicably, my ass. The fucking white birds did it.

Whenever there is violence perpetrated against whites, everybody is super-quick to point the finger at blacks. In fact, I wrote a post about this a long time ago called "The Black Guy Did It." I'd hyperlink to it, but, you know...

Anyway, are our memories so short and faint? Do we not remember the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, when Southern blacks faced violence in untold numbers at the hands of angry whites, railing against integration and Rosa Parks and James May and the right to vote? Doesn't anybody remember that?

And now, in Arkansas, we have thousands of dead birds-- dead black birds-- and is anybody pointing an accusatory wing or beak at the fucking white birds?

No.

The news media is too cowardly. They're afraid. Christ-- I'll bet the head of AOL-Time Warner owns a few murderous doves himself. I'll bet that the owner of Knight-Ridder is having an affair with an albatross. No doubt there's some fucking seagull feathers in the pockets of Ann Curry and Dianne Sawyer.

Disgusting. That's all I have to say.

We're talking about mass murder, here, people. Thousands and thousands of deceased black birds, birds of color, and where is the public outcry? Where is Jesse Jackson? Where is Al Sharpton? Had these birds all been taken out by white police sharpshooters, well, you can bet there'd be rallies up the ying-yang. But no. Because this crime was perpetrated by an anonymous squadron of white supremacist birds, who answer to no calling and no master other than the power that justifies the wanton slaying of black birds, there are no speeches, no righteous indignation, no shouts from the pulpit.

Doesn't anybody find it somewhat unsettling that not a single white bird was felled in this 2011 inaugural massacre? Isn't it just a little too... convenient? A little too... curious?

Not everything is racial, I know-- but one thing is clear: this is.

And I would never be one to preach violence under normal circumstances, in normal times, but let me tell you brothers and sisters something-- these are not normal circumstances, and nor are they normal times. WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF RACIST AVIAN OPPRESSION AND IT IS TIME TO BEAR ARMS IN DEFENSE OF OUR NATION'S PRECIOUS BLACK BIRDS.

That's right. You heard it here on My Masonic Apron. A call to take up arms. If you, in your travels, come up on a so-called "peaceful" dove-- don't be afraid to shoot it right in the face.

Yeah, that's right. REVENGE!

Snow-owl? Right between the eyes.

White swan? Choke the racist life out of that gimpy little neck.

White-tailed Tropic Bird? You know what to do. You. Know.

REVENGE, YOU WHITE-POWER BIRD ASSASSAINS!

And some day, some fine day, maybe the black birds of Beebe, Arkansas will fly, free from fear from their villainous oppressors, and, together, we will vanquish the white power birds. Together.

Amen.

Dusty Old Racism

My wife and I went to Cape May yesterday. Going to the beach in mid-October has its advantages. There are no beach tags, no lifeguards to collect said beach tags, no annoying people listening to the Phillies game on portable radios, no annoying people smoking, no annoying children kicking sand in your face....

No, well, people.

It was 71 degrees. The perfect type of weather for consuming freshly-prepared chicken and vegetarian sandwiches on portable chairs, running lines for my upcoming production of Iolanthe, and basking in the glow of four years of marriage to my partner. In crime.

Don't worry-- it's mostly misdemeanors. We're pretty vanilla.

Our mid-October trek to the beach was sandwiched in between trips to antique shops. Antiquing is a strange sort of hobby that neither my wife nor I enjoyed very much until we got, as Basil Fawlty would say, "manacled together," and, ever since then, it is something that we very much enjoy doing. Typically, we have a mission. We need some obscure item for some even more obscure reason. Case in point: we found one day that we needed a china cabinet. Why would a thirty-year-old and his twenty-nine-year-old bride necessitate a china cabinet? Because my wife's great-aunt Frieda (my wife's father's father's sister) passed away many several years ago, and neither her son nor his children wanted her prized Limoges china.

Well, we wanted it! Bring on the crap-- we'll find a home for it and, if not, we'll buy a home for it. (Actually, my mother-in-law paid for the china cabinet, which was very nice. We paid for the rental van to schlep it to our house.)

Hunting for the china cabinet was entertaining. Antiquing becomes more of an adventure when you have an actual mission, something specific you are looking to procure. A pair of antique eyeglasses for a play, a pocketwatch to add to the collection, some odd piece of Victoriana that you just can't do without when you're, um, gay.

However, this weekend there was no specific mission, nothing on the horizon or agenda that we needed or that was lacking in our lives. We were just another couple, puttering around the vast depths of the past's detritus, seeing if something glittery or something threadbare might catch our eye.

Nothing really did, and we bought exactly nothing (well, except for an overpriced Kit-Kat Bar [not antique] because we were on a bit of a sun-drenched sugar-low by around 3:20pm) but we still enjoyed our little romp through the decades and centuries.

I don't particularly know why people go antiquing, and I'm not even particularly sure why we do it, but we do it. We don't have especially a lot of money to toss around, and, when we do make purchases at antique shops, they usually aren't terribly momentous ones. A $40 typewriter, a $15 pair of glasses, nothing very dramatic or impactful. Maybe that's why I like antiquing, because there's something that makes it accessible for everyone. We know we're not going to come home with a $3,000 armoire, and that's okay with me.

I like antiquing in various parts of the country to see the objects that pop up in different geographical areas. Antiquing in Hershey is fun because of all the chocolate-related business. Antiquing in Lancaster yielded lots of Amish goodies, and also lots of Pennsylvania Railroad stuff, including comfy-looking woolen blankets given out to passengers emblazoned with the PRR logo. Gone are the days of such luxuries.

Some antique shops have bins of shitty old VHS tapes. These boxes are required, by law, to contain the following:

"Sweatin' to the Oldies with Richard Simmons"

"Top Gun"

"Porkys"

"Uncle Buck"

"Fatal Attraction"

"Caddyshack II"

And there's always some Jesus shit for children, with some terrible drawing of J. C. wearing a dress with his arms outstretched and a camel and a sheep standing around looking stupid and a big star shining in the sky or something.

And then there's always the Nazi stuff. In the larger antique marts that are home to multiple vendors, there are booths manned by the following archetypes:

Charming elderly lady

Catty elderly lady

Morbidly obese elderly lady with cyanosis, attached to an oxygen tank

Ex-hippy middle-aged woman with hair down to her ass

Liver-spotted elderly man who smells like a century-old humidor

Vaguely homosexual man wearing sunglasses and a kimono and smells kinda purty

Ex-army whackjob with PTSD and a twitch

The latter gentleman is most typically the one who's got the Nazi stuff, and it's challenging being an overtly Jewish schnozzite walking past this type of antique-dealer's booth without feeling a bit, well, prickly. And scared. And moist in the trousers-- and not in the good way, either. There's just something about seeing a case containing a bunch of knives bigger than my torso, surrounded by German army officers' uniforms and swastikas and SS patches everywhere that kind of makes you want to lose your lunch.

There's also, of course, the black stuff. I jokingly refer to it as "Negrobilia." Aunt Jemima grins at you in thick-lipped consumeristic glee from inside alarm clocks, transfered onto serving plates, from her original cardboard and paper boxes and advertisements-- and you can still see her in the supermarket, turning stomachs of liberal-minded white folks since 1893. There's ceramic renderings of wide-eyed elderly black men in sharecropper's garb settin' on down on a fencepost, suckin' down some watermelon, boss, and salt-and-pepper shakers made to look like a slave and his wife. Let's not even get started on the creeptastic Al Jolson record covers. Jazz hands, indeed.

And, somehow, it's perfectly okay to put all that schlock out for sale, amongst the rotary telephones and the filigree engagement rings with the old mine-cut diamonds, the red-handled kitchen tools, and the Victorian hair mourning jewelry. Don't ask me why, or how, because it always still feels wrong to me.

Then again, so does Victorian hair mourning jewelry.

Beautiful White Children Are Missing

20somethings amuse me, and I guess, as a twenty-nine-year-old, I can still say that and sound self-aware without sounding crusty. I often balk at the things they say and do-- the vapidity, the insipidity, the shameless vanity and unapologetic trendiness, the egomaniacal self-engorgement.

The overwhelming propensity to treat "The Daily Show" as an actual news source.

Oh, is this what being "counterculture" has become? Lame!

Then again, if you want lame, come join me, my snoozing wife, and the dogs on the couch for a round of "The Today Show." If you only got your news from "The Today Show," you would be convinced that the most pressing issues of import in our world are Tiger Woods' pink-seeking missiledick and Joe Biden proclaiming healthcare to be a "big fucking deal."

Which, by the way, it is.

Also, if all you watched for news was "The Today Show," you would be unalterably convinced that only beautiful white children go missing in America.

While I don't have real, hard-n-fast statistics to back up my claim (I don't need them-- this isn't a scholarly article-- I was never very good at writing those anyway-- far too much passion, you know) I can tell you that my anecdotal observance of "The Today Show" missing child content is overwhelmingly tilted towards photogenic white children. Just this morning, they announced that a girl named "Kayleah" was missing. Now, I admit that this is probably racist of me, but, when I saw the spelling of the name on the screen, I said to my wife, "Oh my God, are they finally profiling a missing black girl?"

My wife, of course, was asleep, her head thrown back on the sofa cushion and her mouth unceremoniously open, trying to catch another few minutes of pre-commute sleep. Needless to say, she didn't respond.

Then, a moment or two later, they showed a picture of the missing girl. White.

Living as I do just a couple of short minutes away from Philadelphia, I know that black children go missing-- because I sometimes watch the local news. The local news cannot possibly get away with singlemindedly promoting and publicizing the plight of grief-stricken Caucasian families whose children have been plucked from their grasp. In Philly-- black kids get abducted all the time: by perverts hanging around playgrounds and schools, by their parents or relatives, by their Baby Daddies, by criminals and by miscreants and by ne'er-do-wells, by, well, kidnappers. Sometimes they're returned safely. Sometimes, they're returned in bodybags.

Somehow, neither event seems to warrant the national spotlight.

There's an old news maxim: "If it bleeds, it leads." I suppose a mantra for the new age of news about abductees, and even murder victims could be: "If it's white, it sees the light."

When I had my old blog, I wrote a post that slammed the "New York Daily News" for repeatedly profiling the murders of young, attractive, white women. One was a former model, slashed to death on the subway, an inglorious end for anyone, one was found tossed in a dumpster like, well, like yesterday's "New York Daily News." One was stuffed between a mattress and a wall, killed by a jealous boyfriend. In the text of these articles, there was almost always some reference to the victim's physical beauty. The references were never in quotation marks, the comments of a family friend or a relative, but they were embedded within the text of the article, presented by the reporter as just another fact-- no different than the location of the crime or the description of the murder weapon. Words like "attractive," "beautiful," "very pretty" were all used liberally. And, after reading the fourth or fifth story like this, I started to think, "do ugly people get murdered in New York City?" and, if they do, do the reporters write:

"Silvio Carnacci, a foul-smelling, unshaven 54-year-old Italian immigrant with three real teeth and one hair-covered mole on his forehead was found dead in his apartment yesterday morning by two patrolmen from the 9th Precinct answering a distress call. One of the officers was 6'2" and handsome in a classic way with a Romanesque nose and broad shoulders, his partner, however, had chin acne and a slight limp."

Sometimes I think back to the night when Barack Obama got elected President of this country. At that time, my wife and I lived in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, and people were blaring their car horns all goddamn night, even banging on kitchen pots and pans with spoons in the middle of the street. I think maybe some of those people were heralding Obama's election as the beginning of the end of racism in America.

I don't know. I still only see pictures of missing white children on TV.

Black and Blue

There's been a lot of ink spilt, both very recently, and in the short history of this country about the relationship between African-Americans and law enforcement. Two very recent incidents stick out like sore thumbs as concerns the ever-flowing controversy that surrounds the black and the blue: the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his own home in Cambridge, Mass, and the whirlwind that has erupted here in Philadelphia surrounding the unofficial online meeting place for Philadelphia police officers, www.domelights.com.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with both or neither, here's a quick sum:

1.) A few days ago, Cambridge Police were summoned to a home by a passerby who observed two African-American males trying to force entry into said home. When the police arrived, there was a verbal altercation between officers and one of the males who was identified eventually as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard professor and the person who lived at that home (he was having difficulty opening his front door, and so he had forced his way into his own home). According to the arresting officer, Gates became "agitated" and disruptive, and he was placed under arrest for disorderly conduct. The charges were dropped after a maelstrom of protest from the Cambridge community, Gates' lawyer, and Al Sharpton. Last night, during his press conference about healthcare, President Barack Obama addressed the incident, stating that the did "not have all the facts" but that the "Cambridge Police acted stupidly."

2.) Also a few days ago, the Guardian Civic League, Philadelphia's local chapter of the National Black Police Association, filed an injunction to attempt to ban on-duty officers from logging in and posting articles or commentaries on the website www.domelights.com. Domelights was created and is maintained by a Philadelphia Police Department sergeant and is, according to its own text, a "forum for interaction, information exchange and friendly debate among police officers and law enforcement agents, as well as their friends and supporters." The Guardian Civic League claimed that hostile and/or racist comments are frequently posted on the site about black police officers, creating a hostile and racially charged work environment. The League wants the site shut down, but the courts have requested that all parties involved preserve all relevant comments on the site and settle the matter out of court.

I have no idea what to say about the first incident. Is breaking into your own house a crime? No. Did the police initially know the man they approached was breaking into his own house? No. Was Professor Gates being verbally abusive? I don't know. Did the arresting officer "follow the letter of the law" in arresting Gates? I don't know. What exactly happened inside that house, blow-by-blow? I don't know. So I really don't feel it's fair to comment on the case, and I really don't think it was fair for President Obama to do so, either. People are talking about how this was a case of "racial profiling." That may be true, but the police aren't to blame-- blame the white passerby who summoned the police to the scene. She's the one who observed the two black men trying to gain entry to an upscale home in suburban Mass, after all. All the police did was respond.

There is a problem with profiling in this country, that's for sure. African-American males are assumed to be miscreants and felons, and that's a tragedy-- just ask the family of New York City patrolman Omar Edwards. He was off-duty and out of uniform, just leaving his precinct house after a tour-of-duty when he saw a man breaking into his car. Edwards drew his gun and chased the thief, only to be gunned down by several officers who mistook him for a criminal. Edwards was black. This tragic incident is just one of many like it, and it proves that we have a long way to go in this country before race relations are normalized. So many stereotypes still exist about African-Americans, and in spite of successful recruiting programs to hire more and more black officers in metropolitan and suburban police departments across the country, that divide is most keenly felt when black and blue come together on the streets of America.

The www.domelights.com debacle is living proof of that.

The Philadelphia Police Department hired its first black police officer in 1881, and, today, the Commissioner of the department is African-American, as are many of its officers, but don't let that fool you into thinking that Philadelphia's police department, or any other police department for that matter, is a cross-racial utopia, with black and white police officers singing "Kumbaya" while holding hands at roll call. I've been a posting member of www.domelights.com since January of 2008, when I found an editorial that I had written for the Philadelphia Daily News reposted on domelights without my knowledge. I tried my best to post comments that fit within domelights specified message: to foster interaction and friendly debate. I quickly realized that my way of doing things was not appreciated, understood or welcomed at domelights. When I complained to a friend of mine in the EMS industry about the hostility I encountered on the site, he laughed and said, "What do you expect at dumblights? Those guys are all assholes."

Go see for yourself-- the blatantly offensive and racist material that gets posted on this site, by men and women who still patrol the streets of Philadelphia, will make you cringe at best. I have no doubt that, if I were African-American and a police officer and I went on domelights and spent even just one hour on there, pointing and clicking, I would be afraid to return to the station house the next morning. Furthermore, if I were a black citizen of Philadelphia and I went on that site, I would be outraged and appalled that people who are openly expressing these views and using that kind of language are charged with protecting me and my family. It's disgusting and disgraceful. The behavior exhibited on that website is not just an affront to African-American police officers, it is a violent slap in the face to the citizens of Philadelphia, who deserve better knights errant.

Yes, I know that there will always be racist police officers, just as there are racist lawyers and doctors and teachers. I know that policing is better off than it was in the 1950s, when officers could openly and proudly serve as both police officers and members of the Klu Klux Klan and fear no repercussions. I know that black police officers can find meaningful, important employment in police departments across the nation, and that's great, but we're still really, really, really far away from where we need to be as a society.

Police officers, like anybody else, should be able to express themselves openly and candidly, however, the need to remember that they are public servants first and foremost, and that their conduct must be above reproach twenty-four/seven, for they are representatives of law and order, integrity, equality under the law, and fairness.

The motto of the Philadelphia Police Department is Honor, Integrity, Service. You can't hide behind a screenname and call African-Americans "monkeys" while claiming to uphold those ideals.

The Craigslist Killer

They caught him.

Shemales, masseusses, whores and trannys rejoice. All those who provide "erotic services" in New England area hotel rooms for money: you are now safe at last, and you have the Boston Police Department to thank.

Well, you're safe-er, I guess.

It's funny, the Craigslist Killer (isn't the media so undyingly clever?) does not fit the profile of what the American populous expects a Craiglist Killer, or any killer for that matter, to look like. We expect killers to be, um, I don't know... unwashed? Er... stark, raving, looneybonk? Uh... black?

(Uh-oh, another blogger who "tells it like it is!" EEP!)

Seriously, though, people are as surprised that someone as successful and good looking as Philip Markoff can kill as they are that someone as frumpish and awkward looking as Susan Boyle can sing. When people don't fit into stereotypes, the American public just goes ape. We don't know what to do.

"But... he was going to get married in the summer...."

"But.... he wears his Abercrombie sweater tied around his shoulders...."

"But.... he was going to be a doctor...."

Well, guess what, homies: rabbis kill their wives, priests finger boys' buttholes, cops use excessive force, and doctors are not so nice sometimes too.

Ever hear of Josef Mengele? 'Nuff said.

People like the Craigslist Killer shake us out of our state of complacency, where everything fits just right and the people we see are who we think they are, or who we want them to be. But, really, this guy is just a hapless schmuck like the rest of us, who probably had one too many student loans to pay, and bills for his impending marriage to his All American Girl looming overhead like a sword of Damocles-- and he made the decision to get some quick money by robbing some less-than-proper folks and, in doing so, became one himself. Especially when one of them made the mistake of resisting or fighting back. Oops! You're dead.

It's time, though, for people to stop being so stunned and shocked when these good ol' boys from "the top of their class" wind up in handcuffs. They're nothing special because their names were on the Dean's List a couple years ago. They're just shitheads, the same as the ones you see getting jacked up against Crown Vics outside trailer parks on FOX every Saturday night. The only difference between them is that Bobby Deans List has the means to facilitate a veneer to fool and obscure that Jamal Drop Out does not possess.

We really show ourselves to still be an inherently racist society when our mouths hang agape everytime a clean-shaven white kid gets busted. People, get over yourselves and get over your love-affair with the crew-necked, crew-cut, crew-team American boy.

He ain't home.