IF YOU'RE LIKE ME there's nothing like an outbreak of warts and lice to inhibit the libido. I love my wife, but, oh, you cootie free doll! My local CVS at 43d and Locust Sts. has had these lime green pie plate sized signs for a few months now, and I always get a kick out of the juxtaposition of birth control and pest control products.
I'VE DISCOVERED SOME SPECIAL effects on my computer that allow me to enhance photographs. Not that a Philadelphia dawn needs enhancing. But I thought I'd share a computer-enhanced view of Center City from 45th and Market Streets around sunrise last Wednesday around 6:45 a.m.
GIVE ME TEN MEN. Who are stout-hearted men. And I'll give you some lyrics I don't understand. I've heard that song a thousand times but I never quite got the words. The first lines in the rousing chorus of that famous Nelson Eddy march go, "Give me some men who are stout hearted men. Who will fight for the right they adore." All these years and I never heard the key word, adore.
The song comes to mind because I was in the company of stout hearted men Saturday night during the Philadelphia-Whitemarsh Rugby Club hall of fame induction ceremonies. A man doesn't get into an amatuer athletic hall of fame without adoring the sport he played, and in the case of rugby football it is no coincidence that adore rhymes with endure.
Rugby has haunted my life like an exercise in bad judgement that I would keep making over and over again even in the face of maturity, responsibility and certain death. Every rugby player knows he's going to die one day. Could that be why we play? To cheat the reaper? What terror can death hold after you've voluntarily submitted yourself to the torments of Monday morning after a rugby match, week after week, year after year. The game is tough enough. But the physical hangover from all that pounding is nothing but inglorious suffering. And just when your body is getting over last week's injuries, you start all over again.
Every rugby player I know hurts. Not that he'd tell you. I mean anyone who has played rugby every weekend like a religion for at least 10 years of his life. A decade of rugby proves something to a man about himself. Not only can I hack it, I love it. Not only do I suffer, I enjoy it. Not only do I risk injury, I can almost guarantee one. And yet the rugby player, like the boxer who "carries a reminder of every glove that laid him down or cut him 'til he cried out," still remains.
Saturday night I was in rugby heaven, which is a place you go when all the people who lived through the same madness, bus trips and mud flats show up at the same time. Along with their sons and daughters. And the people who love them anyway. The inductees into the Philadelphia-Whitemarsh rugby club's hall of fame -- John Siano, Joe Dougherty and Keith McLean -- were to a man, men. They were poised, prepared, modest and funny. And they didn't know when to shut up. They were honored to be honored. And maybe just a little bit amazed. They stood among peers in a shared brotherhood of pain and they fought back tears, some more successfully than others.
I AGREE WITH ALL THESE SCHOOL LIBRARIANS around the country who are banning an award winning children's book from their stacks because of the use of a certain word on the book's first page. The word involved is scrotum and I think that just about sums up all the reasons why.
The author of the book. Susan Patron, is shocked that such a fuss is being made about her use of perhaps the most clincally precise, not to mention universally repulsive, word there is to decribe a man's junk or a boy's woo-woo. There are lots of words I don't want my children to hear, let alone know the meaning of, until they are of an intellectually responsible and less vulnerable age. Preferably in their early thirties. This would depend upon whether I'd actually have to hear my child say the word in my presence.
You wouldn't believe how many common words a determined father can deny hearing in the company of his young children. The word nigger for instance my youngest daughter heard for the first time when she was three years old from the lips of a boy maybe twice her age standing in front of us in line at McDonalds. I remember it well because my heart stopped beating and all I could hear was the silence that followed. Awkward, with a frozen smile on my face, I stood waiting for the inevitable question from a precocious child who hadn't missed a word, seemingly since birth. She delivered as if on cue. With a serious look on her face, she looked up to me and said, "Daddy, what's in the Happy Meal?"
Lub. . .DUB! Lub-DUB! Lub-Dub. . . Just like that, it all came back. Pulse. Consciousness. Reality. The whole catastrophe. I had dodged a bullet, but for how long? When would my little girl's heart be broken, or worse, hardened by the power of words to intimidate and strike fear in the souls of innocents? That day arrived sooner than I dared imagine.
We were in the car driving home after a day at the beach. "Daddy," my daughter said with that same adorable serious look on her face, "my vagina hurts." I didn't exactly swallow my tongue, but that option seemed tempting. With the calm steady measured tone of a panic-stricken parent speaking to a dazed child who seems about to step off a roof, I inquired, "Why's that, honey? And my daughter answered, "There's sand in my bottom." Well, why didn't she just say so in the first place?
WELL, IT WAS NICE while it lasted. It's been several winters since we had a snowfall that lingered more than a few days. Last year's only snowstorm dumped about a foot of snow on a Sunday, and it was literally gone by mid-week. Last Wednesday's six-inch snow-and-sleet-fall is still causing parking problems on city streets, where frozen piles and rutted ice paths remain traffic hazards.
But the surest sign that snow still covers the city landscape during this Winter of '07 are the sledders in Clark Park, the premier sledding hill in West Philadelphia. The modest hill is part of a natural bowl formed by a pond on Mill Creek, that now runs under the park at 43rd and Chester Ave. Kids and adults have been sledding day and night ever since the snow stopped falling. By today with the coming of above-freezing temperatures, the sledding hill was beginning to show signs of wear.
Who do you think is paying him? Come on, you know somebody has got to be paying him. Nobody gets a distraction this big without good reasons, generally the countable kind. But that would be the easy way, the reflexively cautious and prudently suspicious way to approach judgement about anything that Milton Street does.
Incidentally, the mayor's older brother announced he was running for mayor of Philadelphia last week, despite the campaign difficulties of being under indictment and living in New Jersey. In fact, he was arrested in Jersey today for unpaid parking tickets. When first we saw Milton Street a few weeks back he was standing in front of his home in Jersey. The house that came equipped with a lawn and, on it, a cheesy sculpture of a noticably Caucasian lawn jockey holding the ring for massa.
Who couldn't love that in yo face disgrace, Milton Street style? Come and get me feds? Come and get me Philadelphia. The showman answered the call. What'chu got on me?
So far that's the highlight reel of Milton Street's political career. And what does that tell us about his legacy? That the man reacts well under indictment? There are a lot of sleeze balls and stand up guys who have gone away for political corruption Philadelphia over the years. Ozzie Myers shamed his South Philadelphia roots by squealing like a pig on a buchet, begging for mercy in his first and only speech on the floor of the Congress before he was expelled. Jimmy Tayoun served his time and wrote a book about how to serve time. Is that guy Lebanese, or what? There have been so many characters over the years. Men conveniently named Izzy. (Well, is he? ) For young reporters it was like shooting fish in a barrel. "It's rainin' men! Hallelujah!" That could have been the soundtarck during Abscam as reporters at four Philadelphia daily newspapers toasted their good luck to be covering City Hall during late nights at the Pen and Pencil Club.
Even then, Milton Street was a joke. It was almost like other pols couldn't be arrested fast enough to keep him out of the net. . Milton was on every reporter's dance card. It was only a matter of time. He once, famously, betrayed his entire constituancy -- forget about black people, he sold out the Democratic party -- by cutting a deal with the Republican governor and changing his votes to break a deadlock in the State Senate. As a consequence, Milton Street has never -- and will never --be ected to anything ever again in Philadelphia. And now he's running for mayor. While under indictment. Some would wonder why.
Not me. I want to go on record by stating that I don't believe Vince Fumo is behind Milton Street's campaign for mayor. He needs Milton like he needs another Orec. I don't believe that he's working for Bob Brady. There are already 223 better- qualified black men running for mayor. Besides, both white candidates are running TV ads that sound like Steve Martin doing. "I was born a poor black child. . ." We get it guys, none of us had it easy. So who's Milton working for? The white guy? The black guy? The Watermelon Man? How dare he? How dare Milton Street play the same game and get away with it. How dare the man who's paying him.
AH, YES, THIS IS WINTER the way I remember it, back when men were men and sheep were nervous. We used to have winters like this all the time and even before that. Two weeks after Groundhog Day we're reliving a winter from back in the day; a cold, cruel, basic winter from a time when when "wind chill" was the name of a syndicated newspaper columnist instead of a way to make the temperature outdoors sound colder that it really is.
Yeah, this is winter the way I remember hating it, when ice and slush become obnoxious house guests who won't leave, no matter how much you curse them, threaten them, or call the cops to have them hauled away. We're not quite at the sustained frigid level of the Winter of '77, when you could walk to Camden without using a bridge, when you could skate from Manayunk to Boat House Row on the Schuylkill.
I didn't remember just how butt ugly a real Philadelphia winter can be until I saw this car parked on 63rd Street in West Philadelphia this morning. This is what city cars used to look like for the better part of January and February, when car washes were luxuries and once white snow turned into hideous brown splatters that froze on contact.
Yes, my friends, this is winter before the thaw. Over the river and through the hood, caked salt and frozen slush. Resistence is futile. There is no escape. There is only survival. And the promise of spring.
Eventually.
WHEN BIG BUSINESS AND SPECIAL INTERESTS try to sway political candidates with the offer of campaign "contributions," rarely is the deed done so baldly and so publicly. Usually it's done behind closed doors, between intermediaries to buffer the transaction from prying eyes. But mayoral candidate Michael Nutter is not just any candidate. When the "special interest" in the black hat tried to "pay to play" Nutter turned him down cold in front of witnesses at Dirty Frank's bar. No sir, it will take more that a twenty dollar bribe to crack the wall of integrity that is the Nutter candidacy.
Who murdered Anna Nicole Smith? You or me? Don't worry, they'll get around to accusing us the same way they'll get around to calling it murder, if they haven't already. Accusing us will come after a litany of other suspects have been thrown under the media bus, but sooner or later we'll be tossed into the lineup.
We enabled her fame. We killed her by paying attention. We killed her by caring. Good lord, what a lie to die for.
Of course the real guilty parties in the death of Anna Nicole Smith are lining up behind lawyers, like pirhana behind cow entrails. Quick come the cannibals to the conqueror's devour.
Why call it murder? Why not call it occupational liability? To be Marilyn, one must die like Marilyn. And Anna Nicole Smith copied Marilyn Monroe's meteoric rise and sad public fall like a Cliff's Notes version of a classic Hollywood tragedy.
It's not like we didn't see this coming. The vivisection of Anna Nicole's good looking corpse began years ago. But now that her train wreck of a life has ended -- and just about all the obituaries managed to use that same "train wreck" image -- in death her second act has just begun, part mystery, part cautionary tale and one hundred percent salacious.
If the life of Marilyn Monroe was like a candle in the wind, then Anna Nicole Smith was like a garbage disposal in the sink. When the flame flickered out for Norma Jean, the reverent hush lasted as long as it took for the first reporter to write that Marilyn was found in the nude. However the tragic death of Anna Nicole
is like a straight-to-DVD version of a big budget B movie flop. Who green lighted this mess?
The news media were horrible to behold in the aftermath of Marilyn's sad lonely death. But that was back in the early '60's when newspapers and television still clung to shreds of decency. Anna Nicole's media post mortem started as a farce and will only become more ludicrous as new layers of absurdity are layed on top of old layers of fabrication.
Could the spin meisters have possibly come up with a more appalling coincidence than Anna Nicole's boyfriend having the name Howard Stern? And could a paternity dispute over Anna Nicole's infant daughter be complete without a" yeah-I-did-her" cameo by Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband?!
This story is so sordid it has to crawl on its belly just to reach the gutter. This is a murder story, all right, and every word we read about it kills our spirit just a little bit more.
Continue reading "Anna Nicole: Like a Candle in the Garbage Disposal" »
YOU WOULD THINK that whoever was responsible for the signage at the Metroplex shopping mall off the Norristown exit of Rte 476 would have better sense than to list these client stores in the order listed on this sign. There's a Giant store, sure. And there's also a Dick's sporting goods retailer. But did they have to list them in that order? Especially when the fleet is in at Old Navy and all those swabbies are looking for a Party City. How risque can one sign get entirely not on purpose?
POWER CORRUPTS AND running for Mayor of Philadelphia corrupts absolutely. Sometimes a candidate has to bend his principles in order to connect with the wider electoral audience in a citywide race. For instance, Michael Nutter is about as popular with cigarette smokers in the city's bars and nightclubs as an LCB enforcement agent. Will Nutter, who introduced the smoking ban legislation that outlawed cigarette smoking in bars and restaurants throughout the city, compromise himself to gain votes from this crucial cross section of voters? Hey, buddy, gotta light?
Continue reading "Temptation 5: Say it ain't so, Michael Nutter" »
AND ON THE THIRD DAY Michael Nutter contemplated what would actually happen if he won.
Continue reading "Temptation 4: Michael Nutter Meets His Base" »
AS MAYOR Michael Nutter would be placed under considerable pressure by members of special interest groups, such as this lobbyiist for the Philadelphians for Scarves and Jeff Caps Action Committee. Will Nutter fold under the squeeze of narrow interest groups? Only time will tell.
IT'S BAD ENOUGH that mayoral candidiate Michael Nutter is being hit on by attractive young
women. In this photo he seems to be capitulating to a red-hatted dominatrix 's demand that all Philadelphians wear jeff caps. "Homey, don't play that," said Nutter.
Continue reading "The 2nd Temptation of MIchael Nutter (cont.)" »
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT a Michael Nutter man. And it's not his after shave. A Michael Nutter man is confident, sophisticated, worldly and irresistable to women. Preferably Philadelphia registered Democratic women. Since announcing his candidacy for mayor, Michael Nutter has discovered the difference between being merely a Dudley Do-right member of Philadelphia City Council. As a legitimate candidate for mayor, he exudes the scent of power that women react to like musk on a warthog.
Can Nutter's newfound sex appeal be his undoing? Will he fall prey to the wiley ways of campaign event temptresses. Will his sqeaky clean image survive the months of pressing the flesh leading to the May primary? Can a graduate of St. Joe's Prep resist the temptation of co-ed campaign trail tail?
His lips say no, but his eyes say, "Hummina, hummina, hummina!"
Continue reading "The First Temptation of Michael Nutter (cont.)" »
PHILADELPHIA'S NEXT MAYOR is going to be a man elected from among a crowded field of qualified candidates (not counting the Republican, whoever that may be). The Daily DeLeon has taken a personal interest in former City Councilman Michael Nutter, who may or may not be the best man for the job, but whose clean-cut, holier-than-John Street image needs a funkadelphic do over. Face it, if Michael Nutter hung around with Philadelphians who enjoy stinky, smokey, loud, alcohol-enhanced barroom s, he'd be as welcome as Hillary Clinton at an NRA rally.
I'm not saying that Michael Nutter is a hopeless square, but he needs to mix it up a little bit with the the voting Philadelphia taxpayers who fuel the hospitality industry. To that end I invited the candidate (actually, a Nutter lookalike, Center City lawyer John Rollins) to demonstrate how Mayor Nutter would deal with some of the temptations he might encounter while trolling for votes among disaffected members of the electorate who used to enjoy smoking a cigarette at the local tavern.
As you can see, Candidate Nutter is fitting right in with the regulars at Dirty Frank's.
Stay tuned for more temptations of Michael Nutter. He's almost too clean.
Continue reading "Michael Nutter, let the temptations begin" »
Groundhog Day has come and gone, and on this, the morning after, we awake in yawns, outrage, joy, despair, bewilderment, indifference, contempt and promises to ourselves that next Super Bowl Sunday will be different. Next year we won't be disappointed. But next year never changes Superbowl Sunday. It's the same old same old. The Roman numerals may change, the teams and host city may be different, the game itself may actually not suck, but in the end it seems like we've lived this day before. And a year from now we'll hardly recall who played. Quick now, who was the runner up in last year's Superbowl?
See what I mean? It's all Louie Louie. A song we've heard a thousand times and still can't remember the words. If you watch the Super Bowl at a party or a sports bar, you end up missing huge chunks of the game and not even noticing. You'll also miss that TV commercial everbody is talking about the next day. If you're watching at home with family, chances are there will actually be someone who enjoyed the halftime show, but unless there's a stray nipple exposed, the mega-hyped halftime spectacular will be as forgettable as the game. Other than Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, can you remember particulars from any recent Super Bowl half time shows?
The big game officially turned extra large last February with Super Bowl XL, but it's been suffering from middle aged spread for years. It's all soft in the middle, like most of the people watching. What should be a tense and gripping championship football game ends up being background noise at a cocktail party. The bloated televised event has become a spent cliche. Anytime the commercials become the most anticipated parts of an annual broadcast, you know that the national attention span is enjoying a senior moment. This won't hurt, did it? Super Bowl Sunday used to be a holy day of obligation for true NFL fans, but it's no more sacred today than St. Patrick's Day is to bar-hopping amatuer drinkers. Maybe it would be different if we lived in a city that had actually won a Super Bowl. Would it matter to us? Is the pope. . .German? Yeah, it would matter. Two visits in 41 years hardly qualifies the Eagles for frequent flyer miles to Super Bowl destination cities. And maybe the dreary sameness of Super Bowl Sunday is as much an act of emotional self preservation. Our football season ends when the Eagles do. After that it's just going through the motions.
Continue reading "Was It Me, or Did It Suck Again This Year?" »
PHILADELPHIA LAWYER John L. Rollins (left) is a dead ringer for Democratic mayoral candidate Michael Nutter. Add a goatee and you couldn't tell these guys apart. The likeness is so striking that Rollins was once mistaken for Nutter on the street by one of the candidate's staff members.
In the days to come, we here at the Daily DeLeon (which as you may have noticed isn't quite as "daily" as advertised) will be having a little fun with the striking resemblance between the two men in a feature we call, "The Last Temptation of Nutter." Stay tuned.
Continue reading "Will The Real Michael Nutter Please Stand Up" »
