Three Arrivals, Always in the Morning #1

Every weekday we'd drive to the parking lot of the obscure company and stand on the pvement, eating take-out breakfasts and making awkward conversation in the cold. The sun would come up and melt the frost in the wasteland of scrub and river around and below. When conversation faltered I'd watch that big empty space while we shivered and waited for Oscar to come out of his office.

Oscar relished our days together because we were young idealists and he was a wise, no-nonsense populist with extreme ideas. He'd bring us fresh coffee and reveal inklings of a generalized xenophobic hated. When he'd finished venting and the sun was up we'd drive our rickety vans a hundred kilometres, avoiding the weigh station with a long detour through undeveloped hills and farms, returning to the highway just in time to rendezvous again at the bankrupt company building.

The building was the only one in sight, otherwise just cars and trees and a lone microwave tower that I never got to visit. Oscar would unlock the front gate and then lock it again behind us, and for the rest of the day we'd be imprisoned, doing something that was probably illegal, protected only by our presumed innocence and the big steel fences.

Oscar gave us clipboards, then he'd disappear to prepare the vans and do his own mysterious paperwork. We, the employees randomly drawn from a temporary student labour force, picked an area within the building and systematically dismantled it. In the garage where the gardening tools for the bankrupt company were stored, we'd disregard safety regulations and hang from high shelves, dropping picks and shovels into the hands of fellow workers who would load them into Oscars' trucks.

Oscar was not innocent, he was informed and guilty and cheerful about his job. He told us to remove everything but the paint on the fresh new walls. In the bathrooms we'd unscrew soap dispensers and lighting fixtures and toilet paper rolls. In the meeting rooms we'd take down corkboards and put all the push-pins into the drawers of desks that we'd also move downstairs, out the door, into the vans. Then we'd go back up and remove the carpets, piece by piece.

One day, while we were on our lunch break, a black car arrived and a man in a suit approached the fence. He tried to give us a piece of paper. "Just take it and hand it to your supervisor," he kept saying, pushing the rolled-up paper through the fence, and the three of us stood back, afraid he'd grab us and take us to jail. We said no, no, no. Oscar had told us never to take papers from anybody. The man smiled at us and drove away, and when Oscar heard about it he was proud.

We drove the vans back the same way we'd come, even more careful to avoid the government weigh stations. The vans were old and not meant to hold a company's entire assets. They were sluggish and creaking and they rode low to the road with wide gaps in their carriages, and it was a relief to return to our starting point and unload the contents into storage sheds.

Desks, tools, carpets, fax machines, and paper documetation...everything was pushed into the sheds and locked up, hidden away from everybody who wanted it. Oscar was very happy at the end of every day, standing under a sky that had become warm and lazy, watching us spray water into the vans that leaked rusty mud out of every crevice. Every day he'd say "See you tomorrow, kids!" until the last day, when we were finished, and we handed in our clipboards and he said "You never did any of this." We forgot everything we'd done, like he'd cast a magic spell.

How Long Can Marriage Last...In a Cocktail Setting?

I love the qualification in the Mark Hellinger endorsement: one of the best novels IN ITS CLASS. Just so we're not confusing it with Dostoyevsky or anything.

Here's How to GET RID of Prohibition

As best as I can glean from the pages of The New Yorker, 1930 was the year of:

• Backgammon. All the department stores were selling deluxe sets and offering free lessons and tournaments.
  
• Tom Thumb golf. Suddenly there were courses everywhere. Rather than the low-rent "mini golf" of today, the fad was marketed to the Gay Young Things as an after-club pastime drunkenly played in evening gowns, tuxedos, and high heels. Much ado was made about the damage to the courses caused by high heels.
  
• Maybe this "depression" thing isn't going away?
  
• Even the staunchest defenders of prohibition are getting sick of it. Like, to the point where virtually everybody wants to somehow repeal it.

The most obvious sign of the anti-prohibition fever so far is this advertisement in the October 18, 1930 issue. It sums up everything I've been reading (click for a larger view).


Joseph S. Auerbach seems to have been a moderately well-known lawyer...well-known enough to have been publishing books before and after this one, at least.

The Volstead Act would not be repealed until 1933, so it will be interesting to see if this vocal opposition continues to swell, or if it will simply be viewed as a fait d'accompli in the laps of the lawyers.

A Street Person's To-Do List

For a few weeks this summer my workplace has had to deal with a street person's leftovers. This person would sleep overnight in one of our entry ways, then leave behind a bizarre collection of odds-and-ends the next day, including syringes.

Some of his leftovers have been bizarre -- children's toys, a broken stereo, a sleeping bag -- but once I discovered a backpack, and in it a "To-Do" diary with some very interesting notations.



His writing is difficult to decipher. Here's page one:

I NEED DO THE DO
STOP
DO NO HARME
BI BI
LEET GOOD

DO
CALL SHARON
MOM

Page two is labeled "TO DO" and says:

1 DENTOS AP
RENT TO INTENT LETTER
1 2 3

FIND OUT WHAT NEEDS TO BE DON AT
1 TAX
2 WELFARE
GET RENT
PHONE BANK

400 WATS + iPOD
99 HDML DVD
49 5.100
B: DVD
79 200WAT

Page three is one-sided:

START TO SLOW DOWN AND STOP
M L

AT 5:00 I WAS DOWN TOWN AT MARKET IN KIT
$120 PAND FOR RED PUMPKIN
7 DID IN IN THE ROW
8 WALKT HOME

10 TO 2:00
1 AM

Page four is most interesting:

CALL MOM
GOOD DAY TO DAY
TRY 3 OR
$10: OOW AT LARAL STREET

TO DO
GET NUMBER FOR METH
CLINICK WOOD STACK
BUS FAIR
$20 DOLLERS

NIKKEY IS WITH ROS AND ALL I SENS IS NEGATIV MY LAIF IS OFF THE HOOK

And finally, page five:

I CANT US
I CANT SEE YOU MONBER
HEPUT

I suppose this is a glimpse at the functionality of a drug-addicted, partially literate person. He hasn't come around lately.

PS: As much as my workmates hated having to dispose of his garbage, what they objected to most were the syringes. This annoyed me too, but then I realized that they were all prominently displayed...almost laid out deliberately in front of his former possessions.

Suddenly it occurred to me: what is a street person going to do with used syringes? They aren't going to carry "sharpie" boxes around which would advertise to the world that they're injecting drugs. When they want to dispose of a needle, I think their only options are to throw it in a garbage or hide it in something until they're far away.

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather the syringes be immediately visible...I don't want to pick up somebody's old backpack or pull out a garbage bag and get a needle in the hand. I wonder if, by leaving their needles where everybody can see them, these street people are being CONSIDERATE?

Scrutable [Song Lyric] Corner: "Mother's Home Again!"

Throughout 1928 The New Yorker ran a sporadic "song lyrics we'd like to hear" section, most of them satirizing the over-sentimental "moon/June" ballads of the time. In the 1928 Christmas issue (December 22) Don Marquis gave us this screwball ditty called "Mother's Home Again!"

I know that this is hardly the time for Christmas cheer, but view this as a window into the secret lives of your sweet, innocent grandparents. It's a surprisingly nasty piece of work.

'Twas on the Eve of Christmas
A face against the pane
Peered in at the firelight;
'Twas worn with vice, and plain;
But all the children shouted:
"Mother's home again!"

Mother's out of jail, Dad!
Let us ask her in!
Make her Christmas merry,
With food and fire and gin!
Mother's out of jail, Dad,
Let us ask her in!

She's watching through the window
Her babes in happy play;
Do not call a copper
To club the Jane* away--
Remember, ere you strike her,
That once her hair was gray!**

Soon at some new night-club
She'll be pinched again,
For Mother is so popular
With all the dancing men--
Invite her in to visit,
Mother's home again!

She's staring through the window
At the Yuletide glow!
Oh, do not throw the old wife
Back into the snow!
She bore you all your children,
And oft has told you so.

Mother's in the street, Dad!
She is out of jail!
Put morphine in the needles,
And some ether in the ale,
Mother's home for Christmas,
Mother's out of jail!

* I assume this is from the 1920's slang word for "sweetheart," but may also reference a 1925 New Republic article called "Flapper Jane."

** Either a forced rhyme, or Mother dyes her hair now, or maybe she got her head shaved at the jail?

"Harriet Said" by Beryl Bainbridge

Sometimes I pick up a book in order to fill a gap in my reading habits. Recently I have been buying and reading random books by female authors, because I've realized that a disproportionately large number of the books in my collection were written by men.

During one of these "expand my horizon" sprees I bought "Harriet Said" by Beryl Bainbridge, knowing nothing about the author or the book. I'm happy to say that the book was brilliant and that I'll DEFINITELY have to read more of her work.

While reading all of John Barth's books last year I finally understood the benefit of a "show, don't tell" approach...but I've been wondering exactly HOW skilled authors manage to "show" without "telling." Bainbridge's approach in "Harriet Said" is to give us an unreliable narrator -- a painfully awkward 13-year-old girl -- and subtly reveal the disconnect between her perception and her reality. Since we supposedly understand the world a little better than she does, we can draw our own conclusions about the story based on what she tells us. Sweet.

This girl is the perfect depiction of a type of confused, malleable teenager searching for identity, ready to be influenced by anybody strong enough to guide her. In this case her unfortunate guide is Harriet, a brilliant, manipulative, attractive, popular, and borderline sociopathic peer.

During a summer vacation in postwar England, Harriet proposes a secret project: to "humble" an unhappily married man who they call "The Tsar." We see everything that occurs -- including Harriet's ambiguous and multi-layered schemes -- through the eyes of the narrator as the three of them engage in increasingly dangerous games.

The brilliance of the book comes from the spot-on characterizations of all the characters, particularly as modified by the perception of the narrator herself. This girl's world is a terrible, changeable place, and though she herself doesn't understand the motivations of herself or others, WE do, and from this comes the sense of cloying menace that gradually builds and then -- at the climax -- crashes down. Particularly awful is the inability of the narrator to see the terrible events coming; she is far more concerned about other people's opinions about her than she is about the terrible things she's doing.

This book made me feel goosebumpy and sick, as it spells out all too clearly the reasons why certain types of people end up doing bad things. If you like a careful character study laid thickly over a thriller plotline, you should definitely find a copy of "Harriet Said."

But don't read it if you have a suspiciously-indrawn teenage daughter, or you might begin to wonder what sort of dark thoughts she's harbouring.

Life Was Cheap For the Vaudeville Felines (plus "socks")

In his rather informal book "American Vaudeville," author Douglas Gilbert often goes off on wild tangents, describing the long-lost vaudeville routines that he obviously pines for. He takes real delight in remembering the more bizarre acts for us, and I take a real delight in reading about them:

A performer whose name nobody can recall had an act called "The Cat Piano." It comprised a number of live cats confined in narrow boxes with wire netting on the front ends. Artificial tails extended from the rear. This performer was a marvelous cat imitator and miaowed the "Miserere" by pulling the cats' tails. Spits, snarls, and plaintive mews added to the effect of the back-fence serenade.

He also mentions "Nelson's Boxing Cats" in his huge list of standard acts from 1880 to 1930, sadly with no further details.

Here's another passage that I love:

Most of the museums pasted warnings in dressing rooms that the words "slob," "sucker," "damn," "hell," and "socks" were forbidden. The ban on "socks" may seem unreasonable today [1940] but in the eighties crude jests--"stronger than father's socks," or "I threw my socks at the wall and they stuck"--were common gags.

Next time I'm at a party I'll be sure to try out some of those sock gags. "The wine has a pungent bouquet...stronger than father's socks!"

Ye Olde Novelty Songs: "A Bird in a Gilded Cage"

In honour of the gold rush demimondes that I'm reading so much about, here's a song they were known to sing in the far-north dance halls at the turn of the century: "A Bird in a Gilded Cage." Picture them decked out in diamonds, gold nuggets, and silk, illuminated by gaslight, surrounded by dirty and horny (but rich) men and performing until 5am. Amazing, beautiful, and terrible.

The singer is the largely forgotten Beatrice Kay who was known for her authentic reinterpretations of songs from that period. This comes from her "Gay Nineties" album, which has no date on it, but I bet it was recorded in the late '50s. There are many contradictory stories about why her voice sounds like that, most involving injury or illness.

PS: Visitors from the future, this link is bound to break eventually.

The Strangeness of YouTube

A few weeks ago I (poorly) digitized a couple of rare Canadian music videos, and then put them on YouTube. Strangely, the one that generated buzz was Belinda Metz's "What About Me."

Metz herself (AKA "mamamelody") showed up in the comments and seemed confused about the situation; who would EVER put her video online? WHY would they do such a thing? To make the situation stranger, her daughter showed up a little bit later ("dancer88skye"), as did a man who apparently appeared in the video ("cathode42").

While it's often difficult to judge a person's attitude in a comment's section, one of Metz's points was that posting the video was flattering but "not nice." And I don't think she just meant my making fun of her outrageous shoulder pads.

There's no question that posting a person's music video online is a violation of copyright. As Metz said later, she gets no residuals from such a thing. Legally her viewpoint is cut-and-dried.

But then we enter the strange world of online promotion. While Belinda Metz has become an established actress, it would seem that her mid-80s music career is...well, finished. That's not saying she can't resurrect it, but few people in the world actually know she exist, I don't believe her video is in rotation even on retro-music shows (hence its unavailability on YouTube), and even her CD is long out of print.

In short, I would think that posting a video in this situation serves only two purposes: to potentially promote the artist, and then to rally fans. It does not TAKE AWAY residuals (since there is no other way for people to SEE the video) or discourage legitimate sales of a DVD release (since no DVD exists).

Of course I would always bow to artists (and their lawyers), and I understand their antsiness about online reproduction. Fortunately Metz has given the posting her blessing, so you can now enjoy a wonderful song and an otherwise forgotten video.

But this makes me wonder: when I put other obscure Canadian artists online, will they think it's a positive thing, or will they sic their lawyers on me?

Just Let Me Vent For a Moment

One of my many self-improvement resolutions is to stop being concerned about what other people do, but let me just say this:

I hate people who carry more than eight items through the supermarket express lane. There's simply no excuse. These people don't believe that the rules apply to them and they have no concern for the other people in line.

Today I was behind a late-20s yuppie couple who actually TRICKED their way into the line. The wife put two items on the counter, but her husband actually HID a basket full of produce until the first two items were rung in. And produce is the slowest thing to deal with, because it can't just be scanned. It was incredibly rude.

When the cashier asked them if they'd like to donate two dollars to a children's charity, the husband scoffed, "I don't." He turned to his wife. "Do you?" "Me neither," she said. Their tone was distinctly, "don't waste our time."

After seeing those two selfish, tricky jerks breeze through like that, I started fishing for spare change. Because the only good thing about bad people is they set a baseline against which the rest of us should compare ourselves.

To Those Who Destroy Saplings

Ever since I've started walking (instead of driving), I have come to appreciate trees. I used to climb them as a child but I don't remember THINKING about them...if there were no more trees to climb, I would have done something else instead (like read the books that the trees were cut down for).

But now I see them differently. During these increasingly hot summers, a tree-lined road is a blessing. They also serve as windbreaks, and homes for birds and squirrels, and they're beautiful things: they make a sound, they have a complexity, they have a visual softness. The big ones are older than you and I, and they're still going strong...strong enough to rip up our sidewalks and tear down our phone lines when they die and fall.

And yet, every major construction project in Waterloo has involved what appears to be a blithe disregard for trees. Many of the old trees on the west side of King street have been removed to make way for Uptown development, the Bauer Lofts destroyed some really beautiful foliage, and Waterloo's upgrading of the sewage system around the University resulted in the destruction of (probably) hundreds of trees. These places are bare now; the wind blows too strongly, the sun is too bright, and the animals...?

Maybe those trees were dying or something. Maybe, if construction companies were required to somehow protect the trees, they would just refuse to do these worthwhile projects. Or maybe it's laziness, short-sightedness, and indifference...I think it's the latter.

Whenever ten trees are cut down, developers see it in their hearts to plant a single sapling. That's at least SOMETHING, and it's heartening to see these little trees grow every year. But then...

...some drunken yahoo comes along and kicks them down. There is a special place in hell for these scumbags, and I imagine that place is full of nubile saplings, and full of girls who they want to impress, but when they kick the saplings they accidentally vomit instead. Sadly, life is not hell, and over the past month many of the saplings along King Street -- ones that had been growing for five years or so and were ALMOST strong enough to withstand a kick -- have been broken in two and their corpses removed.

Every day now, I walk past half a dozen little piles of sawdust where the saplings used to be. The City probably won't bother planting more. Strong, living things were killed for no reason whatsoever, and the future will be very hot indeed. This is sad. I HATE people who kick down saplings.

Underworld Slang: "The Lamster"

No, it's not a story about a cuddly rodent, it's another excerpt from The New Yorker's series about "underworld slang." Once again I leave the translation up to you.

A shaum I knew came over one day and told me the beef was in. My partner figured the rumble was too hot and to square himself he fingered me. I tried to connect for a roscoe but missed. Anyway, I went out to tamp up this partner of mine. I found him in a gin-mill playing Santa Claus for a couple of blondes. The dive was crowded but that was no hold-back for me. I declared my weight to the guy and called him a fink and then asked him to step out. He had to go then and right hands was trumps. I got this shiner for my end but I put him out of the picture. Somebody hollered "Jiggers!" and I lammed out the hammer and tack.

(This is from the April 21, 1928 edition).

Underworld Slang: "Strictly Homelike"

On March 24, 1928, the New Yorker has begun publishing a series of articles written in "underworld slang," supposedly written by a convict named "J.P. Grover." To make things more entertaining, they publish the "slang" version alongside a straight-forward translation. Here's an excerpt:

I get a drive out of casing the mob posing around the lobby. There are a few marks and square-shooters there but not many. Most everyone is a hustler of some kind. On my left chalk are two twists cutting up their daddies. I tin-ear on them and get hip. They are boosters doing it solo. Their daddies are cannons and are working the shorts and this spot is the meet. They rap to a geezer and he flops near them. In his dukes he has some rats and mice and he is practicing a switch. He is a dice hustler waiting for a play. His fiddle and flute speaks for itself. It is that kind. His bottles of booze are keeno. The lean and fat is the real McCoy, and he has a Spanish guitar between the uppers and beneath. He looks Annie Oakley and soon cops a sneak out the grocery store.

Got that, Mr. Lem Kegg? Pop off about it over a little gay and frisky.

Surprisingly Good Music: Hank Pine and Lily Fawn

I try not to write music reviews because I'm tempted to use words like "fabulous" or "wonderful," which don't communicate anything except my own enthusiasm. I'm trying to remove words like that from my vocabulary. This is what a year of technical writing has done to me.

But I've just run across a duo so "fabulous" and "wonderful" that I can't help yelling about them: Hank Pine and Lily Fawn.

Hank plays cello, draws cartoons, and wears a chemical mask on his face. Lily wears deer horns on her head and bends the musical saw. Besides also playing a whole range of other instruments, they record music and tour with other talented musicians from British Columbia, putting on a depraved cabaret about Hank and Lily's road-show adventures. On their 2CD debut -- "The Road to New Orleans" -- they've released 26 songs about seedy carnivals, infanticide, drug-induced constipation, sex with old people, and Laika the Space Dog (of course).

Why are the CDs "fabulous" and "wonderful?" Because the story is full-fleshed, entertaining, and unique. It isn't just a hodge-podge of mysanthrope-wanna-be-ism. It's a coherent work full of funny lines, quirky surprises, and great musicianship. The tunes are catchy and have a sweet, unpretentious country twang.

More importantly, it isn't polished to perfection. It has that Tom Waits sound of everything starting to fall apart...but not quite. Hank and Lily don't have great voices but they DO have great delivery, and the guest musicians give enough good voice to make up for the vocal shortcomings; Ryan Beattie goes all out with "Ballad of the Dancing Bear," an especially epic and strangely sad song. Never before has clown sodomy been so poignant.

Well then, it's not ALL "fabulous" and "wonderful" -- the second CD seems to have been a repository for the less-inspired numbers -- but the rest of it...wow. Personal mythology, unique sound, professional musicianship, and right on our very own west coast. And they're still travelling back and forth across the country today. Love 'em.

But heck, don't just take MY word for it...watch their video!

Card and Dice Hustlers

In my final year of University I took three courses that literally changed the way I look at the world. They were all taught by Robert C. Prus, torch-bearer for Symbolic Interactionism and a really entertaining guy. Unfortunately Prus couldn't (or wouldn't) seem to get a handle on the DIFFICULTY of his courses, and would heap us with huge amounts of diverse reading material and then give us really evil tests.

I've got my transcript in front of me. I achieved a C- in "Deviance: Perspectives and Processes," a D in "Social Psychology and Everyday Life," and I actually DROPPED OUT of "Sociology of Marketing and Sales" because I simply couldn't handle it.

Regardless, I look back on these courses as the most significant ones I ever took. After the somewhat rigid, dogmatic, and cocky field of Psychology -- my actual major -- this new discipline really spoke to me: a discipline of flexible patterns in individual behaviour as opposed to standard deviations and multiple-choice questionaires.

Prus wrote many of the books we had to read. One of them was "Road Hustler" (written with pseudononymous professional card sharp "C.R.D. Sharper"), a book about the profession of card and dice hustlers: people who discreetly infiltrate parties and stack the odds in their favour using various means. I didn't read the book when I was taking the course (I barely had time to BREATHE at the time), but I'm reading it now and it's plenty informative, especially if you want to understand why people gamble and how hustlers of all types "get along."

The book follows Prus' typical Symbolic Interaction script: interviewing professionals, sitting in when he can, then fitting the people's actions into a framework he developed. Basically he tries to figure out how people become involved with an activity, how and why they stay, and how they eventually become disinvolved. He seeks out the patterns involved with the activity and presents them in logical ways, liberally interspersed with long quotations from the people in the business. Prus is so methodical in his approach that you wind up seeing every situation from a dozen possible angles, and some of the revelations are striking (often even more striking because they're so mundane...you just never THOUGHT about it before).

It really is fascinating to read how these people ply their trade, and it would take far too long (and involve far too many digressions) to summarize it all here. But as usual I'm curious about how gender figures in this world of hustlers and grifters.

In short, it doesn't, really. Card sharps seem anxious to avoid women in professional situations except when they can be used as enticements. Speaking about hiring women to entice men into hotel suites during huge conventions:

Like these women, they're always looking to get laid, to make a little extra money. You tell them, "You don't have to do anything but be sociable," and you pay them a good buck, but they always seem to get some guy away from your game... once they see a guy with money, they try to grab him for themselves. If they get him out of the game, that's bad, because we want to beat him in the crap game. But, they come in handy, you have to have the chicks around. Imagine f you didn't, some guy comes up "What am I coming to this room for, there's no women here!"

This viewpoint isn't derogatory, it's the view that professional card sharps seem to have toward any person who isn't part of their "crew"...they can't be trusted, they don't have any regard for the well-being of the entire group, and they're quickly jettisoned when they're no longer necessary.

When it comes to women who aren't hired -- who are just there as part of the party, and aren't "wise" to the situation -- card sharps have different attitudes, depending on the marital status of the women:

Say you go to a convention where they have their wives with them. This is usually not as good, because the wives will hold the men back or the committees will be more concerned with appearances.

When it comes to single women, however

Okay, so you might get near the bar and set up a table and start rolling the dice, sort of joking about it, not getting too serious. Then, you try to involve some good-looking chick, "Come on over here, baby doll, and shoot for me!" And these women will roll the dice for the longest time, because they are the center of attention. They have all these men around and they love it... You don't mention any money at first, but later, as they see all this money changing hands, almost every one of them will say, "Well, what do I get?" So then you say, "Well, see this twenty, or fifty, if you make one more pass, I will give you this." Now, my partner is prepared, and when she rolls the dice towards him, boom, he makes sure she loses... the guys go for it, and once they get started, they get caught up in the betting. Sometimes a crew will pay a good-looking woman a hundred just to have her hang around that table for the evening.

Alluring Advertisements

Despite my complaints about the gender/class sledgehammer that Carolyn Strange weilds in "Toronto's Girl Problem," I AM enjoying much of it. And since today is an "eat Ched-a-Corn and watch Catherine Tate" sort of day I've had some time to read a little bit further.

Midway through the book she presents a reproduction of a 1912 flyer from the "Toronto Vigilance Committee." Besides the usual hysteria about white slavery and indecent literature, the TVC lists "alluring advertisements" as a source of concern:

Recently a number of persons have been advertising for lady stenographers, waitresses, etc., and when the applicants called, they would be rudely treated by being asked such questions as: 'Do you wish to have a good time, and make big money?' 'Do you smoke, play cards, dance, stand on your head?' 'Do you desire to go to wine suppers?' 'What are your measurements from your hips down?' One villain of a man induced one of the young girls to go to an establishment he operated on Bathurst Street, and there accomplished, possibly, the ruin of the girl. OUR SISTERS AND DAUGHTERS MUST NOT BE SUBJECTED TO THESE GROSS AFFRONTS!

I have to agree. I HATE it when guys in bars ask me if I stand on my head.