From “Brickbats,” Reason, May 2007 (subscription only). First, there’s this:
Denver authorities gave Cynthia Roberson 24 hours to remove the snow from the sidewalk in front of her home or a face a $150 fine. Roberson is 60 years old and disabled. But what really galled her is that she had already paid someone to remove the snow. City snow plows that cleared the street had piled more snow in front of her home.
Then this:
Forget staging Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Denver. Judge Michael A. Martinez of Colorado’s 2nd Judicial District has refused to exempt theatrical companies from a statewide smoking ban. Performers can’t even light up herbal cigarettes.
Ironically, one of the reasons I decided to move to the southwest from Baltimore is that I’d hoped to regain the personal freedoms being wrung out of me by the incessant protective hugs of the east coast nannystate.
And yet now, should I wish to catch a bit of theater depicting those halcyon days when free people were free to smoke legal products without Judge Michael A. Martinez having anything to say about the matter, I have to hope somebody stages such a show inside a cigar bar.
Further, I have to hope that said show isn’t running in winter. Because the truth is, I rather doubt I’ll have time to catch a play once I’m done digging myself out of the dig out I initially paid for with my tax dollars.
update: Just ate some trans fats. In front of my son. FOR FREEDOM!
This is easily remedied. All it takes is a Key Grip, or Best Boy hiding behind our star with a econ-O-sized drum of baby powder. Whenever the script calls for a big puff off of the faux-cig – the talc gets a vigorous squeeze. IT’S CALLED ACTING.
For real fun, use foot powder.
Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that this same jurist would have found that smoking pot during a production is protected by the First Amendment, as “expressive conduct”? Just conjecturing here.
Then again, maybe he’s a consistent fascist and can’t allow anybody see anybody else smoking anything.
They may take our cigarettes and our booze and our transfats and our cell phones and our gasoline and our ability to speak our minds in public & ct, but they’ll never take our . . . oh, nevermind.
Pet Peeve Alert:
Denver is the Southwest? South of what, Manitoba? In a less Eastern-Time-Zone-centric America, we’d call Colorado the Midwest. We wonder why American kids can’t find anything on a map, when we have scholars at Harvard calling Ohio “the Midwest.” Ohio is not mid-anything, and it’s to the east of 80% of America.
End of East-Coast-Bias Geography Rant.
PS. When you moved to the “southwest” (for FREEDOM!), were you aware that Boulder was just a half-hour away?
Heh. I was just about to address that myself.
It ain’t the Southwest unless the government buildings are made of adobe, or topped with those curved terra-cotta tiles.
And in some cases not even then.
Ahh Dan, that reminds me when I was touring with a scruffy cadre of actors/n’erdowells in “Braveheart: The Musical”.
As an experienced utility actor, I was charged with the great task of playing both “Man with lesions” and “Kilt merchant” along with the responsibility of being assistant to our great star Sir Rodney Hampshireworcestershire who was on hiatus from the dinner theatre smash “Feed My Horse When I’m Gone”. He had a passion for his craft, God rest’m.
I’ll have you know that Ohio is The Great Northwest Territory.
Its pronounced “Hamster”, you know.
Is there really a place in the USA where one can go to escape the nanny state? Seriously. From MA all I can see is the ever-burgeoning powers of gov’t.
I’m looking for Galt’s Gulch on Google Earth, but I’m not having any luck. Chillingly, the offices of Dick Durbin and Barbara Boxer are returned as possible results. Maybe that’s supposed to be motivational.
tw: industry27
My bro-in-law is in the roofing business, and can’t sell enough “southwestern” shingles… in Kansas City. Like they’re trying to capture the glorious tradition of living in Oaxacan squallor.
Wow, I got a ‘70s Oakland A’s flashback just from the post title. Like… wow…
Was, my friend, was. And back then, IIRC, it was technically France, too. So lots of reasons to change geographic affiliations, I’d think.
I’m afraid to mention where Northwestern U is located. (Hint: not Seattle!)
So tell ‘em to light up anyway, pay the friggin’ fine, and flip off Judge Nanny. FOR FREEDOM!
Since when do theatrical-types have no balls?
Oh, yeah… Never mind.
The key to avoiding nannyis to look at a red/blue electoral map, and get your ass into the reddest area you can find. Texas, minus Austin and that third world state known as “The Valley” is about as close as you can get.
Portions of Colorado certainly qualify as the Southwest. Denver? Nope, that’s the Front Range.
I’ve been living out west (Montana, Arizona, Idaho) for over a decade now. Even in that short time frame the changes have been dramatic. Kalifornication continues apace and while Mormons may be redstaters, of a sort, their are obvious social issues when they dominate the polity.
Once, at a Chili’s in Mesa, while attempting to order a second beer the waitress looked at me and asked ‘are you sure?’ It was only then that we realized we were the only people in the entire establishment actually consuming alcohol. And it was happy hour.
Additionally a large portion of the western population isn’t so much conservative or libertarian as just plain populist. They’ll curse the Federal government 24/7 but heaven forbid the checks stop flowing. They will turn a blind eye to alot as long as it’s not their particular ox being gored.
Leaving the rustbelt for the south in the 1970s it was pretty clear regional politics were undergoing permanent change.
The West is also changing and it’s not going to get any redder. The total population of Idaho is currently about 1.3 million. It doesn’t take a whole lot of coastal refugees to change things forever and in my neck of the woods (about 30 minutes outside of Couer D’Alene) it’s happening right now. I’m not clear on where things are going, but what many think the west once was, will never be again.
My moving lips are dyslexic; they read that as “Aw, squawk an’ holler.”
Colorado and Utah and Wyoming are “mountain west”, aren’t they?
All’s I know is, we touch New Mexico and Arizona.
Joaquin Phoenix’s little brothers?
Transfat is bad for you,but what the hell,For Freedom!
I thought they were Coen Brothers movies.
Is Denver the part of the southwest, or Mountain West?
Denver is West Berlin to Boulder’s East Berlin.
The last time I flew into Boise (1999, IIRC), I could have sworn I saw a fleet of C5-A’s carpet bombing the SW psrt of town with about thirty acres of new developements per hour.
Then I read an editorial in the paper that said Idaho should be bussing in people of “diversness” from New York and other exotic lands of the exotic East coast.
Idaho is still #1 in my book, but I shudder to think what has happened to Boise in the intervening 8 years between then and now.
In 1985, I went to Boulder to visit some old friends. I hadn’t been there since about 1972, and, to this day, I still have eyes that bulge like a frog’s.
Ain’t progress grand? Sometimes it reaslly is embarrassing to be white.
What ThomasD said.
Oh, and Ohio is in the “Midwest” (and Chicago has the “Northwestern University”) for historical reasons…
Does all of the above mean that Massachusetts is in Europe?
Please?
JG – So will you be moving to Alaska sometime soon?
Ah, Alaska—where natural resources are owned collectively, and there is no problem too small for a government solution. Also, the place where Ted Stevens will be re-elected to four additional terms in the Senate even after he’s dead.
Also known (to me) as “The Lost Frontier.”