Category — Jonathan Morris

:: Mayor Wilders’ recent initiative to “clean up” the city’s catalog of archaic, outdated, obtuse or redundant ordinances begins in earnest next Wednesday when he plans to unveil his self-authored C.O.M.B. (Consolidate Our Municipal Bylaws) Initiative. Among the ordinances targeted by the measure are a 1988 ban on prostitution services for pets, last year’s activist “pro-smoking” initiative, and a late 17th-century punishment which calls for “stabbing centrely amidst the fleshie organs” for anyone caught “dealyng with goods of a gypsie nature.”

:: In addition to police officers, emergency response and medical personnel, it is technically illegal in the city to pose as a practitioner of the following professions: Plumber, baker, cobbler, milliner, grocer, asphalt-mixer.

:: Number of local coyote attacks sparking the “Coyotes: This Summer’s Sharks?” three-day investigative series on Channel 8’s newscast next week: 0

:: The Woodbridge District of the city boasts more hair salons, Thai restaurants and British import shops than any other district in the city (124, 70 and 17 respectively).

:: Tourism in the city is down 15% over the same period last year. The Valley Regional Tourism Bureau attributes the decline to budget cuts, leading to a lack of presence for the city in print and internet advertising over the past few months.

:: Ten most common words found in print advertisements in local publications during March 2008:
1. Sale
2. Free
3. And
4. Discount
5. The
6. P.M.
7. A.M.
8. Pork
9. Credit
10. Rebate

:: The Interactive Orwell exhibit celebrates its fifteenth season this year at Agnew Community College’s Wonsley Blvd. campus. Popular with young children and preteens, the “Living Or-world” features an “Animal Farm Petting Zoo”, the “Oceanian Tele-Screen Playground” and “Ministry of Truth Big Brother Relay Race”. This weekend - June 25th, Orwell’s birthday. As always, with purchase of one child ticket, big brothers get in free.
- David Andrews, Shek Baker, Jon Morris, RJ White

Dubious honors were heaped upon the collective heads of The City Desk this week with the announcement of nominees for the seventeenth-annual SirSirSir Awards, hosted by the Journalists’ Smoking Club.

The “Sirries” are a lampoon award granted annually since 1991 by the JSC - an unofficial subset of The Typesetters Club, the city’s professional organization for members of the press- and developed “to honor those members of the fourth estate who boldly hold forth the principles of cowardice, ineptitude, laziness, meekness, collusion, self-righteous crusading, shoddy reporting, functioning livers,pink lungs and all other things anathemic to the field of journalism.” The ceremony will be held this Sunday at the Typesetters’ two-story clubhouse on Landon Avenue (between the Kwik-Park and 24-Hr-Park garages).

The City Desk finds itself nominated for three awards in the “Blogs” category established last year by long-serving Journalists’ Smoking Club President Orville “Otter” Oliver, columnist for The Evening Press. These include the “Bloag” award - short for “bloated blogs” - for “blogs laboring under an inflated sense of importance,” another award for sloppy fact-checking (certain of Ron Paul’s internet supporters would no doubt vote for the site) and the “Any Monkey Can Access The Internet” award for one of our frequent contributors (whose name we’ll leave unwritten, as reports have it that he is taking the nomination pretty hard).

The SirSirSir Awards are named after the infamous on-air performance of local reporter Tom Harley at a 1987 mayoral press conference, when the ten-year veteran of the Journal-Clarion vainly attempted to gain recognition from then-mayor Walter Jackson by repeating “Sir. Sir. Sir” in a staccato monotone for well over twenty-five minutes, and several tens of thousands of iterations, while never being acknowledged by Jackson.

Still, heads are held high at The City Desk this week. The consensus among the contributors is that morning show weatherperson and professional party planning consultant Patricia Casey’s mid-2007 series of entries on the Channel 18 morning program - wherein she argued the unusual premise that adopted children inevitably became overt and violent racists later in life - is bound to sweep the awards.

It pays to remember that the SirSirSir Awards are intended as gentle ribbing from a society of hard-nosed professionals, and that President Orville Oliver himself holds a record 47 “Sirries.” Oliver has also twice been decked by offended past winners and nominees.
- Jon Morris

More than a few protest groups will be pleased to know that this will be the first Thanksgiving in forty-two years to go without the annual crowning of the Thanksgiving Baby.

Long-time residents of the city may have enjoyed watching the annual protests as much as the crowning. At last count, more than fifty groups over the event’s lifetime had lodged official complaints with the city, sponsored activist campaigns against the entire concept of the Thanksgiving Baby and actively protested the event in the streets.

Begun in 1965 by local pediatrician Casper Moore, the event of “crowning” a baby declared by a select judging panel as being “the city’s healthiest” was part of Dr.Moore’s long-term plan to weave pediatric health awareness inexorably into the fabric of a prominent American holiday.

The first controversy erupted in 1969, when the “crowning” event – which traditionally opened the Thanksgiving Day Parade festivities in the Central Corridor and Downtown – was marred with claims of racial intolerance. It was revealed that one of the event’s six judges – Dr.Moore’s cousin and grocery store chain owner Roger Costello – had steadfastly prohibited the inclusion of any child of African-American descent.

His reasoning was that “potential complications from the curse of sickle cell anemia and the exaggerated fatality rates of urban (black) men” prevented him from, in good faith, choosing a black infant for the award. Seven civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, protested the event that year and many years following, even after the election of an African-American infant in 1975.

Since the majority of the Thanksgiving Babies to date have been under one year of age, several children’s health experts have objected to the tradition of the “Thanksgiving Feast” – which includes many solids, such as turkey breast, accompanied by a large cup of cooled coffee - presented to the Baby at the start of festivities. Although the removal of coffee and the transition to pureed turkey breast has quelled many doctors’ complaints, PETA continues to object.

Child labor organizations have protested what they believe to be the ceremony’s breach of child labor laws, metalworkers’ unions have protested what they believe was “non-union” labor involved in the casting of the Thanksgiving Baby Crown, Native American groups have protested the celebration of European colonialism and a half-dozen other types of organizations have made their feelings known every year since the event’s inception.

In a 2001 television broadcast, news anchor Heather Guisewite commented that it was “impossible to hear the name of the winner, for all the chanting.”

Lampooning the protestability of the event, fake “activist organizations” have, over the last ten years, increasingly participated in the condemnation of the event. “The National Association for the Advancement of Former Thanksgiving Babies,” the “Thanksgiving Baby Liberation Army,” “The Justice League of America” and more than a dozen other student-led prank protest groups have made management of the event a greater nightmare than Dr.Moore had ever anticipated.

Citing the innumerable protest activities, Dr.Moore capitulated, and turning eighty-five this year he chose to disband the organization and event once and for all. The retired medical professional explained “You can’t hardly get to the stage for all the picketers.”

“I just wanted to help people raise healthier babies,” added Dr.Moore, “Where did I go wrong?”
- Jon Morris

A recurring series in which we take a look back at the city’s most familiar advertising icons.

From the annals of spokesfigures whose time had come and gone before they’d even arrived, there’s Fatty Turkey, the eponymous mascot of Fatty Turkey Brand Whole Frozen Turkeys. A subsidiary spawned from McLaren Preservatives, the Fatty Turkey Brand was the brainchild of founder and then-president Leland McLaren, who’d decided to expand his modest nitrate and polysodium empire into the market which his goods typically serviced.

Debuting in freezer sections in 1977 - during the height of the health-conscious mania gripping thirties-bound baby boomers - McLaren’s advertisedly bad-for-you birds may have seemed a counter-intuitive comestible.

Leland’s reasoning was, as he stated in a company newsletter and PR release later that year, “to reclaim the word ‘fat’ from the doomsayers and finger-wagglers.” The 131-pound, six-foot-two McLaren - then fifty-five years old - continued, “When I was a boy, ‘fat’ meant healthy! ‘Fat’ meant robust! We all drooled at the thought of a fat, juicy chicken for dinner or a nice, fat goose for Christmas.”

Essential to McLaren’s campaign to reclaim the luxurious implication of the long-since demonized word, pot-bellied Fatty Turkey himself was stamped onto the trademark Fatty Turkey “Rich White” packaging. The smiling, rotund bird sported a very unfashionable full-figure, which nonetheless seemed to ring a chord with typically calorie-conscious consumers.

In time, Fatty Turkey was joined by Fatty Goose, Fatty Duck and Fatty (Cornish) Game Hen, both in the freezer section and in the company’s promotional coloring books, tee-shirts and cardboard cut-out finger puppets. Collectors of mascot memorabilia may be interested to know that the entire Fatty Family of plump poultry once adorned the cardboard cover of an Easter Egg dying kit, in 1984.

Leland McLaren’s one-man mission to return respectability to “fatness” (what one Alternative Weekly newspaper reporter called “McLaren’s Crusade for the F-Word”) derailed in the late Eighties. During a live television broadcast of the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade from the Central Corridor and Downtown, McLaren - whose company had sponsored an in-parade appearance by health guru Richard Simmons and many of the super-sized dancers from his popular Sweatin’ To The Oldies series of videocassettes - interrupted himself during a television interview in order to indulge a seemingly unprompted tirade.

Rumored to have had personality clashes with the colorful Simmons, Leland McLaren went on-air accusing the “homosexual community” of “maliciously and malevolently appropriating the word ‘gay!’” for “Lord only knows whatever (bleeped) purpose!”

“When I was young, gay meant happy! Now what does it mean? I’ll tell you - “ was as far as the rant was allowed to go by sound booth engineers.

Apparently, one reclaimed word was enough, and McLaren stepped down owing to internal pressure from Nabisco, who’d purchased McLaren Preservatives two years earlier. The Fatty Turkey Brand was dissolved, and Fatty Turkey and his Fatty Friends have since waddled off to Fatty Obscurity.
- Jon Morris

:: Number of states represented by marching bands in this year’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: 5

:: Number of people saved by this year’s parade Grand Marshal, Janelle Welks, when that van went off of Pier 8 in June: 7

:: Number of candidates for next year’s mayoral race who will be marching in the parade: 3

:: This year’s balloons: Farley, a tin soldier, Batman, the Haddon Bros. Meats Tom Turkey

:: Number of elves used for the penultimate Santa float: 12 (8 on the float and 4 alternates)

:: An upcoming episode of the Discovery Channel series Mythbusters is scheduled to explore the myth that rock candy stored in the back of a refrigerator will absorb free-floating freon molecules and, if ingested, result in a “serious high.” This urban legend is believed to have originated with local late night horror tv host Count Film-Ula during a spirited 1978 broadcast.

:: Due to a change in their membership’s male/female gender ratio from 19:1 in 1968 to 1:3 in 2006, the 39th annual Sadie Hawkins Day Dance, held as a fundraiser by the Westside Independent Business Owner’s Group (WIBOG) on the third Saturday of every November, will feature a bachelorette auction instead of the traditional bachelor auction. This year’s festivities will take place at 8pm on November 17 in the old BPOE hall on West 19th Street.

:: The local chapter of the University of Oklahoma Alumni Association will take over the Pitcairn Room at the Hyatt Regency Shaffer Boulevard Hotel on November 17 to celebrate the Oklahoma Statehood Centennial (46th State, entered the union 11/16/1907) and watch their beloved Sooners try to position themselves for the Big 12 championship game and the BCS title game in their prime time tilt in Lubbock against the hated Texas Tech Red Raiders. Halftime will feature the piñata-bashing of a life-size likeness of Tech head coach Mike Leach.

:: On November 19 at Noon, actor Mike Rooney will recreate Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on the front steps of the City Hall Annex. Don’t be late, as the 16th President’s most famous speech runs a scant 278 words. Rooney is best known for portraying Mr. Lincoln in widely-seen television commercials selling Rozerem sleep aids and co-starring a talking beaver.

:: And remember- If, in the next week, someone asks where Black Friday came from, you know the real answer.
- David Andrews, Jon Morris, RJ White

:: Today, at 5pm, the city’s Office for Information and Complaints hotline will shut down after 33 years of service. It will be subsumed into the city’s new 311 information service.

:: Number of staffers for the hotline in 1974: 1

:: Number today: 28

:: Number to be staffing the new 311 line: 35

:: Former Channel 6 local horror show host Count Film-Ula will no longer be participating in next season’s broadcast of the CBS reality-based game show, The Amazing Race, as previously announced. The Count’s scheduled Amazing Race partner, nephew and publicist, Anthony Reno, cited the Count’s declining health as the reason behind the pullout, although he added that his uncle continues to be very dedicated to his hobby of creating chainsaw sculptures.

:: Due to pressure from the AARP and local advocates for the aged, the Geriatriclympics has been canceled. The second annual event, which was to be held this weekend in the parking lot of the Sunny Tomorrows Assisted Living Center on 117th and Carrey St, had come under fire as not being particularly sensitive. Among last year’s events were a colostomy bag toss, a 100-meter shuffle and the Rascal demolition derby.

:: Funeral services will be held this weekend for Toto the Tiger, accidentally struck by a city bus last Tuesday. The husky male Royal Bengal tiger was born in captivity at the Chauncey Butler Circus in 2000, and has been a favorite of city residents since his debut later that year as “official spokes-tiger” for the year-round, indoor event. Famously tame, Toto was renowned for his live, unleashed appearances at charity events, children’s hospitals, retirement homes, animal shelters and swim meets. The Chauncey Butler Arena will remain open to all attendees beginning Friday night, and ending Sunday at five p.m. City bus driver Rolly Furst remains on paid suspension.

:: Veterans Day (November 11) falls on a Sunday this year, so the official municipal holiday will be Monday, November 12. The current contract for municipal employees does not include Veterans Day as a paid holiday, so city employees should show up for work as usual.
- David Andrews, Ray Ingraham, Jon Morris, RJ White

:: The city is home to no less than seven junior and community colleges, one of which (Sparrow Valley Community College, on Cedar Ave and S.Sparrow Valley Dr.) boasts a Zagat-rated three-star cafeteria.

:: The large outdoor clock above the main entrance of the City Hall Annex was accidentally set to Standard Time last weekend. On Monday morning approximately 12 employees and visitors were seen waiting outside the building one hour before official opening time.

:: Amount of leaves a City resident is allowed to burn per week (by volume): 7 cubic feet

:: Distance from freestanding structures (doghouses and meat-smoking lodges excepted, starting in 1989) burning City leaf piles must be: 25 feet

:: Times City Code stipulates a resident must wave arms and “clearly and directly” state “I am burning leaves” before setting leaves aflame, to notify any deaf or blind children who might be playing nearby: 5

:: Times a resident of one of the city’s six unincorporated areas must “thoroughly and purposefully” probe leaf piles with a lawn implement to ensure no children or squirrels have burrowed into the leaf piles before burning: 1

:: An elaborate new storefront window display was unveiled for the struggling Spoiled Brats restaurant, located on Smithson Place, in the Courthouse District. The animatronic diorama depicts a crying bratwurst dressed in overalls and holding a lollipop while being offered an array of toppings and dipping sauces. Owner Reggie Von Leold recently admitted, “I’m not sure that this was the best name to pick for a restaurant and figured it could use some further clarification.”

:: City Parks and Recreations Services announced yesterday that they expect to have repairs to the 1:6 scale model of the Cutty Sark in Mabel Tripp Gardens completed by next Friday. The cherrywood replica vessel has been undergoing renovation and repair over the last four years, to remove more than 1,200 profanities carved into its hull by vandals. The endeavor employed a remarkable 920 pounds of wood putty.
- David Andrews, Benjamin Birdie, Craig Gaines, Jon Morris

It’s once again time to grab your frying pan hats and potted mint plants; DeedlesCon is back in town!

Celebrating its twentieth year of operation, DeedlesCon is a chance for memorabilia collectors and fans alike to come together and share their love of locally created comic strip icon Junior Deedles.

Probably best known for being the one comic strip which New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia refused to read over the radio during a 1945 newspaper strike (“I, er, won’t read this one” explained the mayor, without further comment, before moving on to Li’l Abner), Junior Deedles was actually a wildly popular strip during most of its forty-seven continuous years of publication.

Created by local cartoonist Fred P Skates, Junior Deedles made his debut as the so-called “Canny Oaf” in Skates’ then-titled Humorous Junction comic strip. Within three years, by 1927, Junior Deedles had acquired his name, “adopted” the first of his Magical Mint Plants “Julia,” and had proven so popular that the Humorous Junction strip was renamed in his honor.

Skates perished in 1959 from complications related to a case of Queensland Fever contracted when he was a child, but Junior Deedles lived on via a long series of replacement artists, a multitude of merchandise and a series of surprisingly vulgar black-and-white animated shorts released during the 1940s.

Although the strip ceased publication more than thirty-five years ago, it continues to delight its former audience and develop new fans along the way. Mitch Prince, organizer of the DeedlesCon since its inception in 1987, claims that new fans are drawn in by the timelessness of the stories and the characters.

“When you talk about the great characters of literature, you have to put Junior Deedles right up there with Hercules, Jesus and Shakespeare,” says Prince, “Not to mention his supporting cast, Deedles’ girlfriend Hotcha, his father Poppa Deedles, the evil shoe salesman The Rattlesnake or even the Hopping Hootenanny.

“These are classics,” added Prince, “They represent the work or one of the great masters of a unique American art form.”

After a moment’s consideration, Prince added “Or as Deedles used to say, “Cushy Coo Coo Coo!”

DeedlesCon 2007 will be held in the Hussar Room at the Lawbell Alley Hilton, east of Exit 551.

Notable Facts About Junior Deedles:

• At the peak of its popularity, Junior Deedles was carried in over seven-hundred newspapers. At its nadir of its popularity, it was carried in only one.
• Fred Skates and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz shared a profound hatred for one another, both personally and professionally. On the occasion of Skates’ death, Schulz sent an infamous telegram to Skates’ widow reading “My apologies as I cannot attend funeral stop may reconsider if I can find my dance shoes stop”
• Names of all the Magical Mint Plants “adopted” by Junior Deedles: Julia, Hortence, Agatha, Alice, Pearl, Posey and Roy.
• Most valuable piece of Deedles memorabilia, according to the 2005 Comic Strip Character Collectible Price Guide (Collector Books): The Junior Deedles Mint-Scented-Spray Gun (1945) - $125,500
• Least valuable piece of Deedles memorabilia: Junior Deedles Christmas Candy Cigarettes (1992) – No Value Listed
• Whatever happened to the statue of Junior Deedles which occupied a place of honor on Wonderland Walk at Mabel Tripp Gardens, until 1983? No one knows.

- J. Morris

:: The plug has been pulled on the traditional giant electric pumpkin atop the 49th floor setback on the Chandler Building downtown. Vandals had redrawn the pumpkin’s face with triangular eyes and a gap-toothed grin that presented an uncomfortably near likeness of the mayor’s wife, Jean Arroyo-Wilders.

:: It remains illegal to sell or purchase candy pumpkins within city limits, owing to a 1998 ordinance dedicated to eradicating “marketplace confusion.”

:: For Tuesday and Wednesday night’s games at Fourth Financial Arena, the Cosmopolitans will be offering a discount to those wearing costumes which utilize pucks.

:: Number of local businesses with “Trick” in the name: 2 (”Ms.Tricks” Gentlemen’s Club and “Tricky Rickles Buffet-Style Steakhouse”)

:: Number of local businesses with “Treat” in the name: 4 (”Sweet Treats” confectionary, “Treats by Tina” cake designers, “Heavenly Treats” croissanterie, and “Ms.Treats” Gentlemen’s Club)

:: Number of local businesses with “Trick” and “Treat” in the name: 1 (”Tricks and Treats” Gentlemen’s Club)

:: Both “Halloween” and “Dia de los Muertos” are considered viable “floating religous holidays” for municipal employees.

:: Apparently, someone has, over the last week, been periodically calling the pay phone on 17th between Archer and Bergdon, saying “You fool, Warren is DEAD” when someone answers, then hanging up.

:: Street musician Sylvester ‘Spooky’ Sherman is expected to test the new city ordinance prohibiting unlicensed public performance within 30 feet of any retail establishment by playing his 29th consecutive ‘Halloween Concert’ in front of the Arch Street Walgreens next Wednesday, October 31.
- David Andrews, Jon Morris, RJ White

:: Clarence ‘Big Stan’ Stanton is the only mayor to be recalled (1910) in the city’s history, though it is widely believed that Mordecai M. Miller resigned (1877) to avoid the same fate. His successor, M. Seymour Haley, faced recall in 1879, but retained his office by a single vote. Both Haley and Miller died in a mysterious warehouse fire at the 17th Street Pier in 1887.

:: According to a poll by local youth blog CityTeenz, the three most popular places to “hook up” are: 1) under the bench in the middle of the Max Schmeling Garden of A Thousand Faces, found within the Jack Dempsey Memorial Statue Gardens; 2) in the greenhouse tool shed at Miles Muzio Memorial High School; 3) anywhere on the Great Lawn of the historic Fonda-Dodge House.

:: The poll, conducted during the week of Aug. 3, also found that it’s becoming popular among “extreme” young men to stick forks in their forearm.

:: Of the 216 area teens who took part in the poll, 78 percent said they “Want to get out of the City as quickly as humanly possible.”

:: Water levels in the central branch of the Ostahanoc River are at their lowest point since 1934. The river was, in fact, completely dry in August of 1934 due to the final phase of construction up-river on the Valley Vista Dam.

:: The producers of the locally cultivated Monet Cabbage (a dark-blue, baseball-sized legume edged with gauzy pink and white frills) have entered litigation today against the Gilroy, CA agricultural firm responsible for the cultivation of the Monet Pear (a dark-green, baseball-sized fruit speckled with pink-and-white ‘freckles’) on charges of “deliberately manufacturing confusion in the produce marketplace” between the two rather dissimilar food items.

:: Number of local businesses with “Belly” in the name: 3 (”Belly-Busters” Restaurant on Elmer St. and Avenue D; “Pink Bellies” suntan salon in the Civic Center Mall; and “Bellies,” low-impact fitness centers for expectant mothers, multiple locations)

:: After reviewing hundreds of entries over the last several months, it has been decided that the official name for the 50th Annual Meatloaf Festival being held at Mabel Tripp Gardens in late October will be called “Meatloafia!”
- David Andrews, Craig Gaines, Jon Morris