Bodies, Bodies Everywhere

The Broad Street Review has a new piece about Bodies… The Exhibition, and if you’re wondering if the author has confused Body Worlds with the knock-off, you’re in luck: It appears he has.

You’ll also no doubt note there is a reference to the Nazis in the second paragraph. This is a journal of arts and culture, after all! “It did not reassure me that the show’s promoter is a German. Displaying corpses in amusing poses, with witty props and paraphernalia, put me in mind of Nazi lampshades made out of human skin.” Yeah, way to not hold that exhibition, Franklin Institute. (If you’re wondering, Body Worlds was run by a German; Bodies… The Exhibition was run by Premier Exhibitions, Inc., an Atlanta-based company.

Boy, It’s Almost Impossible To Tell Them Apart

I was going to write some words about Jill Porter’s Daily News column today column about how new breath mints “look uncannily like tiny heat-sealed bags of cocaine, crack, heroin or any other powdered drug.” But then I decided the photos the Daily News ran with the story told it all.

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Magazine Ranks Cities To Get Magazine Into News

Some stupid magazine did a stupid city ranking in order to get itself in the news. This time, the magazine was Self, a magazine for women I guess, and it asked women if they were happy and healthy or something.

Apparently, Philadelphia women were neither happy, healthy nor in shape, and the magazine ranked Philly 87th out of 100 cities. Philly also won “worse environment” in the pointless poll.

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So This Is What NJ Residents Do After Leaving Old City

There’s not really much I can do with this article about Camden’s streets at night from the Courier-Post so I’ll just print a few of the excerpted quotes.

• The harsh, bright lights illuminated a crowd milling near the Crown Fried Chicken on Mount Ephraim Avenue.

  Inside, Tara Kittrell, 28, wore a tight-fitting white T-shirt with the words “Baby Sex” on it. After a night on the town at a Philadelphia club, she was back in Camden, trying to explain why it’s important to keep the late-night fast food restaurants open — even though some officials say they are magnets for crime and should close by 1 a.m.

  “People go out. They get drunk. They want to get something to eat,” Kittrell said. “They got to feed their liquor. They don’t want to be going home, throwing up all over the place. They got to eat so they don’t get no hangovers.”

• “Yeah, I’m concerned. But I’m watching my head before I’m watching someone else’s,” said Pop Marcus, 20. “Shooting? Yeah. That’s daily here. . . . But it’s survival of the fittest, dog eat dog. . . . Everybody wants to get out, eventually, but you got to deal with the situation at hand.
• As he leaned against the doorway of the takeout restaurant, Jose Rosa took a long drink from a plastic bottle and complained that the Camden police are picking on him and his friends.

  On this cool, quiet evening, just a short time before the nearby bars will close, Rosa, 50, says he’s feeling a little resentful about an incident earlier that night.

  The police shouldn’t have asked him and his friends to stop drinking in public, he says.

  “We’re not the problem,” he says, in Spanish-accented English. “It’s the jitterbugs.”

  Jitterbugs?

  “This is a stick-up place,” he says of his neighborhood. He blames the “jitterbugs,” which is his name for the young, nervous, armed bandits who pull guns and steal from people in the community.

Uh, I’m pretty sure that last one is his derogatory term for black people, but whatever.

Camden streets at night [Courier-Post]

Larry West Has A Wikipedia Page

In the “criticism” section:

On an article written by Daniel McQuade, a writer for Philadelphia Weekly for the Philadelphia Will Do blog, he wrote, “It’s becoming more and more apparent Larry West is an art-school prank or perhaps the new host of Punk’d.”

For the record, Philadelphia Will Do is 100 percent in favor of Larry West’s candidacy. I will be sad when Larry’s Wikipedia page is nominated for deletion.

Larry West [Wikipedia]