Check it
out:

Don’t get me wrong. It’s lousy that someone did this. But what I like is that the photographer landed right there, right then.

And that our Web master at City Weekly, Bill Frost, picked up on the subtle grammar challenge at hand.

Life in the City.

Oh great.

That inch-deep acting talent Lindsay Lohan has announced, fresh from her stint in pricey drug rehab at The Cirque Lodge in Sundance, her decision to put down roots in Utah.

The slow pace and wholesome environment here will apparently help Lindsay — who apologizes to her fans, “especially the younger fans” for making some bad choices in the past few years.

No indication in the published stories where she’ll be living. Park City? Too much nose candy temptation. Utah County? Plenty of modest formal gowns to choose from for the next Academy Awards, but with Oxycontin and Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Xanax and Lexapro (did I leave one out?) flowing freely to obsessive and overtaxed Mormon moms, it’s not exactly a safe haven for your standard spoiled Hollywood drug addict is it?

Maybe she can be a tour guide at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

I wish she’d just move on.

I just finished a telephone interview with Missy Larsen, executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Council for Utah. PPAC is the political action committee for Planned Parenthood, and has the legal authority to lobby state legislatures and Congress on family planning and abortion rights measures.

Here in Utah, when the Legislature tries to roll back the clock on women’s reproductive rights to the Mesozoic Era, it’s typically PPAC workers who show up and try to gently talk them out of it. They’re already gearing up for another fight come January, when state legislators are expected to take another spin at overturning Roe vs. Wade.

Missy tipped me off to one of the latest Utah myths concerning sex she’s heard through her line of work (and in this state she hears plenty of them). It’s called “floating.” Apparently, more than a few teenagers and even some college students believe it — the idea being that if you put a penis inside a vagina and then hold very, very still — it doesn’t really count as sex.

“Floating” is such a popular notion in Utah culture it even got a mention in this year’s version of Saturday’s Voyeur, the annual spoof on Utah culture by the Salt Lake Acting Company. Now that’s some street cred for a stupid urban myth, eh?

Sometimes I just want to go plum insane.

The City Weekly staff returned about 30 minutes ago from the bomb scare across the street at the Wells Fargo Building. Details are still trickling in, but there appears to be no bomb.

The call to evacuate Wells Fargo came at 2:30. We left obediently at 3:15 p.m. — one of the last office buildings (along with our neighbors, the Sam Weller’s Books crew) to be ordered to leave the area. Most people stood around a safe distance from the danger zone. But it was hot. So our publisher Jim Rizzi — ever the generous sort — sent us all two blocks south to Port O’ Call, where he bought a round of drinks for everyone. At least it was air conditioned. And we’re on Tuesday night deadline, no less! (Don’t count the typos in the paper on Wednesday, please.)

Also on this very day during lunch hour I broke up a fight between a drunk homeless man and his drunk homeless girlfriend. I learned later their names are George and Julie. What went down was this:

I was walking into the front door of our building at 248 S. Main when shouting broke out. Shouting and some genuinely awful profanity aimed at the woman, Julie. George was screaming at her, running in and out of traffic and standing on the TRAX tracks. Most bystanders were uh, standing, on the sidewalk, mouths gaping open. Suddenly, George ran up to Julie, who by then was standing on the Gallivan Plaza TRAX platform. He took a swing at her, but missed.

That’s when I ran over, stood between the two of them, looked him square in the eye and shouted: “You lay a hand on her and you’ll have me to deal with.”

He grabbed his crotch, told me to fuck myself. I told him I had called the police, and I would not be leaving till they came. He spit at me. Got my shirt. But it’s black, the spittle didn’t show and besides, it’s washable.

I walked with Julie to the benches at the TRAX stop. We talked. She lives on the street. She just got out of Volunteers of America Detox. She was drunk again. I told her it didn’t matter whether she was drunk or not, I wasn’t going to stand there and let that guy hit her. She said “thank you.”

It took more than 15 minutes for the cops to arrive. I called 911 twice. The second time, I was angry. Why should it take two calls, I asked the polite dispatcher, to a downtown incident? There was violence, there was disruption of traffic. What else did the scene need for police intervention?

Two minutes later, Officers Snipes and Conrad arrived. Snipes is a bicycle cop. His bike was on the back of the squad car. They were very professional. I told them I’ve written a lot about homelessness. I know it’s a cycle, I told them. You’ll take George away, but any day now he’ll be back and so will Julie. She doesn’t have the tools to leave him, neither of them can be drunk and stay at the shelter, so here they live, on Main Street.

Gwen Springmeyer, of the Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs, told me she’ll communicate with the City Council and Police Department about the problems. No one here at CW wants a sweep of the homeless off Main Street. This is city life. The sidewalks are free and open to all. But I don’t want women getting beat up out here, either. No one — of any stripe — should have to worry about that.

Can someone tell me how this happens?

And what is this “a family of about” 15 children? I have “about” 15 tomatoes on my plants in the garden. I have “about” 15 pens and pencils in the cup on my desk.

But counting children? Isn’t that sort of an exact science?

Unbelievable.

I guess a guy has to make a living.

But isn’t it slightly weird to see this man defending convicted polygamist Tom Green’s son? David Leavitt (younger brother to former Utah Gov. Mike) was the Juab County Attorney who prosecuted the elder Green. Back then, Leavitt considered it a crime to be doing more than one child-bride at a time. Now, son William is a victim of a system that lacks appropriate boundaries and this 19-year-old defendant has Leavitt pandering to the court for a lighter sentence.

Whaa?

Of course, you have to get your arms around Utah’s love-hate relationship with polygamy in the first place. I’ve never been able to do it. Mostly because, every now and then, I’m due back on Earth.

Just got an e-mail from a relative noting some great gossip from her friend’s Mormon ward: A 56-year-old member just announced her engagement to a 21-year-old male (he’s a friend of her youngest son).

I’m 18 years younger than my hubby.

But this?

What say y’all?

… That is the way I’ve come to think of “ttstark,” the person who posts flames on this blog that have zero to do with either the topic under consideration or the general tone of mullentown.

I’m probably insulting wolves by saying that. Wolves are known for their strict social order and for being good parents to their young. “ttstark” simply comes across as a boor with a poor upbringing. Also, I have the distinct feeling he’s drunk when he writes these posts. And a bitter drunk at that.

I hadn’t even checked in this weekend, mostly because I took a dream bicycle ride halfway to Big Mountain (at the Salt Lake/Morgan County line) on Saturday and truly enjoyed Mother’s Day on Sunday. My family gave me time — the best gift of all. I planted my tomatoes and then sat on the porch drinking pinot grigio from a box while reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new book. I’ve always been a fan of Kingsolver, and this new non-fiction work is a cross between her fabulous essays and a journalistic foray into how we get the food we eat.

So, I called up mullentown this a.m. and found yet another flame by this character (See “Girl and Fire,” May 9 post). I saw all your kind efforts to defend me. I’ve also received a couple of e-mails from readers encouraging me to somehow shut off his access to the site. I guess that decision is partially up to all of you. What do you think?

I’m naturally anti-censorship. But as my brilliant Webmaster Joey pointed out to me a few minutes ago, I’m paying for this site and I should have some power over who uses it. He compares it to owning a restaurant. My blog is open to the public and it benefits from varied opinions. But I wouldn’t sit by and allow someone to come into the restaurant, throw trash all over and scream insults at me, the proprietor, or at the patrons. Joey suggests if ttstark has a problem with me kicking him off the blog, maybe he should pay to keep the domain name — and all the others costs associated with the site.

Of course, shunning him the way many of you already have might work. I tried ignoring him, but that didn’t work. If you would like to take up this topic on mullentown, go ahead. Right now, I’m inclined to kick him off, but I can be swayed the other way with a good argument.

Peace out.

No, I can’t take credit for that headline. It’s the work of Bill Frost, a City Weekly staff writer whose writing always makes me laugh out loud. He gets all the credit.

Go here for Bill’s blog post on the silly, overhyped debate between Hannity and Anderson. It’s the best review I’ve read anywhere of last Friday’s event, and believe me, I read more criticism than than my gut could take.

A lot of you have posted on my previous blog entry about the Hannity-Anderson thing. I’m all but finished with writing/talking/thinking about it now, as the story is going on four days old and has just about grown fur at this point. I did, however, hear an amusing take on the whole drama while listening to KSL radio’s Doug Wright on the car radio this morning.

(My husband always asks why I listen to Wright’s talk show, and I always tell him it’s my best yardstick for measuring the way our garden-variety Utahn who marches in lockstep with authority thinks. For me, the show is a cultural magnifying glass. Today’s show did not disappoint.)

You’ll recall that KSL has been blowing every gasket since it learned the debate was a go. They went all wacky with promotion, including billing it as a “smackdown.” Those who watched it either live or on TV know it was anything but. Anyway, this morning Wright was doing his usual “woe unto us” hangdog analysis of our wretched, values-crossed society. The horribly insensitive audience, he said, was the real loser.

Wright simply couldn’t believe how rude, uncouth, how positively barbaric the crowd was. What with their heckling, interruptions and catcalls, why, the two narcissists on stage could barely get a word in edgewise. How, he asked, does an audience get off on behaving this way? What possible excuse could those people have?

Naturally it never dawned on Doug that his very own Sean Hannity has built a whole industry on interrupting callers he disagrees with, on name-calling and heckling and on pushing public discourse lower than an earthworm’s abdomen. You reap what you sow, Doug, and KSL has cultivated quite a garden of idiocy and social intolerance by choosing to syndicate Hannity year after year. Even though many of the outbursts came from pro-Rocky forces, we have a whole society that feels it’s perfectly fine to belittle others and cut them to their quick in a disagreement. I’d have to say both sides have learned the technique from the master: Hannity.

Hey, it’s always worked for him. So why not a crowd of heckling hayseeds at Kingsbury Hall as well?

It’s getting crazy as all getout in this town, leading up to the big Rocky Anderson/Sean Hannity debate tomorrow night at the University of Utah. Smart U. students, who got tickets for $5 a pop, are selling them on eBay for more than $75 a piece. Now that’s free enterprise.

Anyway, at City Weekly we have this thing in perspective. Resident funny man Bill Frost has made it easy for people intent on keeping score between our mayor for life and Hannity the showman. If you missed Bill’s take on the frenzy, check it out here.

Speaking of promoting my newspaper, I’m regularly pimping each week’s issue on FOX-13 here in Salt Lake City. For the next nine weeks, I’m on live with “Good Day Utah” anchors Kerri Cronk and Dan Evans each Thursday at approximately 8:50 a.m. We talk, we laugh, we act vapid just like the best morning show people do everywhere. Check it out.