~ it is bad enough that you emptied two months’ worth of comics from our subscription box, including the issue covering the return of the black uniform, but it was it necessary to patronize us by shouting to the clerk from across the store, ‘show them where it says to come in and pick up books.’? we are aware that we need to physically appear in the store in order to pick up our books. after shopping at your store for two years, we were not under the impression that we would somehow receive the books into our possession without taking any action to place our hands on them. after you discarded our books, we had made plans to never enter your store again, but as your clerk had a new subscription sheet waiting for us at the counter, we felt obliged to fill it out. so, enjoy holding those books for three months before discarding them, as well.

~ regarding litter, guns, and philadelphia’s insistence on thin whitewash over deep itreatment nstead of painting a mural of trees next to the empty lot on 47th, why not just plant some real trees in the empty lot on 47th?

~ what we mean to say is, the enormous amounts of garbage that litter the streets and sidewalks of philadelphia – ‘cheetos’ bags, beer bottles, chicken bones – are a larger threat to a suitable quality of life than is the possibilty that a teenager might have a firearm. if teenagers aren’t swayed by the consequences of robbing or shooting someone, they aren’t going to be dismayed by the thought of being fined if they caught with a gun. they aren’t using guns because guns are available; they are using them because they have no other prospects around here. on top of that, frisking people in the streets is unconstitutional. cleaning up pizza boxes and campaign signs in the park – and picking up recycled materials from residences once a week – is not.

~ also, to the white house, if jimmy carter is ‘increasingly irrelevant’, then he wouldn’t be on the front page, and you wouldn’t be commenting on him. the fact that you go to the press with statements on him proves you have defeated your own argument.

~ baltimore quote: ‘if michael nutter didn’t want to be an asshole, instead of stopping and frisking citizens, he’d make it illegal to leave unsolicited pizza fliers on everyone’s door.’
to continue this trajectory: nutter, along with all the losers, should also be forced to personally walk through the city and pick up every one of these campaign signs that are littering public property such as clark park, telephone poles, and thoroughfare medians.

~ green line cafe quote:
“isn’t furness the same one who did our church?”

the trend mentioned in a previous post [+] has continued. at first it was merely a curiosity that lovely, clever-looking young ladies would spend their afternoons studying the holy bible. now it is no joke, with spring arriving, the tables are packed and you can not enter the place without seeing someone cracking open the bible or at least ‘dive into ecclesiastes’. we always knew there were christians out there somewhere, presumably running hallmark franchises in strip malls and trading in glass doves at craft fairs, but we didn’t expect that they had decided to co-opt the myth of intellectualism and cafe culture, exchanging incendiary discourse and revolutionary texts for the gospels.

we thought west philadelphia was a hotbed of radicals, but apparently it is a cradle full of holy rollers. there seems to be less overt christianity at the other green line; perhaps it should be moved up in the queue of scheduled tableaux.

anyway, cafe tableaux has a new green line photo.

~ all the panic can cease; we managed to score a copy of ‘amazing spider-man’ #529 at new york city’s forbidden planet this weekend. we dug through a pile of second printings and uncovered a few first printings; we left two (2) of them on the shelf for anyone who wants to pedal there immediately upon reading this.

~ speaking of marvel comics, it is news to us that marvel and dc have held the rights to the term ‘super hero’ since the 1960’s!

~ speaking of ridiculous ideas, we have seen parked in front of the abandoned church on 47th and kingsessing vans emblazoned with a logo for an ‘anti-graffiti network’ [w]. this is a surprisingly clever use of philadelphia’s limited resources; we need graffiti so much less than we need anti-stabbing, anti-shooting, or anti-getting beaten in the street in broad daylight networks. although, perhaps if more hoodlums were allowed to spraypaint, they would have less time to punch cyclists in the face [+] and steal routers and hand tools [+].