Ball of confusion - cocks and pimps in the Inland Valley

Last October, in my personal mrontemp blog, I wrote a post about David Allen's blog. In that post, I made several references to my blogging name (Ontario Emperor), and clearly noted that Ontario Emperor and David Allen were two separate people. For example:

Back then when I communicated with David Allen, I had to use this thing called "electronic mail." Perhaps the older people among you have heard of it.

This blog post was written before I implemented Disqus, so I went ahead and set something on that mrontemp blog so that older comments have to be approved. I just approved a comment that began as follows:

Hi David - I was the one who asked you to delve into the historic calendars at the Chino restaurant, the "Cock-A-Doodle".

Either she has confused David Allen and myself (hey, we both wear glasses, we both have jobs, and we have both attended Ontario City Council meetings), or she thinks that I have an inside line to David. Trust me, I don't; Allen doesn't even know about my Empoprise-IE blog, which would certainly fit under the "local content" category. (Of course, that's my fault, since I've usually provided the mrontemp URL when communicating with him.)

And, believe it or not, it gets better from there. The major point that she wanted to raise was as follows:

Can you find out how in the world the Upland Public Library was allowed to sponsor an event tonight (9-17-08) titled: "PIMP YOUR BACKPACK"? We were shocked that a supposedly educational institution was using the work "pimp" to encourage students to come in to decorate their backpacks. The Director of the library, Ms. Kathy Bloomberg-Rissman, told me today that the teenagers "identify" with this word, and have no understanding of the true definition of the word. Yeah, right.

Now, while I agree that the word can be construed as an offensive one, I am baffled on several levels:

• Why does the commenter think that David will conduct an in-depth investigative report of the Upland Public Library's event naming policies?


• Why does the commenter think that libraries are "allowed" or "not allowed" to do things? If there's any institution that could talk about material in an unrestrained manner, it's a library.


• How can someone worry about a "pimp your backpack" event, but not consider the sexual ramifications of a restaurant named "Cock-a-Doodle"?

P.S. If you haven't read Allen's list of local blogs (sans this one), I highly recommend it. I was only aware of half of these blogs myself, so it looks like I will be updating my Google Reader feeds.