Tom Monaghan’s 11,000-home Catholic community, Ave Maria, opened to the public this weekend. I don’t know how selling $256,900 to $481,900 homes to wealthy, retired Catholics really helps spread the word of god here on earth, but I’m sure that it all makes sense in the mind of the super-conservative pizza mogul. I’m just happy that this colossal monument to his ego was built in Florida, and not here in his hometown of Ypsilanti. He says publicly that the town will be open to non-Domionists, but I can’t imagine that he’d allow anyone to live there who didn’t fit his narrow vision of what a “good Christian” is. If you’ll recall, he spent quite a bit of money here in Ypsilanti in an attempt to deny equal rights to gays and lesbians. One can’t imagine that he’d welcome them into Ave Maria with open arms. Someone really should give it a shot. I bet, if there’s a gay couple willing, we could raise the quarter million dollars Monaghan’s asking for a starter home. I’d contribute $100, if they promised to blog about their adventures in Ave Maria… In all seriousness, though, I hope he’s successful at building his compound there in the swamps of Florida, among the other cultists. If he is, maybe he’ll divest from his remaining Ypsilanti properties and we’ll be done with him and his shitty pizza legacy once and for all.
My level of hatred for bottled water (and the wealthy) reached an all new high this evening. I was reading an article in the British newspaper “The Guardian” on America’s new breed of super-rich, and it mentioned an increasingly popular brand of “luxury mineral water” that was selling for up to $90 a bottle in Los Angeles. The water, called Bling H2O, was apparently the brainchild of Hollywood producer Kevin Boyd, who felt there was a niche for something more exclusive than the Pellegrino being swilled by the common, single-digit millionaires around him. The URL I located for the company said to be marketing the water doesn’t seem to be working, which makes me hopeful that they’ve gone out of business, but I suspect they’re still out there, gluing crystals on frosted bottles full of Tennessee spring water and laughing their asses off. Regardless, it makes me want to visit a market on Rodeo Drive and see what the rich and famous are wiping their asses with these days. Surely they’re up to five-ply by now.
Clementine and her friend, Amelia, got into one of their infamous, face-to-face screaming matches this morning. Fortunately, this time I had a camera on hand and caught it on video. The disagreement had to do with how many mommies someone could have. Clementine was adamant that a person could only have one mommy. Amelia, citing the family of a friend of hers, kept saying two… Afterward, I tried to explain that they were both right; biologically speaking, a person can only have one mommy, however, there are instances where two women raise a child. And, when that’s the case, it’s possible that both women could be called “mommy.” These are the little challenges that make modern parenting so much fun.
As long as we’re on the subject, I was talking with a young friend last night who is getting ready to go off to Oberlin. We were talking about dorm assignments and the like, and she mentioned that there were “about ten” choices to choose from in the “sexual orientation” part of the housing application. She also said that you had to indicate whether or not you would mind sharing your room with someone who identified themselves as transgender. (They apparently have a transgender residential program.) I was wondering this morning whether Oberlin was unique in addressing transgender students in this way, and decided to look online. The first thing I stumbled across this conservative article containing the following clip:
…Oberlin embodies a far-Left paradise of agitation, Marxist activism and sexual licentiousness. It is, in short, a model of the Left’s paradise. It is specifically for this reason that it resembles most traditional Americans’ version of Hell.
It also said that Oberlin “indulges in hating whitey.”
However hard we think it is to be a parent these days, it’s got to be ten times as hard to be a kid.
In May of this year, I started bugging the folks at City Hall, asking for a brief “one-page sales document that states what we have available and what the terms would be if a company were interested” in the City-owned parcel commonly referred to as Water Street. Well, on Friday, I got the attached pdf. I thought that some of you might all like to see it. If you know of a developer who might be interested, please feel free to forward it. And, if you have any thoughts as to how we, the people of Ypsilanti, could better market the property, leave a comment. We need everyone working on this.
