The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

This sign is part of my regular bike ride.

Last night, in what will likely be remembered as a defining moment in this gong show of an election, Marco Gutierrez, founder of Latinos for Trump (talk about working against your own self-interest!) gave an intended-to-be-ominous warning that there would be “taco trucks on every corner” if the short-finger orange vulgarian didn’t become president.

Here are captioned still frames from that moment:

Simply put, what he’s saying is: “I come from a people who need to be brought under control.”

This Tio Tomas is a racist campaigner’s wet dream: a member of a visible minority who’s only too happy to share his self-loathing to further promote the idea of the white male as the preferred default person. I hope he doesn’t like tacos, because I can’t imagine that there are too many taco places that would be willing to serve him after that statement.

As a fan of Tampa’s Taco Bus…

…and living within biking distance of a truck that serves some really good smoked pork and salmon…

…my first thought was “Hey, I’d love to have a taco truck on my corner!” Besides, it would go well with our local ice cream place:

I’m not the only one who expressed that sentiment…

Today we learned there are two Americas: One that thinks “taco trucks on every corner” is terrifying, and one that thinks: delicious.

— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) September 2, 2016

…and in the end, it looks like the day of the election — Tuesday, November 8, 2016 — shall henceforth be known as Taco Tuesday!

Photo by The Good, the Chad, and the Ugly. Click to see the source.

And to anyone in the business of selling tacos: this is a once-in-a-lifetime marketing opportunity. Take advantage of it!

You can find a crazy cat lady in many places, but you’ll have to go to Florida — Port Richey, to be specific — to find a crazy chicken lady. According to the Pasco County Arrests site (a site that’s made possible by Florida’s sunshine laws), a woman was investigated for having livestock in her house. It turned out that she had about 100 chickens there.

In addition to the charges you might expect, she was also charged with resisting arrest and providing a false name to a law enforcement official. After all, this is Florida, and we have a tradition of providing not-quite-believable names to the cops.

Thanks to Rachel Segal for the find!

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Pictured above, from left to right, are:

• The August/September 2016 issue of Girls’ Life magazine, complete with headlines like “Fall Fashion You’ll Love”, “Your Dream Hair”, and “Best. Year. Ever.”, and
• the September 2016 issue of Boys’ Life magazine, splashed with the headline “Explore Your Future”.

Matt Frye, who took the photo at his local library, said:

A sad microcosm of what our society says being a girl vs being a boy means. With three girls to raise, this breaks my heart. I’ll fight like hell for my girls to not exist in this reality.

The owner of the Princess Free Zone has this to say about the photo:

Why I do what I do. Because this shit is real. And kids believe it.

Remember, teenagers read this sort of stuff as part of their attempt to figure out the world. When we present the world to them like this, we limit girls’ horizons, and set up boys to be Gamergaters.

Addendum

Michael Letterle makes this important observation:

Important to note that the two magazines are in no way related or affiliated.

Boys' Life is the Boy Scout magazine https://t.co/ziv4bS25GH

— Michael Letterle (@mletterle) September 1, 2016

Photo by Gary Singh. Click to see the source.

From now on, I’m going to refer to people as “cucumbers with anxiety”.

Alas, it’s not Vladimir Putin, Russia’s Thug-in-Chief and Donald Trump’s buddy, but Vladimir Putin, the West Palm Beach guy who yells at grocery store employees for reasons yet to be determined.

Here’s the arrest record, which shows that for all legal intents and purposes, his name is Vladimir Putin:

Click to see at full size.

For those of you not from Florida, Publix is a chain of great supermarkets that operates in the southeast US, a number of which are dressed up more nicely than your typical grocery store. The Publix where Putin had his little meltdown is in West Palm Beach’s CityPlace mall, and it’s a nice-looking one:

If you think that’s a pretty grocery store, check out the Publix in Surfside:

Many of the news stories I’ve seen make mention of the fact that Florida’s Vladimir Putin is not the “real” Vladimir Putin — as if one can be more “real” than the other, especially when the “real” Putin has become a caricature of himself. None of them seem to have made any attempt to figure out how someone without any apparent Russian heritage gets the name “Vladimir Putin”, or how it’s official enough to use in an arrest report.

Here’s a sentence you never expected to see: Vladimir Putin has dreads!

You may suggest that the West Palm Beach Vladimir Putin simply adopted the name as a way of appearing to be more bad-ass, but who’s to say it wasn’t the other way around? After all, if the Russian St. Petersburg — where Russian Putin was born — can steal its name from the lovely Florida city, why can’t the Russian President steal his name from a Florida Man?