Backwash

Cool or Embarrassing?

Do you really want to know about some gangsta shit? Outkast asked that crucial question on 2000’s Stankonia. But Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline doesn’t want you to get your gangsta shit from public libraries. Kline has made sure that 33 album titles won’t be among those included among the discs that Kansas libraries are to receive as part of the settlement of a federal lawsuit against the recording industry. His office has deemed the material on those 33 discs offensive. We find his effort to play head librarian offensive. And as a service to our readers, we present the following sample of banned lyrics:

I’ve been to pretty buildings, all in search of you/I have lit all the candles, sat in all the pews/The desert had been done before, but I didn’t even care/I got sand in both my shoes and scorpions/In my hair— Live, “The Distance,” from the album The Distance to Here

Threads
Off the rack and on the town

Cookie Factory Bakery, Oak Park Mall, 9 p.m. Thursday

In the pastry case, cookies lean against each other like toppled dominoes. The kid behind the counter wears a red, store-logo T-shirt and wire-rimmed glasses as he bops to techno from a boombox behind him.

Giant rings made of PVC pipe fill each ear, creating enough negative space to fit a … cookie! OK, maybe not quite. The official diameter: 1 and a half inches.

The kid is an anomaly in the world of corporate work wear. “It’s not the cookie image,” says the Pitch‘s fashion expert, a straight guy named Bud. “He sells the whole soft image but doesn’t look soft.” The shirt obviously adheres to company dress code, but the enormous earrings? Apparently no one’s thought to regulate those.

“Probably every other person asks about it,” says the kid, recent Shawnee Mission West graduate Dustin Wells. “I actually want to make them bigger,” he says. “But my boss doesn’t want me to.”

Bored in geometry class his junior year, Wells pierced his ears with a safety pin. Since then, he’s stretched his lobes every day, filling them with street junk — pen caps, bottle caps, the mouth of a kazoo, a hardware store socket (which cut him), syrup bottle caps (available in red, white and blue). He learned his own lessons, such as how to wrap each object in electrical tape to expand its circumference.

“Most people are satisfied with the gauge they have,” Wells says. “I’m just one of those people who, if I’m going to do something, do it as best as possible.”

It’s not a job for just anyone. “A friend of mine got to an inch and ripped [his ears],” Wells says. “I guess my ears are pretty tough.” Still, he says he must position his head carefully on his pillow when he sleeps to avoid a tear. His piercings are too big to go back to their original size. “Not unless I want to cut off [my lobes] or have surgery,” he says.

At least two other employees sport the ear-doughnut look at the cookie shop, but on a smaller scale.

“People are always telling me that it looks gay,” Wells says. “I’m like, whatever. I don’t care.”

“Like the jocks at your high school?” Bud asks.

“No,” Wells says. “It’s the guys with smaller gauges.”

Net Prophet
Notes from KC’s blogosphere

There is a social worker who makes rounds with us each morning. She is reasonably attractive for an older woman, and Jason and I have noticed that some days she wears a padded bra and other days she doesn’t. The difference is very noticeable, and it makes me wonder why she would employ such wide fluctuations in perceived breast size from day to day when the actual state of things is obvious. Maybe she just wakes up and says “feels like a B cup day today,” or “breasts just don’t go well with this outfit.” I think it would be like me deciding to wear a hair piece one day, and then not wear it the next and so on. Somehow I think folks would know what was really going on. I figure if you’re flat, you’re flat and if you’re bald, you’re bald. Genetics can be a cruel mistress.