Salt City Sinner

posted on 8/30/2015 by the Salt City Sinner  The last two times that I wrote about gardening, the tone was uncharacteristically less “playful whimsy” than “agonized demon howl.” This is with good reason. The cockroach-hearted fauxhemian Whole Foods crowd at Wasatch Community Gardens, you see, did a terrible thing to me and many other people – they decided that agreements are for suckers and that what the world really needs is another blighted patch of asphalt rather than a large and vibrant community garden, and so they killed my garden (and the gardens of many others) dead, dead, dead. Forgive my bitterness: there is something about loving a patch of actual soil, about nurturing life from tiny green shoots to a luxurious canopy of flowers and vegetables that brings out a protective streak in a human being, and also a ferocious loyalty. The destruction of Sugar House Community Garden did not, however, end my gardening career – heavens, no! Instead, I and a handfu...

posted on 8/12/2015 by the Salt City Sinner I moved from Utah to the American South as a teenager, and pretty quickly learned that if you hail from the Beehive State, there are a series of extremely dumb questions you will be asked when people first meet you that would not be asked of someone from, say, South Dakota or Maine.  “Are you Mormon?” is obviously the first one – and a pretty reasonable question, all things considered. That is usually followed up with some sort of question about polygamy, however, which is lazy and ignorant and gets old remarkably quickly. Sometimes I would be asked if one can buy alcohol in Utah. This is, again, a not entirely unreasonable thing to ask, especially since many of these interactions took place back in the days of private clubs and membership cards – but it did strike me as a little silly given that I was often asked about Utah and booze while going to college in Conway, Arkansas, which is a town located in a dry county where sales ...

posted on 7/26/2015 by the Salt City Sinner (In part one of this post , I very briefly addressed some of the historic witch hunts, both literal and figurative, that Christians in the West have engaged in. Today we're going to focus in a little closer on literal, 'get him/her, she/he's a witch' witch hunts. ) To be fair, it’s not just Christians in the West (or “Christendom,” as some right-wing Christians have adorably taken to calling it again) who have engaged in this type of hideous nonsense. Listverse compiled ’ 10 Modern Attempts to Police the Occult  -- a fascinating and quick read that is completely worth checking out, by the way -- and only two of the entries on the list are from the West; one example from the United Kingdom and one to Canada. Given the content coming up in the third and final installment of this post, leaving the U.S. off the list strikes me as a little weird. Also, it’s worth noting that Islam is at least as unhinged as Christianity w...

posted on 7/19/2015 by the Salt City Sinner If you are registered to vote in Salt Lake City, and if you haven’t been paying much attention to local politics, you are forgiven for being a little perplexed to find a mysterious piece of mail from the powers that be at City Hall in your mailbox. There’s a chance that it might be a big lucky chunk of unclaimed property, or an exciting notice that you are being sued by somebody (whether those types of mail actually originate at City Hall I am far too lazy to find out), but most likely it is your ballot for Salt Lake City’s 2015 mayoral primary election, which is being conducted entirely by mail. If you’re looking for advice, I’d say ‘for the love of god, do not read my blog for advice.’ Then, however, I’d say ‘ vote for Luke Garrott , City Councilman, Professor of Political Science, and All-Around Stud’ (full disclosure: Dr. Garrott is a friend and former mentor, which you should in no way hold against him). There have already been m...

posted on 7/4/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Well, look at THAT!  Salt City Sinner has racked up 500 posts! Despite work stoppages created by tense relations between labor and management (in other words I'm sometimes lazy and filled with self-loathing), this thing has kept creaking along, more or less steering itself, for far longer than I ever expected it to, and probably far longer than is sane or healthy. To celebrate 500 posts' worth of sometimes entertaining, often obscenity-laced nonsense and balderdash, the following selections have been hand picked, quality controlled, and partially digested before being regurgitated for your perusal and/or delectation. Please enjoy responsibly! A Combat Of Cocks "Lord Dickens Smallwood was Warden of the Short Tower, a stub of a man only as tall as he was wide, and given to agitated frothing at the slightest provocation. He dug his thighs into his mount and pulled up short before a banner bearing the sigil of his ...

posted on 7/3/2015 by the Salt City Sinner  There are two definitions of “witch hunt,” one literal and one figurative. Literal witch hunts still go on in America and abroad (primarily in Africa and the Middle East). They happen when a community succumbs to collective insanity and goes searching for “witches” (practitioners of magick or the occult) and/or evidence of witchcraft, blaming everything from failed crops to moral transgressions by “upstanding” community members or outbreaks of contagion on suspected witches. The victims of these hunts are often, but not always, people who have absolutely nothing to do with witchcraft – and who are certainly innocent of causing the harm they are held responsible for in either case. Figurative witch hunts follow the same pattern of moral panic, a frenetic search for a conspiracy, and the persecution of people perceived to be members of a hated minority, but can happen when angry, panicked idiots set their sights on just about a...

posted on 6/20/2015 by the Salt City Sinner On Wednesday night, Dylann Storm Roof allegedly entered a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. He sat through most of the prayer meeting at Emanuel A.M.E. Church and then opened fire with a handgun, killing nine people including a sitting South Carolina state senator who was also the pastor of the church. Roof was motivated by hatred of Black people, and has since reportedly confessed to committing the crime in an attempt to start a race war. In the wake of such an outburst of deadly violence, I was not sure what to expect from right wing media, be it Fox News, talk radio, or the open, reeking sewer that is the conservative internet, including borderline white nationalist sites like Joseph Farah's WND (formerly World Net Daily). Excuses, sure. The usual bullshit about antidepressants and Big Pharma being the real hidden force at work behind white men committing mass murder in places like Sandy Hook or Aurora (viole...