Heck Of A Guy

Here A Seal, There A Seal

Two days ago, Cal Skinner at McHenry County Blog wrote about the movement to replace the McHenry County Seal with a new and improved version.

Cal went on to nominate his own candidate for the New McHenry County Seal, noting that “the artwork is already completed.” The referenced artwork, reproduced below, was created in 1977 by a public information officer in the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

The concluding line of the post was “What do you think?”

I am saddened to respond that it is my obligation as a co-inhabitant of Cal’s geopolitical and blogospheric communities to report that, while this mock seal is quite jolly and all that and was, no doubt, offered in the spirit of fun, it is nonetheless disheartening to find Cal Skinner, who purports in the masthead of his McHenry County Blog to produce “a journal of news and opinion designed to bring to light matters of public interest and to encourage public participation in the governmental process,” resorting to convenient, too-easy puns in a transparently desperate ploy for a few cheap laughs while ostensibly providing a valid and reliable account of goings-on in the McHenrian universe.

After all, as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors discovered, when that body was first threatened with an ACLU lawsuit unless it removed a nearly invisible cross from its seal and then was sued because it did consequently remove that cross,¹ county seals are serious business.²

Using puns, which are no more than idiosyncratic linguistic coincidences, to evoke a tawdry smirk or two is not only inappropriate in the context of writing about a county that takes itself very seriously but is also dangerously disruptive to the natural order of things.

As a result of this ideological destabilization, the Heck of a Guy blog stands ready to re-establish the cosmic equilibrium disturbed by Cal’s so-called seal, by unleashing, if necessary, this recommendation for McHenry County’s new Motto and Seal:

Let’s all pray it doesn’t come to that.

The Line Of Blog Demarcation

In any case, cheap laughs harvested from provocative puns (verbal or visual), titillating innuendos, Photoshop-revised graphics, double entendres, triple entendres, multiple and exponential entendres, ethnic jokes, dumb blonde jokes, sarcastic suggestions, scandalous sexual simulations, sardonic satire, salacious symbolism, scatological screeds, satyriasis, pseudo-satyriasis, semi-pseudo-satyriasis, strained sequential series of similar sounding sibilants, lewd allusions, clever banter (and witty parentheticals), anatomical references, irrelevant asides, inside jokes, jokes about outings, and any and all anecdotes involving a priest, a rabbi, and a minister are not worthy of a McHenry County Blog – and, more to the point, are clearly the purview of – well, I suppose this is no time for false modesty – the Heck of a Guy Blog and similar bottom-feeders.

Further, I will point out that I rarely infringe on Cal’s turf. For example, I think it sufficiently hilarious that McHenry Community College is campaigning to – pay attention now – build a baseball stadium for a minor league team. No, really – I’m flattered that you think I might have made that up as a joke, but I’m not that creative. Occasionally, if I am especially sad or in need of an unusually hearty belly laugh, I indulge myself with the extravagance of calling to mind that not only is our local community college pursuing this goal with every known political tactic (and this being Illinois, that is a sizable number of political tactics), but they are doing so under the declared, albeit unexplained premise that a minor league baseball team’s tenancy in the proposed stadium is a highly advantageous financial arrangement for the stadium landlord.³ Forget Wall Street, oil, manufacturing, Silicon Valley, and service industries as sources of wealth. The smart money (at least, the smart money not already being invested in llama and ferret farms, wagered on Keno at various casinos or Bingo in church basements, or set aside to aid rich Nigerians, in return for a generous fee, in moving their funds from an overseas bank to one in the US ) is in minor league baseball stadiums.

I assure you that I am, even as I write this, cracking myself up. I mean, this is funny stuff. But is Cal satisfied with the obvious joke? Nooooooooooooo.

On checking his blog’s search tag, Baseball Stadium, this morning, I find many, many long posts studded with statistics, diagrams, references, and material that looks suspiciously like research. There are references to zoning regulations, watershed ordinances, legal precedents, relevant newspaper stories, pertinent experiences of other communities, … . He tries to attend meetings about this matter when it’s quite clear that those holding those gatherings extend to him the kind of welcome usually offered to karaoke-performing parents by their fifteen year old children who had nurtured high hopes of holding their first beer batch and make-out party. Similarly, he completes multiple tedious-appearing legal procedures to gather information⁴ that is held by individuals who just don’t want to share that information with him.

Despite the joy these activities appear to bring Cal, not once have I tried to horn in on his action – because I respect the implicit understanding between our blogs: He does the heavy duty muckraking; I crack wise.

And when the Gay Games Rowing Event took place on Crystal Lake, Cal worried about issues such as whether or not the Game’s organizers would fulfill their agreement to repay the city for the expenses they incurred and took pictures of the races and spectators. In one of my posts, Crystal Lake To Permit “Whatever Floats Your Boat” Rowing Event, I wrote, “While it went unreported in the press, a compromise solution [to the question of allowing the Gay Games Rowing Event to take place on Crystal Lake] was discussed, faltering only when local builders could not commit to completing construction of the closet surrounding the lake by July.” That post, which also featured a secret schedule of other Gay Games events planned for Crystal Lake, including Competitive Makeovers, Full Contact Disco, and Synchronized Sodomy, was headed by this graphic:

See how nicely that division of labor works?

Now, it is true that I can’t resist Cal’s slapstick. His routine with the police escorting him from the school board meeting for taking pictures, laughing loudly in a hallway, and suspicion of intending to somehow photograph super-secret school documents is deservedly recognized as a classic. So, I’m willing to tolerate the occasional County Seal pun – and a funny anecdote now and then. But, again, in general, it’s

Cal Skinner – Muckraking

DrHGuy – Wisecracking

If God Doesn’t Love Bloggers, Why Did He Create McHenry County?

Because this division of world power between the McHenry County Blog and the Heck of a Guy Blog seems to have required more extensive elaboration than anticipated – or at least I never recognized that perfect opportunity to initiate that elegant segue into the topic of the new McHenry County Seal – my thoughts about that redesign project must be deferred to another post on another day.

As a suitable peace offering to Cal, I have created a prototype of a possible new McHenry County Seal that would not only celebrate his and my great good fortune to reside in this Land of (Good &) Plenty and modernize the official emblem of the County but would provide an interesting, unique, and long overdue addition to the agricultural/Garden of Eden scenes, various animals, outdoor sports, stylized graphic elements, and the typically ambiguous, often esoteric, and occasionally unfortunate symbols that, along with a few other categories of content, traditionally appear on governmental seals.

1. The only means by which this story’s Kafka Score could have been increased would have been if the suit triggered by LA County’s elimination of the cross from the seal had also been instigated by the ACLU, which led the legal fight to cleanse the seal of this problematic symbol; in actuality, it was another set of lawyers who brought the suit protesting the cross loss on behalf of a LA County employee – but a guy can dream, can’t he?↩
2. The former and current LA County Seals are displayed below with the troublesome cross circled in blue on the old seal.
   
   ↩
3. Even though I probably wouldn’t understand the bookkeeping if it were made available, I am confident that, one way or another, I am, via the proxy of my taxes, that landlord. And I am one worried landlord don’t-wannabe.↩
4. Further, I suspect that this information would prove similarly tedious to read and analyze↩