Of big swinging appendages *

Our on-hiatus for legal reasons mayor has a pottymouth problem. Among others, since his fascination with the felicitous phrase, "big swinging dick contest", entered the court record this week past on a lo-def police interrogation video. (Hey - who doesn't look guilty on those...? But with no corroborating evidence, he could safely deny the whole rat fuck thing. This was right there in grainy black and white.)

Citizen editorial writer Kate Heartfield - one of the good guys at that eroding edifice - has smartly and thoroughly whacked the language's psychology with a post-modern feminist yardstick, in print and on air. I think that covers it completely, except for small additional light the phrase may cast on O'Brien's record. Ummm, in office.

It's not as if we didn't suspect that he regards his political day - or in the case of the Transpo strike, most of a financial quarter - as an endless series of big dick swinging contests. Supporting evidence for this inference is rich.

Maybe the mayor enters such duels because he honestly thinks his is bigger than everybody else's. Why would he believe this? Possibly because he lucked out in business and has a lotta money. Maybe because he only hires assistants that reinforce his own perceptions. Perhaps because he has temper in private and has demonstrably whirled through a veritable spin cycle of revolving-door staffers.

Doesn't matter. Unfortunately for Ottawa, this view was probably never grounded in reality. Also unfortunately, Mayor Larry is a guy who for some time has been enthusiastically dick-swinging his way straight into The Peter Principle. Problem is, he's so pathologically - and unjustifiably - self confident, he'll never know it. Sorry to keep going on like this. Honestly, I was tired of him before he was elected.

* Just so you know, the photo is named that way because original graphic concept for this post did not make it past certain members of the ESI Ethics Committee. (It also grossed out Woodsy, which takes some doing. I'm kinda proud of that.) And no, it was not what you were thinking just now... and neither is this one. It's a perfectly innocent tee-shirt graphic, for cripe's sake. Purell® your minds, people! We run a squeaky clean metablog here!