At some point this year you have a post-head-trauma epiphany and decide to open a 70s theme donut shop in Pittsburgh’s Strip District and call it Peace Love & Tiny Donuts with the slogan “Feed Your Inner Hippie.” See, your plan is to profit off the “dilusional [sic], uneducated and morally bankrupt” liberals who think they’re supporting a cool, fun, small business run by nice folks. And you know what? That’s a plan. Perhaps not the most ethical, but it would totally work.

Except you blogged about it on your public blog.

Then when people called you out on your weirdo marketing lies, you posted the following:

Thursday, October 1, 2009
It has come to my attention…

A young woman came into my shop today and shared with me that some people have read my blog and now are busy doing what they can to damage me and my family by telling others that I am a horrible person. Apparently, my viewpoint and opinions have been interpreted as not endorsing their lifestyle choices or their political views. Although I don’t look to offend anyone, I find it ironic that many people who stand under the banner of “acceptance”, are in their own nature, unwilling to accept anyone who disagrees with them. Does anyone else find that ironic?

I make the best donuts I know how, and people have gone to Urbanspoon and given our product a negative rating because they are unhappy with my opinion. One person said that I should keep my opinion to myself so that nobody would know what I thought! Yet these same people who cry out for legitimacy, attack anyone who doesn’t agree with their positions and choices. That to me is the epitome of hypocrisy. I’m not ashamed of who I am, although I admit I am a work in progress. I will not couch my faith or my person-hood for any reason, especially not to sell a donut.

I have been kind and respectful to everyone that has come into my shop. Not just to sell them something, but I try to be the best version of myself that I can be. I take being generous seriously, along with all of God’s commandments. I try to love people and hate sin. Most of what I write about is the struggle to do that without a ton of human debris in my wake. Everyone wants love and peace. The problem is with SIN. I didn’t invent sin (although my wife might joke that I am trying to perfect it), nor did I define sin. I just happen to believe like most people, that there is a better life to be lived if we avoid sin. That requires a knowledge of what IS sin, and my source for that is the Bible. If that makes me the scorn of people and hated… then I say what Martin Luther said… I can not recant the truth. I would welcome the chance to defend my ideas or my faith but only two people have asked me to explain my writings. Others are taking some paragraphs and sending them to others in an attempt to amplify one of my musings. I have a saying for people who try to demonize others by focusing on one attribute or expression… “you have to walk over mile of balance and reason to have that opinion”.
Posted by Ron Razete at 6:37 AM 0 comments

And then delete the whole thing. (Formerly located at ronrazete.blogspot.com, but in the spirit of Martin Luther I will keep it un-recanted here.)

Well, you’re a cowardly liar, and you really can’t be shocked when folks catch on to you. What is your next move? My hypothesis: blame the meanie liberals for not buying your bullshit instead of your poor judgment, lack of business savvy, and bizarre need to politicize donuts.

* * *

You know what, Ron? My unwillingness to tolerate your intolerance doesn’t make me intolerant.

I accept that there are people like you in the world, and your right to be as horrible as you can within the bounds of our laws. But just like you can have issues with the sexiness-levels of movies, and feel the Christian college you pulled your daughter out of was not Christian enough because they let GLBT students enroll –I, and others, have the ability to not support your dishonest endeavors.

Why market to “hippie leftists” and not let your business reflect your true self? Especially since you insist you will not couch your faith or your person-hood for any reason.  I don’t think you should keep your opinions to yourself, or lie about them to make a buck. Let’s see if your intolerance is profitable.

In an accidental feat of awesome timing, Don Netflixed The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and we watched it on Sunday before even realizing Monday was Dr. Seuss’s birthday. (Thanks Google!)

This live-action musical is visually interesting and perfect for a Dr. Seuss tale. The sets and costumes, and even the musical instruments have all of the whimsy required for a Suessian world. The 500 seat piano set is incredible and the furniture in Mrs. C’s and Dr. T’s suites are fabulously wonky. But the story and the characters were maddening.

Don’t let your little boys take music lessons or they’ll turn into fruity fascist wackos, says this film. No really. As the film progressed we found ourselves turning slowly to each other with our mouths open, our eyebrows at their WTF positions.

The incessant hammering of “musicians are queer” and “this is what happens when you don’t let boys play baseball!” was overwhelming to the point of absurdity. Boys must be allowed to be REAL BOYS. The horror of this mother being brainwashed into thinking piano lessons are something her fatherless son should do! It’s like seeing Touch of Evil for the first time and choking on your iced tea when you see Charlton Heston painted brown. First you think “How can this be real?” and then you think “How could I forget that this is totally real?”

Wikipedia notes, “Although he had written the original treatment and all the song lyrics, Geisel himself regarded the finished film as a ‘debaculous fiasco’ and omitted any mention of it in his official biography with Random House.” I want to read his biography to see what sort of mommy issues he had. Why the hatred of the piano? Why the need to swishify the villain? The whole thing just seems so shocking coming from the man who created lasting works that introduced children to political and moral issues like racism (The Sneetches), environmentalism (The Lorax), and internationalism (Horton Hears a Who!).

Here’s a clip of an awesome song sung by the villain as his team of dressing men help him suit up for the grand opening of his institute:

Art hid with art, so well perform’d the cheat,
It caught the carver with his own deceit:
He knows ’tis madness, yet he must adore,
And still the more he knows it, loves the more:
The flesh, or what so seems, he touches oft,
Which feels so smooth, that he believes it soft.
Fir’d with this thought, at once he strain’d the breast,
And on the lips a burning kiss impress’d.
~Ovid, Metamorphoses (Translated by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al)

In a twist of the Pygmalion story, German film director Karl Freund’s sculptor is a skilled surgeon shown as a benevolent doctor healing deformed children in his last film, 1935′s Mad Love. His Pygmalion, Dr. Gogol, played by Peter Lorre, is a study in loneliness and obsession; short, bald and, well, Lorre-esquely strange looking, Gogol never misses a public beheading or a night at the horror theater where Yvonne Orlac plays the role of a tortured dutchess.

The film opens with him ogling a wax statue of her character in the Parisian Theatre des Horreurs before her final performance. After the show, he brings flowers to her dressing room and professes his love and deep upset at her leaving the stage. She explains that it really must be her last performance as she is meeting up with her husband, famous pianist Stephen Orlac, that very night so that they can finally begin their life together as a married couple. After an awkward, creepy exchange, someone comes in to bring her down to her farewell party that has begun downstairs, and seeing her biggest fan the respectable Dr. Gogol there, insists that he come join in the festivities.

At the party everyone is stepping up to give her farewell kisses (in exchange for cake) and yet another oblivious numskull suggests Dr. Gogol have a go — which he uses as an invitation to introduce her to his tongue. The assembled French actors shrug it off assuming it is some custom from his strange foreign country full of short creepy fellows, and they proceed to emulate what I can only imagine becomes a new trend in fashionable molestation.

Perhaps mortified by her reaction, or upset by the frenzy of ridiculous kisses that he’s started, Dr. Gogol leaves in a hurry, passing some workmen taking down the wax display of Mrs. Orlac. He bribes them to deliver it to his home instead of the melting pot. There are all sorts of other things happening in the film, but for our purposes here you only need to know that he has his housekeeper brush her hair and maintain her see-through flow-y robes, while he plays the organ to her, calls her Galatea and discusses with her his crazy scheme to get Stephen Orlac into the loony bin and have the real Mme Yvonne for himself. You’ll have to watch the film yourself to see the Pygmalion/Galatea story played out in its tragi-comedic way. This was Lorre’s first American film, and it is no wonder he became a horror favorite.

Parting ways with the original book, Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac, the story here is not about Gogol as a scientist/medical genius playing God. Initially he saves Stephen Orlac with the best of intentions. He did it for Yvonne, and because he was the only one who could. The results (as preposterous as they are) could not have been known to him, silly horror-”science” aside, he’s accomplished something miraculous — the first successful hand transplant. This is the story not of his scientific obsession, but of his misguided idea of love making him a monster.

“I have conquered science! Why can’t I conquer love?”

In the following scene we watch the further unraveling of Dr. Gogol:

Why is he so crazy? Which came first, the craziness or the loneliness? Surely someone would be so impressed by his brilliance, and his kind focus on treating unfortunate children and mutilated soldiers, and being surrounded by the lovely nurses at his practice, he could find someone to be with? Is his mistake thinking he could attain a gorgeous actress? Does your pity end when he persists after discovering she is married? Or does it linger, tugging your heartstrings over his sad eyes and obvious mental illness? I, myself, am not sure when or if I ever stop feeling sorry for this fellow. Clearly we are meant to think him out of his mind to consider that Mme Yvonne would return his feelings; her a beauty, and him an odd foreign unlovable beast.

Ignoring the superficial aspect of the film entirely, let’s look at a redeeming quality. Perhaps this does not do anything to further the Hollywood image of scientists as non-creeps and people with normal, fulfilled lives capable of healthy relationships — but I was surprised by the fact that this wasn’t about a lost soul wearing blinders to keep out everything but his great work that will help the world while destroying the lives of those around him. The Pygmalion addition to Renard’s story gives it more depth than if Freund had followed a more familiar science fiction tale. Even the other film paired on the dvd with Mad Love, Devil Dolls, is a heavy-handed tale of Evil Scientists too single-minded to even know how evil they are. Mad Love is not a brilliant film, and the story of recycled body parts has been done over scores of times before and since. But it does stand out for me after being positively buried in anti-science films. I don’t normally like remakes, however I would love to see this done with a different type of casting for Dr. Gogol, but with the same treatment of love being the monster-maker.

This morning my bus buddy didn’t know that woodchucks are groundhogs, then expressed doubt about this most true fact, and then going even farther, insisted that woodchucks are beavers. (Reasoning: beavers “eat” wood therefore, woodchuck.) This turned into a really dividing debate between our fellow riders. I’ve never been so astounded by a conversation in my life. Beavers = woodchucks? “They’re like really big rabbits,” someone contributed. “Right, and those things you get in pet stores. The rabbits without ears. Only in the wild they’re much bigger, like how it is with pet mice and real mice,” added another. I’m still completely rattled by the morning’s commute. I always figured animals were the most universally interesting part of biology so that ought to be the part of science class that sunk in, at least a bit, right? For a while I thought I was being punked, but no. They resolved to Google it and settle the matter tomorrow. Maybe next week we can come to a consensus on how magnets work.

So just a PSA, in case you were in the bathroom smokin’ up during that bio class (apparently the one day I wasn’t) it goes like this:

• Kingdom Animalia
• Phylum Chordata
• Class Mammalia
• Order Rodentia
• Family Sciuridae (ground squirrels — our friend the beaver is in family Castoridae)
• Tribe Marmotini (where the marmots, prairie dogs, gophers, and spiny and palm squirrels part ways)
• Genus Marmota (marmots, tarvagas, Tibetan snow pigs — no lie)

Marmots are ground squirrels that mostly live in mountainous regions, in burrows, are highly social and unlike most other members of Sciuridae, they communicate by whistling. Other than size and habitat, the main differences between groundhogs and the rest of the marmots that have “marmot” in their common names are that they live in low-laying areas instead of rockier mountain regions, and their ability to predict the weather they have their own holiday.

So you can call a groundhog a marmot, and you won’t be wrong. You can also call it a woodchuck or a whistlepig (except hoary marmots are also called whistlepigs, and thanks to AA Milne, gophers are saddled with whistly-lisps in pop culture and over the years acquired the nickname in some areas – so it’s not very specific). And apparently you could call them “land beavers” but I think that’s straddling the boundary of acceptable artistic license, and I wish you wouldn’t.

I’ve made some very scientific visuals for comparison, to spare you the ookiness of doing an image search for “beaver”. Beavers have webbed feet and scaly, paddle-shaped tails (Figure 1). As you can see from Figure 2, groundhogs have cutewiddlefuzzy tails and enjoy posing for pictures.

Why do I know all this about marmots? In 1997 I had to write a paper on colony behavior changes in hoary marmot populations during food shortages. I can understand not knowing what a marmot is, especially if you don’t live in common marmot areas. They all pretty much look alike if your only experience with them is in their roadkill stage of development. And I can totally see someone confusing gophers with groundhogs, since they look so much alike too. But with a beaver? Really?

I wonder what my bus friends would think if they were faced with a capybara.