Maligned Muppets
"Bert and Ernie are gay." Those were my comments at the end of the January 10 city council meeting. This statement was deliberately false.

I went on to say that since Venice has an official municipal stance of city-chartered homophobia (which also is not true), then the city has an obligation to follow through and take an official stance on Bert and Ernie's gayness by banning broadcasts of Sesame Street within the city limits.

I stopped and paused. I was looking at City Attorney Bob Anderson, who involuntarily and silently mouthed the words, "What the...?"

My statement was an outrageous logical fallacy for a couple of reasons: besides being based on a false premise, it smacked of gay-bashing.

As an added bonus, it just sounded flat-out nuts, an out of place, lunatic, non-sequiter statement.

The look on Bob Anderson's face was worth it. He's generally pretty crafty. For the first time, I had him over a logical barrel, clueless as to where this was going. I had an incredibly difficult time keeping a straight face during the deliberately pregnant pause.

This leaves the city in a bit of an ethical dilemma, I then informed council. Do they include my comments in the official minutes of the council meeting? If not, why?

Anderson got where I was going immediately. Council still appeared to be quizzical, while the mayor was stuck pondering a concept that he had never before considered: that Bert and Ernie might be gay.

I admitted that my comments were off-topic, irrelevant, offensive, insensitive, untrue, politically incorrect and clearly beyond the jurisdiction of the city.

Speaking of off-topic, irrelevant, offensive, insensitive, untrue and politically incorrect...
All of these things could be and have been said about Pam Johnson's comments, "for the record," at the recent Sales Tax Oversight Committee. That was the famed meeting in which Johnson stated that the Venice Community Center was never intended to be a hurricane shelter and that at no time did any city official or representative ever promote it as such.

It was a clearly wildly fictional statement on Johnson's part, one that the media jumped on with the fervor of a pack of hungry wolves. Johnson's comments touched off a range war that should have ended up with a municipal head or two rolling down Venice Avenue.

The city has just spent $4.8 million to renovate the Venice Community Center, ostensibly as a hurricane shelter. Now with the looming prospect of the county and the American Red Cross not designating it as an official shelter, city officials are wondering what to do with this stucco and concrete albatross. Residents are up in arms, wondering what they voted on back in 2003 if not for a hurricane shelter. Johnson's solution to the looming PR disaster was a simple and potentially genius stroke: deny that it was ever intended to be a hurricane shelter.

Currently there is a battle going on over whether or not Johnson's comments, which Johnson had stated at the time were "for the record," should be included in the minutes. The city is taking the bizarre stance that since Johnson's comments were off-topic and fictional (if not surreal and other-worldly), the minutes of the meeting should be fictionalized to exclude Johnson's comments.

Here's where things get a bit confusing, so follow closely. There are two oversight committees, one for the municipal one-cent sales tax and one for the $10 million bond. These two committees are made up of the very same members. Talk of the hurricane shelter status would normally fall under the bond oversight committee's jurisdiction, not the one-cent sales tax committee. However, since the hurricane shelter status had just hit the newspapers, it was a timely topic that committee members felt should be addressed, if only nominally, to be brought up and discussed more fully at the later, more appropriate meeting.

That's when Johnson entered the fray -- at the tail end of the discussion that took place at the one-cent sales tax committee discussion, when she bounced up to the microphone and stated that her comments would be, and I quote, "for the record." The irony should not be lost -- a comment that was made specifically "for the record" is now being considered for exclusion from the very same record that the speaker initially stated it was intended for, presumably at the speaker's request.

This bizarre irony prompted me to make an equally, if not greater, outrageously fictional, politically incorrect and off-topic statement, on the record, about the sex lives of Jim Henson's puppets, this during audience participation at the end of the January 10 city council meeting. Now city hall has two bizarre and fictional statements from two entirely different sources that need to be sorted out for inclusion or exclusion on official city documents.

Committee members unhappy
At least two members of the oversight committees think that Johnson's comments should be included in the minutes. Chairman Jon Preiksat will be submitting a correction when it comes time for the committee to approve the minutes, a correction that will include a summary of Johnson's comments.

"Well, it seems to me that if it was said at the meeting, it should be included in the minutes of the meeting," fellow board member Maxine Barritt stated in a phone interview.

Barritt was unaware of the in-house squabble until I informed her, this due to the Sunshine Law's prohibitions which prevent board members from communicating with each other about any substantive business that would fall under their appointed or elected guardianship.

She was also more than a little uncomfortable with my faux-redneck stance against rainbow Muppets. I had to explain that I neither really knew or cared if Bert and Ernie are gay. Plush-puppet buggery may be wildly entertaining, but it is hardly the point.

Plush-puppet buggery. I just wanted to write that. Just once.

Board member Jim Leis was less candid: "I understand that there's a meeting coming up between Preiksat and the city clerk, I'd like to wait until then before commenting."

Why does any of this matter?
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure if any of this really matters. Johnson's comments were widely reported in the local papers, so a municipal denial that they ever took place is an exercise in transparently ludicrous revisionism. An audio record of her statements (which I have listened to) exists and could easily be converted to a web audio file. If the city does eventually deny the existence of Johnson's comments by excluding a summary of them in the committee meeting's minutes, the audio file WILL be posted here.

As to my comments about same-sex relationships between asexual inanimate objects, I could care less if they are included or excluded from the official minutes of the council meeting. If my comments are excluded, however, it will set an interesting precedent: it will be the first time, to my knowledge, that a comment from a citizen will have been excluded from mention in the official council minutes.

Pickle, anyone?

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.