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Sun. Jun 16, 2002

Only In America

Only In America – It’s a bit of a cliche, one I used today at the grocery store. While Susan visited the little girls room, I lolleygagged in the ice cream aisle. I’m usually a guerilla shopper, making a targeted run down the aisle snatching the familiar packaging of brand choices made long ago. Today, as if I’d never seen it before, I became agog at the choice of ice cream. I stood there in front of a 90 foot long run of freezers taller than me, filled to the gills with 30 yards of a stupendous variety of frozen dairy products.

”Only in America,” I told Susan. ”If our enemies could stand here, and see the massive effort we put into … ice cream … and the result of that effort, they’d say, ’what were we thinking?’ ”

Then I came home and finally got to see the full report with audio of the bizarre footage I saw last night with the TV on mute. Oddly and ironically, the only place I can find an online reference is expressindia.com, but this event comes close to defining the phrase, ”Only in America”: "A private golf tournament in Norco, California, added a new hazard to the game – getting arrested for prostitution [...] ’As part of the golf tournament, sex acts were offered to participants for a fee,’ said Lisa McConnell at the Sheriff’s Department in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles. ’There were tents set up around the course, where people could pay for sex.’ Police detained 100 people at questioning and arrested three for pimping and pandering, two for prostitution and one for possession of a controlled substance."

Now, I don’t condone these acts, but think about it. I’d bet there are many countries with very few individuals who could even conceive of such a plan. Nevermind pull it off. You may say, but they didn’t pull it off, they got arrested. However the TV news reports I’ve seen say this was not the first time, just the first time they got caught. Note, there were 100 attendees, a sign of a booming business. As many ways as mankind has come up with to market sex, these people pushed the envelope into new territory.

We are truly the Land of Imagination.