This quote making the rounds…
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… is utter bullshit. Il Duce (not to be confused with L’il Duce) never said any such thing.
Too bad. I wish he had. It’d be so perfect today.
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Revenge
Either the people who run Rainbow Bakery are among the lousiest, lying-est, reprobate bosses for hundreds of miles around or some bratty kids let their grief drive them to…, well, bratty behavior.
Them’s your choices.
The background: Rainbow is one of our town’s beloved local businesses. They’re as crunchy and kumbaya as a for-profit business can be so they fit into B-town better than a hand in a glove. A couple of old Soma Coffee vets, Taylor and Jerico, are longtime employees. The place bakes up vegan pastries et al that are served at the back office of this communications colossus, Hopscotch Coffee. Owners Lisa Dorazewski and Matt Tobey describe their staff thusly:
We are artists, musicians, poets, comedians, cat ladies, independent publishers, feminists, circuit wizards, linguists, professional humans….
And their customers:
We graciously serve a spectrum of customers – families, kiddos with allergies, students, artists, coffee fiends, townie regulars, vegan bloggers, seasoned hoosiers, golden ladies.
All in all, Rainbow purportedly is everything Bloomington wants in its citizens and entrepreneurs. That is, unless Dorazewski and Tobey are pathological liars and tyrants in sheep’s clothing.
A group calling itself the Feral Pines Revenge Coven has claimed responsibility for vandalizing Rainbow’s physical plant. As a result, the bakery has not produced its usual output of goods for days now. Check out FPRC’s manifesto here.
Glue Attack
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To recap, a trans person named Feral Pines used to work at Rainbow. The FPRC claims Pines had been badly mistreated on the job, to wit:
- “[S]he suffered daily emotional abuse at the hands of her bosses….”
- Pines “was paid a shitty training wage for the entire time she worked there.”
- Pines suffered an “emotional breakdown,” partly as a result of her mistreatement
- Pines was fired, coldly, and left penniless with no chance of collecting unemployment.
The abuse, claims FPRC, came about in part because Pines was trans.
It turns out Feral Pines lost her life in the fire at Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire ten days ago.
FPRC writes in It’s Going Down (a blog for radical hell-raisers):
We will not accept this. We have lived for too long in this town keeping our mouths shut as our friends are exploited by punk bosses. We are asked to pretend that a business is “part of the community” if the capitalists who own it put out some shitty, nasally folk punk record back in the day. This stops now.
Rainbow Bakery fucked with the Troll Queen, and now they will pay. This bit of sabotage is only a taste of what is to come for you goofy-ass muppet motherfuckers. We are going to destroy your business. Nothing will fucking stop us.
If true, these charges are dynamite. They throw everything the Rainbow gang stands for into a stinking shitpile.
Other local businesses are running scared now. One biz has instructed its employees not to talk about the incident, probably for fear of inciting the FPRC or anyone else like them.
I offer any or all the members of the Feral Pines Revenge Coven the opportunity to state their case, unedited, more specifically in this space. I want proof of your charges.
Then we can argue whether your action was warranted, even if the charges are true. And I’d be just as happy to host that debate here.
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TV’s Frank Speaks…, Uh, Frankly
Former Mystery Science Theater 3000 funnyman Frank Connif has turned his attention of late to politics. Here’s his take on the burgeoning Russia-gaming-the-election scandal:
Don’t give me that “Hillary was a bad candidate” bullshit. Real-life Bond villains plotted against her and she still got the most votes.
TV’s Frank
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He’s right and he’s wrong — Hillary was a bad candidate inasmuch as the hatred she engendered was fatal. It wasn’t her fault; it was the fault of the haters, natch. Still, if your product makes too many customers want to hork, you’d better get out of the restaurant business.
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Break The Chain
Oh yeah, as I typed yesterday, we’ve done it a million times ourselves:
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That doesn’t mean, though, we should sit by idly and let it happen to us. Sound unfair? It is. Tough.
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Talking. Big.
Here’s the link for this past Thursday’s Big Talk with restoration architect Cindy Brubaker. And go here for the slightly-edited original interview with her.
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BTW: Cindy’ll be the subject of my next Big Mike’s B-town column in the Limestone Post. I’ll link to that just as soon as it’s published. Y’know, like, I gotta write it first, see?
This afternoon, it’s back into the studio again as I grill actor and drama teacher Francesca Sobrer. Tune in Thursday at 5:45pm to WFHB 91.3 for this week’s Big Talk.
You wanna know something? I dig doing this stuff!
[ALERT: The WFHB News Dept. will be running its annual end-of-year best stories compilation every weekday for three weeks beginning a week from today, Monday, the 19th. That means there’ll be no Big Talks after Thursday’s edition until January 12th. That doesn’t mean the Pencil’s going away. so even though you get a respite from my voice, you’ll still have to endure my keyboard ramblings. Good luck.]
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And Finally…
Re: The constant barrage of soc. med. posts pointing out every single laughable, cryable, head-scratching, rage-inducing appointment L’il Duce makes, every brainless, witless pronouncement he utters, and every wrong-headed policy he trumpets, is wearing awfully thin.
Dig: We’re all standing here looking at the forest. For months, we’ve known we were going to take a field trip to look at the forest. We’ve read books and articles and seen videos and docs about the forest. What in the hell good does it do us to keep pointing and saying “Look, another tree!”
The forest is rotting and it’s on fire. The more important topic should be: What are we going to do about it?
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