Now there are 643 things to write about!

Out in the great Midwest there exists an "upscale" city (the kind where they don't take kindly to newcomers and poor people and poor newcomers) called Hudson, Ohio, some 30 miles southeast of Cleveland, home of the Indians Guardians.  

The job of mayor there is largely ceremonial, and yet the man who held the job since the fall of 2019, Craig Shubert, managed to muddy up the waters more than anyone in recent memory.

First, he asked Hudson school board members to resign last spring, because the high school was using a book with writing prompts for a college-level class and he thought some of the writing prompts constituted child pornography. The book is called "642 Things To Write About" and the mayor was so doggone het up about it, he threatened to prosecute members of the board for not jumping to the tune he called.  The Summit County prosecutor deemed his claims baseless, but declined to prosecute, possibly because they saw a train wreck coming up fast.

And then, this winter, Hizzoner (a former TV news reporter) spoke up at a city council meeting, saying he wanted to raise some “data points” when the talk turned to allowing shanties on a frozen lake for the purpose of ice fishing.

“Does someone come back next year and say, ‘I want an ice shanty on Hudson Springs Park for x amount of time?’” Shubert said. “And if you then allow ice fishing with shanties, then that leads to another problem — prostitution. Now you’ve got the police chief and and the police department involved.”

He told  WJW-TV in Cleveland that he said that about Ice Shanty Hookers ("The Shame Of The American Ice Fishing Community") because of his days as a news hawk, where he dealt with law enforcement agencies arresting people for prostitution in shanties.

“When discussing proposed legislation, it is wise to discuss the potential for unintended consequences,” Shubert told the station.

Well, a week after that foolish display, Shubert resigned from his job, saying that the whole thing was his attempt to inject dry humor into the meeting. I guess that bit about rounding up frozen tarts on Lake ComeoninIwannalayya was just made up.

I have never lived anywhere where it gets cold enough to do much ice fishing. I do know from listening to Garrison Keillor that it's a big deal in the flyover states, and that they commonly drag a broken-down Dodge automobile onto the lake and put money in a pool to see when the ice is sufficiently weak to send the car to the lake's bottom to join other derelict cars and missing gangsters. The person who guesses the date most accurately gets half the jackpot and the volunteer fire company gets the other half of the swag.

If the mayor had spent any time at all watching Ricky Gervais in "After Life," he would know that we no longer call them prostitutes; they are properly known as sex workers. 

And we no longer call him mayor, so it all evens out.