The Great Palm Beach Boondoggle and Buncombe ... A Modest Phallic Proposal
Apologies for the use of the archaic "buncombe." I've been reading a lot of Mencken. Anyway, Rick over at the redoubtable blog Stuck on the Palmetto hepped me to the bizarre proposal to create a 1,500-foot space needle in downtown West Palm Beach, regardless of hurricanes, sinkholes and other such problems that have given rise to height limits in many cities on the Florida coast of less than a tenth of the proposed space needle.
An artist's rendering of the needle, which would be the third-largest structure on the planet, after the CN Tower and the Taipei Tower
Look, given the machismo, our-city-can-beat-up-your-city thing underlying this proposal; the idea that the top of the needle will include a fine-dining restaurant and a dance club where yuppie larvae can meet and begin the mating rituals; Palm Beach's long history of catering to wealthy residents at the expense of anything even remotely resembling culture or a good time (see Clematis Street); and, finally, the obvious shape of the needle as is, I have a proposal that I think anyone can get behind — instead of a space needle, I propose that West Palm Beach erect a 1,500-foot schlong.
Following the completion of the proposed penis, the city could change it's name to Big Cock, or maybe just make the city's motto "The Dong of America." The quarter-mile-high phallus would feature a working head and, halfway up, hydraulic gears that would allow the penis to bend at the halfway point and, with pinpoint accuracy, urinate on passersby with a force approximately 200 times that of a fire hose. The city manager would be given control of this function, and could use it to keep the streets clean of homeless vagrants, gang members, miscellaneous poor, journalists, and other undesirables.
The head of the erection, which we could dub The Great Dome or something equally illustrious, would feature the same restaurant and club as the proposed space needle, and I think we can all agree that having a dance club in the head of a giant penis is hilarious if you really think about it. Hell, that's just the sort of sense of humor that Big Cock: The Dong of America will need in the coming days.