Since James Taranto has given up his daily “Best of the Web” column for the Wall Street Journal, others need to fill in the gap, especially his “Bottom Story of the Week” category. And here is another story out of Canada showing that we’re losing our minds:
Moby Dick’s Restaurant Barred as an Offensive Name
VANCOUVER, B.C. (CN) – A business in Vancouver, B.C., has sued its building council for blocking the lease of its restaurant property to “Moby Dick’s” fish-and-chips franchise, because the council says the word “Dick” is offensive.
Plaintiff Mengfa International bought a unit in a commercial building in 2010 and in 2014 leased it to an Asian-fusion restaurant, “The Change,” for five years. The Change fell on hard times, though, and in May 2015, Moby Dick Restaurant, a fish-and-chip franchise, agreed to a lease and purchase arrangement.
The building council wouldn’t allow it. It insisted “that the word ‘Dick’ in Moby Dick was an offensive term,” Mengfa says in its Jan. 9 lawsuit.
Oh for Gawd’s sake. The real absurdity, though, is the fact that the news report thought it necessary to explain that Moby Dick actually involves a literary reference:
The Moby Dick name and logo are “not offensive to the public, given its literary significance and fame”. . . The story, of course, tells the tale of Captain Ahab, obsessed with finding and killing a great white whale which cost him half a leg. The book ends with its narrator (“Call me Ishmael”) floating on a coffin in the ocean after Moby Dick smashes the whaling ship and kills everyone else in it.
Irony deprived as the media is these days, I guess no one thinks to note that the obsessed Ahabs of our day are the forces of political correctness determined to sniff out any microaggression anywhere. (Though I wonder how this might have played out if Ahab had been after a whale of color instead of a clearly oppressive homicidal white whale?)
Only one thing to do. Yes, you guessed it correctly, with apologies to Anthony Weiner—a dick pic:
The great prankster Dick Tuck (heh) was not available for comment, apparently because you can’t print his name in the newspaper any more.
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