Choose wisely, Reykjavík!

Let's do a homeless news roundup! We'll rope'em, tie'em, and brand'em!

Here at Adventures in Irony we make it our duty to leave the local homeless news to the paid professionals. We will have nothing to say, for now, about the SHARE/WHEEL occupation and subsequent arrests at the Lora Lake Apartments which were a big deal of last week's homelessness-related news in the Seattle area. Except, "gross misdemeanor, my ass." The gross misdemeanor was shutting down the apartments.

OK, moving onward and outward. A wheel-chair bound homeless woman in Fresno was arrested and cited at a McDonald's restaurant for attempting to use the restroom without first making a purchase. And rightly so!

Think about it. Let's say you want to start up a McDonald's franchise somewhere. How do you choose where to put it?

What I would do is ask myself, where would people get the most benefit from my placement of my McDonald's? I would take into account all that McDonald's franchises have to offer. There's greasy, over-salted burgers. There's tastes-like-chicken sandwiches. There's parking. There's air-conditioning. There's 30-minute seating in tiny little chairs made for people with one buttock each, in a room with walls painted in scientifically calibrated "move-along" colors. And there's bathrooms. I should site my new franchise someplace where one or two of these items of attraction will be a big draw. That means a place in a warm climate with a severe shortage of public bathrooms. Sounds like Fresno to me!

So I can totally sympathize with the management of that Fresno McDonald's. That wheel-chair bound homeless woman was trying to use her full bladder, or whatnot, as an excuse to steal one of the only two good things their store has to offer. If they didn't draw the line with her, then, pretty soon, everyone would know that you didn't have to buy the food at their McDonald's to use the can, and then nobody would buy the food there, 'cause the food sucks!

In more abstract homeless news, but still out of California, an article on homelessness and health care by Margot Kushel, MD, of the University of California at San Francisco says that, "Since the early 1990s, the average age of the homeless population has risen approximately eight months each calendar year."

Combining that with statistics which show that the average age at death of homeless people is under fifty, and we can now predict that old age, murder, and suicide, will assuredly solve the homeless problem in ten years after all, in spite of all our recent hand waving and hollering in the direction of the opposite conclusion. We are most sorry for having been so wrong.

The most interesting news this week is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) news from the online Iceland Review, which says that the shelter that was planned for homeless men at Njálsgata 74 in downtown Reykjavík will open in October, as previously scheduled, over the objections of neighbors, but, by way of compromise, would house only 8 men rather than the 10 that were to originally have been sheltered.


[Above: Y'all's gotta see this picture of Njálsgata Street!]

My concern is, what are the odds that the two guys that are excluded are going to be just exactly the two bastards that the NIMBYs were trying to keep out?

Out of any 10 people, statistics shows that two of them will be saints, and another two of them bastards, whether the ten are homeless or not. Studies have repeatedly shown that two out of ten of all human beings are worthless scum.

But if you pick 2 people out of 10 at random the odds that the 2 you picked will be the 2 bastards of the bunch is only 1 in 45. That's just simple math!

Choose wisely, Reykjavík!