"...and I want it to say 'I Believe' underneath!"
The Globe has an article today about tattoo regulations that made me do a double take.
The owners of local tattoo shops say they are in favor of a state proposal to increase licensing fees for tattoo artists, as long as the additional revenue is used to enforce health rules aimed at improving public safety in their industry.
How sad is it that a business owner gladly accepting an increase in costs for the greater good is more surprising to me than the fact that creationists are willing to believe in unicorns?
It keeps the riffraff out,” [Body Accents owner Mike Rowland] said. “If you’re a professional shop, it shouldn’t bother you at all. What we really need is to get rid of all these people doing it in houses.
How many responsible dog breeders said something like this when Prop B was on the ballot? Perhaps they knew, or suspected, that they weren’t as professional as all that?
Anyway, I bopped on over to the comments section. Surely the stalwart champions of capitalism are howling in outrage?
Well, they are howling. They’re always howling. Globe comment threads are less like a forum and more like the area of a coliseum where they keep all the enraged exotic beasts.
chuck wrote:
These are the kind of fees that they need to raise. Leave my property taxes and sales taxes alone they are already high enough.
Yep, it’s OK to regulate THOSE businesses.
Anonymous
Does not matter whether you pay on the front side or the backside as most of these jailhouse ‘ink freaks’ will end up in custody and doing time at taxpayer expense, not to mention they won’t be allowed burial in a consecrated Jewish cemetery.
Crap! Who doesn’t want to be buried in a consecrated Jewish cemetery? That was my backup in case my wish to be stuffed and mounted in the Bass Pro Museum got tangled in legal snafus. Gotta revise my will, brb.
It cracks me up that some people still think getting a tattoo is “freakish”. Dumb, maybe, not your bag, maybe, but freakish? One third of twenty-something Americans have one. It’s well on the way to joining video-game-brainwashed school shooters and backwards rock albums in the graveyard of moral freakouts. But then again, a good proportion of Americans are willing to believe in unicorns.
Yeah, I’ve linked to that article twice in an unrelated blogpost. I just can’t get over it though. This stupid goomba believes in freaking unicorns and has thousands of people clinging to his every mouthfart. I digress.
Kajed Heat 
I think the term “gobsmacked” was coined to fit the circumstance of, and its use should be limited to, coming across reader comments which breathtakingly equate tattoo licensing fees and not being “allowed burial in a consecrated Jewish cemetery.”
I don’t think it should be so limited. I think it applies to every comment section on every Globe article. Especially ones where Av-I-Tar shows up.
But over the years one can grow inured to them, as one does the death cries of the banshee or the lonesome wailings of the terminally insane. But a good tattoo licensing fee / Jewish cemetery mash-up? It gobsmackingly astounds.