Antioch: 50 Miles from Chicago, Sanity
By Margaret Lyons in Miscellaneous on Nov 17, 2004 6:20PM
This story cracked us up bigtime. We sometimes forget that we live in The Big City and that our horrible potty mouth might offend people (sorry, by the way) and that the word "ass" is like a total abomination. Wait, what? Ass? Not a big deal? Yeah, for us either. They don't even bleep ass on network TV, do they?
Attention residents of Antioch: get with the fucking program. A Bad Ass Coffee shop is set to open in Antioch, to the chagrin of its puritanical residents. On Monday, the Antioch Village Board passed a resolution 5-1 (way to be strong, one guy) that read in part
The shop's name is found to be utterly vulgar, to be highly offensive to the ordinary moral sensibilities of this community and to be repugnant to the entire concept of family values and traditional American ideals.
OK, family values have officially jumped the shark. Bad Ass Coffee Co. takes its name from…donkeys. Chief Operating Officer Harold Hill told the Antioch Review that the name is "about a donkey…. The word 'ass' is in the dictionary and it refers to a donkey." Word. The company's logo also features an ass (ahahahah) in addition to its Hawaiian theme. Sure, this is clearly mostly a joke or whatever, but "badass" doesn't even set off our spellchecker. And the name of the company isn't even badass-one-word. We're left to wonder: Is the word "ass" seriously the biggest problem facing Antioch?
"'I like coffee, but I'm a Christian and I would never go in a place named like that,' said Rosemary Schalk, 59, of Grayslake,'" apparently unaware that the word ass appears in lots and lots of versions of the Bible—at least 80 times in King James, even a paltry 7 in New Revised Standard, although mysteriously absent from New American Standard. Oh online searchable bible, you are the religious studies student's bestest friend amen. Also, high fives for the woman who quipped "I wouldn't go in there if they had the best coffee in the world, on account of the name....I think it's asinine." Is that a pun? Or just the awesomest thing ever? Maybe it's both.
Anyway, Chicagoist kind of wants some ass coffee. We'd settle for some ass, though.