Take Back Toledo: Cake Or Death?

I was sitting Tuesday evening, desperately trying to come up with something intelligent, interesting, and perhaps even informative for my traditional mid-week posting. I cannot tell you how miserable that experience was. I know that there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum, but the space between my ears had achieved a state so close to such perfection that the laws of nature were taking a considerable beating. 

Of course it is at time like these, when there is no potential interference to the random thoughts careening around my brain, that inspiration strikes. (Or more accurately, that my ADD connects the dots on things that had shown no previous connection.) 

In this case, it was a connection between the Take Back Toledo (TBT) Group and an old Eddie Izzard comedy routine. For those of you who don't know, the Take Back Toledo group is seeking to gather enough signatures to recall the Mayor of Toledo, one Carlton S. Finkbeiner. I have detailed the reasons for this recall in numerous earlier postings and Fairy Tales, so I will not bore you with them again. 

The need for the recall effort however, is both real and self-evident. Eddie Izzard, for those of you unfamiliar with him, is a comic import from the UK (though he was actually born in Yemen), who describes himself as an "executive transvestite". He has been around for a more than a few years now, and his stand up material is both outrageous and sheer genius. (He is also an actor of some note as well, and for those of you who recently saw Valkyrie, he had a small part in that film.)

"What's the connection?" you might ask, and you might even be forgiven if you were not familiar with Mr. Izzard's material. You see, one of Izzard's more famous routines involves a description of the lack of fundamentalism in the Church of England. As a consequence, his opinion is that if the Anglican church were to have inquisitions, it would lead to such difficult choices as "Cake or Death".

As you can see from the video, the choice that TBT offers is likewise pretty simple. Sign the recall petition for the mayor or face the slow, tortuous death that the city of Toledo continues to experience under the administration of Mayor Finkbeiner. As for me, before they run out of it, I choose ... cake.