I saw a show from last night where people were discussing some famous person who purportedly acted in controversial ways to produce success, but who was so well-loved and successful that he had a rest area named after him. But that immediately made me wonder: is it really an honor to have a rest area named after someone? I mean, what do you do at a rest area? Well, mostly you go to the bathroom. (Some rest areas also permit the visitor to purchase supposedly unhealthy fast food that will reportedly kill them.) So when someone has a rest area named after them, isn't that basically saying they deserve to have everyone pee and poop on them all the time? I mean, when you think about what a rest area really is for, that's basically what message is being conveyed by naming the rest area after someone, isn't it? So maybe it would be more appropriate to have things like the Boss Tweed Rest Area, rather than a rest area to commemorate some well-loved statesman?
This is Boss Tweed, for those of you who don't know (He was basically a political version of Bernie Madoff, stealing tens of millions of 1800s-value dollars from his NYC constituency):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Tweed
(Oh, and incidentally, Boss Tweed was brought down largely due to the efforts of a Harper's Weekly political cartoonist named Thomas Nast, whose icky-looking depictions of political corruption was the genesis for coining the word/term "nasty", proving once again that the pen really is mightier than the sword when in incorruptible, talented and determined hands.)
(BTW: Wikipedia claims the word "nasty" existed before Thomas Nast, having come from French and Dutch sources hundreds of years prior to his birth; but isn't that just what something like Wikipedia, who obviously permits Boss Tweed's vengeful ghost to attempt to trivialize Thomas Nast's legacy from beyond the grave, would try to say? {Those fibbers.})
