Naked Mermaid
A Dave Barry article that was posted this week on the Miami Herald web-site brought to mind an incident on Kwajalein atoll. The article discussed modern art in public places and questioned whether the average tax payer would appreciate large sums of money being spent on an object that essentially looked like a mangled air conditioner. It was something like that. It reminded me of a controversial art object on Kwajalein. In this case it was a mermaid statue that (parents don’t let your kids read this part) had her breasts exposed. I would not say it was exactly anatomically detailed if you catch my drift but if you looked at it and were a love starved bachelor you could imagine that they were breasts. There are many such bachelors there especially on gender deprived Roi-Namur. Well, a certain well intentioned woman decided the statue was pornographic and complained to the authorities. I hope this lady never goes to Europe because I’ve seen photos of the statues there such as Michelangelo’s David and Venus de Milo and they are much more detailed than this mermaid. But the authorities on Kwaj are sensitive to offending the public so they covered the mermaid with a t-shirt. I don’t know if the lady in question (who is an otherwise nice lady that I was friends with) did not consider that good enough or they were worried the t-shirt would come off but eventually they removed the statue altogether based on one person’s complaints. Read more »