Questions

I am a naturally curious person. I want to know how things work and why they happen the way they do. Some things puzzle me, and I have yet to get an acceptable answer. Here are a few things I’d really like to get answers for.

When did strip joints become Gentlemen’s Clubs? For the record, I’ve never been to either, and I don’t have any desire to. But the question remains. Did it happen when they left downtown for the suburbs? Here in Pittsburgh, there used to be some famous (or infamous) strip joints on Liberty Avenue. There was one place that supposedly employed a stripper who could smoke a cigarette with her vagina. Obviously, that’s a strip joint, no gentlemen involved. Some years ago, the city tried to shut the strip joints and porn theaters down, and they succeeded. They are all gone now. That’s a good thing, but there was always something amusing about going to the theater all dressed up and looking across the street and seeing a sign on a storefront promoting “Doc Johnson’s Marital Aids.”

Most of the downtown strip joints are gone now, but there’s a place uptown called Blush, which bills itself as Pittsburgh’s only ‘totally bare’ gentlemen’s club. To repeat, show me the gentleman. There’s a place not far from where I work that claims to be a gentlemen’s club. I’ve never seen anyone going into or out of the place, but it doesn’t look too upscale to me. I suppose that’s the question. Why do they call them gentlemen’s clubs when the guys who go to them are usually anything but? If anybody has any thoughts, let me know.

Question number two. When did models become supermodels? Did they all get a promotion I didn’t hear about? There’s a woman named Janice Dickinson who claims to have been the first supermodel. I’d never heard of her until she got her own reality show.

And I can’t tell you how relieved I was when Niki Taylor reached age 20. I didn’t have to see her referred to as “teen supermodel Niki Taylor” any longer. Besides, when every model is a supermodel, none of them is. Who decides? Does appearing in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue make you a supermodel, or do you have to appear on the cover of Vogue or Elle? I don’t know. It bugs me. Every time I see a photo spread of women’s clothes, I wonder if it’s peopled with models or supermodels. I guess it depends on how expensive the clothes are.

Try this one on for size. Here in Pennsylvania, cars are required to display their registration tags, or license plates, as we call them here in PA, on their rear bumpers. By contrast, Ohio-registered vehicles have to display tags on their front and rear bumpers. Consequently, there’s a market for “front plates” for Pennsylvania cars. You see them for colleges and universities, car dealers put them on cars they sell, and here in the western end of the state, lots of them for the Pirates, Penguins, and especially the Steelers. Some of them bear the team logo and the words "#1 Fan." I’ve seen many of these for the Steelers and Penguins. Maybe I’m taking this excessively literally, but can’t a team have only one #1 fan?

Just askin’.