[Comics.com] Oh hey look, up there, it’s our old friend Burnaby Q. Horatio Marcus Longfellow “Crump-Daddy” Orbax, immortalized in comic-form, courtesy of the good folks at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! The comic is all about how Orbax, when not munching glass or whatever he does in his spare time, is actually some kind of sell-out nerd professor of “physics,” whatever the hell that is. Hey freak, make with the laughs! (Click the Comics.com link to see it in all its full-sized glory.)

[Atlanta Journal-Constitution] Well, no laughs here. A few days ago, some idiot drunken goblin named Eugene Ashley decided it’d be a grand idea to tattoo his three-year-old son’s shoulder with the initials “DB,” allegedly standing for “Daddy’s Boy.” Hey, that’s fun bonding experience, right? No? Yeah, not so much.

The tattoo was discovered after an unidentified person complained to the Department of Family and Children Services about the conditions at the Ashley home. The Ashleys have three or four children, Davis said.

“You keep thinking you’ve seen it all, and then voila,” Davis said.

The children remain with their mother; Eugene Ashley was arrested May 21 and faces charges of child cruelty and tattooing a person younger than 18 years old, the latter being a misdemeanor, Davis said.

Interestingly, Theresa Walsh Giarrusso, a columnist for the Journal-Constitution, when discussing this shit-bird in a subsequent column, raised a point not uncommon to the likes of BME and its community, but one particularly foreign to the average AJC reader: Is this really much worse than piercing a baby’s ears or circumcising a newborn?

I get that there’s a law about not tattooing someone under 18, but why is that more worthy of a law than the other two? Is it simply because the other two are done more frequently so they have become socially acceptable?

[…]

Piercings (at least in ears) can close back up, but circumcision can hardly be reversed. I have heard of a method of stretching the foreskin back over the head of the penis using weights but that doesn’t sound easy. Laser surgery to remove tattoos seems preferable to trying to “re-grow” your foreskin.

Are tattoos more painful than piercing or circumcision? Not sure that’s true.

I’m not promoting tattoos for toddler and babies, I’m just wondering if there is a double standard of what is acceptable to do to a child?

Somebody get this lady a wheelbarrow in which to carry her massive balls! Whether you agree with her or not (and I don’t think she even really indicated whether or not she necessarily believes the argument she’s put forth), this isn’t a conversation that occurs among the general public very often, and it’s one that should probably be had. So, Theresa Walsh Giarrusso, we salute you for opening up the dialogue about a tricky subject at a difficult time. What say your commenters?

“Wow, trying to stoke some fires and save your job at the AJC with crap like this? Why not talk about Mike Vick too?

TATOO= PERMANENT AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSION (for adults)
PIERCED EARS= GHETTO TRASH
CIRCUMCISION= HEALTH BENEFITS, and doesn’t give your son a odd looking member.”

[…]

“My granddaughter got her ears pierced at 9 months old and she didn’t cry. How can you compare THAT to a tattoo. You people are nuts! lol”

[…]

“Are you seriously comparing tattoos to circumcision? Need I say more? Thought not, I rest my case.”

(In all fairness, there are a surprising amount of reasonable and rational discussions going on in the comments there.)

[YouTube] Astute reader “Cassie” sends in this charming YouTube clip on everybody’s favorite egg-laying water mammal, the platypus! Why are we posting it here? Because, in addition to being suckers for weird and/or cute animals, it also features several segments with Stephen Kolomyjec from James Cook University, who is all pierced and tattooed and whatnot, and is working on genetic research for platypuses. And hey, we like to show off modified professionals whenever we can. (See: Orbaxy up top.) Stephen pops up around the 1:14 mark.