More on what I learned this week: Félix, Susan, and the Engahan times we live in.

Remember the law about signage outside polling places?

It was enacted to move the political operatives away from the doorway, where they used to stand with stacked crates of Kessler, handing out half-pints of whiskey so that someday, we might have a Main Street Deforestation Project.

Those handovers of booze in broad daylight were masterpieces of subtlety and discretion compared with what happened in New Albany during the third England administration, when Hizzoner awarded Susan Kaempfer $108,000 at a rate of $50 hourly to serve as project manager of the Midtown neighborhood stabilization project.

From the moment Kaempfer endorsed that first check, presumably with the mayor’s wife beaming while handing her the pencil, her credibility vanished faster than the plume from an e-cigarette.

It was the veritable capstone of England Doug’s career in cynical payout largesse, and a complete, all-encompassing civic embarrassment rivaling that of French president Félix François Faure.

Take it away, Wikipedia:

Faure died suddenly from apoplexy in the Élysée Palace on 16 February 1899, at a critical juncture while engaged in sexual activities in his office with 30-year-old Marguerite Steinheil. It has been widely reported that Felix Faure had his fatal seizure while Steinheil was fellating him, but the exact nature of their sexual intercourse is in fact unknown and such reports may have stemmed from various jeux de mots (puns) made up afterward by his political opponents. One such pun was to nickname Mme Steinheil "la pompe funèbre" (wordplay in French: "pompes funèbres" means "death care business" and "pompe funèbre" could be translated, literally, as "funeral blow-job"). George Clemenceau's epitaph of Faure, in the same trend, was "Il voulait être César, il ne fut que Pompée" (another wordplay in French; could mean both "he wished to be Caesar, but ended up as Pompey", or "he wished to be Caesar and ended up being blown": the verb "pomper" in French is also slang for performing oral sex on a man); Clemenceau, who was also editor of the newspaper L'Aurore, wrote that "upon entering the void, he [Faure] must have felt at home".

For the past two weeks, we’ve witnessed Kaempfer on the comeback trail, actively and politically soliciting cash for “her” farmers market,openly on behalf of "her" Develop New Albany, in spite of DNA's largely theoretical non-profit-driven stance against such crass, transparently manipulative activities.

In effect, Susan Kaempfer has orchestrated a hostage-taking, by abducting a straw man of her own creation, stirring up panic among the non-resident vendors, then slicing the straw man's throat before a spineless, pliant council while City Hall looked skyward in search of missing Malaysian airplanes.

There have been so many lies told this past week that if our civic symbol of Pinocchio (an intellectually impoverished river town's equivalent of the Golem) might be positioned facing east, toward Bamberg, those among us seeking immediate exile might promptly arrive at the Schlenkerla tavern without once wetting our feet.

Concurrently, before I begin shopping for plane tickets, permit me to hereby propose that we rename the newly embellished farmers market the Félix François Faure Memorial Cucumber Stand, because in New Albany, the city itself is Pompey, with the cash spewing inexorably in one direction.

JAYsus: Why -- why, why -- on earth must we continue paying her, again and again?