At a town hall meeting at City Hall on Friday to discuss the budget for the arts and announce his Arts Advisory Council, Mayor Michael Nutter again acknowledged that, yes, things are bad right now, and they will almost undoubtedly get worse. Tax revenues will continue to decrease as consumer spending plummets and the growing unemployed population finds it has less and less to spend on tax-generating goods and services.

Funding for the arts is one of the few areas that, as a whole, has actually seen net growth despite cuts, and this meeting was less gloomy than others past. The Philadelphia Cultural Fund alone grew by $750,000, or about 30 percent. Nutter and the four advisors that accompanied him — including Arts Director Gary Steuer and Finance Director Rob Dubow — were generally well received by the crowd that fully occupied City Hall’s conference room. When you look at how other cities’ arts funding has plummeted – from New York’s 7 percent cut to Atlanta’s 40 percent cut — the 4.5 percent increase Philly gets makes things seem almost utopic.

But no one asked the one question I thought someone would bring up: In light of the growth in arts funding, why don’t we transfer some of it into other areas to offset some of the other cuts? There are a few potential answers to this, I think.

• Even though city money has seen an increase, the real threat to the arts comes the damage to charitable endowments that have been swept into the economic whirlwind. I’m not certain how big the chunk of funding that originates from those sources truly is, but it’s almost certainly more than what will be offset by the growth of the city’s arts budget. Because the arts rely so much on private and non-profit sources, the increased city spending might be necessary to keep it zero-sum, or at least more so.
• Nutter looks at the arts like he looks at sustainability, a spend-money-to-make-money strategy that in the long run will make the city more financially solvent. It’s the same strategy behind moving the Barnes Foundation to Philly. The more people we can draw in with artistic and cultural attractions, and the more residents we can get to spend money at events, the better off we’ll all be.

(And of course, last night wasn’t without its cameos by Friends of the Barnes members, who time and again have proven themselves to be some of the most unstable interest group members in the city. Before the meeting started, one member stood in front of the audience and called us all to attention before giving the group’s mission statement, this time presented in a way that will somehow make leaving the Barnes in Montgomery County better for Philly. Another member later addressed Nutter directly with the same complaints: It will cost the city more money than it’s worth and consistently operate at a deficit. She asked Nutter to reconsider the move. Nutter told her he wouldn’t.)

• Nutter made big campaign promises to increase funding to the city’s cultural fund and arts institutions. The arts community is a powerful one, and many of the community’s members were just appointed to the city’s Arts Advisory Council. To shortchange them would not be a good idea.

City Paper staff writer and Philadelphia native Tom Namako put the post-World Series riots like this: “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.” For a few hours, I could get it. Brad Lidge’s winning pitch was the spark to a powder keg that’s been filled for the past 20 years. Fans had every reason to congest Broad Street by the thousands, climb on top of signposts, shout from the top of newsstands and spray champagne on anyone in close proximity. It was the one night when a drunken bro standing through the sunroof of a car would whoop at me and I would actually whoop back.

But the sight of my deformed bike outside Dirty Frank’s on 13th and Pine streets was the big comedown from two hours of an anarchic high. That’s when I stopped “getting it.”

The bike was locked to the railing of a house, not in the middle of the road, and yet you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that a car had run it over. How the back of the frame became so bent confounds me.

This was in one of the lower-key areas of the city’s collective celebration Wednesday night. It was only four blocks away that more spectacular destruction was taking place. My only means of transportation were gone, with SEPTA closed for the night and Broad Street shut down. On my way across Broad, riot police were clearing out the area. A few of them pushed a kid on the ground, and when I stopped to watch, one firmly pushed me and told me to get the hell out.

“Excuse me?” I said to him.

“Don’t,” my friend Steve said to me. “They’re just sick of this.”

It wasn’t until I got west of Broad that I realized exactly what they were sick of: The streets seemed post-apocalyptic. Nearly every news kiosk was overturned, and strewn City Papers and Philadelphia Weeklys concealed the gray of the sidewalk. You couldn’t walk 20 yards without crunching shards of broken beer bottles under your feet. Occasionally, the bright orange of a small fire would catch my eye.

The most serious fire ignited at 16th and Walnut. As I walked by, someone lit the heaping bags of trash, and I turned around to stomp it out with my feet and yelled at the arsonist, who responded by grabbing my knit hat and throwing it onto the nascent flames. By the time the police arrived, it had effloresced into something too large to extinguish with feet. Spectators surrounded it and snapped pictures with their camera phones.

I walked up Broad to the site of an uprooted stoplight laying on the ground with its wires exposed. It wasn’t the first. On my way to 7-Eleven, I passed at least three more stoplights that had been ripped out of the ground, the lights broken out of the yellow caves. And 7-Eleven — the last late-night supplier of tobacco for smokers across the world — had closed to prevent looting.

No matter where I went, hoots and hollers carried down the streets. I had to think that this was no longer anymore about the Phillies winning than it was about an excuse for primal mob aggression. I had seen the aftermath, but I realized that there was more I hadn’t seen: overturned cars and store lootings slightly southward. Is this really how people react to good news?

The sideways kiosks provided for good makeshift benches. I sat down and smoked, and a man with a backwards 1979 Phillies hat came up to me and asked me if I was OK. I told him I was fine, I just hated seeing the city in such disrepair. I wondered aloud how much of the revenue Philadelphia earned from the World Series was lost in one fell, raucous swoop.

“You gotta understand,” the man started, “they’ve been waiting for this for years. It’s been 100 total sports seasons since Philly’s won a championship. They’re just happy to finally see it.” I asked why happiness translated into the destruction of property. The man shrugged.

I don’t get it.

Mama Voted is Zilber’s latest follow-up to his last two child-friendly introductions to the Democratic Party,Why Mommy is a Democrat and Why Daddy is a Democrat. Why is mommy squirrel a democrat? Because like mommy, Democrats make sure that children share their toys, go to school and don’t hide their allowance in accounts in the Cayman Islands.

I’m all for counter-balancing Republican propaganda. The way MSNBC has swooned over Obama is only justified by Fox’s apologies for all things conservative. Zilber’s books might be seen in the same light — they were published only after Katharine DeBrecht wrote Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!, which follows Tommy and Lou as they start a lemonade stand and watch as half their earnings are snatched away to help poor leeches who don’t have startup capital for their own sugary enterprises. And of course, there’s Bill O’Reilly’s infamous The O’Reilly Factor for Kids.

Even so, this is dangerously close to some fascist shit. Teaching young kids about our political system shouldn’t extend beyond the nonpartisan Schoolhouse Rock or the most basic understanding of our Constitution. This is a bill. This is a president. This is a Congress. Now go play with Legos. I have a feeling this is only going to get more and more issue-specific. How soon before we see Mommy, Teddy Bear Kennedy is Stealing My Squirt Gun?

But woven throughout all these intentions is the idea that, Ebersole says, the greater portion of the Philly art scene is not hospitable to people like himself. He says the galleries and art spaces have become pompously exclusive with a fixation on financial markup, and the only venue that offered itself to him was the city. What is really being liberated, then, is art from galleries.

“I got here and it was like a goddamn desert,” says Ebersole, who returned to Philly in 2006 after living in West Chester for seven years. “Even in terms of outsider, critical art, it’s a pattern, it’s the same thing,” he says. “It’s somebody building a fucking tree house or taking a picture of someone’s ass. Really good art is generally not in a gallery.”

So after two street installations (the first in November 2007; the second this January) and a vow to stay true to the essence of street art, it surprises even Ebersole that he has a gallery show booked at Bambi Gallery this weekend. The show will feature an array of different fists and photographs of them taken by Jared Castaldi while they were installed throughout the city.

All of Ebersole’s work is a product of his first-generation punk rock, anti-establishment ethos. The most prominent piece in his Fishtown dining room is a wall-size plywood and Masonite fist and star underneath the words “Rise Above.” He and Castaldi are working on Barred for Life, a book about the meaning Black Flag tattoos have for their bearers. (Ebersole recently covered his own small Black Flag tattoo on his calf with a bigger, newer Black Flag tattoo.)

As loath as Ebersole has been to place his work in the confines of a gallery, it’s the only chance many viewers have to see the LIBER-8 ME project: No more than a few days after Ebersole has screwed the fists onto building exteriors, they’ve almost all come down. Half the time, they’ve been looted as souvenirs by admiring passersby. The rest have been vengefully torn off by angry landlords and others whom Ebersole thinks have not yet learned to see street art as anything other than vandalism.

And with aspirations to return to graduate school (he already has a master’s in geology and taught science at the School at Church Farm in Exton from 1999 to 2006), Ebersole, 41, is reaching the point when his art is not worth risking a criminal record.

“I’ve had friends who were jailed doing similar stuff and I want none of that,” he says. “I’ve never been arrested, but I have been scared shitless [by cops].”

In West Chester, he started the Renegade Art Coalition, a semi-organized group of artists known for their offbeat shows and anarchist bent. But it wasn’t until he came back to Philly that he could work in an urban environment less hostile to street art.

Ebersole may be the creative fountainhead of LIBER-8 ME, but the project is a multi-man effort. After Ebersole carves the fists, he sends them out to 10 different artists.While Ebersole paints his fists in sets of five with one design to a set, his collaborators make each fist unique, painting colorful polygons and textures, then send them back to Ebersole to stencil in clenched fingers and the “LIBER-8 ME” signature.

Seeing the fists in a gallery is like watching lions in a zoo, out of their natural habitat and confined to a location antithetical to their existence. Ebersole comes off as uncertain about the decision to move his project in the opposite direction of its original intentions. Even though Bambi doesn’t have the same “agenda” as the Old City galleries, says Ebersole, his street art will still be exhibited indoors. The pieces will also be for sale during the show’s curiously short run.

“I’m doing a gallery show,” he says while stenciling a fist, “for a project that was meant to make people look at abandoned buildings.”

original link: http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/09/25/rise-up-with-fists

By Aug. 22, the protestors had been camped outside of Philadelphia Nursing Home for five days. Most of them were paraplegic and confined to electric wheelchairs, and the only two tents were occupied by the able-bodied, so when the chanting and slogan-shouting ended at around 7 or 8 p.m. each night, they would simply recline in their chairs to sleep. A few feet away, a giant banner was spread on the barrier of PNH: “MAYOR NUTTER TEAR DOWN THESE WALLS.” Behind those walls, the protestors said, was an institution that “warehoused” people, letting them languish in bedsores and human- and rodent-excrement. They wanted Philadelphia “out of the nursing home business.”

Sometime late the afternoon of Aug. 22, according to organizer Nancy Salandra, she and co-organizer Zach Lewis headed down to City Hall to try and talk with Mayor Nutter, just as they had the day before when they approached him after a press conference concerning casinos. Salandra and Lewis tried to get in to see the mayor, were kicked out and then began chanting outside City Hall. Eventually they were let in to meet with him.

“He was mad,” says Salandra. “He said, you know, ‘I’ve only been in office for seven months. I don’t know why you’re targeting me.’”

Still, as Salandra tells it, he agreed to meet with them this month, saying that this time, the meeting wouldn’t be like two prior meetings when he said he would consider their concerns. In September, he said, he would hand them a plan that would initiate the process of moving people out of PNH by December, and eventually closing it.

“I asked [Nutter] three times, ‘Is Philadelphia getting out of the nursing home business?’” says Salandra, “and he said yes.” (She says Nutter declined to pledge anything in writing.)

That night, the protesters held their last nightly candlelight vigil outside PNH and sang “We Shall Overcome.” When the singing was over, German Parodi, one of the organizers, pulled out the megaphone that had been used for the past week to amplify declarations against nursing homes, and declared victory. They had won. It was time to pack up and party.

“Remember this: We will stay to make sure the mayor goes through with his promise,” said Parodi.

Three days later, Philadelphia Health Commissioner and Deputy Mayor Donald F. Schwarz said in an interview, “I think the mayor believes he’s been misquoted.”

*

Last month’s stakeout was a month in the planning by the Philadelphia chapter of ADAPT, a national grassroots disability group that opposes nursing homes (preferring attending care in independent setups). Locally ADAPT is closely linked with Liberty Resources, Inc. (LRI), a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that assists people with moving into their own homes (sometimes from institutional settings, like nursing homes). While various ADAPT chapters are their own entities, the Philadelphia chapter files no tax returns, and the ADAPT organizers of last week’s protest were employees of LRI.

City officials say ADAPT and LRI didn’t exactly catch the message Nutter intended to send them: If Philadelphia ever gets out of the nursing home business, they say, the plan to do so won’t be revealed in September. What was discussed in the Aug. 22 meeting, they say, was a promise to consider moving an unspecified number of people out of PNH — though not necessarily by December.

“We’ve wanted for a long time to move people out,” says Schwarz. “We would prefer to have people in a less restrictive environment and have people in their own homes. We’ve told [LRI] that now since March.” The particular challenge at PNH, says Schwarz, is that the facility has a disproportionate number of patients who differ from the typical nursing home resident: Many PNH patients are younger people with psychiatric problems that impede their chances for independent living.

But this isn’t good enough for ADAPT and LRI. The organizations are against nursing homes completely: They see them as depressing layaways for human beings, where dignity is lost in a vacuum and independence is mythical. The group advocates attending care and assisted living. And to LRI, PNH has reached what the group considers criminal levels of neglect and overcrowding. According to Schwarz, PNH has about 450 patients — more than four times the national average, though still shy of its maximum capacity. Its rate of bedsores is more than twice the national average, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and 20 percent of patients are depressed or anxious, compared to 14 percent nationally.

The day after ADAPT began its demonstration, however, the Pennsylvania Department of Health conducted an impromptu inspection of PNH and found no issues worth citing. In the past five years, PNH has gone through 66 separate inspections after complaints. Most of the time, it has gotten off without an infraction. Occasionally, it has been cited for not keeping track of records, allowing food to become cold, and not keeping rodents out of the building. On five occasions, it was written up for failing to prevent injuries.

“Nursing home violations, when you read them, they sound crazy and egregious,” says Maura Kennedy, a spokeswoman at the mayor’s press office. “[PNH] is government-run, but it’s not the horrible facility people are making it out to be. It’s not USSR-style.”

LRI currently has a contract with the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) to place 100 nursing-home residents into private homes. Downsizing PNH could, a least in theory, lead to more city business for LRI, which is the pre-eminent independent-living organization for the disabled in Philly. In fact, PHA likes the idea.

“We happen to agree with Liberty,” says Kirk Dorn, a spokesperson for PHA. “We wanted to help Liberty and take people out of the nursing home and put them into private units.”

(Historically, the rapport between LRI and PHA has been more antagonistic. LRI has repeatedly sued PHA since 1998, alleging that the agency doesn’t provide enough wheelchair-accessible housing. It was after a 2007 suit was dropped that LRI received the housing vouchers.)

But what of Schwarz’s denial, and the different understandings that the city and the activists apparently have of their meeting with the mayor? Both Salandra and Lewis say that because neither Schwarz nor any spokesperson was in the meeting with Nutter, no one except they and the mayor can lay a legitimate claim to what happened behind closed doors. They both vehemently assert that they asked Nutter three times if he was committing to downsizing and closing PNH, and that he said he was.

“We’re going to meet with him at end of September to see what his plan is,” says Lewis, “and we’re going to hold him accountable to what he said in that meeting.”

Within the United States is the nation of Guyland, a demographic of 16-26 year-old white males who live by the credo “Bros Before Hos” and binge drink their ways through their formative years. At their most innocuous, the citizens of Guyland are nothing more than young men who play too many violent video games and watch too much porn (often with other guys). But at the core of Guyland are toxic mores that permit and encourage date rape, vile fraternity hazing and beating homosexuals.

Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, posits that the hyper-masculine culture that has emerged among young men is the male backlash to gender equality. With more women achieving the same things as men, men now feel they must assert their manliness in increasingly extreme ways – ways that usually incorporate the degradation of women. Additionally, the homogenization of American culture has created an atmosphere in which these guys have choices of where to turn for camaraderie, as citizens of Guyland have become the dominant social groups on many college campuses and high schools.

From interviews with hundreds of guys, Kimmel writes a highly readable account of the Guyland mentality and its consequences for those both inside and outside Guyland’s borders. 

The idea that Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst would direct a family film like “The Longshots” is the stuff of late-night talk show jokes, an idea so absurd that there would seem to be some law of nature prohibiting it. But you’ve got to hand it to Durst. The guy skyrockets to fame and coolness, plummets twice as hard, and manages to earn himself a job as a film director. “The Longshots” is his second film, following up on “The Education of Charlie Banks” last year, and Durst and screenwriter Nick Santora should be lauded for their ability to make it slightly less mundane than most family comedies. The real life-based story follows Jasmine Plummer (Keke Palmer) from humiliated nerd at school to the first female quarterback of a Pop Warner football team in history. Her athleticism is nurtured by her uncle Curtis Plummer (Ice Cube), a washed out former football player (in college or high school? The movie never really tells us) who became unemployed after the manufacturing sector upped and left their town of Minden, Illinois. They’re seldom shown apart as the film moves from symphony-backed sentimentality to football-in-the-crotch gag. For as one-dimensional as a family film directed by Fred Durst and starring Ice Cube inevitably will be, though, the film at least includes some subtle socioeconomic commentary about how the departure of blue-collar jobs has impoverished small American towns, and – surprisingly – there aren’t any moments so horribly executed as to be considered intolerable. But “tolerable” is the strongest endorsement the movie gets.

It’s how Hayes, 62, has been showcasing his work for the past two months. Three times a week, he loads the grocery cart he found in Germantown with pictures depicting the creation of the universe and romantic loss, crutches encrusted with glitter and colorful stones, and lamps smeared with paint.

“I’ve met people who don’t go to art galleries but they’re still interested in art,” says Hayes, a North Philly resident. In that respect, his cart is a humble, mobile art gallery.

Painting was an unexpected lifeline for Hayes three years ago when he was repairing his life at the Ridge Avenue Shelter after years of living on the street as an addict. One of the directors tapped him to paint. Once he started, he couldn’t stop.

Hayes’ work would likely not fascinate the art world. There are no “How did he do that?” moments or stunning displays of technical prowess. He stopped going to school when he was 8 years old, he says. Even though his paintings are clean and coherent, his lack of formal training is no surprise.

But transcending his amateurism is an instinctive conceptual maturity, both aesthetically and philosophically. “When I first picked up that brush, it just came out of me,” he says. One of his first pieces was a stand-up mirror painted on both sides. On one side is “The Birth of Messiah,” originating as a sort of cosmic cloud, coming down the sky and through the abstracted birth canal of Mary (Hayes says he never really bought the idea of immaculate conception, and the celestial creation could easily symbolize anyone).

Turn the mirror over and it’s “The Crucifixion.” From a sea of blood emerges a hand clutching a heart. In the background, a devilish serpent is wrapped around the globe. The handheld heart recurs throughout Hayes’ work. He says it’s a symbol of human love, both in Christ and in ourselves.

Even though the bulk of his work centers on Christianity, it’s theologically open-minded and is more philosophical than religious. Above his bed hangs a painting of two doors floating in space, one symbolizing creation, the other nonexistence. Between the two is a door in limbo, symbolizing man.

Much of the time, the frames are simply embossed extensions of the paintings, as if Hayes just needed a bigger canvas and couldn’t afford one. His use of mirrors and wood as canvas is half creative impulse, half financial constraint. Hayes lives mainly off Social Security and supplements his income by selling his art for $20 to $50 apiece.

Money not spent on sustenance and art supplies goes into his startup safe-sex organization, Heart to Heart, which is still, and may forever be, in its nascence; there are more types of distributive literature than there are members, whom Hayes tries to wrangle by passing out his admonition-soaked business cards. “Remember cowboy keep your gun in your holster and ther [sic] won’t be any trouble,” one card reads below a picture of a reservoir-tipped pistol. “That’s LAW.”

On First Fridays, Hayes is down in Old City with his grocery cart, hoping one of the gallery owners will notice his work and schedule a showing. Two years ago his work hung in a hybrid art gallery/community center on Girard Avenue. It was his first and only showing.

When he approached the owners of the Old City galleries, they told him he needed to type a biography and explanation of his work.

“I don’t read well and I don’t spell well,” says Hayes, citing his early exit from education. Of course, it’s likely not for lack of a written bio that he has been denied a showing; his work wouldn’t comfortably hang next to the abstract expressionism in posh Old City galleries. But he doesn’t mind if his first gallery showing was his last.

“Things come to mind that I wouldn’t normally think of if I didn’t have a brush in my hand,” he says. “If I never get in a gallery, I’m gonna always figure out things to get across to people.”

On Saturday, members of Casino-Free Philadelphia walked to the proposed site of Foxwoods Casino on Columbus Boulevard, carrying beach balls, umbrellas, liquid bubbles and floaties. They stopped on the sidewalk in front of the gate at the site, and they played.

As some of the members impersonated police, asking the gatherers what they were doing and demanding they leave, and others acted as irritated union workers, also instructing the activists to move, Casino-Free members playfully tossed beach balls, and invited them to join in the fun.

Call it the protester’s filibuster: When all else fails, chain yourself to a fence until you’re either bulldozed or hauled off in handcuffs.

Casino-Free plans to use a lighthearted version of this tactic in the event that the Foxwoods or SugarHouse Casinos start construction on sites in Port Richmond or South Philly. Last weekend, they practiced swooping into construction sites with their summertime playthings, a “site reclamation” that would prevent the casinos from being built.

“Our goal is to show what should be done on a waterfront, which is to play and have parks,” says Daniel Hunter, an organizer and spokesman for Casino-Free. He says hundreds of members have gone through similar training sessions.

It may well be months, if not years, before casino opponents even need to consider such a contingency. Casino construction is stuck in the muck of city committees, courts and legislatures. SugarHouse is currently fighting its 12th case in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, opponents are amassing more political leverage. A report released Friday by Penn Praxis, a design agency commissioned to plan the waterfront, stated that the designs for the casinos would yield unsightly boxes at odds with the city’s waterfront goals. It advised that they be relocated — a position shared by Mayor Nutter. What’s more, state Sen. Vince Fumo and state Rep. Dwight Evans in July threatened to introduce legislation that would strip the casinos of tax breaks if they don’t find different spots.

But SugarHouse and Foxwoods have declared they won’t budge, and so Casino-Free set out preparing its jocular last-ditch effort. Ultimately, it might prove more of a gesture than a tactical maneuver. Capt. William Fisher of the Philadelphia Police Department Civil Affairs Unit told Saturday’s organizers that if they trespassed or blocked driveways, they would simply be removed after three warnings. After that, construction would resume.

“I don’t think a lot of these people realize that they’re going to be arrested,” he said.

But the Casino-Free members did realize it. George Lakey, a consultant to activist groups, worked with Casino-Free on Saturday and delineated steps to follow when under arrest: Protesters could, he said, be held for up to 72 hours, prosecuted for trespassing and face fines.

Lakey says the merrymaking protest isn’t that uncommon and tends to work better than lying on the ground in front of a Caterpillar.

When asked what he would do if a protestor tried to rope him into a game of catch, Fisher replied, “I don’t want to talk in hypotheticals.”

The only insight to be gained, then, was from the role-playing. Before heading to the Foxwoods site, Casino-Free members gathered at the Old Swedes’ Church on Christian Street and held a pre-rehearsal rehearsal, playing different factions as they would later on the street.

They then sat down in a large circle. Lakey asked the faux police how they had felt.

“Everyone was smiling and laughing and I didn’t want to arrest them,” said one woman who played a police officer.

“The offering of ice cream really ticked me off,” said a man. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”

“I felt there was nothing anyone could say to me,” said another, “that I was interested in hearing.”

By 2008, most of us have realized that the person you consider your “soul mate” is really just the carrier of some genes you think a mini You ought to carry in his DNA. But talking and spending time together are so 19th century, and they leave you blind as to whether the genes of your partner will create a child that can withstand an Ebola shower or one that will crumble at the first whiff of his own mucous.
So cancel your match.com membership and sign up with GenePartner, the online dating service that best matches your genes to prospective lovers’. For a fee of $199, GenePartner analyzes your saliva for its HLA (human leukocyte antigen) properties and allows you to see which members have opposite HLA. According to Dr. Wedekind (GenePartner gives no first name), a Swiss scientist who developed the method at the University of Bern, humans are most attracted to partners with different HLA, since it allows them to bear children with the highest resistance to diseases. We subconsciously evaluate someone’s HLA through our noses, says Dr. Wedekind and if someone’s great on paper but “just doesn’t click” with us, they usually just have unsightly HLA.
What do you do if you get paired up with the Elephant Man? The site doesn’t say, but you should probably ignore the jarring deformity and focus on the genes. It’s for the good of your kids.