KEIZER, OR — They say that beauty… and art… and pornography… are in the eyes of the beholder. A small town in Oregon is certainly putting that theory into practice when it comes to the shape of its concrete pedestrian posts.What some likely see as a series of vertical tubes capped with rounded tops and decorated with a thin incised band around their circumferences are seen by others as circumcised phallic symbols. Similar designs have been employed for trash cans.
“They certainly did not turn out the way we anticipated,” Keizer, OR City Manager Chris Eppley concedes about the 52 posts commissioned to keep pedestrians safe from automobiles at a particularly traffic heavy intersection.
Eppley further admits that he can understand why some area residents think that the posts look like penises.
Apparently that’s not how they looked in the catalogue that the city ordered the posts from.
Eppley thinks maybe that the problem might not be so much the posts as their location. “They’re a standard style,” he insisted to KOMO TV. “I think in the right context they look fine. They just happened not to, here.”
No explanation about what kind of “context” would be appropriate for the posts was provided.
Public servant Eppley isn’t wild about the idea of spending a lot of money on the real or imagined problem, but says the city is considering metal post collars and post-to-post linking chains as possible solutions.
While that may change the look, it’s only a matter of time before someone finds out about cock rings, penis leashes, and other kinky genital possibilities.
“If that fix doesn’t work and I still think they look inappropriate,” Eppley told KOMO, “we’ll have wasted $20,000 and we’ll have to do something different.”
Whether not imaging one sees genitals everywhere they look is on the list of options is unknown.
