• Goth with the wind Goth with the wind There’s an old joke about the guy who’s stomping around his house screaming “Wooba-wooba” when a friend asks him what he’s doing. “Keeping the elephants away,” the guy says. “Does it
• Goth with the wind
Goth with the wind
There’s an old joke about the guy who’s stomping around his house screaming “Wooba-wooba” when a friend asks him what he’s doing.
“Keeping the elephants away,” the guy says.
“Does it work?” asks the friend.
“You don’t see any elephants around here, do you?” the guy says.
In the same spirit, the Kansas City suburb of Blue Springs, Mo., recently returned $132,000 to the federal government, nearly half of a $273,000 grant it received two years ago to study the problem of “Goth culture” among the city’s youth.
Apparently the grant worked: Blue Springs officials said that, technically, they never managed to find any Goth problems to study.
The city did spend nearly $75,000 on salary and benefits for a project coordinator and an assistant (you need an assistant when you look for Goths) and held 17 sessions for people who work with kids to tell them how to deal with a problem that, alas, they didn’t have.
Sure, Blue Springs spent $141,000 to determine that it did not have the problem it thought it had, but the city did fess up and return the rest of the money.
It’s a pretty good deal, if you think about it.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
