Just saying yes to dildoes in Brazoria County

Something happens when writers are freed from the bonds of the dead tree medium and step into the digital age.

Their consciousness is expanded. They become smarter and livelier. They are afraid no longer, and their fingers literally dance across the keyboard as they whistle while the work.

The Weekly Journal, the new on-line newspaper that covers Angelton, Danbury and Rosharon, proves this theory of ours to be true.

TWJ replaces the short-lived Angleton Observer, a free weekly that used ink and paper (as well as a Website).

The Angleton Observer was OK, but pretty standard fare as small-town weeklies go, but it most certainly had a place in the community, especially after Southern Newspaper pulled the plug on The Angleton Times.

Nevertheless, The Angleton Observer didn't make it. Something about cash flow problems.

Enter The Weekly Journal, which just got off the ground.

Columnist Susan Bardwell, who recently resigned from The Houston Chronicle, obviously feels a certain sense of liberation in going totally digital.

In her latest column, she chastizes the Brazoria County Sheriff's Department for stationing an officer outside a new "adult boutique" store with a camcorder, which the High Sheriff said was designed to catch registered sex offenders violating their probation.

This occurred at a sort of grand opening party at the dildo and plastic vagina emporium.

Now there's a plot worthy of The Andy Griffith Show, right? Can't you see Deputy Barney Fife wielding a camcorder outside a new adult boutique store that just opened in Mayberry?

Anyway, after living three decades in Brazoria County, Bardwell suggests we all just grow up. She .writes:

This is not the only act of ham-handed pseudo-law “enforcement” by the sheriff’s department. I recently spoke to a club owner whose plans for a bikini contest was quashed soon after being advertised, by a visits from a sheriff’s deputy expressed concern that such an event might violate the state’s obscenity law.
A bikini contest, for crying out loud. The state’s obscenity law hinges on what is deemed obscene by a community. Did the deputy believe we have never been to the beaches here? That we don’t have Dish TV? That we lack Internet access? What are they protecting us from?
Growing up?

Huzzah, Ms. Bardwell. We will be reading The Weekly Journal on a, well, a weekly basis from here on out.