Willy Wonka

Yesterday I was contacted by a reporter from a suburban Chicago newspaper called The Daily Southtown. The reporter explained that he was “writing a story about a guy who filed a lawsuit asking that a judge restrain his neighbors from referring to him as Willy Wonka. The guy sells gumballs and the neighbors complain his sells them out of his home and creates a bunch of problems.” He wanted to know my opinion, as a Roald Dahl fan of some standing, on whether “Willy Wonka” was actually a negative reference. So I emailed him back with a few thoughts… and got quoted in the article! That’s the wackiest story I’ve seen in a long time. How funny! (Although I will add that the Michael Jackson bit was an afterthought. They cut my bit about how a lot of people found Gene Wilder’s Wonka menacing and got the idea that Wonka somehow deliberately bumped off the naughty children. But I guess that wasn’t as fun as my offhand reference to pedophilia!)


Important Note

This site features content going all the way back to 2000. The posts you’ll read reflect my views and writing style at the time. While I have gone back to clean up a few of them, I think it’s important not to sanitise too much. This site is a record of who I am and how I’ve grown. Any blog post written years ago may not reflect who I am today, nor how I would write about the same topic today.