Ted Strickland Chooses Weird Calf Muscles, Appoints Foliglio Judge

This week Ohio Governor Ted Strickland took a stand for weird-looking calf muscles by appointing city of Akron attorney Stephen Foliglio to an opening at the Akron Municipal Court.

If you've not yet had the dubious pleasure of beholding the calves of Judge Foliglio, allow me to describe them for you here. I first became acquainted with Steve's legs in the early 1980s, when he and my father were regular tennis opponents. Steve's very, at times unreasonably short shorts revealed a pair of legs that were nearly devoid of any color or hair. Like rivers on a map, a crisscrossing network of undulating blue lines ran beneath his pale, almost transparent skin. When I asked my dad what these lines where, he answered:

Varicose veins.

They're disgusting, I said, purposefully in earshot of Steve.

Dad agreed with a visible shudder.

And there's a LOT of them.

Sure are.

And he has almost no hair on his legs!

Try not to look at them, son.

Steve's legs also feature a pair of knees that, in the fertile fantasy land that is his mind, have been aching chronically since early in the Eisenhower administration. Here is just a sampling of feigned knee ailments that have dogged Judge Foliglio over the years:

Torn cartilage
Water on the knee
Partially torn anterior cruciate ligament
Arthritis - rheumatoid, osteoarthritis, and gout
Bursitis
Torn medial collateral ligament
Ruptured patellar tendon
Assorted sprains and strains
Shattered kneecap
Cancer of the knee
Osgood-Schlatter disease

And yet, while astounding, Steve's fake knee pain finishes a distant second to the spectacle that are his calf muscles. To be sure, there is a great deal of variance that occurs in both the size and shape of all human musculature, but the calf muscle of the male homo sapien is generally represented by a visible bulge in the upper part of the calf. However, the phenomenally exaggerated proportions of Judge Foliglio's calf muscles have led some experts to believe that, while in utero (when his famed moustache was already burgeoning), the fetus of the future attorney was exposed to massive doses of gamma radiation. That coupled with his mother's fried bologna-heavy diet is believed to have caused the genetic mutation that would result in a pair of calf muscles up to 12 times the size of those belonging to a normal male.

Governor Strickland, in a sweeping gesture of goodwill, has chosen Foliglio in spite of, or, perhaps because of, his grotesquely misshapen calf muscles. McBone salutes the governor for his progressive stance toward calf deformation and his willingness to look beyond the leg in his judicial appointments.

And to Judge Stephen A. Foliglio we say McBonulations, and, for the love of all that's holy, put some pants on!

nwb