San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has never been known for witty, off-the-cuff remarks. But at a San Francisco Fisherman’s Wharf Merchant’s Association crab feed Thursday night, Lee reportedly "made light" of the measles epidemic and cracked what just might have been a subtle joke about pubic lice.
Anyone who's squirmed through Lee's appearances at the Board of Supes for "Question Time" knows that our mayor lacks the oratorial slickness of his predecessor, Lt. Gov Gavin Newsom.
But perhaps with over half-a-million bucks in the bank for his unopposed re-election campaign, Lee felt he could cut a bit loose at last night's dinner event, saying, per SHOCKING report from CBS5, that “People go to Disneyland for measles, but come to San Francisco for crabs.”
(My favorite part of the CBS brief is how they then embed tweets angrily responding to their report. That is some follow up!)
But CBS, in their eagerness to alert readers regarding Lee's joke, missed another low hanging fruit, which I will now pluck for them: was Lee also mocking San Francisco's pubic lice epidemic, with his throw-away line about people coming to the city to "for crabs"? After all, he didn't say they come here to "eat crabs." No, he did not.
According to the San Francisco City Clinic, a SF Department of Public Health-managed clinic that focuses solely on sexually transmitted diseases, crabs (which are officially referred to as "pubic lice") remain a significant sexually-transmitted disease for San Franciscans and those who visit here to copulate with us.
The Center for Disease Control says that "pubic lice infestations (pthiriasis) are usually spread through sexual contact." Female crabs will lay about 30 eggs on a victim's hair shaft, eggs that eventually mature into adult crabs that "require human blood to survive." That's why they cause such intense itching and irritation that victims can end up with "sores and secondary bacterial infection of the skin." Hilarious!
And, so you know, crabs aren't just found in the pubes, according to the CDC. Victims might also have crabs on their "eyelashes, eyebrows, beard, mustache..."
Wait, did you say "mustache," CDC? Oh, boy. Not going there.
Anyway, if you're going to manufacture outrage over Lee's crack about measles, then surely you have some left over for his flagrant disregard for SF's itchy junk?
We await your angry tweets.