Local gossip...

It has been noted that the husband of The Mouth of Bloomberg, Mrs. Shannon Watts, has (or rather, had) an art gallery in Zionsville, a suburb north of Indianapolis. Just to provide a little local color, downtown Zionsville is made of art galleries and antique shops the way Broad Ripple is made of hair salons and vintage clothing stores:

Zionsville is lousy with "hobby businesses". Mrs. Doctor or Mrs. Esquire has an antique shop or a gallery as a tax write-off.

Seriously, get in your Google car and take a virtual drive around the main drag; it's the sort of painfully twee small town square on the fringes of the big city that has been preserved by the kind of people who love old Victorians and do not wish to dwell in the thunderously gauche McMansions of Bedroomville next door, but don't want to risk living in a trendy in-town neighborhood, either, because there might be black people nearby.

Mrs. Watts' hoplophobia is amusing for multiple reasons. For instance there's the entrenched view of the dwellers in the northern bedroom communities along the Zionsville-Carmel-Fishers arc that the area south of I-465 is some sort of blasted wasteland, a la Robocop's Detroit, a view greeted by bemused headshakes in the leafy streets of Meridian Hills. Proximity to The Big City gives the northern suburbanites an almost pathological fear of crime; the Monon Trail extension into Carmel was opposed on the grounds that it would be an artery of urban crime, apparently for criminals too dumb to use the hundreds of existing streets.

The other is that Zionsville is not in Hamilton County, like Carmel, but rather in Boone County, which is something of a mecca for Midwest gun nuts, since the (sadly, term-limited) sheriff is an adjunct Gunsite instructor and brings trainers like Louis Awerbuck, Steve Tarani, and Pat Rogers to the sheriff's department range for open-enrollment classes because he thinks armed and trained citizens make his job easier. Shannon should look into taking a class.
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