OCR Text |
Show A2 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, December 2, 2008 The LIGHTER SIDE Dazed News Off The Beaten Path Slice of Life Mr. Flexibility, or Maybe Not James L. Davis I asked my daughter to show me some good stretching exercises over the Thanksgiving holiday. My thinking was that I really should start stretching something other than my stomach. So my daughter went through half a dozen or so exercises that I could do that would limber me up a bit and I did my best to follow her example as she went along. The good news is that the paramedics arrived at near record time. The bad news is that there are parts of my body that may once have been able to bend, twist or rotate, but apparently they no longer are able to do so. For instance, my daughter stood in the middle of our living room, had me stand beside her and then told me to touch my toes. So being what I thought was a reasonably intelligent person, I bent my leg, reached down and touched my toes. No problem whatsoever. “No Dad, like this.” My daughter bent at the midsection and touched her toes without bending her legs and apparently without rupturing any internal organs. I tried to do the same and came to the horrifying conclusion that my toes are several miles further away from my fingers than my daughter’s toes apparently are. I could touch my knees, but unless my toes were willing to walk up my leg and meet me half way, there was simply no way that we were going to be touching this way. Not only that, but I am fairly certain the stabbing pain in the back of my legs was not natural and I told my daughter as much. She thought this was terribly funny, as did my wife, who promptly stood up, bent at the midsection and touched her toes. Of course, my wife and daughter lack one thing at the midsection that I possess in abundance, and that is…a midsection. I realize that possessing a midsection should not prevent you from being able to touch your toes, but in my own defense I must say that while that may be true, it does throw off your balance. Because when I tried again to touch my toes, this time with a little more enthusiasm, my stomach apparently thought I was attempting to roll myself into a ball and tried to help me complete the maneuver, which is how I ended up with my face planted against the living room wall. My daughter and wife thought this was terribly funny as well. Any time I emit any noise that indicates that I might in some way be in discomfort, it is cause for great fits of laughter by my family. Which is why any time I begin a physical fitness routine, attempt to construct anything with hand or power tools, or try to cook a meal that is edible, my family is amused to the point where they laugh with great, gleeful outbursts. It is good to have a purpose, I suppose. Coming to the conclusion that touching my toes without bending my legs might very well be an impossibility, my daughter continued to show me variations of many other stretching exercises where the goal was for me to touch my toes. I could not complete any of these exercises and am now convinced that touching your toes has been and always will be an overrated activity. Realizing that if I continued to try and touch my toes our Thanksgiving meal might be served in the waiting room of the hospital, my daughter sat on the floor and showed me some other exercises. The first exercise involved sitting on the floor with your legs crossed in front of you. I could accomplish this part of the exercise with only a little discomfort, mostly involving the whole sitting on the floor part. I asked if I could do the same thing from my recliner, but apparently I cannot, because my daughter gave me The Look, and anyone who has or ever has had a 14 year old daughter will know exactly what I mean by The Look. After sitting on the floor and crossing my legs, my daughter did something that in my mind confirmed that my beautiful, loving, 14 year old daughter is in all reality an alien creature. She crossed her right leg over her left leg, pulled both up close to her body, crossed her right arm over her left arm and it seemed twisted both behind her back, then tucked her head into her abdomen. All she needed at that point was a handle protruding from her back and she would have been a piece of carry-on luggage. “You have got to be kidding me,” I said. “That’s not even possible for a real human being.” My wife sat on the floor and performed the same alien body twist, apparently doing so without causing herself any permanent damage, which only goes to prove that my wife is an alien as well. I was having trouble just staying in a cross legged position on the floor. My stomach apparently thought I was trying to curl myself into a ball again and was trying to roll me across the floor. Which my alien daughter and wife found to be terribly funny. Casey Wood, Taylor Tanner, Brett Mecham and Rebecca Lofley give the thumbs up after delivering food to the food bank. Schools compete with food drive Casey D. Wood Emery High recently completed a food drive where they had a friendly little competition with the students of Carbon High. All of the food that was gathered at Emery High was intended to go to the branch of the Utah Food Bank in Castle Dale. Emery High was competing against Carbon High School, which had a week’s head start. Also in competition were the different grades at Emery High, and each of the different Secondary Reading, or “Home Room” classes. The food drive tradition began last year under similar circumstances, where Emery won. In order to keep the trophy and of course bragging rights, it was important that Emery once again defeated their rival. Aside from that, the grade with the most food will be rewarded with hot chocolate and donuts, and the class who gathered the most food will be rewarded with a pizza party. Emery had one favorable condition in their hands. Because Emery High has only 460 students compared to Carbon High’s 704, to have a competition purely based on numbers seemed unfair, so it was agreed that the winning school would be the school with the most pounds of food per student. The last day of the food drive was Nov. 25. At the beginning of the day, Carbon High reported to have just over 3,000 pounds of food, while Emery had approximately 1,500 pounds. The juniors were in the lead with just over 1,000 pounds, while the seniors and the sophomores each had around 300 pounds. Tom Hansen’s class was leading again with about 1,000 pounds, crushing all the other classes. By the end of the day, numbers would be drastically different. When the students at Emery High had weighed and delivered their food to the food bank at the end of the day, they called Carbon High requesting their numbers and were informed that the food was still being delivered. Emery High’s final numbers were a drastic improvement from earlier that day. In third place was the sophomores, who raised 1,064 pounds total. The juniors gathered 3,282 pounds, but the senior class gathered a total of 5,001 pounds. The top three classes were: in third, Valene Wakefield’s class with 887 pounds; followed by Tom Hansen’s class with 2,860 pounds, and the top class, which annihilated the other competitors, was Kristi Guymon’s class, who contributed a total of 3,766 pounds. The next day, Emery once again called Carbon for final results and the students were very pleasantly sur- prised. The 704 students of Carbon High had raised 7,814 pounds, roughly 11 pounds per student. The 460 students at Emery High had raised 9,347 pounds of food, not only beating the pounds per student total, being roughly 20 pounds per student, but also beating Carbon flat out by 1,533 pounds. The food bank also reported that the number of pounds raised by the food drive outnumbered the county-wide scouting for food drive. While Emery High was in a very celebratory mood, it can certainly be said that the students of Emery High School were not the true winners, but those who need the extra help during the holiday season. Anyone who needs help with food during this season should not hesitate to go to the food bank during operating hours, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, from noon to 4 p.m. which The Daily Mail said would require a tax-paying family to earn the equivalent of $68,000 a year to draw. The Daily Mail reporter also noted that the Tate home is immaculate and the Cromptons’ home, messy. -- Two of Oregon’s unique public health markers clashed dramatically for resident Barbara Wagner this summer when she was informed that the universal medical care available to everyone in the state (but with certain service restrictions) would not pay for her expensive lung cancer drug (because her five-year survival likelihood was poor), but was told, at the same time, that the state would pay for any necessary drugs under its Death With Dignity Law (i.e., suicide). Women Under Arrest (1) The September mug shot of Michelle Allen of Middletown, Ohio, was possibly the Internet’s most-circulated news photo of 2008, since she was inexplicably dressed in a full-body cow suit (with rubber teats) as she was allegedly disorderly in chasing children and interfering with traffic. (Alcohol may have been involved.) (2) Shopper Amber Dibartolomeo, 23, was arrested in a Wal-Mart in North Bay, Ontario, in July and charged with selling crack cocaine inside the store. Police said they found $2,217 in cash on her, along with a can of pepper spray, and 27 grams of cocaine. Things You Thought Didn’t Happen These Days (1) A restaurant owner in Rutino, Italy (near Salerno), told police in November that as he was negotiating over the building’s lease with his landlords, one hit him in the head with a chair and two others kicked him repeatedly in the stomach. The landlords were not from La Cosa Nostra but were a priest and two nuns from the local Catholic order that owns the building. (Copyright 2008 Chuck Shepherd. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.) News of the Weird Chuck Shepherd Lead Story The Brazilian designer Lucia Lorio introduced women’s lingerie in October containing a global positioning device to enable the wearer to be tracked by satellite. The creator said the password-protected lace bodice would make it easier for women kidnapped by thugs or terrorists to be located and rescued. Critics called it a virtual chastity belt, primarily of service to insecure males curious to know where their women are. (However, the wearer can manually turn the device off.) Another anti-terror lingerie product may also surface someday, based on a 2007 U.S. patent, issued to a Plainfield, Ill., company for a bra whose cups could also function as air-filtration systems in case of chemical attacks. Government in Action! -- Facing a state budget crisis in July, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fired about 10,000 temporary and part-time workers and or- The Duplex dered the 200,000 permanent employees to be paid only the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until the legislature passed a crisis-solving budget. However, a week later the State Controller John Chiang pointed out that state payroll records could not be changed to accommodate the cut because they were written in the antiquated COBOL computer language, and virtually the only state employees who knew the code were some of the part-timers Schwarzenegger had just fired. -- London’s Daily Mail profiled two 10-children British families in October to illustrate the inconsistencies of government benefit awards. Sean and Anne Tate and their children live on Sean’s truck-driver salary of the equivalent of about $23,000 a year, plus the government’s standard per-child benefit. Harry Crompton has been out of work for 15 years, and his wife, Tracey, has never held a paid job, yet they receive the equivalent of $48,000 in various government benefits, By Glenn McCoy |