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Show A2 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, December 23, 2008 The LIGHTER SIDE Dazed Eying Santa News Off The Beaten Path Slice of Life Local Author Visits Schools James L. Davis I never actually caught Santa Claus when he came on Christmas Eve, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. I knew that attempting to catch Santa Claus was an evil thing to do and that if I did actually catch Santa Claus my eyeballs would pop out of my head and roll across the floor to plop into the heater duct, but I still tried to catch the jolly old elf every year. The reason that I knew that if I ever caught Santa Claus my eyeballs would pop out of my head and roll across the floor to plop into the heater duct is because my older brother told me that they would. I assumed that he knew this because he had met people who had lost their eyeballs to heater ducts after sneaking a peak at Santa Claus working his Christmas magic. I later became quite sure that my brother had been the one to lose his eyes down the heat duct while spying on Santa Claus. He lost his eyes down the heat duct and replaced them with the eyes from a doll…an evil doll that liked to beat up its little brother for trying to sneak up on Santa Claus. But even the risk of losing my eyes down the heat duct or having to look at my brother’s evil doll eyes as he smacked me around for attempting to steal a peak at ol’ Santa Claus never actually stopped me from attempting to steal a peak at Santa. It was a compulsion that I was powerless to resist, but even though it was powerful, so was my desire not to be beaten or lose my eyeballs, so I was pretty careful not to be caught in the act of sneaking up on Santa. On Christmas Eve my parents would put my older brother and I to bed sometime after 6 p.m. They said they did this because our house was one of the first stops on Santa’s list. The funny thing was they told us we were one of the first stops when we lived in North Carolina and in Utah. So while we waited in our bedroom, me on the top bunk, my older brother on the bottom bunk, we had a fairly large amount of time to kill before our excitement would let us even consider going to sleep. While we waited for sleep to overtake us we talked about Christmas and what we hoped would be waiting for us in the morning and since I was closer to the ceiling than my brother, I listened for the first faint taps of Rudolph’s hoofs on the roof. And while we waited and I listened to my brother talk about all the things he hoped we would get I could feel the magic taking place right outside our bedroom door. Santa may not be there yet, but he was close, ohh so tantalizingly close and my heart would skip a beat or two at the thought of Santa right on the other side of the door. Eventually my brother’s endless chatter ended and with one ear I listened for my brother’s breathing to deepen and with the other I listened for reindeer sounds on the roof. And just as sleep was beginning to push on my own eyelids something made them fly open once again. There was a noise on the roof! I was so very sure of it. As a boy I had the ability to actually turn my skeletal frame into gelatin, which enabled me to hide in places that no normal adult (or older brother) would ever think to look. It also enabled me to slither from my place in the center of my bed to the edge of my bed without ever actually using any of my limbs. I stared down at my brother and smiled happily. His evil doll eyes were closed and his mouth was open, which meant he was sound asleep. I knew this because when his eyes were closed and his mouth was open like that I could drop lint balls from my pillow into his mouth and he would never wake up. So with my brother asleep and Santa in the living room I risked losing my eyeballs forever and slithered out of my bed, out the door and down the hallway. As I neared the living room the sounds I had been so very sure that I had heard were no longer there and when I finally dared sneak a peak into the living room Santa was not there. But he had been! The toys encircled the Christmas tree and the only light in the room, the only light in the whole house was the soft glow of the Christmas lights. Yes indeed, he had been there, you could feel his magic in the softly blinking star atop the tree, you could almost see his magic dust dance across the toys he had left. So as I sat there in the middle of the room I realized that I didn’t want to catch Santa Clause at all. I just wanted to be the first one to see the magic of Christmas morning. I wanted to feel the magic of dreams realized and wishes granted and milk and cookies eaten. I wanted to catch a little of that Christmas magic and hold it in my hands…and not worry about my eyeballs rolling into the heat duct. Kathy Ockey Brooke (Griffin) Peterson has been visiting several area schools to tell about the new children’s book she has written, “Santa’s Sick.” The book is the story of what happens when Santa gets sick and how it affects Christmas. Brooke said she wrote it as a play for children and has had it for about five years. Her family urged her to have it published and she finally e-mailed it to a publishing company. She said it took about a year and a half to get it together and published. The illustrator is Eddie Russel, an employee of the publisher. Brooke read the book to the children of Cleveland Elementary as they viewed a slide show of the illustrations. Brooke also attended Cleveland Elementary as a child and recognized Mr. Lofley and Mrs. Rasmussen who were her teachers and still teach at the school. After the presentation Brooke’s father, Boyd Griffin, led the student body in singing Christmas carols while he played guitar. Brooke said, “Santa’s Sick is a story to help children have fun and celebrate Christmas, but to also remember the true meaning of Christmas.” Photo by Kathy Ockey Brooke Peterson and her father, Boyd Griffin, sing Christmas Carols at Cleveland Elementary. News of the Weird Chuck Shepherd Lead Story One of the world’s best-known strategists on the game of checkers passed away in November. Richard Fortman was Illinois state champion six times, and in the 1970s and 1980s published a seven-volume handbook on rules and tactics. Many people now considering the game would be astonished to know that, as in chess, there are masters and grandmasters, and international rankings, that experts actually study historical opening moves and endgames, and that some play, move-by-move, via the U.S. Mail. A New York Times obituary noted that Fortman played as many as 100 games simultaneously, and won games blindfolded. Until the end, according to his daughter, Fortman spent “hours each day” playing checkers online. Cultural Diversity -- Serbians, who have previously, bafflingly, constructed large, reverential public statues of martial-arts actor Bruce Lee and movie characters Tarzan and Rocky Balboa, built one of reggae musician Bob Marley in August in the village of Banatski Sokolac. Also planned was a statue of British singer Samantha Fox, but that project fell through. One Serbian artist who helped raise money for the Rocky statue told The New York Times, “My generation can’t find role models (at home) so we have to look elsewhere.” -- The Gorani, a small group of Muslims scattered through the former Yugoslavia, lead mostly unremarkable lives, except for their singular distinction: Every five years, they gather in The Duplex southern Kosovo for Sunet, a festival of mass-circumcision of toddlers, with a history tracing back centuries. Last year, 130 boys born since the previous Sunet were circumcised, without anesthetic, by Zylfikar Shishko, 70, for a small fee. Many Gorani are apprehensive about 2012, according to an October dispatch in Germany’s Der Spiegel, because Shishko is 70 years old and the only skilled Gorani circumciser. Latest Religious Messages -- An administrative court in Sweden overruled a government agency in November, thus requiring that the Madonna of Orgasm Church founded by artist Carlos Bebeacua be registered as a legitimate religious community. “The orgasm is God,” he said, and “should be worshipped” as a “metaphor of life.” It should not be limited to ejaculation but can be taught “through art or by looking at a landscape and thinking, ‘Wow!’” Bebeacua already claims “a few hundred” followers. -- The streak for the longest continuous chanting (already noted twice in the Guinness Book of World Records) is still active, according to an August Indo-Asian News Service dispatch from Ahmedabad, India. Clerics at the Shri Bala Hanuman temple started intoning “Shri Ram Jay Ram Jay Jay Ram” on Aug. 1, 1964 (more than 23 million minutes ago). -- “Intercessionary” prayer (having other people pray for you) is proliferating on the Internet, with the oldest such broker, Unity Church, now a Web presence (200,000 requests a year) after a century’s operation by mail (500,000 last year) and telephone (another 1.3 million). Other Web sites also handle requests for life-saving miracles, inner peace and financial recovery (and one, on OurPrayer.org, quoted in a November New York Times report, asked for success on her financial accounting exam: “This is my third attempt on this paper, and I pray that the Lord will grant me wisdom and a clear mind”). Questionable Judgments -- In September, Atlanta-area educator Phillippia Faust, working on a $455,000 annual federal sex education grant, offered a $10,000 contest prize for an engaged local couple who had so far abstained from sex and would continue to do so until the wedding. (Any sex would be “risky behavior,” said Faust, but worst of all would be living together before marriage, which is a “set up for the kill.”) However, despite the large population of the area, she had no takers, and as the deadline approached, she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she even considered opening the contest to engaged couples who had had sex but regretted it. Faust eventually had to scrap the contest altogether because of conflicting federal grant rules. -- In November, a judge in Dublin, Ga., sentenced Rico Todriquez Wright, 25, to at least 20 years in prison for the 2006 shooting of Chad Blue, who had told police initially that he didn’t know who had shot him. Blue later heard a thug-life song on CD, “Hitting Licks for a Living,” in which rap singer Wright brags, “Chad Blue knows how I shoot” and realized Wright was the one who shot him that night. Least Competent Criminals -- Embarrassing: (1) A 49-year-old Leavenworth, Kan., man was hospitalized in November after (according to police) using a front-end loader to pluck an ATM from the Frontier Credit Union. He was hurt when he drove to the edge of a 50-foot embankment and tried to drop the ATM, imagining that the fall would break it open, but instead, he, the loader, and the ATM all crashed to the bottom. (2) British Muslim convert Nicky Reilly, 22, pleaded guilty in October in Exeter, England, to attempted terrorism for detonating a homemade nail bomb in the Giraffe restaurant. The plan failed when Reilly triggered the bomb in the men’s room, intending to take it into the dining area, but then could not unlock the men’s room door to get out. (His lawyer called him perhaps the “least cunning” person ever to be charged with terrorism in Britain.) Recurring Themes As animal hoarding goes, the 30 seized from Darlene Gardner’s double-wide trailer home in Kootenai County, Idaho, last year weren’t particularly noteworthy, even though two of them, deer, were living inside, each in its own bedroom. Authorities released the deer and other healthy animals into the wild and euthanized the rest, and Gardner’s husband pleaded guilty to one animal cruelty charge. However, in November, Darlene filed a $2 million federal lawsuit against the county’s “jack-booted thugs” who, acting without a search warrant, she said, had “killed my babies,” referring to the animals that “were my life and my family.” (Copyright 2008 Chuck Shepherd. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.) By Glenn McCoy |