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Show A2 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, June 17, 2008 The News Off The Beaten Path MUG SHOT D E DA Z LIGHTER SIDE Easy Riding on My Scooter James L. Davis If you’re a man it’s fairly difficult, some might say impossible, to pull off looking cool while riding a scooter. I know this because I’ve tried, and I’m not totally sure I pulled it off. I highly suspect that rather than looking cool while riding a scooter down Main Street, I instead looked like, well, an idiot. The reason I suspect that I looked like an idiot is because when I went to church several members of the congregation paused to tell me they had noticed me riding a scooter around town and not one of them looked at me with any sense of admiration or respect. On the contrary, they looked at me as though they feared they might burst out laughing at any given moment. Perhaps I should have worn my leathers, but unfortunately I don’t own any leathers, unless you count my belt and the leather bomber jacket my wife bought me, and I don’t think those count. Even if I had leathers like real motorcycle riders wear I don’t think wearing them would make me look any cooler when I was riding a scooter. I believe it has something to do with where you put your feet when riding a scooter. On a motorcycle you straddle the motor and the gas tank, you grip the handle bars, lean back and ride. It’s a lot like riding a horse. You’re on top of the mechanical beast and you are in total control. On a scooter your feet are daintily placed in front of you as you zip around town. It’s the equivalent of riding a horse sidesaddle. There’s nothing cool about riding a horse sidesaddle if you’re a man. Of course I realized that the image of a 6 foot 2 inch, overweight man riding a scooter down the street might look a little odd, so when I rode the scooter I tried to offset how absurd I might look by having a really cool expression on my face, a look that said “Hey, I know that a real man wouldn’t be caught dead riding one of these little scooters. I ride this scooter because I am so incredibly secure in my manhood that the fact that I look ridiculous riding this scooter doesn’t matter to me in the least.” I practiced that look in the mirror for a few minutes until I had it down, and then I climbed aboard my wife’s scooter and headed out on my way. The look required me to be smiling, as if to say, “Hey, I’m laughing too because I’m an incredibly secure guy.” The problem is that when riding a scooter you have a tendency to intercept a bug or two along the way and it is a law of nature that when striking a bug with your face it will either go in your mouth, up your nose or in your eyes 99.9 percent of the time. Because of this I had to stop smiling and suddenly my “I’m Secure Enough in My Manhood to Ride a Scooter” look turned into a “Hey, Look at This Constipated Idiot Riding a Scooter,” which was something far different than the look I was hoping for. But my wife’s scooter gets 60 miles to the gallon, so I have decided that looking cool is not nearly as cool as not having to spend so much money on gas. Of course that’s just a rationalization to convince myself that although I don’t look cool in any way shape or form, in all reality I am incredibly cool. In psychological terms I believe that condition is called self delusion. But, like most men I have spent a great deal of my life in the delusional state of believing that I am somehow much cooler than I really am. For instance, up until about nine years ago I was a card carrying member of the Mullet Club. And my mullet was cool. I joined the mullet club two years after being discharged from the Air Force, and the reason it took me two years to join the club was because prior to that I was a member of the Charles Manson hair club. After eight years of having to have my hair cut every couple of weeks I couldn’t wait until the time came when I could grow my hair as long as I wanted. My last six weeks in the Air Force, I used hair jell to plaster my hair to the side of my skull because I couldn’t stand the thought of another haircut. And once I was out of the service I didn’t get another haircut. For two years. And I was cool. I was so cool that when I walked into any department store I was followed everywhere I went by at least one sales clerk and two members of store security. I joined the mullet craze because my hair kept getting caught in the car door and I was continually chewing on it while trying to eat. Besides, my friends all had mullets and they were cool, so if I had a mullet I would be even cooler. I’m not sure why I decided to cut my mullet, perhaps it was because people kept telling me I looked stupid, but I could be wrong. But what I’m not wrong about is the fact that at the time I was wearing my hair in a mullet, I was cool. I’m older now and I realize that wearing my hair in a mullet did not make me cool. I realized that while in the bathroom trying to come up with a new face that I could make with my mouth closed that would still make me look cool while riding my wife’s scooter down Main Street. Sidesaddle. Chance of Wind The county was buffeted by high winds throughout most of the week, and a continual chorus of “I hate the wind” was repeated by a great many people. In Emery the high winds toppled a tree (roots and all) in the rest area, giving Mike Christensen and his children, Grace, Maggie and Cooper an interesting new place to sit. In Huntington, the high winds toppled one of Nielson Construction’s cattle trailers (left). NEWS OF THE WEIRD Chuck Shepherd Lead Story Leading Economic Indicator: Rising prices of synthetic fertilizers and organic foods have intensified the collection of bird droppings on 20 climatically ideal islands off the coast of Peru where 12-inchthick seabird guano coats the land. In the 19th century, Spain fought with Peru on the high seas for the right to mine the guano, which at that time was 150 feet high in places. Said an official of the Peruvian company that controls guano production (to a New York Times reporter in May), “Before there was oil, there was guano, so of course we fought wars over it.” The exceptionally dry climate means that 12,000 to 15,000 tons of guano are available yearly. Government in Action -- The Los Angeles Police Department announced in April that it had investigated 320 complaints against its officers last year for alleged “racial profiling” and found that not a single one was valid. The Los Angeles Times reported that that was at least the sixth consecutive year that LAPD reported a perfect record on racial profiling. -- WWL-TV reported in April that at least one east New Orleans floodwall, built immediately after Hurricane Katrina, had been temporarily stuffed with newspaper to create seals, but that in the two years since had not been upgraded. Among the stuffing that had not decayed or been eaten by bugs was an issue of Parade magazine of May 21, 2006. A contractor of the Army Corps of Engineers told a resident at the time that the newspaper seals were used only until money from Washington arrived to finish the job. Two weeks after WWL-TV’s report, the corps repaired the seals properly, but a spokesman insisted that the newspaper stuffing “ha(d) no effect from a structural or safety factor.” The Duplex -- The Government Accountability Office revealed in April that more than 60,000 of the federal government’s contractors owe a total of about $7.7 billion in unpaid federal taxes, and that health care providers who take Medicare payments owe an additional $1 billion in late taxes. One unnamed company owes $10 million in back taxes, yet the Pentagon did $1 million worth of business with it. (One activist on tax issues pointed out that firms might find it easy to win low-bid contracts if they don’t have the tax expense that their competitors have.) -- The British government compensates soldiers the equivalent of about $115,000 if they lose a leg in battle. In March, though, the Defense Ministry paid out the equivalent of about $400,000 in disability to a civil servant who had injured his back while lifting a printer, and in May the ministry paid out the equivalent of about $500,000 to an army paratrooper to settle a claim of “humiliating and demeaning” treatment. The soldier had undergone sex-change surgery, converting from “Ian” into “Jan,” yet was ordered by the army to report for a physical exam dressed as Ian. Great Art! -- Austrian director Johann Kresnik’s re-interpretation of the classic Verdi opera “A Masked Ball” opened for a limited engagement in Berlin in April, aimed at America’s “war and the excesses of American society today,” he said. In one scene, against a backdrop of the ruins of the World Trade Center, 35 naked senior citizens danced, wearing Mickey Mouse masks. -- “Art is no longer just a painting on the wall,” said the curator of the Museum of Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv, Israel, in April. “Art is life; life is art.” He gave that as an explanation for why he had accepted, as a live exhibit, seven young people from Berlin whose art is merely to live in the museum for three weeks with lice on their heads. The artists denied they intended a Holocaust expression based on Nazis’ references to Jews as “parasites.” -- Worth Every Penny: (1) At an April auction in Beijing, artist Liu Xiaodong’s large (8 feet by 30 feet) oil painting, part of his Three Gorges series, brought the equivalent of about $8 million. The work, “Breeding Ground No. 1,” depicts 11 men in their underwear playing cards. The Continuing Crisis In May, eighth-grader Michael Avery of Thousand Oaks, Calif., told the hometown newspaper The Acorn that he was undecided which area high school he would attend next fall. This was a matter of interest in that Avery, 15, is a basketball prodigy and, though undecided on high school, he knows exactly where he will go to college because he had just accepted a full scholarship at the University of Kentucky beginning in 2012. The following week, Kentucky offered another one, to ninth-grader Jeremiah Davis III, to enroll in 2011. Fetishes on Parade (1) Martin Turner, 39, of Blackpool, England, pleaded guilty to four counts of harassment in May, specifically, pestering several workmen by telephone over a three-year period to please come by and stand on his face, his fingers and his genitals while wearing their heavy boots. His lawyer said it had something to do with “domination.” (2) Jeremy Pope, 26, was arrested in April in Madison, Wis., in an alleged second episode at a Target store (the first was in December at a ShopKo), in which he urinated on women’s underwear on the shelves. Police said Pope was quick to confess: “Yeah, I have a problem.” Least Competent Criminals Police in Mesa, Ariz., chased driver Christopher Psomas, 38, in May after his companion, Ashley Strahan, 20, allegedly tried to pass a forged check at a business. The pair’s car ran red lights at high speeds to get out of town, then left the road near the Salt River Reservation, and when the car became disabled, kept going on foot. However, they ran smack into a bed of chola cactus, becoming virtual pin cushions. At Banner Desert Medical Center, as nurses plucked the needles from his body, Psomas, in pain and in tears, said, “I am so stupid. This is what I get for trying to run from the police.” Update In March, News of the Weird reported the bratty behavior of two Boynton Beach, Fla., high school girls who not only swiped money from a Girl Scout selling cookies at a supermarket, but then told a TV station on camera that they were “pissed” because they got caught and had to give the money back. One of the girls, Stefanie Woods, 18, chose to go to trial on the theft charge in May, but was quickly convicted and will be sentenced in June. A week after the conviction, she also pleaded no-contest to an intervening event in which she allegedly skipped out on a $28 dinner tab at a Denny’s. She said she was sorry for the theft, but that “I still don’t think it gives (the public) the right to be screaming things at me” around town. “People scream things at me every single day, and it’s getting really hard.” The Classic Middle Name (all new) Arrested recently, and awaiting trial for murder: Cody Wayne Moore, Rockford, Ill. (April); Larry Wayne Rubin, Decatur, Ga. (April); Darrell Wayne Buchanan, Burke County, N.C. (February). Pleaded guilty to murder: Christopher Wayne Hudson, Melbourne, Australia (May); Fred Wayne Douty II, Martinsburg, W.Va. (June). Committed suicide while a suspect in the murder of a state trooper: Brandon Wayne Robertson, Cass County, Texas (May). Copyright 2008 Chuck Shepherd. Distributd by Universal Press Syndicate. By Glenn McCoy |