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Show A2 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, December 9, 2008 The LIGHTER SIDE Dazed News Off The Beaten Path Mug Shot Pass the Popcorn James L. Davis I have never wanted to be a doctor. Doctors have to spend far too much of their time dealing with sick people for my liking. They also always want to share information with you about what is going on inside of your body, and I would prefer to let what goes on inside my body remain a mystery to me. When I go to my doctor I do not want to see pictures of what the inside of my body looks like. I do not care. Just tell me what is wrong, what I need to do (or stop doing) to fix it, and let me be on my way. I also do not want to take popcorn with me when I go to the doctor’s office, but some people might. Take my wife and daughter, for instance. They seem to have an almost unhealthy fascination with what could possibly be going on inside a person’s body. Since it may not seem appropriate for them to hang around hospital rooms with bags of popcorn, they content themselves with watching television shows that devote a considerable amount of time exploring what happens in a human body. They have plenty of shows to choose from because almost every television show I come across seems to want to show me, in high definition no less, what it looks like in a human body. On any given evening I can walk into my living room to find my wife and daughter sitting on the couch watching as someone’s insides are exposed to the outside world on the television. They will sit and watch blood oozing from here, there and everywhere with a look of utter fascination on their faces. And they will be eating popcorn while doing so! It’s not that I have anything against blood. I happen to like blood and try to keep some in me at all times. But I do not wish to see it. I do not wish to watch people working in it, slopping it around or cleaning it up. Of course, that means I get to watch very little television anymore. Every crime or medical drama on TV nowadays seems to want to show me exactly what is going on inside a person’s body. When I was younger you watched TV and when someone was shot, they would grip their chest, make a face like the laxative they had taken a few hours before had finally kicked in, and fall to the ground. End of story. They were dead and it was time to move to the next scene or go to commercial. On medical shows you could tell they were in surgery because they had those funny masks on and were saying things like “scalpel!” or “sponge.” You didn’t need to see it to know it was going on. But today the camera follows the action from start to finish, from the outside to the inside with no detail left to the imagination. All of this is done in slow motion, of course. So while I am sitting on the couch with my mouth open and my stomach making threats that if I don’t close my mouth it might try to escape from it, my wife and daughter are sitting beside me, happily eating their popcorn. Meanwhile the actors stand with their hands on their hips looking very concerned. They do this in one of two ways. If they are male they stand there with a stern look on their face, looking perhaps a little constipated as they consider the poor victim/patient. If they are a woman they stand there with a stern look on their face, looking perhaps a little constipated and showing a great deal of cleavage while they consider the poor victim/patient. The only thing worse than this is when the victim/patient dies and they decide to move on to the autopsy. Autopsy! Since when did scenes of an autopsy become such common practice? Invariably the stern, constipated looking man, and the stern, constipated looking woman with the cleavage will watch as the subject of the autopsy is turned inside out for the cameras, and then they will say something very dramatic in a stern tone of voice. Then it cuts to a pizza commercial. Why would you advertise food during one of these shows? Advertisements for medication to relieve an upset stomach, I could certainly understand. I could even go along with medication to relieve constipation or even advertisements for breast enhancement. But food? Then I look at my wife and daughter and they are shoveling popcorn into their mouths by the handful, so maybe ads for popcorn would also be effective. The only thing worse than the crime dramas my family enjoys watching are the actual medical shows available on satellite or cable. At least on a crime or medical drama I can remind myself that what I am seeing is not real. But not on these medical shows. These are real people undergoing real surgical procedures and the camera is right there to record the whole thing. My wife and daughter love these shows as well. My son and I, being the sane ones still remaining in the home, prefer not to watch these kind of shows at all, but we are overruled nine out of 10 times. If I ever have to have a camera inserted anywhere in my body, I do not want the video broadcast to the rest of the world under any circumstances. The thought that someone might be eating popcorn while watching footage of my insides makes me feel ill. But not ill enough to go to the doctor. Photo by James L. Davis San Rafael Junior High Christmas Chorus Concert San Rafael Junior High presented is annual Christmas Chorus Concert on Dec. 3. Directed by Hans Baantjer, with Eileen Lofthouse as accompanist, the students sang a variety of numbers inspired by the holiday season. Students Rachel Rogers accompanied the women’s chorus for the First Noel/Pachelbel’s Canon and student Adrienne Carter accompanied the women’s chorus for Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella! News of the Weird Chuck Shepherd Lead Story Change Oregonians Believe In: The voters of Sodaville (pop. 290) elected Thomas Brady Harrington, 33, mayor in November, notwithstanding his criminal rap sheet showing robbery, eluding a police officer, felon in possession of a gun and other crimes (with his electoral success perhaps due to voters’ confusing him with his father, a respected town elder). And the voters of Silverton (pop. 7,400) elected as mayor Stu Rasmussen, 60, an openly transgendered, longtime resident who previously served as mayor while a man but who now sports breasts and dresses exclusively as a woman (especially miniskirts and cleavage-enhancing tops). Actually, Rasmussen still describes himself as a man and lives with his longtime girlfriend, but explained his switch as just his particular “mid-life crisis.” Compelling Explanations -- “I’m really sorry. ... I thought he was just tired,” said Lynne Stewart, who was arrested in West Melbourne, Fla., in October and charged with stealing items from a 56-year-old, unconscious man who in fact had just suffered a fatal heart attack during sex with Stewart. She blamed her larceny on a cocaine binge that impaired her judgment such that (according to a police commander) she had sex with 20 men that weekend. (However, she was not charged with prostitution. Said the commander, “No, she just likes sex.”) -- Lame: (1) A woman being interviewed for jury duty on a murder case in Bronx (N.Y.) Supreme Court in October asked to be excused for the reason that she was once murdered, herself, by her husband (but had somehow been revived by a doctor). (She was dismissed from the jury, but on other grounds.) (2) In a recent report of DUI excuses in the Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, a 56-yearold woman had asserted that, though she had been drinking, her driving was not affected because she had remembered The Duplex to keep one eye closed so as not to be seeing double. Ironies -- Hummer H2 driver Yvonne Sinclair, 29, was convicted of gross vehicular manslaughter in November in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., from a 2006 crash that killed two people and in which her intoxication was a major factor. Sinclair had bought the Hummer from proceeds of a lawsuit settlement over the 2003 death of her boyfriend, who was killed by a drunk driver. -- Strange Justice: (1) The Saudi Arabia delegation to the United Nations sponsored a conference on religious tolerance in November. (Not only does the kingdom employ a police force “on the prevention of vice and the promotion of virtue,” but it is accused of widespread internal discrimination against disfavored Islamic sects.) (2) Janice Warder, a former Texas judge and now the incoming district attorney for Texas’ Cooke County, was accused in March by a Dallas judge of having improperly withheld evidence in a 1986 case to secure a murder conviction. (The Dallas judge ordered a new trial.) -- Patricia Howard filed a lawsuit against her USA Environmental employer in 2006 (just recently unsealed by a judge) for subjecting her to dangerous work during 20032005. The workplace was in Iraq and involved detonating surplus munitions to prevent their falling into insurgents’ hands, but that was not the “danger” she feared. Rather, the munitions were located in abandoned football-fieldsized warehouses that had long been home to pigeons. Foot-high piles of feces had dried and turned to powder, and Howard charged that the company’s respiration protection was nearly useless, subjecting workers to Hantavirus and other diseases. Chutzpah! -- Veteran Massachusetts thief Robert Aldrich applied for compensation because his latest arrest happened to have been illegal, and a state law permits recovery for lost income during wrongful incarceration. However, in November, a Suffolk County judge turned him down as she was unable to find any “income” that Aldrich might have earned during his six wrongful months in jail except from more burglaries or for home-improvement money that Aldrich admitted he earned “off the books” so as to evade taxes. -- “I would like an apology,” explained Michael Wax, who was ejected in July from the Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City because of customers’ complaints about his body odor. “There’s no question I stink. ... I do have an odor. I’ve been playing for 17 hours,” said the 440-pound man. Nonetheless, Wax filed a complaint with the Casino Control Commission, claiming that he should not have been so rudely treated in front of other patrons. Creme de la Weird Ms. Hang Mioku, 48, is winding down her 20-year obsession with cosmetic surgery, having been at one time bulked up with enough silicone in her face to earn the nickname “the standing fan” because her head was so large compared to her legs. Hang moved from South Korea to Japan for better access to surgery and said she had convinced herself that each procedure in her odyssey only made her more beautiful than the last. When finally no surgeon would treat her, she began injecting cooking oil. Finally, she was talked into face-reduction surgery (removal of 260 grams of foreign substance from her head and neck) but, according to a November report in London’s Daily Telegraph, she remains grotesquely misshapen. Oops! One of the items in a November seized-contraband auction by the Denver Police Department was a 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass that was ultimately bought for $350 by a 19-year-old woman, but which is still evidence in an active murder investigation. Police eventually took back the car, which has bullet holes and a bloody interior and contained blood-stained clothing. Furthermore, a second shooting victim who was in the car survived and was among the bidders at the auction. He dropped out, but did later sell the winning bidder his spare key to the car for $40. Update The quasi-religious “philosophical” group Summum has been on News of the Weird’s radar since 1988, when leader “Corky” Ra and his small band in Utah began offering to mummify household pets for $7,000, or create statues of them for $18,000 (though the price is considerably higher today), with an eye toward future mummification of humans, as illustrative of its core precept that “the soul moves forward” even though the body is memorialized. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments that a city park in Pleasant Grove, Utah, must allow Summum to place a monument with “The Seven Aphorisms” next to the existing monument of the Ten Commandments. (Summum’s Aphorisms shore up the soulmovement belief by recognizing, for example, such properties as psychokinesis and the constant vibration of bodies.) The court is expected to rule later this term. A News of the Weird Classic (December 2000) A New York Times dispatch from India highlighted the growing problem of intra-family frauds in which one member claims a living relative’s land or wealth by swearing to the government that the relative is dead. According to the Times, the “deceased” had finally begun to fight back. An advocacy group, the Association of Dead People, helps aggrieved citizens figure out how to prove that they are alive, which can be difficult, given India’s slow-moving bureaucracies. The association’s founder said that he personally had tried to authenticate his existence by public actions such as running for office, filing lawsuits and getting arrested, but that he nonetheless remained officially dead. (Copyright 2008 Chuck Shepherd. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.) By Glenn McCoy |
