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Show A2 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, October 21, 2008 The LIGHTER SIDE Dazed News Off The Beaten Path Mug Shot Catching Religion James L. Davis Some people, I have observed, are religious by nature. At an early age they appear to have an understanding of their Creator and strive to live a life in accordance with whatever their religious convictions might be. Then there are those who have at some point in time had an event in their life which so impacted them that they went in search of and found religion. I do not fit into either of those categories. I was not born to religion and I did not find religion. I was caught by religion, just like my father before me, although not quite as dramatically as my dad. My dad grew up in the swampy back woods of North Carolina in Terrell County. He was the son of a farmer, woodsmen and grocery store owner and when he was 8 years old my grandfather caught my dad by the ear and had him baptized as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But that was pretty much the end of the matter. He had been caught by religion but hadn’t stayed caught. The closest church was in Elizabeth City and Elizabeth City was a good ways further away in 1936 than it is today. So, they only made it to church a couple of times a year, something most boys could survive without “catching” anything. Ten years later, things were a little different. Mormon missionaries had gone from spending very little time in the county to actually being assigned to the county. Such an assignment gave them ample opportunity to visit my grandparent’s house. My dad and my uncles, aware that missionaries were on the prowl, determined that the best way to continue their mischievous lifestyle was to never be caught by the missionaries. So they made sure not to be at home when the missionaries came calling. The missionaries weren’t dummies, however, and they eventual realized that the Davis boys were dodging them. So being roughly the same age and probably a little mischievous themselves, they determined that they were going to catch my dad and uncles. Aware that they were now being actively hunted by the missionaries, my dad and his brothers made an escape route in case they were ever caught at home when the missionaries came calling. It just so happened that their bedroom faced the rear of the house and the fields beyond, so they rearranged their bedroom in such a way that they could easily slip out the window and into the woods when the missionaries knocked on the front door. This game of cat and mouse with religion could have gone on forever, but one day the missionaries got lucky and my dad found himself facing a bridge that he could not cross…literally. My aunt and uncle were keepers of a swinging bridge that spanned one of the rivers in the county. When tug boats came down the river hauling trees to the saw mills, the boats would sound their horn and one of them would open the bridge, which would swing on a pivot in the center. Fully opened, the bridge was in the middle of the river and boats could pass on either side. One day my aunt and uncle had to go to town and my dad and one of his friends were left in charge of opening the bridge. To hear my dad tell the story, the bridge was a good distance away from the fields where they worked, so when the boat tooted its horn they had to hightail it to get to the bridge in time, but my dad was a pretty fast runner, so he wasn’t too worried. Running from missionaries will do that to you. When a tug boat blew its horn later that afternoon my dad and his buddy took off running for the bridge. They made it with time to spare and started to swing the bridge open when who just happened to appear, but the missionaries that had been out to catch them. There wasn’t going to be any running because the bridge had to be opened, and just as the bridge reached the point where it was going to swing away from the shore and be inaccessible to the missionaries, they ran and jumped onto it. So when the bridge became an island in the middle of the river my dad, his friend and the two missionaries were the only occupants. That left my dad and his friend with two choices: jump in the river and try and out swim the water moccasins, or be caught by the missionaries. My dad’s friend risked the water moccasins and escaped the missionaries (and the snakes). But my dad was caught by the missionaries and on a bridge in the middle of a river he had to listen to them. Eventually he became one of them, which, all in all, was a good thing because my dad met the young woman who would become my mom while on his mission. That is how my dad caught religion. I also caught religion, but in my case I just happened to fall in love with a woman who had found religion. So, all things considered, my dad’s caught religion story is much more interesting than my own. Playing with Rocks Like most small cities and towns in the county, Orangeville has far more projects on its “to do” list than it has resources or manpower to do, which is why Eagle Scout projects are such a welcome benefit to the city. Kameron Stilson, left, took on an Eagle Scout project to beautify the approaches to the bridge on Main Street that spans Cottonwood Creek. Weeds had long ago overtaken the area, but with an army of volunteers Kameron has removed the weeds and is putting down a plastic liner to keep the weeds from coming back and then topping it off with a decorative rock pattern. His project has helped make Orangeville a little nicer place to visit and call home. News of the Weird Chuck Shepherd Lead Story Developing Democracies: Candidates for local office in Brazil can either register under their own names or make them up, and in the October election this year, three candidates chose “Barack Obama” (none won), and others registered under “Bill Clinton,” “Jorge Bushi” and “Chico Bin Laden,” but more than 200 offered themselves under the name of the country’s popular president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. And in July, when the government of India tried to push its historic nuclear pact with the United States through the parliament, it found six more votes among elected members who were serving prison sentences, and ordered them released so they could vote for the bill. (Nearly one-fourth of the 540-member parliament have criminal charges pending against them.) News That Sounds Like a Joke -- (1) Britain’s Bristol City Council warned residents in government housing in September to always leave their sheds unlocked. Otherwise, thieves would have to break the doors down to get inside, and taxpayers would be stuck with the repair bills. (2) Atlanta Pentecostal preacher Thomas Meeks told the Journal-Constitution in October that he was “in talks” to create a “Survivor”-type TV reality show in which the twice-divorced evangelist navigates a field of single women and selects a winner. “Holy Hook Up: Who Will Be the Next Mrs. Weeks?” will, he said, be a “very tasteful, five-star presentation.” Great Art! -- Chilean-Danish artist Marco Evaristti is working with condemned Texas inmate Gene Hathorn, 47 (convicted killer of three in 1985), on an anti-capital-punishment exhibit to be staged after Hathorn’s execution. The murderer’s body would be frozen, then made into flakes that museum visitors could feed to goldfish. Evaristti is most noted for his 2000 exhibit in which he placed live goldfish in several electric blenders and invited museum-goers to turn them on. -- Sculptor Marc Quinn unveiled “Siren” in October at the British Museum, feting the model Kate Moss, who posed for him, though not quite in the position Quinn ultimately created. “Siren” is lifesize, in 18k gold (that cost Quinn around $2 million), and treats the gaudiness of The Duplex the so-called supermodel. As such, Moss is posed seated, holding her legs behind her head. (Some, but not all, news outlets chose to show “Siren” modestly, from the side rather than the front.) Government in Action -- Things Government Does When It’s Not Bailing Out the Economy: (1) The municipal transit company in Austin, Texas, unveiled a rider-education campaign in August, giving step-by-step instructions in how to stand up on buses without falling over. When the bus is accelerating, “lean forward and put your weight on your front foot.” (The introductory frame on the poster features a harried rider exclaiming, “Help! I’ll never figure it out!”) (2) A British governmentfunded poster campaign, also introduced in August, aims to encourage those waiting for municipal buses to do Pilates-type movements to improve physical fitness. Among the suggestions: standing on one leg, pointing the toes forward, clenching the buttocks. -- Most workers who have retired in the last few years from New York’s Long Island Rail Road have also qualified for disability payments (though most did not claim such disabilities while working), according to a September New York Times investigation of state records. Lax union work rules, plus the astonishingly cooperative “Railroad Retirement Board” (which virtually never rejects a disability application), have resulted in nearly every worker drawing about as much money in retirement as he made on the job. In October, the Times also discovered that many of the same retirees were apparently so confident that their “disability” status would be approved that they also purchased private disability insurance to make retirement even more lucrative. Police Blotter -- Awesome: Police in Dortmund, Germany, arrested six Romanian men in June and charged them with stealing from trucks on the open highway. Allegedly, the thieves would drive their own truck carefully up behind a tractor-trailer at highway speed, and a man on the hood would reach out and open the back of the rig with a bolt cutter. He would climb in and loot the rig of computers and cell phones by passing them out to a partner sitting on the hood of the trailing truck. -- Almost Awesome: Motorist Michael Mills Jr., 38, who was making a getaway from police in Chesapeake, Va. (who wanted him on identity-theft charges), broke through a drawbridge warning arm and tried to jump (“Dukes of Hazzard”style) onto the span that was being lowered (but which wouldn’t be completely down for another several minutes). He missed, and the car plunged into the Elizabeth River, where it sank (but Mills was rescued and arrested). Recurring Themes -- Least Competent Criminals: (1) A 30-year-old man appears to be the most recent person (according to the account of police in Woodland, Calif., in August) to attempt to throw burning fireworks at a target while traveling in a car, but having the toss fail to clear the window and thus explode inside the car. He was hospitalized. (2) In another familiar scene, two 18-year-old men spotted police approaching their trailer-park home in Salina, Kan., in August, panicked, and tossed illegal drugs out a window. However, police spotted the flying drugs, even though cops had originally intended only to serve warrants on two of their neighbors. The men were arrested. -- The estimated one million Japanese (almost all males) who suffer from the major anti-social funk called “Hikikomori” and confine themselves inside (typically, a bedroom in their parents’ home) for months at a time without live human interaction has been mentioned in News of the Weird in 2000 and 2005. In July, the Japanese software company Avex produced a video to help those men, simply featuring a series of young women staring into the lens, occasionally saying “Good morning,” so that Hikikomori sufferers can practice feeling the gazes of strangers. Dignified Death -- From the self-composed obituary in the Casper (Wyo.) Star Tribune of James William “Jim” Adams, who died September 9th: “Jim, who had tired of reading obituaries noting other’s [sic] courageous battles with this or that disease, wanted it known that he had lost his battle ... primarily as a result of ... not following doctor’s orders. ... He was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date.” (Copyright 2008 Chuck Shepherd. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.) By Glenn McCoy |