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Show A6 Wednesday, February 27, 2008 Vernal Express BERTHA BUTTERBEAN Out of the closet and back again f" VERNAL -tsmress Op nioro WE CAN BE CULTURED TOO By lis Bowtfl : ,m.... . , - 1 . ., Web opinion poll Each week the Vernal Express offers an online poll to its readers. To participate in the poll, visit www.vernal.com and click on the opinion link. Polls are not scientific and represent the opinions of voluntary Internet users. New polls are posted weekly and printed results represent voting as of Tuesday morning. If you have an Idea for an opinion poll, e-mail it to editorvernal.com. Results for this week Do you think the returns from Super Tuesday's primary (Obnma leadi ng the Dema and Romney leading the GOP) reflect the views of Utah's electorate? a) Yes (68) b) No (32) Question for next week Should elementary students attending Lapoint Elementary be assigned to the new K-8 school in Fort Duchesne? a) Yes b) No A By Dama Colowch Express Associate Editor It's not often that fine art and culture come to Vernal. Sure, we have exhibits at the museum, an annual community theater performance and several opportunities from schools and local artists. But Saturday brought a rare opportunity for the Uintah Basin to hear from a group of extremely talented musicians and local talent as well. Growing up on the Wasatch Front, I had several opportunities to go to symphonies and concerts, plays and musicals at venues like Abravenel Hall and Capitol Theatre. But I've spent the better part of the last decade living in rural Utah. And I kick myself for not taking better advantage of those opportunities when I lived in Salt Lake. So my wife and I were thrilled to attend last weekend's concert. Sadly, it's also flu season and several in the audience brought their cough with them. I admit I went through about six cough drops during the evening eve-ning to keep myself from hacking. But I can tolerate a few coughs, the occasional sneeze and even the few who couldn't wait until intermission to excuse themselves from the performance perfor-mance only to return moments later. I'll even overlook a few parents who misjudged their children's ability to sit through nearly two hours of performance. It was getting late and several kids in the audience got fidgety after sitting there for the whole evening of music. But there's one type of disruption I can't overlook. Anyone who has had the luxury to hear a cello solo of fine classical music knows that at times, you just want to sit back, close your eyes and absorb the sound - impossible on Saturday. In the middle of a solo of a piece by Bach, there came what bothered me most: a group who sat in the sound booth at the back of the junior high auditorium. Apparently this group thoughttheir conversation was more important to us in the audience than the performance. And through two more performances before intermission the unruly chatter continued. Finally at intermission, organizers orga-nizers of the evening's event found the offenders and shut them up. Musical performance is an art. And in the case of what we were hearing Saturday, it's a fine art. You wouldn't take a hammer and chisel to a sculpture by Michelangelo or Balzac. Nor would you take a can or spray paint to a painting by Salvador Dali or Vincent van Gogh. There's no question that running across the stage during a performance of a play by Simon or Shakespeare would be considered rude. What this group in the sound booth was comparable. I've heard too many comments that we "hicks" who live in rural areas don't appreciate the fine arts. Sure, we show up in jeans to a concert where slacks are more appropriate. And yes, we do enjoy things like cowboy poetry that others just don't understand. But that's not to say we can't or don't appreciate the rest. When we look for them, there are several opportunities for us to experience fine arts - just not as many as there may be in more populated places. And when we find them, we want to have the full experience of enjoyment enjoy-ment - not be reminded of how "uncultured" we appear to outsiders. , FINANCIAL EXPLOITATION OF SENIORS By Dr. Vol fwm Guest Writer - Preston Connection Financial exploitation is the "act or process of taking unfair advantage of a dependent adult or a dependent adult's physical or financial resources for one's own pecuniary profit, without the informed consent of the dependent adult, including theft, by the use of undue influence, harassment, duress, deception, false representation or false pretenses." Code of Iowa 235B.2 The lack of clarity regarding "exploitation" comes in when the elders' healthphysical impairments which affects their cognitive ability to make decisions deci-sions or give consent is not considered. Social services, law enforcement and the legal system have to (ITALC)interpret(ITALC) if the elderly person has the ability to give consent to his or her actions. The pattern of abuse starts in this fuzzy area long before impairments become obvious to family members and outside authorities. Perpetrators are usually family members or caregivers who are in a position of trust and power upon whom the elderly person is dependent. (BOLD)Some of the signs or symptoms of financial abuse include the following.(BOLD) Abrupt changes in wills, trusts, contracts, the power of attorney, the durable power of attorney, property titles, deeds or mortgages. Withdrawal of investments in spite of penalties for early withdrawal. Withdrawals from the elder's bank account, particularly in round amounts such as $1 00 or $500. Changes in beneficiaries on insurance policies or RAs. Forged signatures. Large checks being written to unusual recipients. recipi-ents. Increased lack of contact with and interest in outside world, reluctance to accept visits or phone calls. Caregiver restricts the elder's contact with the outside world, speaking for the elder, refusing phone calls, preventing visits, reading mail for the elder, handling all expenditures. Contacts with the elderly are screened, monitored and supervised. A sudden close relationship with a much younger, more able person (including a marriage or domestic partnership). Valued possessions or money missing from the seniors household. Sudden interest by relatives historically not close to the senior showing ingratiating concern in caregiving and emotional support. Discharge of long standing professional advisors and replacement with individuals more aligned with the caregiver. Disparity between incomeassets and lifestyle or living arrangements. arrange-ments. (BOLD)What can be done to prevent elderly abuse?(BOLD) Here are a few ideas on preventative steps that will address this problem. Have a respected family member in the loop to whom the caregiver confers prior to major expenditures of the senior's assets. A routine independent financial audit to monitor accounts and spot unusual activity. SEE Seniors on A10 Guest Writer I remember remem-ber when was not a first-degree felony. It used to be a minor inconvenience in-convenience or sometimes a godsend. Maybe we have come full circle with the toilet-paper thing. Lots of things have gotten out of society 's collective closet clos-et in the past several years. My personal closet door still remains closed mostly, and I don't intend to discuss the skeletons in there, but one thing I will talk about: those rolls of white stuff. A generation ago, we sometimes carried a roll of toilet paper in the car's jockey box, flattened under the owner's manual, the registration, reg-istration, the extra fan belt, the Reader's Digest and the eight-track tapes. Clear at the bottom, out of sight. We carried it there just in case we got too far from home and what we politely called the little girls' room, which is also one of those skeletons that has come out of the closet. (Do I know what I am talking about?) But it came out from the bottom of the glove box, and for a while there, kids carried a four-pack in the back seat of their cars just in case, while driving around, they found a likely house to toilet-paper. . "Toilet-paper" used to be a noun (well it still is, thank goodness), but somewhere along the line it became a verb meaning, according the Butterbean's New World Dictionary, "the quaint practice prac-tice of spreading toilet paper around someone else's front yard, paying special attention atten-tion to tree branches mailboxes, mail-boxes, basketball standards and other tall structures." Butterbean's spells it with a hyphen since "head-hunting" was the first roughly comparable compa-rable word that I came across in Webster's while trying to decide whether it should have , one. This activity, I'm sure, contributed to the nation's rising costs of toilet paper. In fact I'm surprised there weren't real shortages. Wait a minute, there were - like in my house at ten o'clock on Friday nights. The grocery stores probably experienced a run on it every Saturday morning if not the night before. On one Saturday night a few years back, I got caught without a square of it in the house. I could have sworn there was some in the closet. I couldn't beg or bribe a soul to go to the store, so we went to bed hoping that we could survive without one of the necessities of life for just one night. You 'might say that our prayers were answered. Come morning we had toilet paper growing on our trees. You just had to go out and pick some. By the end of the day we had cleaned up all of the "manna" and were wondering won-dering whether we had faith enough to skip the store-run for one more day. I think in the early days of the rise of the art of toilet-pa pering, being toilet-papered was supposed to be some sort of insult. But as time went on, it became a means of conveying convey-ing all sorts of messages like: congratulations, good luck, I like you, you are a good old Joe who wouldn't mind, or yours was the only house on the block whose light were out. When I heard that people were toilet-papered, I advised them not to get excited, just to mellow out and settle for the "good old Joe" connotation or to not look a gift-horse in the mouth. Whatever the intended message, or whichever way you used toilet paper, you had to be prepared to hide in the bushes so you wouldn't get caught. If you got caught, it didn't count. And that was that. How something that harmless became a criminal offense, I don't know. But it did. Toilet paper, or its unintended use, became the scourge of society, soci-ety, something the likes of which must be crushed and reconsigned to the closet, to sit there by its lonely self. Public Forum - Letters to the Editor What is your opinion? The Vernal Express welcomes letters from its readers concerning any subject pertinent to the Uintah Basin. There are no restrictions on contents, if in good taste and not libelous or vindictive. Letters may be edited for grammar and style, length and content. All letters must be submitted exclusively to the Vernal Express and bear the full name, signature, phone number and address of the writer or writers. Letters for the sole purpose of expressing thanks to individuals or groups will not be printed in this forum. Submissions may be mailed to 54 N. Vernal Ave., Vernal, UT 84078; faxed to 435-789-8690 or sent by e-mail to editorvernal.com The name or names of the persons submitting letters must appear on all published letters. Letters express the opinion of the writer or writers and are not necessarily the opinion of the Vernal Express. ECOWC 5TWJU)S j SADDENED OVER DNM DECISION Dear Editor, Reading the headline, ' "Monument paleo program remains intact despite cuts," I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or get mad. I'm leaning toward the latter, and I hope other people who care about Dinosaur National Monument will feel the same, and say so. The article describes the elimination of two positions from Dinosaur's paleontology program. Since the entire paleontology staff was three positions, it's hard to grasp how the program can be considered "intact" after a two-thirds reduction. The superintendent assures us, however, that the full-time Ph.D. paleontologist position posi-tion is "the most essential part of the program" and that the jobs being cut have merely "supported" it "for the past seven years." That makes it seem these two jobs are just recent, unimportant additions whose loss is no big deal. Under changing titles, these jobs have been a crucial part of the paleo program for more than 50 years. They were first filled in the 1950s by the two local men, Tobo Wilkins and Jim Adams, who exposed most of the quarry's amazing display of in-pluce fossil bones. These men didn't have degrees in puleonlology, just a PEOPLE ARE STARVING IN UINTA BASIN Dear Editor: It is this writer's opinion that people must be desperate and nearing starvation in the Uinta Basin duringthis hard, cold winter of 2008. It must be so because people are buying elk depredation permits to kill elk that are facing starvation. starva-tion. Anyone who would shoot a weak animal that has been deprived of nutrition (a walking, walk-ing, breathing stick of jerky) isinmyopinion, "Adesperate and starving person." The recent PR of the Utah DWR was a radio broadcast that said, "We have every available man out there on foot, in four wheel drive units and in the air to monitor and make sure that Utah's wildlife is not starving. We feel like overall, the animals are looking pretty good. We also want to apologize for many of the back roads being be-ing impassable and people have been unable to fill their depredation tags." It seems that this state's policy is that wildlife must be self supportingand killing animals is priority to feeding them. Offering depredation perm its durin g a year like this one is like the USDAofferi nga bargain on starvingbeef with Mad Cow Disease because the fanners and ranchers are in a drought. I do agree with the biology that feeding wild animals can cause diseases and other problems but this was and still is a harsh time for migrating elk and deer that found their winter range ravaged by drought and forest for-est fires. These animals may never need our help again but they needed it this year. It is sad that there are not emergency funds in place to help Utah's wildlife if it needs subsistence in an emergency situation and that money trickles out of Salj; Lake city only when there is an outcry of urban residents that see starving deer in their back yards. I am not blaming our northeastern region of the DWR or its many good people who care about our wildlife. Our local DWR didn't even know about that radio broadcast at the time it was aired. Policy on wildlife management comes from Salt Lake City and this policy is not only contrary to many of DWR's local key managers, it is an embarrassment to them. I blame the public for buying depredation tags and for reinforcing the mis-management of our big game animals. ani-mals. I blame the public for not speaking up and making noise in Salt Lake City about neglect and overharvesting. But it's pretty hard to blame somebody who must shoot an elk or deer that is nothing but skin and bones, because that person must be starving. Joe Jessup Farm Creek EXPRESS YOURSELF ON VERNAL.COM Each week the Vernal Express prints a sample of reader comments posted to the previous pre-vious week's headlines at the newspaper's Web site. Not all comments are considered. Comments may be edited prior to printing. National Spay Day on February 26 CB wrote: As for spayingneutering being too expensive, If a person is not willing to get their pet spayedneutered, as well as provide good food, adequate shelter and love and exercise, they should not get that pet in the first place. Anyone considering adopting an animal needs to be aware of, and agree to, the ongoing responsibility and expense adequate and humane requires. Monument paleo program pro-gram remains intact despite cuts VF wrote: I appreciate the fact that they are trying to preserve pre-serve species but get real, thousands of species are disappearing every day on this planet. We have made ourselves the architects of the preservation of the planet. Gee, maybe Mother Nature and the planet are going through their normal changes and if it means species spe-cies die off including the human hu-man species then so be it. With all the human needs in our country right now I'm not going to cry over a bird or a fish. All that money is sure to run out for these parks as the economy fails and people realize our priorities are messed up. What about the hungry children? I am not an anti-environmentalist because I am intelligent and I have something some-thing called 'thoughts." I am a realist and in the not to distant future all these parks are going to have to close and oh my Lord, revert back to the natural land that the people can enjoy and yes, maybe step on a flower or take a rock home. This place has been here for millions of years, I doubt that we are going to destroy it. The Fed3 need to go home. Leave their concession crap behind and maybe a family would enjoy just looking at the beauty of that area without a ranger always saying "Hey you can't pick up that stick!", or "No, you can't walk up that canyon beyond Josie's anymore!" Give it up people. You are a dying breed just like the dinosaurs. SEE Suddoned on A 10 |