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Show The Park Record Saturday, May 23, 1998 And so it goes... mhiu By Tom Clyde r A-18 Executive Housekeeper If you can lead, train, manage and inspire people, this position Is for youl We are looking for an experienced executive housekeeper to oversee a growing inventory of condominiums and private houses in our three resorts. You must know how to recruit, train, lead and motivate a large housekeeping staff. Excellent communication abilities and strong sense of organization required; computer literacy word perfectexcel, if possible FRS - a must. We also require proficiency in budgeting, cost analysis and scheduling. Billingual EnglishSpanish a plus. Administrative Assistant Part-time to full-time position available with flexible hours. You must love fast-paced, ever challenging work environment. If you have a curious nature, a passion for success, enjoy taking responsibilities and can accurately type a million words a minute, this is for youl Along with our executive - management team, you will participate in building the most successful property management company in town. We want you to be proficient with word perfectwordexcel and be ready and willing to learn extra software. Fax or send yourr6sum6 to: HR Dpt.: (435) 649-8063, PO Box 680128, Park City, UT 84068. East West resorts Equal Opportunity Employer w- .... us Odh SaDe! Woods Metals Verticals Shutters Draperies Shades Free in-home estimates! We carry all brands at guaranteed lowest prices. INSTALLED FREE! 544 PARK AVENUE PARK CITY, UTAH 649-9665 CALL FOR AN APPOINTMENT FURNITURE GALLER Memorial Day Weekend Sale at both Forsey's stores. Saturday Sunday Monday Save 20 - 70 off retail prices on our entire collections within both our new Pacesetter Contemporary Gallery and our Traditional Gallery (just south of our new Pacesetter store). Make NO Payments - Pay NO Interest for 6 Months! (oac) In addition to the great prices you will see on everything throughout both furniture galleries, you'll enjoy incredible savings on special orders and you'll make NO payments and pay NO interest for six months on any merchandise (in stock) you purchase during this exciting Memorial Day Weekend Sale iiij Lid-' Woodmark 3-piece Sectional Retail I'na-: , bale nice: 3,4V5. ALL Remaining Woodmark Upholstery Floor Samples 50 OFF Retail Woodmark White Camel-Back Sofa Retail Price: S I Sale Price: 810. American Craftsman by Stanley Queen Anne Cherry Occasional Tables 40Vr Urr retail. , Sold Table fetal Trice: $. Sale PriCC S539. End Table iM.ni ivne: s73. Sale Price: 5405. Colftv Table Kel.nl Price: S R Sale PnCK S495. ALL Stanley Montreaux White French Bedroom to 50 OFF retail Up ALL Emerson Leather 50 OFF Retail Sofa Ret.i Price:.. SALE PRICE: sl,875 Chair & Ottoman Reu.ii esns. SALE PRICE: 1,462. 1 liil!HllNllilil!lliliiliHIIIIIIHIIlllllMl"llliilli4!l j8iiaaMTinrrM iwimi f ; Contemporary Sofa by Precedent ! k I ' 3 j 8 f a Keuii Pmv: si,5. Sale Price: s899. S 1' , 1 f , rjE3ioni V.. t. "V -u T1" ' ""'" JSi ir a "Evolutions" by Stanley CLOSEOUTS Leather Sofa (Available in different colors) Sale Price: sl,299. Contemporary, Bedroom, Dining Room & Occasional 40 OFF Suggested Retail ft ft IK li v, FURNITURE GALLERIES Pacesetter Contemporary Traditional 2955 Highland Drive (801)463-0777 2977 Highland Drive (801)487-0777 SPECIAL SALE HOURS: Saturday 10.00 am- 6.O0 pm Sunday 12.00 noon - 5.00 pm Monday 10.O0 am - 5.00 pm Arming the insane Well, I didnt win the big jackpot in the Powerball Lottery. That's the deal run by 20 states that had built up the biggest jackpot in history. After being big news for a week, sales of tickets soared at the end, and the final jackpot was $195 million. The odds of winning win-ning were something like one change in 80 million. One news story compared that to a stack of pennies 70 miles high, and your chance of pulling one specific penny out of that. Somebody had to win, but wagering even a couple cou-ple of bucks on 80 million-to-one odds seems like a pretty pret-ty stupid bet. You might as well bet that 1-15 will be finished fin-ished on time. It's no surprise that I didnt win. I didnt buy a ticket. That made it certain that I wouldnt win the lottery, though statistically speaking, my odds of winning, had I bought a ticket, were not significantly greater than they were having no ticket at all. Lotteries have been described as a special tax on people with poor math skills. But somewhere in Wisconsin, there is somebody rummaging around in the garbage under the seat of his car, looking for the winning ticket that he hopes he didnt did-nt throw away. The other big news of the week is that India's got nukes. Apparently for no reason other than a weak national self-esteem, India had tested nuclear weapons. Their logic seems to be that the world regards them as a billion sort of irrelevant people in white pajamas and turbans with sacred cows. That image was not as positive posi-tive as they might have liked. People dont take them seriously. Now the world will regard them as a billion sort of irrelevant people in white pajamas and turbans with sacred cows and an atomic bomb. Couldnt they have just hosted the Olympics instead? Improved self-esteem was always one of the big selling sell-ing points for Utah hosting the Olympics. Boy, if we just hosted the Olympics, people across the nation would quit thinking of us as a rural backwater dominated by a little-understood religious majority. They would think of us as a rural backwater dominated by a little-understood religious majority that had hosted the Olympics. There was a considerable movement in the state legislature legisla-ture to develop nuclear weapons on a state level instead, if for no other reason than to nuke the convenience conve-nience stores just over the Idaho line that are selling lottery lot-tery tickets to Utahns. Weapons, nuclear and otherwise, are a big deal here in Utah, and concealed guns are even bigger. Our Republican legislature has been careful to protect the rights of people to pack heat, and has said that nobody can regulate or restrict the right of a person with a concealed con-cealed weapons permit to carry their concealed gun anywhere they want to. Everybody cheered, and then, in one of those lucid intervals, the legislature agreed that maybe concealed weapons could be banned from airports, prisons, and courthouses. But that's it. The University of Utah adopted a policy prohibiting weapons on campus. They didn't think their educational education-al mission was advanced by people carrying guns to class. The governor has adopted a policy prohibiting state employees from packing heat on the job (except for law enforcement people). Some of the state employees employ-ees described the weapons ban as "unilateral disarmament," disarma-ment," because the people visiting the DMV are apparently appar-ently able to carry weapons while renewing their drivers licenses. The clerks administering the eye test want to return fire when fired upon. Seems fair, but maybe the people taking the eye test could be asked to leave their guns outside? "Now see if you can blast holes in the letters let-ters on the bottom line of the chart..." The fight goes on. Officials at the state mental hospital hospi-tal in Provo recently adopted a formal rule banning all weapons from the insane asylum. That had been the informal policy for many years, and nobody had ever cared much about it. It seemed pretty reasonable that you not have guns in the insane asylum. Now the hospital hospi-tal adopted a formal rule banning guns, concealed or not, from the mental hospital. The mental hospital is full of people who are so mentally deranged that they present pre-sent a threat to themselves or others. The situation probably is not improved by arming them. Well, the legislature says that isn't what they intended intend-ed with the concealed weapons law. When they said you could take your concealed weapon anywhere, they meant anywhere. The state Republican convention just adopted a resolution condemning the hospital's attempt to ban concealed weapons in the nut house, at the University, Uni-versity, or the DMV. The official stance of the Utah Republican party is that you ought to be able to carry concealed weapons to school, church, to the insane asylum asy-lum and, presumably, to the Olympic Figure Skating Finals. You never know when the black helicopters from the UN One-World Government will fly into the Delta Center, selling Powerball Lottery tickets and cheap liquor to otherwise good people. Utah's Republicans Republi-cans need to be ready to defend themselves. No wonder Mormon Church officials recently said that GOP does-nt does-nt stand for "God's Own Party," and suggested that it would be OK, even healthy, for a few Church members to be Democrats. What's really strange about the whole discussion is the focus on concealed weapons. People have the misconception mis-conception that you need some kind of permit to carry a gun. That's not the case at all. Here in the wild West, pretty much anybody can strap on their six-shooter John Wayne-style and sidle down the street for a sarsa-parilla. sarsa-parilla. While it may cause some alarm if you walked into the local bank to make a deposit carrying your AK-47, AK-47, and it may be inconvenient to be carrying that .357 in your belt while grocery shopping, it's perfectly legal. With the un-concealed weapons, anything goes. Somewhere in the Dodge City past, a decision was made that there was a different kind of threat posed by somebody carrying a concealed weapon instead of having hav-ing it out in the open so everybody could see it, and let the gun-toting grocery shopper take 15 items through the express lane without complaint. So the law requires the permit to carry the gun out of sight, but no regulations regula-tions at all apply to carrying the gun in sight. It happens all the time in hunting season, but the rules are the same whether hunting elk in the High Uintas or shopping for a new suit at Nordstrom's in Salt Lake. Except that Nordstrom 's wont let you wear that tacky orange camouflage cam-ouflage in their store. Packing heat in the open may be a strange fashion statement, but as long as it isn't concealed, con-cealed, it is perfectly legal as long as you dont try to board an airplane or go to school. While the legislature seems to favor allowing the insane to carry concealed weapons, I dont think the legislature leg-islature has weighed in on whether people in the state mental hospital should be allowed to have nuclear weapons. When you read stories like these, you have to wonder won-der if it is a good idea to let the Republican legislators ' out of the asylum at all. Don't get me started By Gary Weiss The mythic dimension...on a sesame seed bun I've been reading a fascinating book called "Decoding "Decod-ing Advertisements," and I also saw that some 76 nillion Americans watched "Seinfeld" last week. Last uonth, about a billion people around the world watched he Academy Awards. These things came together as the :atalyst for a series of insights about contemporary cul-ure. cul-ure. I now have it all figured out the stuff about why ne're so screwed up, and I just couldnt keep it to myself. Hey, I'm serious here. In the old days, say, before about 1965, our culture as informed pretty much in the traditional ways: school, families and mythopoetics (which really just neans through the transfer of stories), including those of eligion and contemporary devices like movies. I'm not lecessarily saying this was all good, but in these ways, we vere told, or, more likely, it was pounded into us, what he appropriate goals were materially, socially and spiritually. Appropriate in that they provided clues to naking our way in the world. We were given lots of uodels for achieving them. Then, the compass stopped vorking, and 5,000 years of social engineering went right o hell. As Joseph Campbell said, the virtues of the past jecame the vices of today, and the vices of 'the past ecame the necessities of today. But more than that, I believe our society is now pri-narily pri-narily informed through advertising and television, rhese modes of communication have come to vastly wershadow those old ones, and this is bad. Because it :hanges the very way we think, and teaches that we're low defined, quite specifically, by what we have and vhat we should appear to be, rather than who we are. iVe're shown what successful people have, and what hey look like, and the message is that we arent success-ul success-ul unless we have these things, too that we are what ve own and how we look. I also think this has been toughest on women. Need say more than "execu-babe," or tell a few Janet Reno okes? Worse, women are told from a very early age md through every-day experience in magazines and on rv, that the highest expression of achievement is mbodied by inhumanely figured post-adolescents that tand there and are photographed to sell yet more ;oods, i.e; models. I started thinking about this when a '8-year-old relative of mine recently had her face lifted. Think about it; advertising has become so sophisti-ated, sophisti-ated, and we've all seen so much of it by the time we fin-sh fin-sh high school, that a scary percentage of American idults cant say what state Salt Lake City is in, but can epeat dozens of commercials verbatim. We've seen so nany carefully targeted images that when we hear the vord "definition," we think less about vocabulary and irst about triceps and abs. Does anyone not know what laving that "not-so-fresh" feeling means? Was there any it her time in human history when anorexia was some-hing some-hing every parent had to think about? Television, and the advertising that drives it, misren-lers misren-lers the symbolism of the culture. In its need to manip-ilate manip-ilate content to fit it's own formats, it reinforces the mes-age mes-age of advertising, which tells us that the way to life suc-ess suc-ess is defined only by its end. The informative values of he journey itself are essentially eliminated or, at best, bbreviated. In the old way, that's the opposite of the nessage of the cultural reference; to instruct the society that the end is only one part of the entire process. That by going through the real steps the struggle one picks up and incorporates appropriate human values. Both Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan have been proven right; celebrity has become an end in itself, and McLuhan's thesis that "the medium is the message" has become as true as Warhol's "15 minutes of fame." The dominant medium, TV, is so constrained by its twin imperatives to sell the products of its commercial sponsors and that everything must be resolved within the half-hour or hour format, that those characteristics of the medium dont just influence the message, it's controlled con-trolled and structured by it. That's why reading is so important. As a process, it's fundamentally different than getting information from television; it requires different skills, and requires the reader to think while doing it. You can watch television while talking on the phone, cooking dinner, playing cards or having sex. It's tough to do any of those, especially espe-cially the last, while fully engaged in a book. Reading requires, first, the basic skill to translate the symbols on the page into intelligible language, and then to apply those sentences to conceptual thought. It requires us to go even further; past what we know, what the author gives us, to where our minds fill in the blanks that come with every word. We read about people, places, philosophies, animals, weather, landscapes, etc., and in thought we give them form and substance. Visual media does all of that for us. We sit back and receive the images, plot and language, fully formed. Reading demands full involvement, as did movies in the big screen, pre-video era. It doesnt matter if we're reading deep stuff or fluff; exercising the processes of thinking is still the result. I've been profoundly affected by lots of books over the years, and I know that at least five of them changed both the course of my life, and gave me invaluable clues about how to live within my own skin. At 46 years, that still happens to me. Plus, it has given me loads of pretentious pre-tentious material to flex with at cocktail parties and on dates. I have to say that Park City is a terrific reading town; I know this having been a bookseller here for many years. Lots of people read; the town is full of book clubs, and for a place this size, our library is outstanding. I genuinely gen-uinely believe that's one of the things that make it such a nice place to live. Lots of people here spend more time in the backcountry than on their backs in front of a TV. So many people here are involvednn all sorts of creative endeavors. But I wonder about the larger culture where we're told to be responsible, and use the old, ethically-based decision matrices, but we're shown everyday that doing so only renders us fools. I wonder if 76 million people had conversations last week about things other than Seinfeld. I wonder about a society wherein we're told that life will be bitchin' if we'd only buy this new ab machine to get a magazine body in only eight minutes a day. Or a "wonder" bra and collagen lips, or... ah, dont get me started. Gary Weiss is the former owner of Dolly's Bookstore and has served on the Summit County Planning Commission. |