| OCR Text |
Show A2 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, June 3, 2008 The News Off The Beaten Path MUG SHOT D E DA Z LIGHTER SIDE Living Life as Captain Caveman James L. Davis I don’t really know how or why our simple family drive spiraled into my wife’s attempted assault of my eyebrows with a Leatherman, but it did. I believe it quite possibly had something to do with my body hair, at least that is what my wife said. Hearing that my body hair had caused such a violent reaction from my wife filled me with sorrow because there was a time when I was rather proud of my body hair. When I was a boy I waited rather impatiently for the day when hair would begin to sprout all over my body, because I was so very sure that when I had a thick coat of chest hair and could grow a bushy mustache I would be pretty much irresistible to the opposite sex. Actors like Burt Reynolds, Tom Selleck and Captain Caveman were my role models. They had tons of body hair and the girls just loved them (well, I wasn’t sure if girls loved Captain Caveman, but he had lots of body hair and could destroy things with his caveman club, so he was pretty impressive in his own right). After I reached the age of 12 or so I began to give myself a rather thorough inspection on a daily basis, waiting for that first outbreak of body hair that would signify that I was now, officially, a Man. Every day I would search, and every day I would be left disappointed because body hair was nowhere to be found. What made it even worse was that I had to endure the taunts of my friends who proudly displayed their armpit hair by curling up their shirt sleeves and sticking their armpit into my face until I could not help but notice that there were a few hairs growing there. One friend had so much armpit hair that he liked to comb it on the way to school, which I found then and continue to find rather disturbing, especially when he borrowed one of my other friend’s combs to do so. The day finally came that I lifted my arms one morning and with the use of my Mom’s magnifying mirror I discovered right in the center of my right armpit a single black hair proudly sticking out. It was the greatest day of my life, I was so very sure. It was a Saturday and because it was Saturday I wore a tank top out to play with my short, short gym shorts and knee high athletic socks with the cool red stripes and went in search of some cute girl to show her how, overnight I had become a man. I found my next door neighbor, who was a year older than me, but hey, I had armpit hair, so I could handle an older woman. I strutted toward her, lifted my arms to grab onto a tree limb and waited for her to notice that I was well on my way to becoming a sexy, hairy beast. She didn’t notice, so I tried to help her out by scratching at my hairy armpit to draw her attention. She still didn’t notice. So I began to worry that perhaps her eyesight was failing and finally asked her if she could see the armpit hair under my right arm waving at her rather sexily. She looked closer, wrinkled her nose and rolled her eyes. “That’s really gross James,” she said. I soon came to the conclusion that one body hair was not nearly enough, so I waited for more and thanked the hair gods as new hairs began to pop out here and there on my body. Somewhere in my mid-20s I begin to wonder if all my wishing for body hair was not some tragic mistake. Because I now had a thick carpet of chest hair, but I also had a fairly thick carpet of back hair. I had hair on my shoulders, I had hair in my ears, I had hair in my nose and the cruelest thing of all was that it now seemed that men with body hair were no longer considered irresistible to the opposite sex. All those years of waiting for body hair, and when I finally had so much body hair that I could be a stand-in for Big Foot, women were no longer interested in men with body hair. Men were actually going into salons to have their body hair removed. So I considered myself lucky to find a woman who didn’t seem to mind that I was covered with a fine layer of fur. The fact that she was a veterinary technician perhaps helped. This is why I was so caught by surprise when she asked our daughter to get the Leatherman out of the glove box. With the Leatherman pliers gripped firmly in her hand, she put her arm around me and went after my right eyebrow. “What are you doing?” I screamed in a not unmanly way. “You have this one hair on your eyebrow that keeps sticking out and it’s driving me crazy.” She plucked one of the hairs on my eyebrow and I screamed again, in a not unmanly fashion. “Missed it. Hold still.” “I’m driving here. Can we do this later?” “I keep forgetting to tell you about it, so let’s get it now.” “It’s pretty gross Dad,” my daughter added, just to boost my self esteem. Suddenly I was 12 again and being snubbed for showing off my one armpit hair. I had wanted to be Burt Reynolds or Tom Selleck, but instead I was Captain Caveman…and I didn’t even have his caveman club. Hot Dog! Bryce Dugmore opened his hot dog stand in Ferron last week and promptly went about tempting passing motorists to stop and have a meal. He reports that things are going well in his fast food business and with the help of his parents, Gayland and Janeal Dugmore, he took his hot dog stand to Huntsman Motors over the weekend to feed those being tempted to buy an automobile. Chuck Shepherd Lead Story The U.S. military operates a beachfront vacation site for its personnel worldwide and their families at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, with $42-a-night air-conditioned suites, surfing, boat rides, golf course, bowling alley and even a gift shop. One T-shirt for sale reads, “The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean’s Newest 5-star Resort.” News of the facility was not widely reported until a British lawyer who represents 28 of the nearly 300 detainees housed there described it to London’s Daily Mail in May. The Continuing Crisis -- Another Criterion for Teacher Certification: Police in Fort Myers, Fla., were called to Royal Palm Exceptional School in April and wound up arresting an 8-year-old boy named Deshawn for punching his female teacher in the face, leaving several bruises. Said Deshawn’s grandmother, Dorothy Williams, when interviewed by WBBH-TV: “He gets very upset, and he loves to hit,” but “If he was overpowering her that much, I feel like she shouldn’t be in that line of work.” -- America in Decline: One of the Internet’s successful Web sites (10 million page views a month, with $500,000 in ads from companies including Verizon, McDonald’s and General Motors) is a site that merely reports on what celebrities’ babies are wearing, in that so many mothers are apparently obsessed with mimicking those clothing choices for their own tots. A May Wall Street Journal feature said sometimes the site’s posting a photo of a celebrity baby incites a nation- The Duplex NEWS OF THE WEIRD wide run on what it’s wearing. -- Workplace Culture: (1) Salesman Chad Hudgens filed a lawsuit in January against his former Salt Lake City employer, charging that the boss and a “motivational trainer” used, as a “team-building” exercise, what was essentially the controversial “torture” practice of “waterboarding.” The boss allegedly said that if salesmen tried as hard to close deals as they’re trying to breathe during the simulated drowning, sales would soar. (2) British office worker Theresa Bailey, 43, was awarded the equivalent of about $10,300 by a court in Ashford, England, in May after she complained of sexual harassment by her otherwise-allmale direct-marketing team at Selectabase company. Among the “laddish” behavior was her boss’s regularly “lift(ing) his right cheek” and expelling gas in her direction. Bright Ideas -- Most Convoluted Business Plan: Adolfo Martinez, 33, and Mark Anderson, 26, were indicted for fraud in Las Cruces, N.M., in April, accused of passing forged checks. The men’s plan was to buy Domino’s pizzas with the checks, then have one of the men put on a Pizza Hut shirt and resell the pizzas, by the slice, in a local park or at stores (even though the pizzas were still being carried around in the Domino’s boxes). -- Triumph International, the Japanese women’s underwear company, released its latest publicity-seeking creation in May: the solar-powered bra, with enough exposed panels to power an iPod or cell phone. Other Triumph specials include a baseball bra (with fielder’smitt-shaped cups) and a heated bra (with microwavable gel pads to warm the cups). -- Joe Weston-Webb, formerly a carnival showman but who now runs a flooring company in Nottinghamshire county, England, told reporters in March that he was exasperated at crime in the area and his inability to legally use enough force to protect his property, and that he had pulled two pieces of non-lethal equipment out from the old days to shoot at criminals: a 20-foot-long cannon, formerly used for firing his wife across the River Avon (now loaded with rubbertipped projectiles) and a 30foot-high catapult (now loaded with chicken droppings from a nearby farm). Said WestonWebb, “(T)he only people who seem to be against what I’m doing are the police.” First Things First (1) A supervisor at the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services told a Billings Gazette reporter in March that some of his employees were complaining that new computers delivered to the office lacked games like solitaire, hearts and Minesweeper, and that it wasn’t fair that employees with older computers still had the games. (2) The traffic commander of the Rusafah district in Baghdad told his officers in April to start enforcing the country’s seat-belt laws. The fine is the equivalent of about $12.50. Least Competent People At One With Nature: (1) Cameron Fritzson, 20, landed in the hospital in critical condition in May after he scaled first the outer, 10-foot fence at an electrical substation in Pembroke Pines, Fla., and then the main electrical tower, where his arm brushed against a live wire. Police said Fritzson was after a parakeet’s nest at the top so he could sell the eggs to a pet store for as much as $20 each. (2) Sixteen people were undergoing treatment for possibly having rabies in May in Hilton Head, S.C., after exposure to a baby raccoon later discovered to be rabid. While some of the 16 had merely cuddled it, an unknown number apparently could not resist kissing the wild animal on the lips. Update Last year News of the Weird reported on an organic art project, “Victimless Leather,” in which artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr attempted to grow embryonic stem cells of a species onto an artificial platform, in this case creating leather from mouse cells without the need to kill cows. However, in the latest demonstration of the project, at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art this spring, the exhibit apparently grew so rapidly that it overwhelmed the space available, and curator Paola Antonelli said she was forced to kill the organism. She told the Art Newspaper that it was a difficult decision. “I’ve always been pro-choice, and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat.” Instant Karma (1) A 31-year-old man was hospitalized in critical condition in Salt Lake City, hit by cars after running into traffic to avoid paying for a taxi ride he had just taken. (2) A 25-yearold man, pursued by police after he tried to run down his girlfriend with his car, fled on foot across Interstate 45 near Houston, but was struck and killed by cars. Copyright 2008 Chuck Shepherd Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. By Glenn McCoy |
