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Show A2 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, July 1, 2008 The News Off The Beaten Path MUG SHOT D E DA Z LIGHTER SIDE Pigs Feet, Bananas and Tripping the Gross-O-Meter James L. Davis I have observed that gross is a relative term. Everyone has something that they believe is gross and will speak with great conviction about what they consider to be the grossest thing in the world. Most people usually have this kind of conversation at the dinner table for some reason I do not completely understand, which I find to be gross. But then, most of the things that I find to be gross revolve around eating, and that is because I am firmly convinced that most people eat things that were never, ever, under any circumstance intended to be eaten. I believe that God must look down on His creation from time to time and marvel at some of the things we have chosen to eat. Take onions for example. They were meant to be ground into salt and sprinkled into your spaghetti sauce and that’s pretty much it. Or mushrooms. How could people eat mushrooms? Do you not realize what mushrooms thrive in? I do not believe God ever wanted us to eat these things and he probably shakes his head in amazement every time we do. Growing up my parents constantly tried to get me to eat things that were not only gross but I believe to be poisonous in some way. If it wasn’t onions or mushrooms it was peppers or pimento cheese. I have no real idea what pimento cheese is, but my mom always had it around the house and I believe that any food that looks like it could glow in the dark should not be eaten. Because of this upbringing I have developed a finely tuned Gross-O-Meter that is accurate 99.9 percent of the time. Both my parents were raised on farms in the south and since they were raised on farms in the south, their Gross-O-Meter stopped working long, long ago. I discovered this when I walked into our kitchen one day and discovered that my mother was cooking feet in a pot on the stove. Not people feet, but pig feet, not that I could imagine it being a whole lot worse if it had been people feet. If it had been people feet, say the feet of my little brother, I might have even tried a bite or two. “Why are you cooking pig feet?” I asked my mother, thinking that perhaps she had lost control of her senses, which I believe happened a lot more often to my parents then they ever let on. “To eat,” my mother replied. I nodded my head and stepped away from the stove slowly because after looking at the pig feet, and then my own bare feet I realized that my feet looked tastier and I didn’t want to give her any ideas. I went to the refrigerator and opened it, thinking that perhaps someone had come and stolen all of our food and all we had left to eat were pig feet. But no, there was plenty of food in the refrigerator, including parts of the pig that I had no problem with eating. “Why are you going to eat pig feet?” I asked my mother, hoping to see some hint of insanity that I could use to convince my dad that she needed help, serious help. “We use to eat pig feet on the farm, the feet, the snout.” “Snout? You mean the nose? You ate the pig’s nose?” I felt the gag reflex taking hold of me and closed my eyes. “We ate almost all of the pig because we didn’t have very much.” I looked back at the refrigerator full of food. “And now?” “You acquire a taste for it. You ought to try it.” I shook my head slowly and backed out of the kitchen, telling myself that if it came down to pig feet or gravel, I’d try the gravel, perhaps in a stew. As I said, living with my parents my GrossO-Meter has become so refined that foods that most people eat I have placed on my Gross Out List just because they look strange, smell strange or sound strange. Take bananas for instance. I like the way bananas taste but after watching enough children eat them, squish them between their fingers and rub them in their hair they have been placed on the Gross Out List. That is not because of the way they taste, but the way they sound when they are being eaten or mutilated by small children. The pasty smack of a mouth eating bananas is gross. Cleaning between the fingers of a child who has smashed bananas into a paste to rub in his hair is gross. Listening to someone smack their lips while trying to eat a banana is gross. The only thing that would be grosser to me is to use bananas as a paste. And spread them over pig’s feet. Photos by James L. Davis Mutton Busters Future rodeo hands tried their luck with a little mutton bust’n’ during the Heritage Days Rodeo to the delight of the audience. Young cowboys and cowgirls held on with all they had, sometimes even longer than perhaps they wanted to. Chuck Shepherd Lead Story Faced with its Alzheimer’s residents’ tendency to wander away, the Benrath Senior Centre in Dusseldorf, Germany, came up with a novel approach: a fake bus stop (an exact replica of a real one) out front. Straying residents might be attracted to the familiar colors and design of the kiosk (because long-term memory is typically still robust) and wait there for a bus instead of trying to “go home” on foot. But short-term, the resident is typically unaware of how long he has been waiting and will remain until a Centre employee sees him and can guide him back into the home (which often is easy because the resident has by then forgotten why he is sitting there, according to a June dispatch from Berlin in London’s Daily Telegraph). Bright Ideas -- Minor league pitcher John Odom was traded in May by the Calgary Vipers of the independent Golden Baseball League to the Laredo Broncos of the independent United League, but his exchanged counterpart balked at leaving the U.S. for the Canadian team. The clubs huddled and announced that Odom would still report to Laredo, which would send Calgary not a player in return, but 10 bats. -- Car dealer Walter Moore of Max Motors in Butler, Mo. (an hour south of Kansas City), announced in May a free premium to every car purchaser: either $250 worth of gasoline or a gift certificate for a handgun. He told KMBC-TV that 80 percent of customers choose the gun. Weird Science -- Technically, Macie McCartney was born on May 3 of this year in Laredo, Texas, but that appearance outside the womb was actually her second. When a large tumor showed up on Macie six months into her mother’s pregnancy, surgeons actually pulled the fetus almost completely out of the uterus so they could excise the growth and then re-inserted the fetus. Following that rare procedure, the birth was normal, accord- The Duplex NEWS OF THE WEIRD ing to Dr. Darrell Cass, who explained it in June to viewers of NBC’s “Today” show. -- Ironies: (1) Evolution scientists at Switzerland’s University of Lausanne reported in June that over the course of 30 to 40 generations, ordinary flies tend to live longer if they’re stupid. The researchers guessed that heightened neural activity overtaxed their systems. (2) Cardiologists at Hartford (Conn.) Hospital, writing in the June Annals of Emergency Medicine, described a patient suffering from irregular heartbeat whose rhythm was restored to normal following a Tasering by police. Animals Amok -- BBC filmmakers announced in June that they had captured, for perhaps the first time ever, an episode of pandas mating in the wild, for the “Wild China” TV series. A male is shown fighting off other males to coax a female down from a tree. What follows that, said producer Glenn Maxwell, are “loud calls which will make viewers think instantly of the Wookie character from the ‘Star Wars’ movies. I liken it to Chewbaccas in a pub brawl.” Eventually, the female descends, and the pair get to work, “breathing hard and panting,” said Maxwell. “You can see the steam coming out of their mouths.” -- Animals in Trouble: (1) China’s Xinhua news agency reported in March that a farmer in Jilin province had been found with a tortoise that is addicted to nicotine. The farmer, a smoker himself, said he was surprised when the pet puffed on a cigarette he had playfully stuck in its mouth, and since then, he occasionally shares smokes with it. (2) Magistrates in Sunderland, England, accepted a guilty plea in June from Samantha Pearson and David Step for animal cruelty. The couple had relocated quarters last October but left behind a pet, Milly, to starve to death. Milly was a pet rat. Coaches Gone Wild (1) High school soccer coach Sanford Kaplan, 57, was arrested in Lincoln, Neb., in May and charged with having imprisoned several underage boys in sessions in his garage in which they were bound, gagged and suspended from the rafters. (2) Track coach Lawrence “Poppy” Vincent, 74, of Bracken Christian School in Bulverde, Texas, was arrested in May and charged with indecent exposure to an undercover police officer; Vincent was wearing floral women’s panties and a bra. (3) Football coach Steve Halpin, 52, was permitted to retire quietly in June from Mesquite High School near Dallas after officials discovered that he had pawned 270 items since January 2007, including school equipment (which, in each case, he had later retrieved from the pawnshop). District of Calamity (continued) Washington, D.C., police chief Cathy Lanier decided in May to rehire 17 cops who had been fired for misconduct. The cases against the officers were solid, she noted, except that their hearings before a police trial board had not been held within the required 55 days after the charges were filed. D.C. courts and arbitrators had previously reinstated officers where the 55-day deadline was not met, and Lanier felt she had no choice. (However, the following week, Lanier announced she was beginning the process of re-firing the 17 officers, this time because they would be unable to perform their jobs since they could not be credible witnesses in criminal cases because of their records.) Fetishes on Parade (1) “There’s really no way to explain people’s fetishes,” said University of Cincinnati campus police Capt. Karen Patterson, describing the arrest of Dwight Pannell, 43, for allegedly crawling under a library table, squirting liquid from a syringe on a female student’s shoe, and photographing it. Pannell told police he was just trying out his new camera. (2) In February, police officer Michael Curtin, 36, was removed from the force in Munhall, Pa., and in April was charged with offering two underage girls $1,000 each to let him suck their toes. Least Competent Criminals Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Sharon Platt allegedly stole about $5,000 from her employer, Murphy Motors of Williston, N.D., recently and left town. She was apprehended in Pittsburgh in May after she applied for a job and listed Murphy Motors as a reference, and her old employer alerted Pittsburgh police. (2) Charles Ray Fuller, 21, was arrested in Fort Worth, Texas, in April after he took a blank check belonging to his girlfriend and wrote it out to himself for $360,000,000,000.00, which he presented to Chase Bank. He remained in character after his arrest, assuring police that the check was legitimate, offered by the girlfriend’s mother to help him start a record label. Update Methane’s longstanding menace as a climate-altering greenhouse gas is closer than ever to being controlled, said New Zealand scientists in June after genome-mapping found the source of flatulence in ruminant animals, and the researchers said they thought they could vaccinate against it. While livestock accounts for only 2 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas, it causes over half of New Zealand’s. Unless the vaccination is successful, farmers will face a huge tax on methane by 2012 brought on by the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. News That Sounds Like a Joke (1) When a big storm came through Alma, Ark., on the evening of May 7, residents rushed out to secure themselves inside the brandnew community shelter the town had just built with great fanfare. However, as the winds raged, the 20 people who showed up had to sprawl on the ground because the shelter was locked, and the deputy with the key was busy on a call. (2) In January, Dr. Steve Paulk announced that he would commence offering breast augmentation procedures and would be working out of Moundview Memorial Hospital in Friendship, Wis. Copyright 2008 Chuck Shepherd. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. By Glenn McCoy |
