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Show A2 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, August 12, 2008 The News Off The Beaten Path SLICE OF LIFE D E DA Z LIGHTER SIDE A Trip to the Mall James L. Davis Malls frighten me...vehemently. Well, perhaps I should rephrase that. Malls don’t actually frighten me vehemently; people who go to malls frighten me…vehemently. I believe that mall people are, by and large, somewhat unbalanced by nature. That is because Saturday for the Davis household was School Clothes Season, and we were all at the mall hunting for clothes. Clothes hunting is much the same as deer or elk hunting, except instead of going out into the wilderness and braving the elements to seek out your prey, you go to the mall and brave the other shoppers to seek out clothes your children will actually wear. Instead of carrying a high powered rifle with a scope, you carry a wallet that may or may not be loaded. And instead of dressing in orange camouflage (which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either), my children spend a great deal of time and energy dressing in their best clothing. Which begs the question, if my children can still spend hours choosing what clothes they are going to wear to go clothes hunting, why exactly are we clothes hunting in the first place? On Saturday my wallet was loaded with pretty much all the ammunition I owned and it fired dollar bills with the speed of an Uzi whenever my children got a new wardrobe in their sights. Upon arriving at the mall we immediately went to the two or three stores where everyone else at the mall was also shopping, including the employees of neighboring stores. This would be the three stores devoted to skateboard attire. While stores like Zumiez or Pac Sun may have ridden the wave of being antiestablishment a few years ago, they now are the establishment. Great grandmothers now wear skater shoes. I tried to convince my kids of this fact and persuade them that the true rebel teenagers did all of their shopping at Wal-Mart or Ross Dress for Less, but they weren’t having it. So we went in search of skater clothing. The only thing I have to say about skater clothing is this: Skateboarding is an activity that is known to involve a little bit of risk. Skaters quite often fall off their boards and land on the sidewalk, on hand rails, on the road, on park benches, picnic tables, cars, other people and perhaps even a fire hydrant or two. So wouldn’t you think that if you were manufacturing clothing for skaters you would make the clothing pretty rugged? But no, the clothing doesn’t only seem less than rugged; in some cases it seems transparent. Which is why I spend a great deal of my time shaking my head vehemently Shaking your head vehemently involves the rapid turning your head first left, then right at such a rapid pace that your vision becomes blurred and quite often spittle escapes your lips and splatters on innocent passersby. I do this to let my children know in no uncertain terms that I will not be buying the item they are currently looking at. Quite often store clerks will come to ask me if everything is OK in hopes that I will stop splattering all over the merchandise, to which I respond by continuing to shake my head vehemently. I am fortunate that my children do not normally want to walk around showing off body parts that I do not want them showing off under any circumstance. Looking at the clothing (or lack of clothing) hanging on the store racks, I thought to myself that no parent is going to let their children wear clothes like that and I turned around. My daughter warned me as I turned around to divert my eyes, but of course I didn’t and I found myself staring directly at a pair of thong underwear. And they were not hanging on a rack. The woman bent over helping her daughter pick out a pair of shoes apparently was unaware that her pants were falling down because she made no effort to pull them up. I looked at my daughter, she looked at me and we decided to search for her newest pair of skater shoes somewhere else. We exited the store, both of us shaking or heads. Vehemently. At the shoe store next door my daughter found several pair of skater shoes that she liked and as we waited for the salesperson to get her size from the back room, I turned around to see if possibly there were other types of shoes in the store that she might be interested in. And my eyes again fell upon some thong underwear, again not hanging from a rack. In fact, they were the same pair of thong underwear and they were still being worn by the mother who was apparently unaware her pants were falling down. I turned back to the front of the store and with my daughter we both waited for the skater shoe salesman to bring us our skater shoes, shaking our heads…vehemently. Green stink bugs made an unwelcome visit to areas of Emery County last week. Attack of the Green Stink Bugs! James L. Davis The Green Stink Bugs are coming! Emery County found itself in the middle of what could have easily been the plotline of many a l950s horror movie last week as green stink bugs seemed to be invading the area. From Emery Town Hall to the Wells Fargo Bank and Maverik Store in Castle Dale, green bugs coated the walls, the sidewalks and the gas pumps, giving rise to a distasteful grimace from those trying to figure out a way to deal with the little creatures. At Wells Fargo, bank employees cleared the insects from the front door with a vacuum cleaner and at Maverik the insects, crawling across the fuel pumps, were either ignored or stepped on as they coated the pavement. According the Dennis Worwood of the Utah State University Extension, the stink bugs apparently thrived due to the wet spring and were on the move as the heat of the summer dried things up. According to the Oklahoma State University Entomology and Plant Pathology website, the Green Stink Bug, or Acro- sternum hilare, for the scientifically or horror movie minded (green stink bug doesn’t sound nearly as frightening as Acrosternum hilare), stink bugs overwinter as adults in protected areas such as fence rows, grassy field borders, under stones or bark of trees. Green stink bugs are more prevalent in mid to late June and taper off in fruit trees in July and August, with only one generation per year. According to Worwood, the best weapon against the green stink bug is Permethrin or a soap water spray. Killing off an invasion of Stink bugs cover the pumps at Maverik. stink bugs with a soap water spray may work just fine, but it doesn’t sound like any of the weapons they used in the 1950 horror movies. What about laser beams or high frequency sound waves? Now that sounds more like it. NEWS OF THE WEIRD Chuck Shepherd Lead Story Brother Cesare Bonizzi, 62, of a Capuchin Friars monastery near Milan, Italy, is the lead singer in a heavy-metal band that recently released its second album, “Misteri” (“Mysteries”), following a successful performance at Italy’s “Gods of Metal” festival (headlined by Iron Maiden and, ironically, Judas Priest). On stage, the white-flowingbearded Brother Cesare booms out gritty but non-proselytizing lyrics while wearing his traditional brown robe. He told BBC News in July that his superiors have never interfered with his sideline and that he plans to send a copy of the new album to the pope. “He’s a music lover, and metal is music.” The Entrepreneurial Spirit! -- High Point University (just south of Greensboro, N.C.) is not quite Club Med (“Club Ed,” it was called by the Chronicle of Higher Education) but provides free ice cream for students, a hot tub in the middle of campus, wake-up calls and a concierge service, all run by a campus “director of WOW,” whose job it is to thrill the “clients” The Duplex and attract new ones. This is the strategy of President Nido Qubein, a motivational speaker and “customer comes first” businessman, and so far, enrollment is way up (even at higher tuition), new construction is transforming the campus, and $100 million is in the bank. -- Challenging New Products: (1) stilettos for toddlers (though with soft heels), from Bellevue, Wash., designer Britta Bacon, selling recently in Toronto for $39.95 (Cdn) a pair; and (2) a rotating ice cream cone on which the scoop gently revolves counterclockwise, so that lazy people merely stick their tongues out and need not actively lick (sold by Kitchen Craft in the UK). Leading Economic Indicators -- The U.S. government’s $100 billion stimulus distributed to taxpayers this spring achieved mixed results, according to economists, but at least the Internet pornography industry flourished (according to a July trade association spokesman). Adult Internet Market Research Co. reported that “20 to 30 percent” of “adult” Web sites reported that sales rose during the time checks were being issued. However, Nevada brothels were suffering, even though Hof’s Bunny Ranch ran a stimulus-check special: Hand over your $600 check and get the usual $1,200 “party” (“three girls and a bottle of champagne”). -- A July Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that professional fundraisers keep so much of the money donated to charity by conscientious, generous-minded people that 430 different California charities over the last 10 years got not one penny of the contributions. In fact, in 337 cases, the charity paid an additional fee on top of getting nothing back (but did come away with the donors’ names and addresses, for further solicitation). Philanthropy watchdogs say fundraisers should never keep more than 35 cents on the dollar, but the Times found the overall average was 54 cents, and for missing-children charities, fundraisers kept 86 cents. (Fundraisers for an organization called Citizens Against Government Waste kept 94 cents.) Frontiers of Science -- A 10-year-old British boy had such a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder that he was overwrought with guilt that he had caused the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks, in that he had not been able that day to make his ritual step upon a particular mark in the street. Writing in June in the journal Neurocase, psychologists at University College London said the boy recovered only when they convinced him that the attacks had already started by the time he would have made his usual step. -- Many nations are exploring how to curb cattle’s release of the greenhouse gas methane, including altering cows’ diets to reduce flatulence (which requires monitoring the gas compositions from the old and new diets). To collect the gas for measurement (according to a July report in London’s Daily Telegraph), researchers at Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology rigged a large plastic tank to the cow’s back, with a tube to the backside to directly capture each emission. (The alternative, researchers pointed out, would require a human to follow a cow around with plastic bags.) (Copyright 2008 Chuck Shepherd. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.) By Glenn McCoy |
