Restaurant Review: Los Hermanos. Provo, Utah.

Located on Center Street in downtown Provo, this place serves good food. They start you out with a generous portion of chips and salsa. Their special fruit smoothies are touched with sweetness but not overpowering -- they use fruit sherbets instead of crushed ice. The place deserves to be crowded night and day. And usually is.

My daughter Sarah had the fish tacos and I had Chile Rellenos. Lance had the Little Amigo plate. We had Guadalajara guacamole for an appetizer, and two special fruit drinks. It all came to $45.67. I was so busy with my big helping that I hardly looked at the decor, which features original Hispanic paintings and rows of  colorful pinatas.

 The grand kids had to monkey with their water and straws until the table top was a swamp. This reminded me of a funny story which I began to tell Sarah, but then forgot the punch line. So I threw some refried beans at her as a distraction . . .

Sarah's fruit drink was full of kiwi fruit. Mine was full of strawberries. Sarah let her kids drink most of her fruit drink. I wouldn't let the little finks get near mine -- I mean, I love the little weasels, but you've got to draw the line somewhere!

I don't know why I pulled such a cretinous face for this photograph, except that I have a lingering case of the creeping crud that is making its way up and down Utah Valley -- half the people I know have come down with it, and nobody yet has fully recuperated. I myself think it's the dirty air we get here in winter. I told Sarah that in a few more years you would only be able to drive your car on even or odd days, not both. She doesn't believe me.
Anyway. This place get Four Burps. Bring anyone you like here; and you should especially bring me here as often as you can if you don't want a gypsy curse hurled at you.

He meets us where we are

"He meets us where we are."     Carole M. Stephens. 

He meets us where we are, no matter where we've been.
He heals us straight away, from sorrow and from sin.
He loves us without guile, and knows each broken heart.
He is our Savior Lord, who will always take our part. 

Is Social Media a New Religion?

Much has been written about the ways the self-styled Islamic State group has manipulated social media to recruit foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria. But social media is also having a negative effect on social cohesion in other regions of the world, where it is often viewed as a tool for inflaming hatred, reinforcing biases and spreading misinformation.

from Religious News Service  

The Scriptures aren't read anymore.

The internet's what we adore.

Ev'ry subscriber

of all that is cyber

thinks that King James is a bore. 

Cecilia May Hathaway

My new grandchild, I bless you so
but peace and beauty you shall know.
Your parents' tender love will keep
you warm and safe while you do sleep.
May angels hover near at hand
and keep you gently, sweetly fanned.
Because you come from God, my child,
to us you bring sweet mercy mild. 

En Streng av Perler: The Mystery of Elephant Hill

I was blacklisted from the circus in 1980, so I went to vocational school for a third-class FCC engineer's license. You had to have one back then to work in radio, which I thought would be a pleasant change of pace from the rigors of the hippodrome. I was awarded such a license through Brown Institute of Broadcasting after nine months of mainly rote memorization.

During part of my exile I worked as the news director for KIWA Radio in Sheldon, Iowa. This is a pinprick of a town in the northwestern part of the state near the South Dakota border. The town shelters many members of the Dutch Reformed Church, who have last names like Vander Ploeg, Tjeerd, and Veldhuisen. The trauma resulting from pronouncing these convoluted monikers on the air without a stumble eventually gave me a lingering case of tic douloureux. On occasion I still twitch in Morse code.

I quickly learned that as an outlier I was not privy to the community's news simply by asking for it.  In that conservative and religious enclave, the news media is anathema. It was suspected that I would embellish any story I got my mitts on, until it resembled a farcical fairy tale and not the plain unvarnished truth. And that included time and temperature, mijn vriend.

 The daily dispatch logs from the police department and the sheriff's department, which contained many a juicy tidbit about the shenanigans of the demimonde, and which by law were open to the public, were always being 'updated' or otherwise made unavailable to me. The State Patrol never called me with an accident report, and when I called them I was fobbed off onto a superannuated secretary who could only repeat, parrot-like, "Nothing of interest today; call back tomorrow."

I asked the station manager for help in prying open the floodgates of information, but he was worse than useless. He kept a model train set in the basement of the station, where he and the town council spent innumerable hours putzing around with O gauge rolling stock. "Just give them time to warm up to you" was his constant refrain. Another Ice Age would come and go before THAT would happen.

I was worried about how to keep my job if I couldn't wheedle the news out of such deadwood. Losing another job would not sweeten my wife Amy's disposition in the least.

I had to crib items from local newspapers. I seized every single person who walked into the station on business, dragged them back into my studio, and taped interviews with them about anything I could think of. This led to some decidedly off-kilter stories. Such as "Overdue library book fines are a racket", and "Do you know how hard it is to find a public restroom in downtown Sheldon?"

I had started out on the job with dreams of becoming the Voice You Can Trust for the good people of O'Brien County; but I was quickly becoming instead That Man Who Don't Know Nothin'. Even the school board meetings were off-limits to me; the station manager's wife was a teacher at the high school, so she covered the school board meetings for the station (as well as announced the daily lunch menu for the grade school, the middle school, and the high school --  I never knew Tater Tots were so essential to the educational process).

One morning while I was on the air reading some yard sale announcements I noticed that several of them were to be held in the vicinity of Elephant Hill. Why is it called Elephant Hill, I wondered out loud on the air; is it shaped like an elephant or something? As soon as I was off the air I got a mysterious phone call; the speaker would not identify himself except to say he knew the real story of elephant hill. A mastodon skull had been found there by a farmer back in the 1940's. The farmer sold it to the Bell Museum up in Minneapolis. That's why it's called elephant hill, the man said. Then he hung up.

I placed a call to the Bell Museum to ask if they still had a mastodon skull, or had ever had one. The receptionist didn't think they ever had such a thing, but she would check and call me back. She called back an hour later to say their records did not show such a fossil in their catalog.

Oh boy, at long last a real scoop!

That evening I opened my 6 O'clock News by intoning: "The mystery of Elephant Hill continues to deepen. Reports that the hill's name comes from a fossil mastodon skull discovered there over seventy years ago and sold to a Minneapolis museum have proven to be incorrect. The Bell Museum of Natural History has no record of ever receiving or displaying a mastodon skull. I'll have the closing pork belly futures right after this important message from The Anhydrous Ammonia Association."

My story stirred things up in Sheldon and surrounding O'Brien County. It seemed like everyone had their own story or theory about Elephant Hill. One faction claimed a circus had played near the hill in question back in the 1930's and that their elephant had sickened and died there -- so it had been interred in the hillside and the place was called Elephant Hill ever since. Anyone who thought different, this group implied, would have difficulty distinguishing feces from shoe polish. Another group insisted there once had been a barn on the property that had an elephant painted on it -- that's how the name came about. A little old lady, clearly as dotty as they come, came to the station to insist I record her memories of the terrible elephantitis epidemic that had swept through the community in 1929; the victims had been buried in a mass grave on that hillside. And if you went up on Elephant Hill in the moonlight you could still hear their ghostly moans. Since she was the grandmother of the Chief of Police I decided to give that recording the Rose Mary Woods treatment and conveniently 'misplaced' it.

I milked that mystery for nearly two weeks, without ever announcing a reasonable explanation (there wasn't any), until the O'Brien County Fair started up and I got an exclusive on a farm wife who did seed portraits of religious figures like Martin Luther and Billy Sunday.

Hot diggity; I was finally on a roll!

And then, mirabile dictu, my circus ban was lifted. I was offered a gig at Disneyland, where they were gathering a "Grand Comedy Cavalcade of Clowns" for the Easter season to boost attendance. The money was good. Certain I could find a permanent position there, I handed my two-week notice to the station manager while he was fiddling with some wye tracks. It all happened in the space of one day. I didn't bother consulting my wife Amy, because I was sure that as a loyal spouse she would want me to follow the dictates of my restless jester's heart.

 I never knew a woman could heave a two quart slow cooker so far, and with such accuracy.

Restaurant Review: Fat Daddy's Pizzeria. Provo, Utah.

I hate reviews that leave you hanging until the last minute about whether the place is any good or not. I've been guilty of that a few times, I know. So let me start by saying you should eat here. They are at 22 S. Freedom Blvd. They sell by the slice and by the pie. The pizza is floppy and juicy and tangy and crusty -- it's what made America fall in love with this Federally Recognized Food Group in the first place.

I also had something called a pepperollie -- it's a bread stick stuffed with mozzarella and pepperoni. Like a calzoni without pretensions.

One slice of pizza and one pepperollie costs $5.00. Never mind the decor or ambiance or wait staff or who's President of the United States. When you and your friends and your family want good pizza, this is the place. I give it Four Burps with no reservations.

Group of U-Va. students, faculty ‘deeply offended’ by Thomas Jefferson being quoted at school he founded

When Jefferson cannot be quoted
without being labeled as 'foetid',
the nadir's been reached;
our country is beached.
The idiots rule now full-throated. 

Serve a Stranger

"Whatever our age or circumstance, let service be our “watchcry.” Serve in your calling. Serve a mission. Serve your mother. Serve a stranger. Serve your neighbor. Just serve."  Carl B. Cook. 

Service is a boomerang, returning to your hand
all that you have given and much more than you had planned.
So throw it like a prodigal and never fear the waste;
when you boost another it will leave a pleasant taste.
Succumbing to temptation to help others ought to be
a vice I never conquer, that gets worse eternally.  

En Streng av Perler: Clown Alley Gets Religion!

My mother was Catholic. My father venerated Micky Spillane. He would drive mom and us kids to Saint Lawrence Catholic Church for Mass on Sunday mornings, and then stay in the car smoking and reading Micky Spillane paperbacks until we came out. He didn't care one way or the other about his wife's religion, as long as he could follow the adventures of Mike Hammer making out with some blonde bimbo while plugging away at the bad guys.

After my First Communion I dropped the Catholic faith; I was leaning towards my dad's disinterest while hiding a deep yearning for mystical experiences. When I joined Ringling Brothers at age 18 as a clown the only dogma I followed was "Anything for a laugh."  My first week on the show I ran a rope six inches above the ground across the track just as all the showgirls came traipsing by -- they fell over it like bowling pins. I got my laugh from the audience. I also got the eternal hatred of most of the showgirls that season, and my first of many stern warnings from Performance Director Charlie Baumann:

"Dun't do dat kind uf schtuff again, funnyman" he growled at me in his thick Teutonic accent. He was also the tiger trainer, and always carried his whip with him while working -- after delivering his grim warning he flourished it above my head in a figure 8 pattern. I looked properly chastened, but when he turned his tuxedoed back on me I gave him a silent raspberry.

As I got to know the thirty-odd clowns in the alley that first season I noticed that only one ever bothered to go to church on Sunday. That was Tim Holst, nicknamed Bear for his roly-poly contours, who was a Mormon.

Everybody knew Mormons were wet blankets and closet satyrs. But one day he said "Hi Tork" to me and offered to split his smoked turkey leg from Winn-Dixie with me. A few days later the Elders showed up at the train car to tell me about something called The Plan of Happiness. I liked it, and asked Bear to baptize me on New Year's Day, 1972.

My conversion went unnoticed in clown alley. "Live and let live" was standard operating procedure for a group of thirty men tasked with creating chaos in the ring while trying to maintain some kind of sanity outside of it. There were Jews like Prince Paul and Murray Horowitz; Catholics like Lazlo Donnert and Kockmanski; Protestants like Don Washburn and Swede Johnson; Baptists like Boss Clown Levoi Hipps; and now there were two Mormon First of Mays added to the mix. So what? Everyone kept busy combing out their fright wigs and reinforcing their galluses with Velcro, and minded their own business.

Until, that is, Tinny got religion in a big way and tried to shove it down the throat of Spike and the rest of clown alley.

Tinny and Spike had been boon companions, roistering until the pearly dawn and pursuing carnal adventures best left to the pages of Hustler magazine. Their language was peppered with profane obscenities that would curdle the pointed ears of Lucifer himself. They were abandoned sinners, and proud of it.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, Tinny stumbled into a tented revival meeting during a lull in his nightly debauch, sans Spike, who was hot in pursuit of a solitary trollop. Something in what the itinerant preacher said broke through Tinny's hardened heart and touched him deeply. He knelt before the pine board altar that night and committed himself to a new and clean way of living.

Spike was disgusted with his friend's decision, refusing to listen to him and his 'pablum'. But Tinny was now concerned not just for his own immortal soul but for Spike's, and for everyone's in clown alley.

Tinny became a pest.

He read out loud from the Bible while we put on our makeup for come in. He kept asking each of us if we had been saved. To which Dougie Ashton replied "No, but I been recycled." Tinny passed out pamphlets and knelt next to his wardrobe trunk in deep but not quiet prayer for our misguided souls.

Finally Spike had enough; one afternoon in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as Tinny began to preach about the laying on of hands, Spike shot up from his folding chair with a pious shriek to announce he had just been "saved". He then went from clown to clown to lay his hands on the top of each head, bellowing the whole time "You are HEALED, sinner!" Prince Paul called him a schmuck and threw his mirror at him. Tinny did not take the satire kindly; he launched himself at Spike, and in a trice clown alley was transformed into a scuffling and cursing scene not far from Dante's Inferno.

Bear and I and Swede managed to bail out just as Baumann came roaring down upon the brawling clowns like an avalanche. He knocked heads together, flicked his whip none too carefully, and finally restored a semblance of peace and order. Everyone was fined ten dollars for fighting. Tinny and Spike were rusticated back to Winter Quarters in Venice, Florida, for a week, to meditate upon their folly. This was a not uncommon practice when personal issues between clowns threatened the quiet and dignity of clown alley. They had to pay their own way and got no salary for a week; it usually persuaded the feuding parties to kiss and make up.

A week later Spike showed up in clown alley, fresh as a daisy and completely unrepentant. When asked what had become of Tinny he replied with relish that the pious fraud had gotten drunk down at the Myakka Bar (a notorious dive in Venice that catered exclusively to cutthroats and white slavers). Tinny had tried to burn down the bar when they cut him off, and was now cooling his heels for sixty days in the county clink in Sarasota.

Tinny eventually rejoined clown alley, hollow-eyed and silent. He no longer tried to spread the good word, but neither did he rejoin Spike in his wicked ways. We didn't exactly welcome him back with open arms, but neither did anyone razz him about his previous religious mania. Not even Spike. Live and let live. The prop boxes needed repainting and a dozen new foam rubber animals needed to be carved for use in the clown car gag. Salvation could wait until the off season.

Restaurant Review: Wild Ginger. Provo, Utah.

My son Adam wants to retire from business by the age of forty so he and his family can go on LDS missions to foreign countries. He's nearly forty and he's nearly reached his goal; he told me today that his websites produce enough income to pay his mortgage each month, so a little more tweaking and fiddling should see him set for life. I told him he should put in for a service mission to Thailand, my old stomping grounds. His reaction to my suggestion was neutral; but then, his reaction to most of his father's sage advice and counsel is also neutral . . .

I took him to Wild Ginger for lunch today, on University Avenue near the Library. He had a short order of sushi; I had sesame beef.

He seemed okay with the sushi -- he's on some kind of calorie-restricted diet, so he only ate four pieces. My sesame beef was sweet and tangy, almost like barbecue sauce. It was a big portion, so I asked for a container to take the leftovers home -- but it turned out I liked it so much that I ate all of it in one sitting. For all I know my container is still sitting on the table back at Wild Ginger, a puzzling relic to our waiter.

Adam's sushi and my sesame beef cost a total of $20.49. I give the place Four Burps, easy. You can take anyone there for any occasion.