Paul Horner

Paul Horner gropes truth for a thrill.

He peddles a low grade of swill.

I doubt very much

that he has the touch

to put Donald Trump on the Hill.

A tyrant is my schedule

"May you be vigilant in tending the flock of God in ways consistent with your circumstances . . . "    Jeffrey R. Holland. 


A tyrant is my schedule; it doesn't let me sleep.
I follow it most slavishly like any mindless sheep.
It sends me off to work and dictates when I eat my meals;
it disallows daydreaming and keeps turning little wheels.
But finally I break the chains, and for a little while
I visit with my neighbor and pause just to give a smile.
God knows I'm not a hero who can move a mountain peak;
I must return to bondage that I label my 'workweek'.
But I'll escape again real soon to wander carefully,
looking for the good that I can do for you and me.  

En Strengen av Perler: God Throws Money Out the Window

"God throws money out the window" my mother always said. What she meant by that was unclear to me as a boy, and remains something of an enigma today as I totter towards the grave. But she was convinced it was a true saying, and that it covered a lot of ground when it came to economics.

I first heard her say it when my dad won a pink Cadillac convertible with a raffle ticket purchased from one of the priests at Saint Lawrence in Southeast Minneapolis. The raffle was to raise money for renovating the grade school. Someone with very pious bad taste had donated the vehicle, and when my dad drew the winning ticket he immediately loaned the car to his crony Skeets to drive up to Northern Wisconsin for the smelt run. Inordinately fond of smelt fried in lard, with the heads still on, my dad licked his chops in anticipation of Skeets returning with brimming tubs of Osmeridae -- but when several weeks passed without Skeets or the Caddy returning dad became restive.

"Damn that Bohunk!" he griped to my mother. "You can never trust a Pollack to do anything right!" Dad liked to mix his racial epithets the same way he liked to mix whiskey and 7 Up. Skeets eventually showed up, sheepishly explaining that the car was now part of a fish hatchery in Lake Superior for reasons that remained rather hazy and indistinct, but involved a case of Leinenkuegel's and the daughter of a resort owner whose hair was not platinum after all.  

"There goes our trip to the Corn Palace!" dad said, rather cryptically. "And I just paid fifty bucks to have that thing repainted black."

"God throws money out the window" said mom, just as cryptically.

As I grew older but no sharper I wondered about money -- how to get it, how to spend it, but mostly how to get it. I held several menial positions while in high school, scraping together a pittance that would not have fed Mahatma Gandhi. I hated to work after school; it took me away from the mellow and soothing influence of the flickering television screen. I had the ambition of a garden slug.

And then I answered an ad in LIFE magazine and found myself a pupil at Clown College in Venice, Florida. Ringling Brothers decided I would fit a large number of their already-made show costumes, so I was hired at the staggering salary, to me, of ninety dollars a week.

Suddenly in the chips, one of my first extravagances was to buy all the White Castle hamburgers I could hold. I thought they were the most delicious and elegant comestibles on earth when my dad brought them home on a hot summer evening as a way to keep mom from getting heat stroke in the kitchen. But I was only allowed two of them. Now that I was earning my own money, I ordered a dozen of 'em when the show played Indianapolis, and ate every blessed one. Then went to the ER to have my stomach pumped -- which cost a heck of a lot more than the the twelve sliders did.

So I was out the cost of a dozen White Castle burgers and the ER fee, which I recall was about fifty bucks.

After that I limited my splurging to books. I haunted used book stores like a ghoul in a graveyard, pawing over Asimov paperbacks and crumbling Book of the Month Club hardcovers like Osa Johnson's I Married Adventure. My roomette on the train quickly filled with so many books that I was hard put to pull down the Murphy bed and latch it to the opposite wall so it wouldn't bounce back up in the middle of the night, with me in it.

While ninety dollars a week seemed a princely sum to me, it did not impress my co-workers in clown alley. The other First of Mays found ways and means to expand their income. Bear worked cherry pie, helping to set up and tear down in each town, for which he earned an additional twenty-five dollars each week. Chico loaned money to the improvident roustabouts, demanding and getting an astounding vigorish. Others formed liaisons with gullible showgirls and lived off of them.

Still, at the end of that first season I had managed to put away a tidy sum in the bank. I moved back in with my parents with free room and board and smugly awaited events.

I pass over many of those events to the year 1986, when the cry rang out through my own little family of one wife and six kids, "We've got to cut back on spending!" This hallowed trope from many a TV sitcom and B movie was inspired by the escalating cost of providing for a growing bribe that insisted on eating three times a day and wearing clothes that fit. Such unreasonable demands never seemed to stop.

 I'd spent many a season on the road as a clown; some of them had proved profitable, and some had not. Now it seemed the unprofitable seasons were outnumbering the profitable ones to a distressing degree. I had to map out a plan of action to keep the wolf from licking the rosemaling off our door.

First on my list was a call to my parents, asking for a temporary loan to help pay for some unexpected car repair bills and a swingeing great doctor's fee stemming from two of my boys believing they could coast safely to the ground from the roof of the house with the use of cardboard wings. Their fuselages had needed major patching up.

My dad said "No" and hung up. This I had expected. But mom had a soft spot for her grand kids, so I called again when dad was at work. Her response was sympathetic but also negative. It seemed that dad was soon to be retired from Aarone's Bar and Grill, where he had worked and drank for some forty years. So, mom ended sadly, there wasn't anything she could do because . . . "God throws money out the window."

So I took a second job selling educational video cassette tapes in the evening over the phone. It was just as exciting and profitable as it sounds. As this was the winter off season, I was working days as Santa Claus at the Rosedale Mall.

Just as we began to pull ahead financially the one and only upstairs bathtub popped a rivet; the resulting leak left a sinister brown boil on the dining room ceiling. The plumber's inspection revealed pipes so rotten with age and rust that the repair bill would surpass the annual state budget for Guinea-Bissau.

We worked out a payment plan with the plumber, a Mr. Dix whose little white van featured a grinning man in blue overalls with a balloon over his head reading "When you're in a fix, call Dix!"

It certainly was a fix; there would be no Christmas tree that year and no trip to Grandma and Grandpa's up in North Dakota. Presents would be of the Dollar Store variety. But at least we'd have a bathtub again. In the meantime, a jury-rigged system of buckets and tubes in the basement provided an interesting demonstration of hydraulics as applied to the principals of bathing.

I cursed myself as a fool for buying a home; I should have invested in a trailer, and then we could all have traveled together when I hit the road as a clown! In the winters we could snuggle down at a trailer park in the Florida Keys. Now we had nothing but bills to look forward to until the sun rose in the west.

Christmas came and went, and it was not as cheerless as I had dreaded. The kids played outside in the snow while Amy and I shredded Past Due notices into doilies for the dinner table -- which featured a steaming pot of mac and cheese, with canned peaches for dessert.

When the large check arrived from an old clown alley pal, in repayment, he said, for several gag ideas I'd given him when he went to work for Chuck Jones at Warner Brothers, I could only shake my head and repeat "God throws money out the window."

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.