Blessing My Eye -- New Knoxville Voice column

The KV Web site doesn't appear to be getting updated anymore, so I suggest you run out and pick up a hard copy. You'll understand why after you read this column.

Blessing My Eye

The Lord works in mischievous ways

by Scott McNutt

A blessing was loaned to me. Well, technically, it was addressed to "RESIDENT - TO A FRIEND." But written right on the envelope were the words, "This very old church loans this to you, to bless someone connected with this home." I’m a resident, and there must be someone left I’m a friend to, so I figure it was meant for me.

The letter was from Saint Matthew’s Church, P.O. Box, Tulsa, Oklahoma. And what a delightfully emphatic, colorful, bolded and underlined letter it was. So taken with it was I that I was persuaded to do its bidding.

It grabbed me with its inclusive salutation ("Dear…Someone Connected with This Address"), then wooed me with the examples of "financial blessings of all types (III John 2, Philippians 4:19) – better jobs, raises in salaries, being able to buy and sell homes, buying new cars, and so on." An enclosed flyer gave testament that miracles do happen. For instance, a Ms. Y.G.’s mom received a letter from a friend on "Feb. 22…which was a Sunday evening." After this miraculous Sunday-delivery letter, Ms. Y.G. was blessed with $46,888.20.

The clincher was the church’s honest concern for my well being. "If you need more joy, peace, health, money, a new car, a new house, healing in family communication, or whatever," read the appeal, "we, as a very old (57 years) church, want to know about it." So I elected to use the enclosed blessing, which was in the form of an "ANOINTED PRAYER RUG OF FAITH."

The Anointed Prayer Rug of Faith is a carpet of many colorful adjectives. The letter variously describes it as "this unusual, Bible Faith, Church, Prayer Rug; "this Biblical Faith Church Prayer Rug"; "this Holy Ghost, Bible Prayer Rug"; and "this Church Ministry, Prayer Rug." And that’s in just the first two paragraphs.

The Church Prayer Rug folds out from letter size to 11 by 17 inches. It has elaborate purple and gold floral main and inner borders around a lavender portrait of a closed-eyed, thorny-crowned Jesus. The letter promises that if you relax and look straight into His eyes, "you will see His eyes slowly opening, and He will begin looking back at you. Jesus sees your needs." So I did. And He did. Another miracle!

The letter instructed me to go into an empty room ("just God and you," it said), turn off the television and radio and kneel on this Holy Ghost, Bible Prayer Rug. There I was to pray for the needs facing me. Then I was to check my prayer needs on page 2 of the letter, and place the prayer rug on my knees, in a Bible or under my side of the bed, just for the night. However, the letter assured me that if I didn’t have a Bible, a bed or knees to place the rug on, "it’s okay."

Then I was to mail my list of "whatever you need prayer for" and the Church, Faith, Prayer Rug to the P.O. box in Tulsa within 24 hours, so the church could rush the rug to "another family that’s in need of a blessing." If I wanted to include a "seed gift to God’s work," that was okay too.

I considered the instructions. Turn off the television and radio, it said. It was a spiritual struggle, but I turned the TV off. Go somewhere where you and God can be alone, it said. I went into the kitchen, where there is no television and only a small radio. Anyway, one always invites guests into the kitchen for coffee, and I thought maybe God could fix Himself a cup of java while I was completing the instructions.

Spread the rug on the floor, it said, and I did. Kneel on this Church Prayer Rug, it said, and the full enormity of what I was about to do struck me. They were instructing me to deliver a WWE-style double-knee-to-the-head Smackdown! on Christ Our Eyes Wide Shut Savior.

So I did. I double-kneed Jesus in the head and pinned His Prayer Rug to the mat. And both my knees fit on that small rectangle of paper. Yet another miracle!

Then I prayed really hard. I prayed for $46,888.20, the same amount as Ms. Y.G., who had been blessed by Prayer Rug power. I figured, the Lord’s done that amount before, so why not make it easy on Him?

Then I looked up. And I beheld our poor little pup, who, because of the way she’s built, is sorely afflicted in the struggle to lick her butt. It’s a mighty trial for the wretched creature, stretching, stretching and stretching her tongue but never quite reaching her goal. So I asked the Lord if He could see that she need lick her butt no more.

Then I saw that one of our cats was in the kitchen as well. And I prayed the Lord would strike it dead. Or at least make it stop peeing everywhere. And then I realized I had done something terribly, horribly wrong.

I had not followed the instructions, which said to pray where you were alone. If our angelic pooch’s presence in the kitchen hadn’t broken the rug’s heavenly pipeline, then the cat, which is the devil incarnate, surely had.

It’s harder to follow God’s will than I had imagined. I was lost. I would not receive my $46,888.20 blessing. Cody would be forever doomed with yearnings of unquenchable butt licking. The damned cat would live to pee another place. I sighed and got up, intending to mail the rug to the church. Another family was in need of its blessing, after all.

But then I thought, why limit the blessings of the super Prayer Rug to just the next person it’s passed to? I realized I could do the Lord’s work by multiplying the power of the Biblical Faith Church Prayer Rug many times, just like the blessing of the loaves and the fishes.

That’s the meaning of the picture below. I scanned the Prayer Rug into my computer, and I’m passing it along to all readers of Knoxville Voice, so untold multitudes may receive its blessing. If you have special grace, perhaps you’ll let your dog do a blessing on it too!

Note: Not actual unusual, Bible Faith, Church, Prayer Rug; not actual Christ, Our Eyes Wide Shut Savior. Objects in picture are closer than they appear.

(Saint Matthew’s Church invites you to learn more about them at www.biblicalprayer.com. You might also check out http://george.loper.org/trends/2003/Apr/815.html and www.trinityfi.org/press/ewing04.html to learn even more about this very 57-year-old church.)

new Knoxville Voice column -- Life Inference

Don't know when this'll be up on the KV web site -- it hasn't been updated in a while; but the latest issue's on the news stands now, so go grab yourself one.

Life Inference

Is it worth a darn?

by Scott McNutt

The cusp of a new year is always a good time to examine the significance of our existence on this plane. Why are we here? What’s the purpose? What’s the true value of a human life?

That last question’s been asked and answered since hunter Og whacked gatherer Ig over the head with his mammoth-hunting club during a dispute over restitution for mammoth prints in the barley patch, and Ig’s wife ran out shrieking, "Oi vei! Who is now to gather the hens’ eggs?"

Ancient philosophers abstracted a man’s worth in terms of his dedication to the community (i.e., the Greek "polis" and the Roman "civitas"). To end generations of retributive blood feuds, early English law fixed a price for a man’s life (i.e., the Anglo Saxon "wergild"). Timeless fables have measured a man’s life-worth by the dozens of good vibrations he sets off, which then ripple outward, spreading aid and comfort among souls unknown, of which the vibe originator isn’t even aware (i.e., the Frank Capra "movies"). Yes, for all our existence we have struggled to quantify the value of a single life. And for all our existence, we’ve been inadequate to the task.

Then we discovered life insurance.

It all began here when aliens from the planet Actuarius, hurrying to a clam bake in the Crab Nebula rammed into the Earth while their rocket-ship driver was checking the map to see if they'd already missed the ecliptic plane off-ramp. Dusting themselves off, the partygoers got out of their vehicle to assess the damage and see if they could figure out where they'd taken the wrong turn.

Sure enough, sighting the curve of the Little Bipper, they recognized the Big Bopper and realized they’d lost their way in the bird constellation Cygnus when they’d taken a break for some interstellar swan diving (easy for these aliens, having as they did the physiognomy of long-necked geese), possibly because of all the Coronas they’d gone through. Having oriented themselves, they hopped back in their cruiser and bopped along their merry way. But in their haste, the driver left behind his map.

An early human entrepreneur happened to find the alien chart. From it, he figured the probability of a spaceship coming from Actuarius actually colliding with theEarth, which, as it turned out, was really long odds. From this specific measurement of an astronomically high probability, the early entrepreneur realized he could extrapolate the probabilities for much more likely, terrestrial events.

He thought, "An Actuarial ship, moving with velocity A, hitting the Earth, moving with velocity B, has a probability value of C. So if Car C leaves Farragut heading East at 70 miles per hour, and Car D, traveling on the same road, leaves Ft. Sanders heading West at 50 miles per hour, the probability that they'll crash somewhere along the way and kill someone is something I can make a lot of money taking bets on."

His scheme more successful than he ever dreamed, the entrepreneur developed a whole series of Actuarial charts to identify the best life-or-death moneymaking bets. And in a masterstroke of marketing, he coined the user-friendly designation "life insurance," rather than going with the more apt "life gambling." Thus was launched another way to part money and marks.

Yes, the preceding is a pile of BS. It seems about as plausible, though, as the real history of actuarial tables - and slightly less dull. But if you are seriously interested in learning about the life insurance industry, you can go to www.lifeinsure.com.

There you will find all kinds of stuff on all things insurance - including an insurance blog. Yes, now there truly is a blog for everything. The site also includes a form that allows you to fill in all your personal data, including height, weight, age, systolic rate, cholesterol count, personal habits, medical history, and family medical history (including whether great-uncle Nerwin died from a breathing obstruction caused by an overabundance of matted nose hairs in nineteen-aught-eight).

In return for your taking the time to fill out the form, the site will helpfully tell you that you left an entry square blank seven pages back. It will persist in telling you this no matter how many times you go back through and complete the form. This quandary helps you understand your desperate need for some kind of life insurance – you realize you could die of old age while filling out the form that’s supposed to estimate how much life insurance will cost you.

As you probably already guessed, I’m writing about life insurance because I got some just in time for a new year – my own new year, that is. I got insurance before my own superannuation caused my rates to go up.

So now I’m worth a quarter-million dollars dead to my wife. That set me thinking about how we measure a person’s worth, because I know some company shelling out 250,000 smackers for my delectable corpus delicti doesn’t measure my true worth as a person. I can be bought a lot more cheaply. Offer me $100,000, and, baby, I’m all yours.

Anyway, to return to the topic at hand: a life’s worth. How do we define it? All those old Ogs and Igs (and Ig’s wife), those Greeks and Romans, those Anglos and Saxons, those Franks and Capras, they had their answers, however incomplete. Still, maybe they had it mostly right. Perhaps it’s in our struggle to define life’s worth that we find its value.

Whether we can afford to buy $10 thousand or $10 million of life insurance, we intuitively know that those monetary figures are not a true reckoning of our worth to the people in our lives. We know life is worth more than that; we just don’t know how much more - or even exactly what we’re measuring it with, or against.

But as long as we strive to assess a value for life, we give life worth. In other words, as long we don’t take life for granted, we are investing it with worth, even if we can’t say precisely how much its value is. In other other words, the act of wondering about life’s value demonstrates its worth.

Not buying that explanation? Prefer something more concrete? OK then, would you care to bet that if Car C leaves Farragut, heading East at 70 miles per hour, while Car D...?

seasonal cartoon for inMotion magazine

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Illustration for a story on the history of prosthetics in inMotion magazine

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New story: Mail-order DNA test reveals mutts' breed heritage

Mail-order DNA test reveals mutts' breed heritage

Heirs of the dog

SCOTT MCNUTT, NEWS@KNEWS.COM
Monday, December 10, 2007

The Young-Williams Animal Center listed our dog, Dakota, as a beagle mix. But an arching, curly tail and other oddities convinced my wife Dana that Cody (Dakota’s nickname) had a different lineage.

A foot high at the shoulder and two feet from nose to tailbone, 1-year-old Cody weighed a surprising 27 pounds. The dog’s muscular build, thick neck, powerful jaws and barrel chest prompted Dana to dub Cody “the world’s tiniest pit bull.” Friends guessed Cody might have Welsh corgi, basenji and terrier in her...

For the full story:

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/dec/10/mail-order-dna-test-reveals-mutts-breed-heritage/

Knoxberry, USA -- Knoxville Voice column

This will probably be up on the site eventually, but you can alway pick up the hard copy at any of these fine locations:

http://www.knoxvoice.com/find-us.html

Es

Knoxberry, USA

Potentially popular TV programming?

By Scott McNutt

The screenwriters’ strike offers the perfect opportunity to create a Knox County-based TV show. Because our county government is so abysmally dysfunctional, the show would write itself. Imitation being the sincerest form of profit in the television industry, maybe our show could be "The Mikey Ragsdale Show," about Mikey Taylor, mayor of the sleepy Appalachian community, Knoxberry. He’d have a son, Lumpy, and helping him raise the boy would be his Aunt Cynthia (Aunt C for short) and Deputy Mayor Armstrong "Army" Mike; plus there’d be the well-meaning interference of the community’s colorful, incompetent eccentrics.

To show how easy it would be to script this thing, here’s a sample episode:

Stage Directions: (Mikey swings open his office door. Inside, Mikey’s always-befuddled assistant, Army, is sitting on the side of Mikey’s desk, fiddling with a charge-card swiper.

Army leaps up, startled, and twists around, trying to conceal the machine. Tangled in the device’s cord, he rips the wires out, shocking himself in the process.)

Army: Ye-OWTCH!

Mikey: Army, how many times have I told you to keep your P-Card holstered?

Army: I wasn’t using it, Mij, honest I wasn’t. Dad-blamed malfunctioning doodads! It just started beeping at me! I warned it to keep its peace. This is the mayor’s office. We have to maintain some dignity, don’t we? We can’t just have dadburned machines up and beeping, can we? Nip it in the beep, I say. But the infernal thing just kept up the racket. It was challenging my authority is what it was. I had to subdue it.

Mikey: Subdue it? Army?

Army: All right! All right. It wasn’t cooperating, so I had to wheel tax it. It was disrespecting me is what it was!

Mikey: Arm, we been over and over this. You can’t go wheel taxing everything that don’t behave like you want it to. Now, if—

(A tremendous racket cuts off Mikey’s next sentence as Commissioner Scoobers Pile bursts into the office.)

Scoobers: (Out of breath) Mayor Mikey! Mayor Mikey!

Mikey: Scoobers! Just settle down now, Scoobers. Get your wind back, then tell us what’stroubling you.

Scoobers: Hootie-hoo, Mikey, I do thank yew for helpin’ me gather my thoughts together, ’cause like my Grandma Pile used to say, ‘If thoughts ye don’t gather, yew’ll only blather.’ So I do thank yew, thank yew, thank yew. Yes, I do. (Pause.) Well, I guess I’ll be gettin’ back to the commission. (Scoobers starts to exit.)

Mikey: Scoobers? Wasn’t they something you’s going to tell us?

(Standing half through the doorway, Scoobers gapes at Mikey for a moment, then yanks the door shut.)

Scoobers: Well, Sha-zay-um! Fer shame, fer shame, fer shame! I guess my brains’d be wanderin’ behind the forest critters if they weren’t stuck plumb inside my noggin. Yes, Mayor Mikey, they was something. Them P-Cards yew told me weren’t goin’ to be gettin’ no more charges from must be faulty, ’cause that little approvin’ machine down to the commission wuz just chirrupin’ up a storm.

Mikey: Was it? (Darts eyes at Deputy Army, who erstwhile makes a great show of rummaging in a filing cabinet.)

Scoobers: That it wuz. I know we’d got them gas and maintenance charges squared away, but gol-ol-ol-lee, the little feller liked to beat the band, a-clicking and a-whirring and a-spitting out little bits of paper. Then—

Mikey: I get the picture, Scoobers. Well, Army?

Army: It was just one piddling little tax charge! You have to believe me, Mikey!

Scoobers: Commissioner’s aye-ray-yest! Commissioner’s aye-ray-yest!

Army: Nip him! Nip him in the butt, Mij!

Mikey: Simmer down, the both of ye. Now, Army, I said you could have one charge if you kept it—

Scoobers: Mayor Mikey—

Mikey: Not now, Scoobers. I said, ‘If you kept— ’

(The door is thrown open again and in strolls Aunt C with Lumpy in tow.)

Aunt C: Oh, Mi-KEEEEEEY! My family credit card isn’t working, and I was trying to buy lobsters to make more of the pickled lobster tails you love so much.

(Mikey is stricken with caution.)

Scoobers: That’s what I wuz trying to tell yew, Mayor Mikey. That little machine kept a-spittin’ out charge after charge from Aunt C. I figured it must be stuck, so I pulled the plug on it. I thought that might be a help.

Mikey: (Only half-listening to Scoobers) The pickled lobster tails I love so much?

Lumpy: Pa—

Mikey: In a minute, Lumpy. Aunt C? The tails?

Aunt C: Mikey, dear, the batch I made last night for my sorority’s sewing circle is already gone, so I knew you ate them. (Mayor Mikey starts to sputter in protest, but Aunt C cuts him off.) There’s no use in making a fuss pretending you didn’t. It’s a flattery that you enjoy them so much. So I just went down to the corner store to get some more lobsters, and while I was there, I thought I would buy a few things, like a few trips to my regional sorority gatherings, a few more lobsters, you know, necessities. And do you know? The silly card wouldn’t work.

Mikey: Aunt C, which card were you using?

Lumpy: Pa—

Aunt C: The family card, of course.

Mikey: But Scoobers here says they were going on the P-Card account.

Aunt C: Why, Mikey! That is a family card.

Mikey: (Groaning.) Now, Aunt C, I have told you and told you and told you that the P-Card is for county business only.

Aunt C: Mikey, I thought I raised you smarter than this. Aren’t you Mayor of Knoxberry?

Mikey: Yes, Aunt C, but that don’t—

Lumpy: Pa—

Aunt C: Don’t interrupt, Lumpy. (To Mikey) If you are the county mayor, then county business is your business. And your business is your family’s business, so family business is county business.

Mikey: (Ponders for a moment) I reckon I never skuck up on it that way, Aunt C. You’re wiser than a hoot owl, and at least twiced as lovable. Scoobers, hook that machine back up. That’s settled, but we still have a poser. I know I didn’t eat them lobster tails. Who— ?

Lumpy: (Sheepishly) I ate ’em, Pa.

Aunt C: Lumpy, you scamp!

Mikey: Well, for the love of— C’mon, son, let’s get your stomach pumped. That lobster’s not yew’s to a-et.

Aunt C: We’llput it on the P-Card!

(All exit, whistling.)

KNS freelance piece --Agee Park dedication

Making their mark at James Agee Park

Volunteers, donors honored for roles in improvements

Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam led a celebration Sunday honoring those who have contributed to James Agee Park, located at the corner of Laurel Avenue and James Agee Street in the Fort Sanders neighborhood, a block from where the Pulitzer Prize-winning author grew up.

 

"It's a celebration of volunteers and donors who have helped improve the park, especially some recent improvements," said architect and Fort Sanders resident Randall DeFord, who has been involved with the park's development since its early stages...

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/nov/26/making-their-mark-at-james-agee-park/