By By Lee Weyhrich
While flipping through the phone book the other day I ran across an ad for a hunting and fishing guide company that specializes in South African Safari's. As someone who rarely takes advantage of killing the local wildlife, the thought of killing deer-like animals in Africa was not exactly a page turner. What did make me stop, however, was this note at the bottom of the ad: "Malaria free."
Malaria is a deadly disease transmitted by mosquitoes that causes people to become extremely tired and sweaty. (In Alabama we call that summer, but I digress.) By stating that their safari is Malaria free this company is implying that other companies offer malaria as an option.
It's kind of like the smoking section in restaurants I guess.
"Safari for two in the non-malaria section, waiter."
Speaking of things that make you sick, the Runaway Bride has made headlines again this week making this the longest lasting pile of American trash since the New York garbage strike.
One of the hundreds of wedding guests that showed up just to find out that A.) he wouldn't have to sit through a ridiculously long wedding service, but B.) he also wouldn't be getting any cake, decided that he would make up for his lack-of-free-food induced depression by auctioning off his wedding invitation on eBay.
The winning bidder paid over $300 for the honor of owning a wedding invitation that won't be worth a dime when everyone forgets about this whole thing next week.
The guy that auctioned his invitation off should be given an award for trying to take that whole story down a couple of notches, but instead he has only prolonged the media exposure to the case and should be summarily beaten with his computer.
And speaking of prolonging a case, school officials in Benton Harbor, Mich. Tried to ban the middle school band from playing the song "Louie, Louie."
The middle school band has been playing the song for decades, the song came out nearly 50 years ago, and NOW teachers are worried about it.
Benton Harbor Superintendent Paula Dawning said she wanted the song banned for it's raunchy lyrics.
No one in America actually knows the words to the song. At the height of American paranoia when everything was considered subverse, perverse or communist the American government launched an investigation into the song's lyrics.
They found that the song was written by Richard Berry in 1956 though the original lyrics were lost. In 1963 the Kingsmen redid the song and the FBI spent two years investigating the lyrics to determine if they were obscene. They eventually found that the words were not only clean but it took them two years and a lot of government money to even decipher the lyrics at all.
While two years spent working on learning the words to a song seems obsessive it is important to note that the Benton Harbor Michigan School Board hasn't noticed, in several decades, that marching bands don't actually play the lyrics to any song.
So what have we learned this week?
It took America's government longer to research a song than it did for them to ratify the constitution, and the runaway bride should be sent on one of those "malaria optional" safari's. It's for the good of mankind.
Lee Weyhrich is the managing editor of the Atmore Advance. His column appears weekly.