Denise Grollmus, the reporter for the alternative weekly Cleveland Scene who did the ultimate Rex Humbard obituary [1], found a couple of teenage Amish party girls exploring alcohol and rock-and-roll at Twister’s Bar in Middlefield, Ohio, during their rumspringa years, and the result is “Amish Girls Gone Wild,” [2] which details the perils of buggy-driving while drunk, not to mention what happens when your mother catches you wearing jeans and hiding a cell phone in your purse. Fortunately the parents never hear the Eminem lyrics the girls know by heart.

Don’t Call Him the Voodoo Pope

We’re not supposed to refer to Max G. Beauvoir as the Voodoo Pope, even though who can resist that title now that the voodooists of Haiti have finally organized and elected Beauvoir as their “supreme master” [3]? Among Beauvoir’s skills, practiced at his Peristyle de Mariani Temple of Yehwe [4] on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, are goat sacrifice, totem-dancing, spirit-summoning, casting of spells, healing, herbal remedies, and biochemistry (thanks to his degrees from the Sorbonne and City College of New York). And zombies, of course. Beauvoir is the source for much of the research conducted by Harvard anthropologist Wade Davis for his book The Serpent and the Rainbow [5], best known in its movie form [6] as rendered by Wes Craven, who took a Hollywood crew to Haiti and barely escaped with his life after a riot, a sit-in, a siege, and evil spells resulting in the sickness of crew members. (Those last scenes are actually filmed in the Dominican Republic. The entire crew fled Haiti in the dead of night.) At any rate, Beauvoir says he’s determined to clean up the image of voodoo, and that its reputation for secrecy, sinister motives, spirit possession, violent ritual and animal mutilation is an invention of Hollywood and the media, and that anyone who takes a good hard look at the houngans and mambos who practice the religion day by day will be able to see that voodoo is a great benefit to Haiti and to mankind, and if you don’t believe that, then you’ll probably have a rat’s eye placed under your pillow tonight and it will cause you to dream of your intestines being devoured by jaguars.

34 Years Is All You Can Do? Jesus Says You’re So Fired

Kent Gramm, a popular English professor at Wheaton College for 20 years, just got fired [7] because he and his wife of 34 years are divorcing, which is against Wheaton rules, unless you have a “Biblical reason.” Gramm decided he didn’t want to give the reason [8], so university officials cited Matthew 19 and the letters of Paul (without stating which one) as they gave him the heave ho, because, as we all know, the New Testament is a list of rules to hit people over the head with when they screw up.

Yeah, Like That Verse About Free Enterprise

A Vatican poll [9] recently found that the United States was the “most Bible-literate” nation, but as soon as you read into the fine print, you see that a) they only conducted the poll in nine countries, all of them in Europe, and b) they weren’t sophisticated enough to realize that most people who claim to be recalling something from the Bible are actually recalling something from Ben Franklin (“Cleanliness is next to godliness”) or their crotchety grandfather (“Charity begins at home”).The crime is not that people don’t know what’s in the Bible, it’s that they load it up with new stuff. It’s already long enough, people.

Dude Rabbis Battling for Surf Rights

All right, how can there be two surfing rabbis? No sooner had I sung the praises of Yom Tov Glaser, the singing skateboarding surfing rabbi from Jerusalem [10] who recites the Kabbalah while playing Bob Marley covers, than a rabbi named Nachum Shifren [11] turns up in Los Angeles, also billing himself as the surfing rabbi as he promotes his new book, Kill Your Teacher: Corruption and Racism in Los Angeles City Schools. It’s a narrative of his 18 years as a secondary school teacher in the barrio, an experience that included the day when he showed up at Dorsey High School to find his classroom burned to the ground. Shifren claims he was eventually run out of the school system by youth gangs who resented his authoritarian ways and a series of administrators who pled with him to relax standards so students would “like him” more. The “Surfing Rabbi” tag came from his days as a professional surfer–same as Yom Tov Glaser, the Hasidic Party Rabbi–but his book sounds like a totally bogus, if not meshugenah, slacker wave to me.

Chinese to Tibet Supporters:WTF?

So, class, what have we learned? Don’t be seen on YouTube abusing a wheelchair athlete [12]. That’s the image that enraged the Chinese after the Olympic torch was besieged by protesters in Paris, one of whom was fended off by a brave Chinese wheelchair athlete who is now a national hero for protecting the torch from froth-mouth western Lama-lovers. The benefit for the U.S. is that the Chinese are now focused almost exclusively on boycotting French products [13], especially the Carrefour supermarket chain, to the point that President Sarkozy had to send a special envoy to apologize to the Politburo. McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and CNN are also on their radar, however. And once again the question must be asked: why are so many people in the west so anxious to demand independence for a people who say they don’t want independence [14]? At least the two sides are talking [15], although at this point it amounts to little more than “You’re violent!” “No, you’re violent!” Can’t the Buddhists and the Communists settle this in a Christian manner?