HEAVY WEATHER 2008: HAGUPIT!

Here we go again. We are at Typhoon Signal No.1 for the fourth time this year.

This week’s typhoon: Hagupit!



If my Wednesday afternoon seminar gets canceled, I’m going to be seriously annoyed. I have a magazine article riding on it.

FUN FACT: Hagupit is a Tagalog word for “flog”. Which is either good or bad, depending on how you spend yr weekends.

Everywhere I go it rains on me,

This is dF

REMEMBER THE ALAMO

So I was watching the morning news here in Hong Kong Kong, and the second story is about the raid of the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries compound in Fouke, AR for allegedly running a kiddie porn ring.



Which was rather unexpected. Not Tony being raided – just seeing his name pop up on a Hong Kong newscast.

You see, Tony and I go back a ways. Tony was a fixture in Nashville where I grew up – partly because he ran a Country & Western clothing shop downtown that catered to the country music scene (ask Billy “Crash” Craddock if you don’t believe me), but mostly because his followers would hand out pamphlets at rock show queues claiming that the govt was Satanic and the Pope was a Nazi war criminal. That kind of thing. I still have one around here somewhere.

Anyway, he’s always been one of the kookier examples of extreme charlatan Christianity. I knew a woman who went to one of his churches out of morbid curiosity and found herself in the odd posotion of being in a so-called Christian church and fearing for her safety because the guards wouldn’t let her leave before the service was over.

Mind you, the kiddie porn angle is new (as far as I know). But I’m not really interested in defending the guy even if he wasn’t directly involved, so like my good friend Stone Cold Steve Austin once said: “Bye-bye, jackass!”

Awesome hair, though.

FUN FACT: Tony Alamo was the inspiration for the villain Tony Blammo in my spy spoof radio drama, The Adventures Of Solomon Grundy, in which he concocted a plot to take over the world by genetically engineering 50-foot armadillos to destroy every store in Nashville that sold shirts. (Yes, well, this is normally the sort of thing I come up with when I write teh fictions.)

Let the Lord have mercy cos I don’t have any,

This is dF