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LES SAUTERELLES - Ultrarare swedish pysch lp
People Different From Us
Police in Westerly, R.I., arrested Robert Brayman, 51, and his disciple Hobart Livingston in July and charged Brayman with commissioning Livingston to build a pipe bomb to kill a woman whom Brayman was stalking. According to police, Livingston believes Brayman has spiritual powers and submits himself nearly totally to Brayman, including having paid Brayman more than $13,000 over a three-year period for protection of actress Natalie Portman, whom Livingston believes is in danger from creature-implanted eggs that might otherwise hatch without Brayman's guardianship. Among the exercises Brayman uses to upgrade Livingston's avoidance of evil spirits: having Livingston try to dodge BB's fired by Brayman at a local cemetery. [Westerly Sun, 7-26-03]
Urban Legends Come to Life
According to an Associated Press dispatch, a bolt of lightning struck the steeple at the First Baptist Church in Forest, Ohio, on July 1 (damage: $20,000) just as a guest evangelist was beseeching God for a sign from above. And, though it's not quite the rocket ship of the urban legend, a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter is being configured with a 39,000-horsepower jet engine by a team of retired aircraft mechanics in Pierce County, Wash., to challenge the world land-speed record, according to a June story in the Tacoma (Wash.) News Tribune. [NewsNet5.com (Cleveland)-AP, 7-3-03] [Tacoma News Tribune, 6-18-03]
Latest Religious Messages
The family of the late Ben Martinez filed a lawsuit in June against the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe (N.M.) because a priest had castigated lapsed-Catholic Martinez during his funeral, telling guests that the Lord "vomited people like Ben out of his mouth to hell." (The priest, Scott Mansfield, has since moved to another parish.) And Cheryl Bartges has not yet filed a lawsuit but did tell WABC-TV in New York City in July that her late father suffered grievously in the last hours before his death because a priest sent from the Diocese of Rockville Centre (N.Y.) to administer the last rites refused to do it, following an argument about the Catholic Church's culpability in the child-molesting scandals. [The New Mexican, 7-5-03] [WABC-TV, 6-7-03]
Popular Lutheran pastor Thorkild Grosbold was suspended in June from his church in Tarbaek, Denmark, after he declined to retract his statements to a newspaper that he doesn't believe in a "physical God," or an afterlife, but believes instead that God is only a constant moral force; Denmark is a highly secular nation, but church leaders say that pastors still must believe in an actual God. And Tulsa, Okla., Christian evangelist Carlton Pearson recently expanded his "Gospel of Inclusion" (providing for universal salvation) to make clear that even Satan would be admitted to heaven if he apologized; the resurrection of Jesus, Pearson says, shows that hell is only a temporary condition, not a place. [New York Times, 7-8-03] [Dallas Morning News, 5-3-03]
MARTY WILDE 45 '69
