Four Arrested After Exorcism Goes Bad - UPDATEDSounds like these folks have been watching Constantine way, way too many times :-P
By: Erika OdellRussellville, AL - Four people in Franklin County have been arrested after what Sheriff Shannon Oliver calls an exorcism gone bad.
54 year old Dianna Brewer, 39 year old Christie Wahl, 36 year old Ginnie George and 20 year old Zachary Bryant are all charged with 3rd Degree Domestic Violence.
According to Franklin County Sheriff's investigators it all started Tuesday morning when deputies were sent to a home on Highway 61 in Spruce Pine on a domestic violence call. When deputies arrived, they found the front door wide open, with a Bible lying on the front porch and saw a scuffle inside. That's when they learned there had been a dispute when George and Wahl accused their mother, Diana Brewer of being Satan.
Officials said that the daughters held a mirror in front of Brewer and told her to look in and see that she was Satan, and that they were going to perform an exorcism to drive Satan out.
Reports show that George said that she was holding a two year old in her arms when Brewer started hitting her and struck the child in the forehead. That's when investigators said that both daughters began hitting and pushing, causing the fight to escalate...
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Four arrested following botched exorcism in Alabama
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans five years ago
Katrina started out life on August 23rd, 2005 as a tropical system in the southeastern Bahamas. It did substantial damage and caused a number of deaths as it went across the Florida peninsula. And then Katrina entered the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico... where it became the monster that would ultimately cause the worst natural disaster in American history.
Five years later and Katrina is being debated as hotly as ever. I thought at the time that the situation became one of the worst clusterf-cks ever for government at all levels (and both major parties, mind ya).
But there were also quite a lot of stories about the positive aspects of human nature as well that came out of Katrina. The tale of Jabbar Gibson - the 20-year old who stole a schoolbus to evacuate fellow New Orleans residents to the Houston Astrodome - was one of my favorites. So too was the bar in the French Quarter that never closed. And then there was the photograph of Nita LaGarde, 105 years old and in a wheelchair, holding hands with Tanisha Blevin, the 5-year old granddaughter of her nurse. LaGarde and Blevin had spent two days trapped in the attic of a house as the flood waters rose before being rescued.
(I still think that the Interdictor blog is going to make for one helluva movie someday, with the right screenplay and director behind it.)
There is something dreadfully fascinating about hurricanes. And if you were reading The Knight Shift at the time you'll remember well how, ummm... nuts I went in writing about Katrina.
Let us hope and pray that another such opportunity will be a long, long time in returning.
Monday, April 07, 2008
More Star Wars in education: English teacher uses Original Trilogy to instruct about epic literature
Luke Skywalker is not just a character in a series of films to David Golden, an English teacher and football coach at Hazel Green High School. The Jedi knight is an epic hero, whose rise, fall and redemption are part of a story rife with classic archetypes we all know through our collective unconscious as described by the psychologist Carl Jung.There's plenty more at the above link.Seriously.
Each semester, Golden's ninth-grade students watch the original trilogy of the Star Wars movies, with Golden pointing out the situational, character and symbolic archetypes as well as literary elements.
n the cave scene in "Return of the Jedi," Luke faces off against Darth Vader (which means dark knight in German, Golden told his students).
"It's foggy, dense," Golden said, pausing the scene. "What's the main color?" Gray, his students said. That's symbolic for confusion, which is what Luke feels at this point as he tries to learn to control "the Force."
The cave itself is also symbolic - "think back to 'Tom Sawyer,' Golden said - a place where the character undergoes change, emerging a different person than the one who went in.
It's also where Luke first sees that his connection to Darth Vader is more than just as an enemy.
"What literary element is that," Golden said before resuming the DVD. "Foreshadowing."
Ninth-graders study the epic, which usually means reading Homer's "The Odyssey." Golden, however, "fell asleep when I studied 'The Odyssey.' I don't remember much about it."
Golden, a self-professed "Star Wars nut," first got the idea of teaching the epic through Star Wars at a seminar at Western Kentucky University. He was teaching in Tennessee at the time, and attended a program to certify him as advanced placement English teacher...
Stuff like this, I gotta love! Years ago when we were co-workers at TheForce.net, head editor Josh Griffin and I would talk a lot about the educational opportunities represented by the Star Wars movies. And how we should be "playing these to the hilt" (as Josh put it) so far as relating lessons go. I know Josh does stuff like that with his ministry and last week while filling-in as a teacher for a middle school English class studying Greek mythology, I got to "tie in" how George Lucas was inspired to use the divine parentage of Perseus and Hercules when it came time to delving into Anakin's origins.
The kids automatically lit up when I started talking about the Star Wars movies. This is something that they understand and when you relate the classic in those terms, the students can't get enough of it.
There seems to be an awful lot of stories about Star Wars and education happening lately. Maybe this is a sign that the saga, at last, is growing into its own and becoming not just recognized as classic literature but utilized as such, as well.
