crazy english redux

Originally blogged April 9, 2006; decided to unearth it for entertainment purposes.

No languages were harmed in the making of this blopgost. CAVEAT EMPTOR: The use of adverbs abounded.

The following bits of great literature came into being on the Oklahoma Christian University "Singing Campaign" of June 2001. Several of us were playing a language game in which each player contributes a part of a sentence without knowing what the other players are contributing. As in:

Player A contributes a subject ("The handcuffs"),
Player B contributes a verb ("gargled"),
Player C contributes an object ("pimentos"),
and Player D contributes an adverb ("symbiotically").

Players may add other adverbs, adverbial phrases, adjectives, and so forth, as long as the structure of the sentence remains intact. Here are some sentences that came together in strange ways on that starlit night so long ago:

A blunt elephant awakens delicately.

4,000,362 slimy heifers bebop coke repeatedly.

The juicy squirrels rang manure radically.

Some magical Martians snorted river cautiously.

Your mama’s shrunken sludge dances vomit lovingly.

The Saran-wrapped amoeba strangled fever blisters.

Its unwilling dough wore pimples authoritatively.

Mike’s infected Thumbelina impaled puppies slowly.

My swollen blue suede shoes defecated coconuts.

April’s peanut butter jar beheld toxic waste creepingly.

With blackest moss, the other Deutschmark stabbed Romanoffs with ease.

Thy radical snot gulped hamsters alluringly.

Rupert’s clairvoyant slug plucked tongues boldly.

Satan’s slutty cheese cake slurped turtles on the highest rooftops.

Surprisingly enough, our milky busts curtsied pustules right on task.

Tomorrow, flamboyant lace will flatulate kabobs happily.

Russia’s flat hairballs created toilet tingling.

The parole violators’ amazed horny toad blew rafters with great linguistic skill.

On the poop deck, our objective booty crushed dried linguini like a goose in heat.

Eight crunchy handkerchiefs serenade egg drop soup like redneck Olympics.

With the absolute possibility, spoonlike cowboys cut snot rockets while smelling like a stinky tube sock.

Unbeknownst to us, many underground headless horsemen slammed bellybutton lint so well, it would’ve made you cry.

Like sands in the hour glass, strikingly handsome mold slaughtered jazz hands while dancing like a 5-year-old on purple crack.

--April Wooldridge Everhart, Courtney Cantrell, Matt Barger, Mike Antwine, and others, June 2001.

fellow gen-x-ers, take a look at this

The stars of "Stand By Me" in 1986.

Wow.

growing up in bowel town: random memory

I know I said in my last post that I was going to blog about a certain adventure I had that is now 12 days in the past, but I haven't blogged about it yet, so now I'm going to write about something else instead. Namely, this:

I grew up in the city of Darmstadt, which literally translates into "Bowel City," which I choose to render as "Bowel Town" because it sounds funnier. My first home in Darmstadt was an apartment building at Roßdörferstraße 55 (which loosely translates to "Horse-Village Street"--I swear I am not making this up). We lived for eight years in a two-bedroom apartment on what Americans would call the third floor but Germans call the second.

The building's first floor housed a "Konditorei," which I guess would be a pastry shop or confectioner's shop to those of the English-speaking persuasion. The presence of said pastry shop resulted in the most amazing scents that drifted daily up the stairwell and into all the apartments, making everyone in the building crave Butterhörnchen a whole lot more often than fortnightly, lemme tell ya.

The baker's names was Herr Gibis, and before I started 1st grade, he took to wife a younger woman with two children. Their names were Marcus and Sylvie. Marcus was my age, and Sylvie was a year younger, and they lived with Herr and Frau Gibis in the only apartment on the first floor, behind the pastry shop.

Marcus and Sylvie and I became fast and great friends. I could tell oodles of stories of our many outside adventures, including the ones about how Marcus chased me and his sister with daddy longlegs. But that is another story and shall be told another time.

The story on my mind right now is The One Where We Got Into The Bug Spray. You see, adjacent to the back of our apartment complex and beyond a low chainlink fence brooded this squat, square, white building with a fire escape. (The fire escape figures into yet another tale, as does the chainlink fence, but again, that is neither here nor there right now.) In this squat, square, white building lived an old woman. I suppose now that she must not have been very old at all--probably between 40 and 50 years of age--but to us children (we were now 10, 10, and 9, respectively), she seemed ancient. I only ever caught a couple of glimpses of her, and my only memory of her is long, dark hair in a bun, and shoulders wrapped in a fringed shawl. But Marcus and Sylvie must have seen her more often than I did, because they said her name was Maria and she didn't like children.

It quite possible that Marcus and Sylvie were making this up.

Anyway, we were fascinated and terrified. Maria didn't like children; ergo, we
qualified as unlikeable. There was a chainlink fence--obviously, a barrier we were not meant to cross. Mystery, darkness, and danger lurked at this far end of the apartment complex. The lure of the squat, square, white building was irresistible.

I don't know where Sylvie was on that fateful day. I don't remember that she was with us when Marcus and I climbed over the chainlink fence, our hearts thudding wildly in our small chests, our eyes darting over our shoulders again and again in case A Parent should suddenly appear. But, undaunted by fear or threat of parental disapproval, Marcus and I scaled the fence (it was all of four feet high) and found ourselves on terra incognita: Maria's backyard.

Eerie light filtered down through leaves overhead. An unnatural hush descended, as though even the birds were shocked into silence by our audacity. We were shocked into silence by our audacity. The air felt heavy.

The shed beckoned.

It was squat, square, and wooden, with a tin roof and all sorts of gardening implements leaning against its rickety frame. My memories progress as though I'm flipping through photographs, and the next picture shows Marcus and me, not entering the shed, but inside the shed, and Marcus is holding a sort of pressurized pump can, and we're deep in the fantasy of marauders surrounding us, barring our escape, shouting for us to give up and come out, there's nowhere left to run, and Marcus and I are looking at each other with huge, excited eyes, and we know that this moment is The Grandest Adventure EVER.

Meanwhile, the marauders were advancing. They were at the door. They were breaking in. We defended ourselves with the only weapons available: magic sleep-dust spray guns--what else?

Of course, when we got back to our side of the backyard universe (not having had the guts to approach the squat, square, white building proper, defeated marauders notwithstanding), the fantasy quickly broke into smithereens when The Parents smelled not magic sleep-dust on our clothes but insecticide, with which we had sprayed not only the imaginary marauders, but also each other, and generously. Because, as anyone with half a brain can tell you, magic sleep-dust magically turns into a restorative and palliative powder when used on a friend instead of against a slavering, primitive marauder.

I don't remember what happened to Marcus, but I got a spanking and an afternoon in the bathtub, being scrubbed down with great vigor by my mother, who was not impressed.

That was our first adventure centered around Maria's squat, square, white house...but it was not to be our last.

in honor of and reference to memory

Why is it so difficult to say what we really mean?

Why, when we try to communicate something important to us, do we so often send a message we didn't want to send, and end up hurting the other person without wanting to?

What must we do in order to learn to ask the right questions?

What must we do in order to learn how to listen for the answers?

Honestly: Is it so difficult to stop talking, open the heart, and let the soul truly comprehend what the other person is saying?

Why is what we want to say usually so much more important to us than that which the other person needs to say?

Why do we block others from unburdening their souls?

Why do we espouse total honesty, yet we cannot accept it when others are totally honest with us?

Are our relationships truly that fragile?

Are our relationships truly that shallow?

How can we have been so misled?

Why didn't anyone tell us?

Why can't we admit that the fault is our own for not having sought and delved more deeply?

Why do we lack courage?

Where is the safe haven?

Why do we paint love a color only we can see?

in which i don't know whether or not locusts and cicadas are the same thing

I intended to write about this weeks ago but forgot.

A few weeks ago, on a warm spring evening (as opposed to the hot spring evening we are currently experiencing--25 degrees Celsius at 22:00!), Ed and I were sitting in the office with the windows open, doing the kind of nothing that people do in their offices at home on warm spring evenings.

(An aside: I just now sneezed and hit my head on the edge of my laptop. Ow.)

As we sat there, doing nothing, I gradually became aware of a noise. I'd been hearing it for quite some time but hadn't consciously taken note of it. When I finally did begin paying attention to it, I knew immediately what it was: a locust!

Some people find them creepy. Some find them annoying. I find locusts completely fascinating, both in appearance and in lifestyle. ("Lifestyles of the Green and Bug-Eyed!")
As I told Ed on that do-nothing evening of a few weeks ago, the sound of locusts takes me back to childhood summers in Oklahoma, lying awake at night, sweltering in the heat, listening to the locusts as they sang me to sleep.

I've been a lot of places and heard a lot of things, but so far, for me, the sound of locust song is unique to Oklahoma. There's just no other sound like it. And because I associate it with the wonderful, boisterous, adventurous summers of my childhood, it's a sound that is very dear to me. I love walking out into a warm, humid summer evening in Oklahoma and hearing the locusts as they "sing" so loudly, they're almost deafening. Every time I hear them, there's a split second when I'm a kid again.

"Reeeeeeeeeeeeee!" said Ed, imitating the locust. "How would you like it," he asked me, "if your whole purpose in life were to crawl out of the ground in the spring, stretch, look around, and then start making that noise?!"

I laughed.

Oh, and speaking of humid, tonight is definitely the night for that! Earlier, I walked outside, and I could smell the heat and moisture rolling through the air. Like the locust song, this smell is unique to this place. No other place I've been smells quite like this. Germany has its share of humid summers, but they smell different: woodsier somehow, scented with tree mold and green, deep and dark and growing.

Oklahoma humidity smells like earth and rain and wind. It's a wild smell, scented with power barely restrained, occasionally threatening with a hint of ozone. This, too, takes me back to childhood, when storms meant running out into the rain for the sheer joy of getting drenched and seeing the lighting; when climbing water towers didn't seem foolish; when simply everything was possible.

ruminations of the sleep-deprived

As I write, it is Saturday morning, 5:04 a.m. Even if you don't know me well, you probably do know that I am rarely awake this early in the day. Even as a new intrepid jogger, I do not get up this early. Just on general principle. Please note that this is 'principle' not 'principal.'

Anyway...so there I was, fast asleep and minding my own business, when I suddenly realized that I was wide awake. Instead of fighting it like I usually do, I decided to give in and get up.

Hear that wailing? That's night owls everywhere screaming, "Noooooooooooooooo!"

;o)

So here I am, blogging just after five in the morning. And rather slowly, too, as I'm sitting at Ed's desk, using his Mac and his Mac keyboard. (Would that be a MacKeyboard?) Just for the record, I love the Mac, but I hate its keyboard. I have to pound each key with something like vehement fury in order to get it to produce anything. I fIjust tyoe the wayI usually do, i get something like this. Oh,a nd didi mention that the keys are space somewhtdifferently than on my laptop?

In case you haven't already noticed, I have no particular reason for blogging at this time. Meaning, I have no particular subject in mind. I am simply awake at 5 a.m. and needed something to do but didn't feel like doing anything that actually needs to be done. Besides, it's Saturday.

I have a zit on my chin, and it hurts. When I was a teenager, I thought that adulthood was supposed to be free of such things. (Zits, that is, not chins.) Well into adulthood now, I have discovered, to my dismay and disappointment, that this is not the case. I feel somewhat hoodwinked by this.

My parents, who are living with us for the month of July, are currently in Greece. Part of their trip is a cruise, and I guess they must be on it now, because yesterday evening, Mama called and left a voicemail: "Hi, we just wanted to call and let you know that we're having fun," etc. I was amused, even through my envy. ;o)

Although I suppose that I shouldn't be too envious......considering that I get to go to Scotland in less than a month! Wahooooooo!!!! I am so excited about this! We were supposed to go with Clint and April when they went last year, but it didn't work out. So Ed gave me this Scotland trip as my Christmas present. Brief and very vague itinerary: One day in London/Corby with our friend Patrick; one day of fellwalking with Patrick in the Lake District (and maybe with Kevin, too???); then head to the Dundee area and see Dundee, Stirling, Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Glasgow?, and hopefully drive to the highlands for a day. And we hope to see our friends Tristan and Leslie in Stirling! I have no clue if this is all possible in a 9-day trip (5-day, if you don't count London/Lake District/travel), but that's our current inkling of a conceptual hypothesis. I haven't had the time or the brains, so far, to study all the travel materials we've collected and look into specifics. However, Ed and I are going to sit down together sometime this coming week and figure it all out, so I'll keep you posted.

Yaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy, we're going to Scotland!!!!!!

Oh yeah, speaking of voicemail messages... Over the last month or so, Ed and I have received two phone calls to our Skype number in the middle of the night. Both times, neither of us woke up in time to get to the phone--although we *were* woken up--so both calls left messages:

Call #1: 4 a.m. Rustling, music somewhere in the background, then talking as though from a distance. No words distinguishable. More rustling. Then, a new voice talking, but this one sounds like a toy. And it sounds like several toys talking at once, overlapping each other: "I need a hug!" "What are we going to do today?" "(something-something-indistinguishable) hooray!" "I need a hug!" "What are we going to do today?" "(something-something-indistinguishable) hooray!" "I need a hug!" And so forth. More rustling. Then the toy voices start up again. The voicemail message continues in this vein for five minutes before stopping abruptly.

Call #2: 1 a.m. Rustling. Talking in the background. A kid's voice (real, not a toy), or maybe a toddler's. More rustling. An adult's voice, words indistinguishable. Then the adult says what sounds like "No, no, no!" More rustling. End.

Ed and I can't figure out who in the world is leaving these weird messages! The voicemails sound as though the person didn't know they had called, like they'd accidentally dialed the number or something. It's gotta be someone we know, but we can't figure out who it could be. Both times, the computer has been off (which is why our regular phone rang), so we haven't been able to see the number that was calling. It's just all very weird.

The first message reminds me of the time Ed and I (before we were married) used his talking Alf toy to leave a message on my roommate Tamara's voicemail, and she thought she was getting an obscene phone call. ;o)

Okay, it's now 5:45, and I think that's enough for one blopgost. If you read all of this ramblingness, you get a cookie. Enjoy.

Me, I'm gonna give the keyboard a rest from my vehement fury.

Q & A

Q & A Procedure:

1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song. Or your favorite kind of sandwich. Something random. Whatever you like.

2. I respond by asking you five personal questions (in response to your comment, so check back!) so I can get to know you better.

3. You WILL update your LJ (aka blog) with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.

5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.


My answers to Patricia's Qs:

1. If you were to have the chance to adopt a sibling, would you pick a brother or a sister?

Oooh, that's a hard one! I've always liked the idea of having a big brother to stick up for me, and there have been a couple of guys in my life who have been like brothers.... Not to mention most of my guy cousins who are definitely like my brothers....and girl cousins who are like sisters......and girl friends who are definitely like sisters..... As you can see, I definitely have trouble pinning myself down to a concise answer here! I guess I'd probably have to choose a sister, just for all the late-night girltalk. ;o)

2. What is your favorite memory of us from college?

Do I have to pick just one?!?!??!!!? ;o) Okay, here goes, in random order:

(a) All the time we spent in Honors together. You made it fun and interesting and lively during the times my attention started to drift. All the craziness we had together just really made that time something special to me!
(b) The note you wrote me at the end of our freshman year, in which you told me how much you appreciated my friendship. At the time, I had no idea that my friendship meant so much to you, and it was good to hear that in spite of all my difficulties that year, you still liked me and accepted me.
(c) Doing artsy stuff together! I know we didn't get to sit down and draw together as much as both of us wanted to, but at least we had a few times of getting to do stuff as "art buddies."
(d) Getting to go home with you at the end of freshman year. As an only child, I was pleasantly amazed at how such a large family could actually work! ;o) You all made me feel more welcome than I thought I had a right to be. Even though I wasn't there very long, it's a time I'll never forget. (Don't tell Bec and Bradley this, but I still think of them as being the age they were when I visited!) ;oD
(e) Can we say 'Medieval Fairs'?! :oD

3. What book heroine do you relate to the most?

You do know how to ask the tough ones, don't you. ;o) Okay, the one I think of off the top of my head is Kit from "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" by Elizabeth George Speare. Kit grows up in Barbados and moves to Puritan New England to live with her conservative aunt and uncle. The book chronicles her adjustment from one culture to another. She even seeks out the other 'misfits' in Puritan society to try to find her niche. Classic TCK behavior! Since that has basically been the story of my life, I can relate to Kit quite well, even though the book is written for a young reading level. (I've read this book every few years since I was 9 or 10.)

4. What Honors quote will stick in your memory forever?

Again, it's impossible to choose just one!

"Don't ask stupid questions!"
"She was all bust absent from history."
"Moses' Little Bake Shop."
"Nietzsche is bad for you anyway. Nietzsche will rot your teeth."
The essence of scarfness.
Dead Peasants Aren't Much Fun.
"Did I date your mother?"

Hmm...I might just have to do an all-Honors blopgost! ;oD

5. What is the funniest thing you've heard or read recently?

(a) Three-year-old Velony telling her parents in all seriousness: "Ich hab' geschwitzt wie Sau!" ("I was sweating like a hog!")
(b) Once again, I amused myself by watching the guy who webcammed himself dancing to "Dragostea Din Tei". In my opinion, this is one of the greatest videos ever made.
(c)Honors quotes. ;o)

another excerpt from courtney's journal

Caveat Emptor:

The following is an excerpt from my private journal. Some, reading what I've written, will interpret me as being arrogant, self-important, self-righteous. Please know that I don't intend these thoughts to come across this way. These thoughts are the result of my ruminations about my own life as I look back at times in which I followed the will of God and at times in which I didn't. Some of *those* thoughts are too private to share. So what you see here is the conclusion of those thoughts: an account of a part of my life in which I can see God's will at work; an account relating to several friends in whose lives I can see God's will at work. None of this means that we are better than anyone else; none of this means that any of us always follow God's will. It just means that this is a brief excerpt from my journal and a brief excerpt from my life. I'll write about my many failures another time. :o)

Excerpt from my journal:

A few years ago, April was looking at her brother Jonathan’s wedding pictures. In those pictures, she saw faces she recognized, and she was amazed at what the intervening years had brought. She told me about this, and I, too, felt amazed at the detail in God’s planning:

* In the pictures, April recognized Ed and me, whom she didn’t know then.
* She recognized Clint, whom she didn’t know then.
* At that wedding, April didn’t know that her future husband was present.
* Ed and I already knew Clint, but we didn't know that he was one of our future missions co-workers.
* We didn't know that the highschooler (April) who sang at the wedding was one of our future co-workers.
* Clint and April didn’t know that they would end up working as missionaries in Chemnitz.
* And yet, we were all there in the same place.

We didn’t know, we didn’t know, we didn’t know. God knew it all, and even then, he was working on our hearts and on the hearts of other people all over the world to bring us all to the place, spiritually and physically, where he knew we needed to be.

We didn’t know, we didn’t know, we didn’t know. What don’t we know now? Someday, we will look back on today and marvel at the things God is doing even now to fulfill his plans for us for the future. The things we will look back on, God already knew before he spoke the first word that brought the world into existence.

And now I move on to a greater scale beyond the four of us: If you, today, are obeying the will of God, if you are following the path that he has laid out for you, if your heart is turned toward him and you are trusting him to lead you…then you are doing things and living a life the details of which God had in mind before Creation. If you are living out the will of God, then you are living exactly what God set into motion when he spoke the world into existence. He set things into motion, and if you are living a life that pleases him, then what you are, who you are, is a direct result of the will that was God’s even before he said, “Let there be light.”

Human language is inadequate for describing the immense significance of what and who you are, the intricate and millennia-spanning connection between You and the very beginnings of Creation, if you are living a life that is pleasing to God. What you are living didn't start with you...it started before Creation, if you are living out God's will.

This is a grand, awe-inspiring, immeasurable concept…and one that is very humbling.

lotsa update-type-stuff

Did you know that on a 4-year-old laptop, it takes more than three hours to zip-compress 5.1 GB of digital pictures? I didn't know that until I started the process more than three hours ago. I store every current year's digital pics on my external hard drive. At the end of every year, I move the pics from the hard drive to a DVD, thereby freeing up hard drive space. This year, I'm a bit behind. I only just got around to working with year 2006 pics this morning. And now the eternal wait for compression. I can't believe that in one year, I took more digital pictures than can fit onto a 4.7 GB DVD-R. Good grief.

By the way, the laptop's name is Frodo. The external hard drive's name is Andromeda.

I really don't have much of a purpose in writing this current blogpost (or "blopgost" as I like to call them), except for the fact that I know I haven't blogged anything in a few weeks, and I'm waiting waiting waiting for Andromeda to do her thing.

Here's something funny: My mom brought me a box of old letters that I had saved. In it was a card from Susan Morris, who worked with the Chemnitz church with the Sullivans in the mid '90s. This was before I'd ever even heard of Chemnitz, and I certainly had no clue who the Sullivans were. Susan came to visit the church in Frankfurt in late 1994 or early 1995, when I was 17 years old. I met her briefly, and I vaguely remember speaking with her. Now, twelve years later, I re-read a card she sent to my mom. I never even suspected that one day, I would be living and working where she lived and worked. When I first saw the card again, I was amused by it but decided to toss it with the rest of the old letters. But now I've changed my mind. I'm going to stick it in my journal and keep it as a reminder of how God's plans are so much different from and so much more fulfilling than my own. It's funny and fascinating how he works out my life.

Pippin is lying next me, asleep, curled up into a ball, and snoring.

I am currently possessed of a grand sense of accomplishment. For four years, I have been working on a series of Bible lessons on some of the basics of Christian life and faith. (These are lessons that my friend James asked me to write once-upon-a-time. So even though I doubt I'll ever have the opportunity to study them with him, I at least have him to thank for putting the idea into my head.) The lessons themselves, barring revisions, have been finished for a long time. But for over a year now (or two years? can't remember), I've been working on a Teacher's Guide for these lessons. Yesterday, in a thrilling flurry of hunt-and-peck typing, I finally finished the Teacher's Guide! The lessons themselves cover more than 100 pages, and the Teacher's Guide is 178 pages long. I still want to write intros to the Lessons and to the Guide, but other than that and minor revisions, I am done!!! YAY!!!!!! Several people have shown interest in using the lessons as material for their own one-on-one Bible studies, so I'm glad that something I've written can be of service to someone. If even one person can make use of the lessons, then all my time and effort was well worth it. :o)

In other news, I know I'm severely behind in answering comments. I'll get to that as soon as I reasonably can. Dear Commenting Readers, I haven't forgotten you!

And just FYI, in the time it has taken me to write this post, the zip-compression still hasn't finished. The wait continues...

crazy english

The following bits of great literature came into being on the Oklahoma Christian University "Singing Campaign" of June 2001. Several of us were playing a language game in which each player contributes a part of a sentence without knowing what the other players are contributing. As in:

Player A contributes a subject ("The handcuffs"),
Player B contributes a verb ("gargled"),
Player C contributes an object ("pimentos"),
and Player D contributes an adverb ("symbiotically").

Players may add other adverbs, adverbial phrases, adjectives, and so forth, as long as the structure of the sentence remains intact. Here are some sentences that came together in strange ways on that starlit night so long ago:

A blunt elephant awakens delicately.

4,000,362 slimy heifers bebop coke repeatedly.

The juicy squirrels rang manure radically.

Some magical Martians snorted river cautiously.

Your mama’s shrunken sludge dances vomit lovingly.

The Saran-wrapped amoeba strangled fever blisters.

Its unwilling dough wore pimples authoritatively.

Mike’s infected Thumbelina impaled puppies slowly.

My swollen blue suede shoes defecated coconuts.

April’s peanut butter jar beheld toxic waste creepingly.

With blackest moss, the other Deutschmark stabbed Romanoffs with ease.

Thy radical snot gulped hamsters alluringly.

Rupert’s clairvoyant slug plucked tongues boldly.

Satan’s slutty cheese cake slurped turtles on the highest rooftops.

Surprisingly enough, our milky busts curtsied pustules right on task.

Tomorrow, flamboyant lace will flatulate kabobs happily.

Russia’s flat hairballs created toilet tingling.

The parole violators’ amazed horny toad blew rafters with great linguistic skill.

On the poop deck, our objective booty crushed dried linguini like a goose in heat.

Eight crunchy handkerchiefs serenade egg drop soup like redneck Olympics.

With the absolute possibility, spoonlike cowboys cut snot rockets while smelling like a stinky tube sock.

Unbeknownst to us, many underground headless horsemen slammed bellybutton lint so well, it would’ve made you cry.

Like sands in the hour glass, strikingly handsome mold slaughtered jazz hands while dancing like a 5-year-old on purple crack.

by April Wooldridge, Courtney Cantrell, Matt Barger, Mike Antwine, and others, June 2001.