Clark Aposhian, spokesman for the Utah Shooting Sports Council, has a big PR problem. More than 100,000 acres of Utah have burned already this fire season and he fears target shooters will be the scapegoat.
More than 20 of the state’s 400 (and counting) wildfires this year have been linked to shooters exercising their Second Amendment right on public land. That’s only about 5 percent of the fires, Aposhian says, but in the public perception, “It might as well be 95 percent,” said in a conversation with me.
Aposhian admits he’s annoyed that the media and politicans seem eager to blame gun owners for the Utah’s on-going summer of fire in a quest for an easy answers.
“You bet I’m getting defensive. We represent very conscientious shooters,” he says of USSC. “We don’t represent slobs or rednecks who try to find the stupidest thing they can do, then do it. [But] shooters are all colored and impugned by that one percent.”
For one thing, he says, it’s unclear in most cases how shooting alone could have triggered the fires. Contrary to popular belief, hot lead just isn’t that hot. To ignite brush usually requires something more, like military tracer ammunition or explosive targets. In the last few days, Aposhian and his cohorts at USSC have had no luck in experiments to start fires with conventional ammo. But he points out that with the state’s “perfect storm” fire conditions, he is keeping a wide-open mind.
“I’m not saying they aren’t started by shooters,” Aposhain says. “I want to know how a bullet–at what speed? what did it hit?–starts a fire. Not only is going to help the investigations, but it is going to help down the road when, if we find a pattern and a component at fault.”
Of course a new component of 21st Century target shooting is an obvious culprit.
Informal “plinking” sessions in the boonies used to involve paper targets and empty beer cans. But in recent years, the shooting industry has been mining a rich marketing niche: dudes who like to blow shit up. It’s a lucrative market since just about all dudes like to blow shit up.
So what are the chances that Gov. Gary Herbert and the Legislature (which contains its fair share of dudes who like to blow shit up) will regulate exploding targets or limit target shooting on public lands? Besides Utah politicians’ morbid fear of being called anti-gun, a Utah company, Star Targets, makes exploding targets.
When Gov. Gary Herbert met this week with Senate President Michael Waddoups and House Speaker Becky Lockhart to discuss the fires, and specifically, target shooting–Aposhian was there to offer options to what he fears will become a regulatory “free-for-all.”
Not surprisingly for a guns rights advocate, Aposhian is pushing education and public awareness–things like adding five minutes on fire safety to state hunter ed classes and mounting an information campaign similar to the state’s anti-poaching, anti-DUI campaigns.
If you like explosions, here’s a Cabela’s video on the proper use of exploding targets. Notice at left of frame in the first explosion–grass appears to be catching fire.
Bless him, Rep. Jason Chaffetz is actively defending Utah’s title as the go-to state for comic relief.
Chaffetz told Fox News (who else?) that Congress is considering dispatching its sergeant-at-arms to arrest recalcitrant Attorney General Eric Holder on contempt charges.
A few hours later, Chaffetz’s acknowledged his role model is the late Andy Griffith. Tweeted Chaffetz:
“Learned a lot from The Andy Griffith Show. Good fun. Will be missed. He was a national treasure.”
Remember the days when Chaffetz ran for office on a promise of rounding up illegal immigrants and putting them in “tent cities”?
If I recall correctly, Sheriff Andy Taylor’s Mayberry was a southern town eerily depopulated of people of color.
The surprising aspect of the B-52s’ sold-out show Monday night at Red Butte Garden wasn’t the fact that the Athens, Georgia-based crew can still throw a serious dance party 36 years into its career; it’s that the sound of the B-52s remains just as distinct, joyful and odd as it sounded when the band landed on the musical landscape in the late ’70s.
The call-and-response vocal stylings of singers Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson remain the calling card of the band, whether they are delivering classic New Wave cuts like the show-closing “Rock Lobster” or percussion-heavy World Beat bangers like “Mesopotamia” that veer into art-rock territory (granted, it’s a party-hearty brand of art-rock, but still). No one sounds like the B-52s, and the B-52s sound like no one that came before them, despite incorporating familiar sounds like surf-rock and doo-wop into their brand of rock.
The B-52s early in their set Monday night.
The B-52s set was high-energy all the way, and at 13 songs and just more than an hour, it was also relatively brief. Even so, their set covered all the ground long-time fans could hope for. There were the early tunes that forged the band’s identity before founding guitarist Ricky Wilson died of AIDS-related complications in the mid-’80s, songs like “Private Idaho,” “52 Girls,” and “Whammy Kiss.” And there were the songs that marked the band’s commercial heyday after the group had recovered from Wilson’s death and former drummer Ricky Strickland had switched to guitar and started writing songs–tunes like “Roam,” “Funplex,” “Hot Corner,” “Love in the Year 3000” and, of course, the monster hit “Love Shack,” which was a raucous singalong Monday night.
The B-52s’s Wilson, Schneider and Pierson (left to right) Monday night at Red Butte Garden.
Cindy Wilson’s “Give Me Back My Man” was a highlight of the show, as was the encore-opening “Planet Claire.” Schneider, Wilson and Pierson all still sound great, and the audience responded to the band’s set passionately, dancing from the moment the B-52s took the stage–and that’s not always an easy trick with a Red Butte Garden audience.
They got some help from tourmates Squeeze, the Brit-pop crew who delivered a 19-song set of old tunes and new songs that got the crowd moving while the sun was still heating up the venue.
Led by the always affable Glenn Tilbrook and his songwriting partner Chris Difford, Squeeze played a solid 90 minutes of hyper-literate rock that started with the insistent “Take Me I’m Yours” and ended with an extended take on “Black Coffee in Bed,” and touched on all eras of the band’s career in between.
Noting that he typically wears a suit (like most of the band still did, despite the temperature Monday night), Tilbrook sported shorts as he lead the band through songs like “Up the Junction,” “Another Nail in My Heart,” “Is That Love” and “Goodbye Girl.” Difford sang lead on the excellent “Cool for Cats,” and the band had worked out some sound issues well before a closing blast of songs that included “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Hourglass,” “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)” and “Tempted” before the encore.
Tillbrook noted that the last time Squeeze had visited Salt Lake City, the band had a serious fight. Maybe that’s what kept them from returning for about 20 years. Given the response the band got from the Red Butte audience, I’d hazard a guess Squeeze might be back sooner rather than later.
And if they’re paired with a band as fun as the B-52s next time around, it’s sure to be another sell-out.
I took in the Sunday supper at the new Pig & a Jelly Jar in central SLC. The imaginative down-home food was extraordinarily good ($20 a head for the gut-packing pork/chicken-based fare that ended with a doughnut dessert–Value! Value! Value!).
If you want a credible review go here.
Even more interesting are the cafe’s signature cocktails. Because the P&JJ has no license for hard liquor, the staff gets creative with beer and wine concoctions.
That may or may not be a good idea–particularly when the key ingredient is PBR. (Note to swanky cocktail freaks–stop reading now.)
Here’s the rogues gallery of cocktails:
PBR-tini: It sounds like a bar dare: PBR, olive juice, bleu cheese-stuffed olive, bacon strip, Cajun-salt rim. (The bacon strip is stuck vertically into the drink like a swizzle stick from hell.)
OK, if that didn’t make you blow your cookies, the rest are easy.
PBR-Mary: house Bloody Mary mix, celery, lime, olive.
PBR-Sunrise: fresh-squeezed OJ and grenadine. Believe it not, this one works. I sampled it. Beer and citrus are a natural (like lime in your Tecate) and our server Josh recommended chucking the PBR and going with Golden Spike hefeweizen instead — which likely made all the difference.
My partner in crime, Dan Nailen, and I plan to examine these infernal brews more closely and report back.
Pig and a Jelly Jar, corner of 400 East and 900 South.
With all the excitement generated by the opening of a suburban mall in the heart of Salt Lake City and new plans for a beige highrise in the Sugar Hole, I thought I’d check on the stalled redevelopment of the north-end of 300 West–sometimes called the historic Marmalade-Gayborhood District.
The city’s Redevelopment Agency saw development skid to a halt in the M-G with the recession. The instant-ghost town of retail spaces the RDA threw up on 300 West remain empty except for a Landis salon.
Over the winter, a private developer put in a dollar store to compete with the hood’s locally owned 7-Eleven (shout out to Mark the Merchant!) and the nearby family-owned E-Z Mart (행운을 빌어요 !).
But what seemed like the biggest loss of momentum, the stalling of the huge Howa development at the corner of 300 West/600 North has become a win for the neighborhood. Over the last winter, a wetlands has developed in Marmalade Hole. I checked it out this week and discovered an emergent wildlife sanctuary.
In five minutes on the shores of Lake Howa, I observed: Mr. & Mrs. mallards, western king bird, a killdeer family, barn and cliff swallows and a sharp-shinned hawk, that made everyone nervous. (Earlier this spring Canada geese made a stopover).
In short, the recession has given 300 West neighborhood something perhaps more wonderful than another mixed use development. Now, we need to get President Obama to designate it a national monument. (After all, it’s in Rep. Rob Bishop’s district.)
Finally, I was taken aback to see a sheep-herder’s trailer parked next to Club Jam.
WTF? A sheep herder cracked under his mountain solidtude and lit out for the big city? Or is Jam going to sponsor a “Brokeback Mountain” pageant to compete with the Manti Miracle Pageant?
I love this neighborhood.
Even though I have many Mormon and ex-Mormon friends, I’ve never been able to get my head around ex-Mormon syndrome. If you’ve lived in Utah more than 10 minutes, you’ve heard about someone who “resigned” from the church followed by a compulsion to get their name “off the rolls.”
Transplants to Utah soon learn that the only thing more annoying than zealous Mormons are zealous ex-Mormons. (Point of Etiquette: Joking that resigning from the LDS Church is equivalent to writing a letter to Santa Claus to tell Mr. Kringle you don’t believe in him anymore seldom gets a laugh from these folks.)
On the other hand, it must be liberating to blame one’s fucked-up personal life solely on one’s former religion.
Still, breaking with the Mormon Church is apparently a gargantuan deal, at least for the 150 ex-Mormons who climbed Ensign Peak Saturday to “declare their independance” from the church.
If nothing else, it probably annoyed Mitt Romney by dragging his quirky religion into the national spotlight again. Could you imagine a headline: “150 Cranky ex-Episcopalians Resign”?
I thought it was an odd call by The Trib not to send a photographer for what could have been a spectacular photo that probably would have bumped the story onto the Yahoo News rotator. Usually, The Trib jumps on any opportunity to exploit the national fascination with Mormons for online hits.
Why can’t ex-Mormons just followed the lead of potential Mitt running mate and ex-Mormon Marco Rubio? Just walk away.
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Daniel Nailen 