Town name apparently not linked to amphibian abuse

October 14, 2009

Since I have been vaca­tion­ing in Arkansas I have pon­dered the ori­gin of the oddly-named Toad Suck, Ark.

Now I don’t plan on vis­it­ing Toad Suck any­time soon, but I was inter­ested in just how the town got that name. And bless Al Gore’s heart for invent­ing the Inter­net, I found one explanation.

It seems that when steam­boats cruised the Arkansas River the cap­tains would tie up when the water wasn’t at a favor­able depth at as spot that now is occu­pied by Toad Suck Lock and Dam. While await­ing bet­ter waters the cap­tains would visit a local tav­ern and “suck on a bot­tle ’til they swell up like toads,” accord­ing to the Web site of Cory and Jill Imbo­den. The cou­ple are 2009 co-chairs of Toad Suck Daze, which is a 3-day fes­ti­val in Con­way, Ark., that ben­e­fits edu­ca­tional scholarships.

That is a much bet­ter expla­na­tion — the Toad Suck name ori­gin — than I had envi­sioned. I saw per­haps toads being used for nefar­i­ous pur­poses such as peo­ple who lick cer­tain hal­lu­cino­genic frogs as described in this arti­cle from Pennsylvania.

Of course, those steam­boat cap­tains might have seen objects which weren’t really there, pink ele­phants come to mind, after bing­ing on rot gut for an extended period. But I sup­pose that is an entirely dif­fer­ent mat­ter altogether.

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Take your laughs outside the dream, please

October 5, 2009

One of the times I woke up dur­ing my slum­ber early this morn­ing was when I laughed myself awake.

It isn’t often that I awake laugh­ing. As a mat­ter of fact, it maybe has hap­pened only once before if that.

"Dude, that song was by my band, Gone to the Dogs." Photo by jdurham. Courtesy of Morguefile.com

“Dude, that song was by my band, Gone to the Dogs.” Photo by jdurham. Cour­tesy of Morguefile.com

This was a very odd dream, as dreams some­time are. It involved my entire fam­ily — my mother and father who have both been dead for about 25 years and my four older broth­ers. It appeared that we were kids then but were old enough to know that we were to respect older peo­ple and not make fun of peo­ple with infir­mi­ties. We were try­ing hard to be good, which was kind of odd in itself for our bunch.

I don’t remem­ber all the details of the dream, but it involved my dad talk­ing to this old man who was hav­ing dif­fi­culty walk­ing. We were all in a hurry to go some­where and my father was about to tell the man that he would come visit him some­time in the future.

Alas, as my father opened his mouth out came this song that sounded like a record­ing of some rock song that said some­thing about enjoy­ing the visit last night. Two of my broth­ers were doing all they could to con­tain them­selves and I, who in the dream was the more prin­ci­pled one of the group (hey, remem­ber, this is a dream), burst out laugh­ing in reality.

Appar­ently, I couldn’t laugh in my dream so I had to go out­side of it to let ‘er rip. Maybe we were in a “No Laugh­ing Zone.”

Now isn’t that a hell of thing?

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More to Mike Vick story than football

August 10, 2009

Lately, the local sport talk radio sta­tion has been one of my more fre­quent stops on the FM dial.

It is a good time for sports talk. Foot­ball sea­son is on the hori­zon and major league base­ball is wind­ing down with the play­offs in the not-too dis­tant future. Besides, one has lit­tle to pick from when it comes to music on FM in the Beaumont-Houston area. And on AM, of course, it’s prac­ti­cally all right-wing radio unless you get in just the right geo­graph­i­cal spot and can get the Cajun sta­tion out of South Louisiana.

A lot of the radio sports guys have recently spent a lot of air time on the fate of Michael Vick, the one-time Atlanta quar­ter­back who was recently rein­stated into the NFL after serv­ing fed­eral prison time for orga­niz­ing dog fights.

As a story — be it sports or just news — Michael Vick’s is a com­pelling one given the stan­dard for news sto­ries these days. It is a story tinged with race as well as that of ani­mal cru­elty. If gay abor­tion­ists were some­how involved in the story you would touch just about every hot-button out there.

The sports talk­ers are, not to a man, mostly miss­ing the boat when it comes to the fate of Michael Vick. Many of these talk show folks I have heard want Vick back on the field where he belongs (their sen­ti­ment). There also seems to be a good-sized ele­ment of the African-American com­mu­nity who feel Vick is being, par­don the pun, black-balled from play­ing foot­ball. After all, Vick was one of the top NFL quar­ter­backs before his trou­ble with the law began.

I can’t speak for the sports guys and cer­tainly not for blacks. I do believe though that the for­mer are swim­ming against the tide in a great cul­tural gulf. Some of the sports talk­ers can’t under­stand why, if the NFL com­mis­sioner has rein­stated Vick, that he has not been auto­mat­i­cally snapped up by the league’s teams. Some have even gone so far to say the team exec­u­tives must be wor­ried about PETA show­ing up on their 50-yard lines.

But my guess is that the con­cerns go way beyond PETA. Some of the same folks who abhor ani­mal cru­elty show up on Sunday’s in the seats and sky­boxes of the NFL’s sta­di­ums. Count­less oth­ers are chomp­ing down on hot wings and drink­ing Bud Light at home while the games tele­vised into their liv­ing rooms fea­ture young guys knock­ing the beje­sus out of each other. Yet many of these same fans go bal­lis­tic when they see aban­doned or abused pup­pies on the evening news.

Dur­ing my career as a, full-time, jour­nal­ist I cov­ered dou­ble homi­cides, wrecks killing or maim­ing hand­fuls and other mis­cel­la­neous may­hem. But never, ever, did I get as many phone calls and e-mails than the next day after a story I did involv­ing stray dogs and cats.

This guy had become a one-man ani­mal res­cue and he kept tak­ing in dogs and cats until ani­mals had occu­pied one house and mostly took over another. I was out at this guy’s house when sheriff’s deputies came to take the ani­mals away because this oth­er­wise Good Samar­i­tan couldn’t prop­erly feed or oth­er­wise care for these strays. It was as sad as it was vile, if you can imag­ine noth­ing but dogs and cats every­where and doing pretty much as they do when not housebroken.

I notice that the local tele­vi­sion news reporters lately also jump on ani­mal abuse sto­ries like a duck on a June bug. These sto­ries run at the top of the news­casts, ahead of fatal car wrecks, Saturday-night stab­bings and armed rob­beries. That’s because they know such sto­ries play on the basest of human emo­tions. That is, at least for those who have the com­pas­sion to under­stand what is tak­ing place.

I won’t dwell on the racial aspect of it because that is some­thing which I per­son­ally know lit­tle about. How­ever, there is also the “gangsta” ele­ment in the dog­fight­ing cult that ticks off peo­ple of more than one race. Some peo­ple just can’t abide by crack-smoking, drive-by shoot­ing, thugs for some reason.

NFL own­ers know the tightrope they are walk­ing. Should they give Michael Vick another chance? And then that one lit­tle nag­ging thing: What if he lost some of his umpph while he was in the joint?

I have thought that per­haps Vick deserves a chance at some point in time but only after he has shown sin­cere remorse for his actions. I thought per­haps his talk in Atlanta to some kids over the week­end might have been a start. Although, some folks see it more as self-serving.

In the end, nei­ther the sports talk guys nor Jesse Jack­son nor PETA nor I, will have the say as to whether Vick suits up again for the NFL. Whether that is the case, ulti­mately, is another story.

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