SMELLIEST SOCKS IN THE WORLD

SMELLIEST SOCKS IN THE WORLD

The socks didn't smell like unwashed feet - it was closest to the smell of a lynx, which doesn't help very much if you haven't been near a lynx that's marked its territory, and a lynx has a very big territory, so it was like the scent that a male cat sprays, only much stronger. I don't know where Dave is now, so I can't help anyone who wants to get in touch. Schwartz told me they chose the name "British Knights" because it sounded classy - nothing to do with the UK.

copyright 1999 Mark Bellis
GUELPH, JULY 29 (1993) - Pheww!! A Guelph man has won the World's Smelliest Socks Contest by having socks so smelly not even a dog will go near them. "I had a dog at home, one sniff and he'd run under the bed. My in-laws have a cottage near North Bay. When I take off my socks, they'd rather go out and face the blackflies." says Dave Hargrave, 47, of Guelph, who won "The World's Smelliest Socks Contest" in New York yesterday.

"He'd used to sit around with his feet out so I just couldn't stand it" says his wife Linda, who has to do his laundry."I saw an ad in a tabloid for the World's Smelliest Socks contest, I said to him 'Dave,you're a shoe-in for it!'. So I picked out the stinkiest one, put it in a ziploc bag, and mailed it to New York - I had to fill out a customs form - I just put down 'Smelly Sock'!.

"I work making auto parts" says Dave "This was one that I had been wearing in my work boots, but I can wash my feet as long as I want and ten minutes later they still smell."

Dave says that his mother, father, girlfriends and ex-wife have all complained about his foot odour for as long as he can remember. "I had an old doctor that recommended bathing my feet in cucumber rinds and milk to kill the odor. I tried that - it didn't work."

The contest, sponsored by the British Knights shoe company to promote a new canvas sneaker that allows the foot to transpire, and hopefully not smell, received 300 socks from all over North America. Judges included British Knights Executive Vice President Larry Schwartz, Publicist Eric Yaverbaum and his dog Lucy. "We picked Eric 'cause he has the largest nose" says Schwartz. Final entries were sniffed out by Lucy, a Labrador retriever mix, whose response was measured by the degree that she avoided the socks. Dave's size twelve socks did not fail to produce the same duck-for-cover reflex on Lucy that it did on his own dog.

The stinky footgear punted Dave into the rank ranks [I know, I know!] of the top ten finalists, all of who win a three year supply of British Knights canvas outdoor basketball shoes.

In his spare time, Dave prowls the yard sales, helping Linda build her various collections, which include an estimated 10,000 buttons, 1000 fridge magnets, 180 souvenirs spoons, and over 2200 items of pig memoribilia.

"She sure has a pile of pigs" says Dave, "Every time you go into a room in this house, you see a pig." The items include pig slippers, pig lamps, pig hats, pig doorknob covers, pig clothes, and of course, piggy banks, including a very fetching depression-era Porky Pig.

"We always celebrate March 1, National Pig Day." says Linda. "I wanted to get a pet pig but the City of Guelph doesn't allow them." Linda hopes to start a pig fanciers' club. "We're both kinda funny."she says.

-30-

Dave Hargrave shows off his socks and his wife's collection of pig memorabilia, Guelph, 1993

Cure Found?

GUELPH, N0V 19, 1993 - A mysterious green liquid may be the cure to a Guelph man's big problem - his smelly feet!

"They sent him a bottle of blue stuff to try first. They said just to soak your feet in it but he wanted to have a bath too, so he took a shortcut" said his wife, Linda. "He poured the whole bottle into the bath and soaked in it - when he came out he was blue in places he normally wasn't."

"My ass was blue! Every time I bent over you could see it!" says Dave Hargrave, 47

He received bottles of a deodorant concoction called "Dr. Pedirose" (literally 'Dr. Roseyfoot') from Rene Klemme, a Montreal businessman, for him to test on his feet. The blue liquid worked well, but another green liquid worked even better. "It works for up to two and a half months." says Linda.

Dave, a machinist, is more skeptical "On hot days the effect is minimal.Wearing heavy work boots for eight or nine hours take their toll"

Linda interrupts "No, it eliminated the odor completely! I should know, I sit next to him and he takes his shoes off and puts his feet up when gets home from work and watches TV."

Dave had to sign a waiver not to reveal the composition of the liquid, which has a strong odor of wintergreen and camphor. "It's the best thing I've tried, but soaking my feet in cucumber rinds and milk works OK, too." Dave says.

Copyright 1993, 1996 Mark Bellis

Moon World Unification Church

 TORONTO JULY 5, 1993- The leader of a world-wide religion preaches that he is greater than Jesus Christ and prescribes sex rituals to his followers, according to a professor at a Toronto theological seminary.

The reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the World Unification Church, popularly known as "Moonies", says "Before I came, all the world was in darkness, all the prophets who came before me were failures" as quoted by professor James Beverley, a professor at Ontario Theological Seminary in Toronto

Professor Beverley, who is writing his doctoral thesis at the Toronto School of Theology on the doctrines of the Unification Church, has read over 6,000 pages of Moon's sermons during his studies. He exposed some little-known feature before a meeting of the Ontario Skeptics this evening.

The Korean-born Moon claims to be an original thinker, but Professor Beverly quotes sources to show that he derives his ideas from five Christian group popular in Korea.

The Unification Church, known for its mass wedding ceremonies involving thousands of members being married in huge rituals lead by Reverend Moon requires its newlyweds live apart for up to three years and then consummate their marriages over a three day ceremony in sexual positions that Moon teaches his followers to use. The also strike each other with sticks on the buttocks,"'It's supposed to hurt', the Unificationists tell me, to remind them of the fall of Adam and Eve." Moon believes he and he wife form a perfect couple which redeems mankind's sins.

Moon also preaches that his followers should not use two sheets of toilet paper at a sitting and should not grow beards or mustaches because he doesn't do that either, and that women should be inferior to men. "A woman can never be stable by herself" noting that woman are easily distracted. "A country where women dominate will not prosper and will eventually perish.

Moon also has been accused of anti-semitism. In one of the sermons quoted by professor Beverly, Moon says during the Second World War, "Six million perished to cleans the sins of the Jewish people from the time of Jesus Christ. Jews have good minds, but little common sense...if they stuck together they could easily take over this situation." (Society in the USA)

"The main thing that sticks out from his sermons is his unbridled ego - I don't think he realizes how scandalous and crude he sounds." said Beverly, who is writing a book about the Unification Church.

The Unification Church has about 100,000 members worldwide.

MICHAEL COREN - FRANK ANARCHY

• This was done in 1993 for CHAOS magazine, now defunct, published by Raj Dash. I like Mike. He's a nice guy personally. I don't know how much his 'RB gig is a persona - I suggested to him during the interview during the interview he could be a "Rush Limbaugh" style character. (this was way before he started working at CFRB). He joked he would have struck me if he was there in person....

---

copyright 1999 Mark Bellis Michael Coren is speaking on the phone from the toilet seat of his Toronto home.
"I'm in a bit of a rush - Korean Airlines want to do a documentary about Toronto based around a writer with a family". His two children's voices come from the other room."They're serenading the Lego" he says.
Like a Mig-23 getting stuck into a jumbo jet full of tourists, Coren rips into the politically pretentious in his bi- weekly column in FRANK magazine.
Favorite targets are Bob Rae's NDP  "the former high school teachers who run our province"; Michelle Landsberg, the proudly politically correct Toronto STAR columnist with a somewhat Junoesque figure (she's shaped like one of the moons of Jupiter) "the woman who put the lumpen back into lumpenproletariat". "I didn't think she was real - I thought she was some kind of made up monster". (When told that Landsberg would be contacted for her reaction , he said "I don't think she'll answer you - she's probably too busy eating." ); The police, "these bloated peasants who swagger around our city...ignorant, deltoid-obsessed asexual baboons."; and the Reform Party, whom he depicts as singing the Horst Wessel Leid, the Nazi rally song which goes "When Jewish blood spurts from daggers, everything is great." during their meetings. (Coren is half-Jewish)
Coren is famous (or infamous, depending on the political viewpoint) for writing things like a 'modest proposal' to save lesbians from breast cancer by forming "Anti-Cancer Commandos" whose "sole purpose would be to seduce assorted lesbians, no matter how ugly and hairy they were, and impregnate them. The work would probably be hazardous, probably dirty, and certainly be unpleasant, ... [but] - I am sure a generous grant would be forthcoming" from the provincial government.
"Do you harbour hostile notions towards homosexuals or homosexuality?" I ask.
"Have I ever even written that in Frank? My politics, if I have any, are anarchist - I believe the manner in which one makes love, whether one has an abortion, or not, whether one puts on a seatbelt, are all the same issue. I think what an individual does, in any form, is entirely up to them, and the people that I attack in the column tend to be people that go against that."
Coren says that when he attacks radicals, lesbian, feminist or whatever, he is attacking their hypocrisy in insisting that no-one has the right to interfere in their life, but wanting to regulate what other people think or say. "I don't believe that the Church or state or anybody else has the right to tell anyone whether they should make love. Equally, no radical homosexual is going to tell me what I should be reading or doing. In terms of being against the gay community, it's quite ludicrous - As an Englishman I grew up being formed and educated by gay men - great influence in my life." But "When people dress up as fairies and run down Yonge Street on Gay Pride Day, this has nothing to do with their sexuality. It has to do with the fact that they're profoundly neurotic. Dressing up as Tinkerbell, as one chap I mentioned did, is his neurosis speaking, not his sexuality."
He is not just anti-left. "I'm a contrarion - if I lived in a right-wing society, I'd be left wing - Look at what I say about the police - I hope I'm never in any trouble with them - the left are often much funnier, but it does come up fifty-fifty, the police, the Tory party, the Reform party, the far right, racism, I attack these things over and over again."
Coren is busy. He writes for The Globe, The Star, Book in Canada, and many others, edits The Canadian Catholic Review, published a book on H.G. Wells this year, and will publish two more biographies on C.S. Lewis and Arthur Conan Doyle. He appears frequently on TVO's Imprint. The FRANK columns are being publish in book form under the title "Aesthete: The Frank Diaries of Michael Coren" with one volume that made the best-seller list this year and another due out next year. Coren was made a papal knight last year, although as a pro-choice, pro ordination of women andpro marriage of priests, he is certainly outside the Church's official point-of-view. "I don't think they read my columns." He also got into hot water over a Toronto Life profile he did of Archbishop Ambrozic of Toronto, where he depicted the Archbishop behaving like a bonehead, calling a woman'a bitch', criticising non-white immigration and asking someone to lie for him. "To write a profile of a prominent figure - politician, businessman, religious leader, hockey player - if they use foul language it is reported because it is part of their character. If they shout at their press secretary and tell them to lie for them, 'that's their job', that's what he said, that's to be reported."
"I don't make things up - although sometimes the juxtaposition is erroneous." Like serving muscadet with pork? "Yes. that's an in-joke, like when I said recently I wanted to fly to Geneva to claim the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course it's in Stockholm."
"Oslo. The Nobel Prizes are in Stockholm." I reply.
I then objected to his qualification of Gwen Jacob as "a dowdy exhibitionist." "She's not dowdy - she's really good-looking" I say.
"She's not that good-looking - I saw her on TV - Oh, but I think the term 'Dowdy Exhibitionist' is rather lovely - her breasts weren't that appealing - they were rather floppy"
"I didn't pay any attention. That's just her T-shirt actually" I say.
Michelle Landsberg "No longer reads Michael Coren" according to her assistant.
Copyright 1993, 1996, 2009 Mark Bellis

Double rainbow on St. Lawrence, 1993

 

Arthur Ashe

Arthur Ashe looks at a charm I got from a little girl in Iceland, November 9, 1992, Helen Hosmer Concert Hall, SUNY, Potsdam, NY. 

Iceland

Harbour with Coast Guard ship, October 1992. I think this is the Óðinn, (Odin) , which took part in the Cod Wars against British trawlers. The Icelanders resented it being called a gunboat, as it only had a 57mm Hotchkiss gun at the time (very old!), replaced by a more modern 40mm Bofors when this photo was taken.

 

Kristín Jóhannesdóttir was one of two film directors I met in Iceland. She was promoting her film Svo á jörðu sem á himni (On Earth as in Heaven) at a booth in the Kolaportið flea market. Right next to a guy selling Hákarl (fermented shark). I think she might have been Miss World Iceland in 1972.

Geraldine Ferraro, first female candidate for US Vice-president

First female US vice-presidential candidate from a major party. Nice enough to pose for my Mamiya C220 in Massena, New York in 1992.

 Anti abortion protesters

I don't have my notes for this, but I think she was campaigning for Clinton - I don't think she said anything about abortion here, but the demonstrators were picketing her anyway.