The end is near!

Phillipe & Jorge have always believed that if you plan to start a bizarre new religious cult, you should at least make it entertaining. Try as they might, the Hale-Bopp crowd that committed mass suicide a year ago in San Diego didn't exactly measure up, despite their new sneakers and passion for ice cream and old Star Trek episodes. Must have been something about the genital mutilation and, well, mass suicide.

But we're willing to give cultists who believe that flying saucers are about to show up and zip them off planet Earth another chance, especially if they are as entertaining as God's Salvation Church, a group of about 150 recent Taiwanese immigrants who are presently ensconced in the Dallas suburb of Garland.

Recently profiled in the New York Times, the group, naturally, has a charismatic leader. He is Teacher Heng-Ming Chen, a 42-year-old former social science professor who "talks to God through his hand and discerns godly wisdom from golden balls that he sees floating in the sky." Oh yeah, and Chen notes that he "fathered Christ nearly 2000 years ago."

Of course, this revelation has come in mighty handy in identifying current incarnations of Christ. One, 10-year-old Chi-Jen Lo (a.k.a. "Jesus of the East") is already in Garland. The Times article provided a photo of him in sneakers and a straw cowboy hat, sucking down a Mountain Dew on a lawn.

Unfortunately, "Jesus of the West" has yet to be located, even though Chen and a group of followers spent a couple of weeks last summer searching for him in British Columbia. According to Teacher Chen's prophecy, Jesus of the West is "28 years old, six feet tall, and looks like Abraham Lincoln."

The Teacher has put together some of his thoughts in a tract titled "God's Descending in Clouds [Flying Saucers] on Earth to Save People." Unlike the Hale-Boppers, Chen's group is quite clear about the particulars of making a rendezvous with the saucers. On page 176 of his magnum opus, Chen explains, "At 10 a.m. on March 31, 1998, God shall make his appearance in the Holy Land of the Kingdom of God: 3513 Ridgedale Drive, Garland, TX, 75401, USA."

Now this is the kind of specific timetable that we like, including Chen's assurance that if his prophecy comes up a little short, he would never encourage mass suicide, although his translator suggests that, if things don't work out according to plan, "he is willing to be executed, stoned to death, put on a cross . . . it doesn't matter." Well, that's a relief!

By the way, thanks to the fabulous world of modern telecommunications, we all will be able to follow this because, according to Teacher Chen, "on March 25, God will make an announcement of His arrival which can be seen by tuning into Channel 18 on any television set in the world."

As cable customers in Providence, your superior correspondents are relieved that Channel 18 is a Cox Communications public access station, which means we won't have to worry about the preemption of a Hee Haw rerun or some similar outrage.

We certainly hope all goes according to plan, although we must say that we were a little skeptical to discover that Teacher Chen periodically travels to Gary, Indiana, because he considers this "holy land." This does not exactly jibe with our one visit to Gary. But hey, who are we to question a guy conversant with golden balls?

The boys want to be with the boys

A delight at Casa Diablo this week when Jocks, old friend Dan Woog's book on homosexuals in sports, arrived through the mail slot. Woog, an old high school and college mate of Phillipe's, also has penned School's Out, a story of the travails of high school students coming out of the closet and how that affected their lives at Testosterone Tech.

Woog is even more at home with Jocks. As a former soccer player, one of the top junior soccer coaches in the nation, and editor of Soccer America's monthly "Youth Soccer" section, he first came out in his column in Connecticut's Westport News, and in case people weren't paying attention at the national soccer coaches convention, the world of soccer is no bastion of liberal thought.

Nor is any part of athletics. To date, only a few athletes in major sports, out of the hundreds of thousands who have graced our sports pages, have admitted their preferences -- Dave Kopay in pro football (honorable mention to Jackie Smith, the All Pro tight end who unfortunately died of AIDS), Glenn Burke, the ex-LA Dodger, and, of course, Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis. (P&J offer a nod and knowing wink to male figure skaters as well.)

Gosh, just amazing that the percentage matches the general public average of one in 10 gay people, eh? But perhaps we should look more closely at the recent experience of New England Patriot Dave "Family Man" Meggett, he of the four illegitimate and unsupported children who was arrested for beating and robbing a prostitute in Toronto after having sex with her and a former Patriots player.

You know what they say about the Mormons: "They don't like sex, but they sure like making babies." And those pro athletes don't like other guys, but they sure like having group sex with them.

This ongoing proclivity among the practitioners of the Sweaty Sciences has proved to be a great way around the homosexuality issue, as Kopay often points out. Hopefully, books such as Dan Woog's Jocks, with a startling and glowing endorsement on the jacket by Bob Costas, one of pro sports' major butt boys, is a move in the right direction toward opening the locker doors. Good on ye, Danny.

Take my life, please!

The flags remain at half-mast at Casa Diablo due to the recent death of Henny Youngman, the "king of the one-liners." Phillipe and Jorge both had a humorous history with Youngman.

In Phillipe's first-ever celebrity interview, Youngman had conversed with him over the phone from the kitchen of his Brooklyn home. His wife clattering pots and pans and yelling to him in the background, Youngman had ranted all over the place, contradicting himself every 10 seconds, before demanding that Phillipe get him a better hotel room than the one promoters had arranged at the Biltmore for an upcoming appearance in Our Little Towne.

Jorge once performed on the same bill with Youngman and says he was a joke-telling robot, on Borscht Belt auto pilot, who came in, rattled off the one-liners, and picked up his money before heading to a pay phone to call his wife and find out what plane he was supposed to hop on for his next gig.

To paraphrase one of Youngman's stock-in-trade lines, he'll miss his wife's cooking -- as often as he can. Ba-boom! One last rim shot for the road.

Question time

Here are a couple of puzzlers for you. How is it that Vernon Jordan could be so impressed with Monica Lewinsky's "drive, ambition, and personality" that he helped her on both a high-level job hunt and a search for a crack attorney while White House aides transferred her from a job at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to the Pentagon due to "unsatisfactory work"?

Your superior correspondents also fail to understand how President Billary's chief flack, Mike McCurry, can keep his job in spite of his trashy mouth. Howard Kurtz's new book, Spin Cycle, due out any day now, quotes McCurry speaking ill of the president's wife, Hillary Rodham Cuckold.

After Slick Willie's infamous comment about an Incan mummy ("If I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out"), McCurry evidently informed Billary that given his notorious zipper problem, perhaps that wasn't the greatest remark to make. And for this, the head flack was chewed out by his boss.

Later, with sympathetic friends from the media at a bar, McCurry had a drink and snarled, "Probably she does look good compared to the mummy he's been f---ing." Good morning to you, too, Mrs. Clinton.

Brief musings

Regarding all the praise heaped on Fred Friendly, the Rhode Island-bred newsman who passed away last week, we can only say that he was all that. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone who did more to demand that television news live up to its promise. He was a giant indeed.

. . . In response to the news that a New Jersey appeals court had reinstated a Boy Scout leader who had been stripped of his post for being gay, Lyle Antonides, executive director of the Narragansett Council of the Boy Scouts of America, was quoted in a wire service item last week as saying, "Homosexuals do not belong in scouting." Well, P&J believe that discrimination and stupidity do not belong in scouting and would urge Mr. Antonides to step down immediately.

---

The P & J archive

---