March 1999: Vol. 78, No. 2March 1999: Vol. 78, No. 2 |
 BABE: IT'S NOT WHAT'S FOR DINNER EITHER Wearing stickers that read "Pigs are friends not food" and holding signs plastered with porker pinups, a group of UGA students staged a demonstration in front of Athens' Beechwood Stadium 11 Theatres Dec. 8 to ask folks paying to see "Babe: Pig in the City" to think of him the next time they take a bite. "Babe: Pig in the City," chronicles the little pig's journey to the big city to help his owners, Farmer and Mrs. Hoggett, earn money to save their farm. "The film undeniably has a vegetarian message," says demonstration organizer Natalia Ferrando, a freshman journalism major who plans to start a UGA chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals this spring. "There's a scene in a slaughterhouse. There's a hanging carcass."
Publicists from Universal Studios, which produced last year's sequel to the wildly popular original "Babe" movie, declined to comment on the film's vegetarian philosophy. But Ferrando says it's very clear. "Just the fact that they have animals that talk and have personality basically shows kids that their food has faces," says Ferrando. Well, hotdog!
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Beanie critters include Uga and Hairy Dawg!
Who's more loyal (read: rabid)—the average beanie baby collector or the average college sports fanatic?
Lucky Bill Gaffney, he doesn't have to choose. With Gaffney's new business, Campus Critters, he's combined the nation's most beloved college mascots with the nation's most beloved toy phenomenon. Beanie Uga, beanie Albert the Gator, and 88 other beanie mascots—including Hairy Dog—have hit Wal-Mart, Goody's, and, of course, Sanford Stadium.
"I've had a lot of people tell me the idea is so obvious," says Gaffney, an '87 marketing graduate.
(Why didn't we think of it?—Ed.)
Each critter, says Gaffney, is anatomically correct. "We want to create an authentic replica in an eight-inch form. Nobody else is doing that," he says. "The characters are kind of difficult. The Florida critter has 53 sewn parts."
The owner of the factory in China that produces Gaffney's critters visited Athens for the Georgia-Ole Miss game last fall.
"We wanted him to get a first-hand look at college football and all the tradition and pageantry," says Gaffney. "We were down by the field and he said, 'This is bigger than Mickey Mouse.'"
Haunt team on prowl for spooky spirits
Last fall, a group of people armed with infrared scanners, electromagnetic field detectors, cameras, mini-cassette recorders, and the odd notebook assembled outside a building on UGA's campus.
This wasn't just any building—it was Joe Brown Hall, a three-story brick edifice that, in its earlier capacity as a dormitory, was the scene of a student's suicide. Over the past 20 years, staff working in the building have reported seeing apparitions of a young male by their window—sometimes on the inside looking out, sometimes on the outside looking in.
And this wasn't some candlelight campus tour group. This was the Georgia Haunt Hunt Team, the "team of investigators" Cheri Drake formed to document the existence of ghosts. Since the evening in 1997 when she stopped her car outside a country graveyard on the way home from her daughter's cheerleading practice and snapped a few photographs, Drake (AB '92) has been on a crusade.
Because when she developed her photographs from that drive-by, she saw what her naked eye did not: a round ball of light floating in the air above several graves. It was an Orb, the most common form of ghosts, right there on her photographs. (Casper? Not a real ghost. Your average sheeted spook on Halloween? Puh-lease.)
Though Drake and her team saw nothing that night in front of Joe Brown Hall, they snapped pictures and recorded "severe temperature drops." Later they did likewise in Old Athens Cemetery, across from the Main Library. Carol Bishop, a library stack supervisor and hunt team member, summarizes the findings: "A cold spot seems to be in the air just above our heads around a few graves. We've taken pictures in the same area and gotten very large orbs where we felt the cold spot."
Ghosts create cold spots by taking energy from the air to manifest, says Drake, a 35-year-old mother of three. "You can feel it. It's bone-chilling cold. We just use the instruments so others believe we're not hallucinating."
The approximately 20 members of the hunt team have pursued ghosts in 30 locations—ranging from a Stone Mountain bed-and-breakfast where guests report hearing a man singing African spirituals, to Anthony's Restaurant in Buckhead, where patrons report seeing a female ghost in antebellum dress.
In five cases, Drake's team turned up no strange odors or sounds, no tingling electric charges, no electrical appliances gone haywire, no cold spots, not a single beloved orb. Nothing to report in the team's "Ghost Post" newsletter. Drake's not worried though. Judging from the number of calls she gets, Georgia is chock-full of ghosts just waiting to be noticed.
On Sundays, it's Jesus —not Jack Daniels
It's Sunday evening at Athens' Tasty World bar. The neon Budweiser signs are all unplugged and the stools are stacked on the bar, their legs in the air. Vapors from last night's suds linger on. And just around the corner from the kegs, a group of worshippers is singing and praying.
"I always say that a church is its people and not a building," says Chet Boyd, minister of the non-denominational Downtown Community Fellowship, which meets Sundays at Tasty World. Services attract between 10 and 20 people, most of them UGA students.
Despite the untraditional setting, DCF services are quite conventional. After starting with hymns, Boyd delivers an inspirational message. Later there's communion—grape juice, not the house red.
Why meet in a bar when there are plenty of other spaces around Athens? For one thing, Tasty World owner Murphy Wolford offered his place for a good price: free.
"It's a beautiful room, and whether it's for a sorority party on a Tuesday night, a band on a Thursday night, or church on a Sunday night, I just want the space to be used," says Wolford, who works in communication services at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education.
It's also good for the church to meet in a place where students feel comfortable, says Lilburn junior Matt Davis. "We're trying to build people up and serve people at their level," he says. "If that means meeting in a bar, then by all means we will."
Besides, the hardwood floors and huge windows of Tasty World are cathedral-like. And the bottles behind the bar do contain spirits.
Section by Laura Wexler
and Stacie Sutton
