T he Reverend John Wayne "Punkin" Brown, Jr. died of a rattlesnake bite October 3, while ministering at the Rock House Holiness Church in Scottsboro, Alabama, USA. Reverend Brown was known as "the Mad Monk" and was called the one most "mired in the ... blood lust of the patriarchs" in Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington. (These are churches where serpent handling is practiced as religious ceremony, as a demonstration of faith in the Lord.)

O h, Sand Mountain! The Reverend's wife Melinda died the same way three years ago in a Middlesboro, Kentucky church, handling poisonous rattlers!

N orth Alabama will forever be known, to me, by the evocative town name of "Lickskillet". In fact, I once worked daily with a man who lived in Lickskillet, Alabama. He related to me how a pesky skunk had been lurking about his home, smelling up the place. A firearms sort of guy, (5'3" and 300 lbs., purportedly able to lift a refrigerator by himself), he told me he selected his 9mm. and "shot the skunk with two or three rounds. Then seven or eight. I emptied the magazine at him. Later I came out and pumped another clip into him just for good measure."

(S igh.) Like Married With Children, "there's a healthy relationship!"

T his is the same part of the country that spawned "Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers", by the way; an influential old-time string band of the South, and Grand Ole Opry performing and recording group. This was during the dawn of mass public distribution or phonorecordings in America, in the very early 1900's.