CALIFORNIA
Orange County Weekly
Where have you gone, Charles Manson; a nation turns its fearful eyes to you, woo, hoo, AWWWWWWW!!!!!! Was that a frigging bird?!?!?!.
Time was when we could feel good about the shit that scared us: nuclear war, serial killers, cancer. This was scary shit a person could understand and shake hands with. Look at what we have now. Scary comes in such benign packages -- doomsday is no longer likely to be delivered by a superpower but by a subway passenger or a chicken. Charlie? You're more likely to get murdered by a crazy mom or an angry teen (fear the day you cross an angry teen mom off her meds).
We here at theWeeklyare nothing if not -- did you feel that shaking. . . cut it out, Griley, it's not funny . . . I am not crying. I just have very expressive eyes . . . Anyway, we've updated our annual scariest list to include this new trend in fear, so along with our usual menagerie of crooked cops and putrid politicians, you'll also get terrifying tow trucks, reckless restaurateurs and the baseball helmet from hell! All this along with Art Linkletter and the Lord Jesus, who, coincidentally, are roughly the same age. Scary.
22 FATHER JOSEPH FENTON
Last year, we asked Pope John Paul II to excommunicate Fenton because the spokesperson for the Catholic Diocese of Orange was "combative, insulting and as surly as Saul of Tarsus." His Holiness never answered -- what, the pope's on vacation or something? -- and Fenton continues his war on truth. In January, the Toledo Blade asked Fenton to comment on Thomas Hodgman, a former Mater Dei High choir teacher and current Michigan resident who had just been named a predator in the Orange diocese's $100 million civil settlement with 90 victims of clerical sex abuse. "Under no circumstances does the settlement imply any guilt on anyone's part," Fenton told the Blade -- this just a couple of days after newspapers across the country ran a picture of Fenton's boss, Bishop Tod D. Brown, apologizing to Hodgman's victim, Joelle Casteix, for her abuse during the 1980s. MITIGATING FACTOR: Breaking the Silence, Fenton's documentary explaining the Orange diocese sex-abuse scandal to teens, is the most unintentionally hilarious Catholic romp since the Inquisition segment in History of the World, Part 1.