The Salt Lake Tribune brought an interesting fact to my attention today. If you chec
k out this website that is a "guide" to Draper, UT, you'll be pleasantly surrounded by the various things Draper City offers. Good dining, good shopping, and the State Prison. The State Prison is not mentioned under the 'Trivia Facts" section (which unfortunately doesn't even exist). It is listed under "Entertainment".Upon clicking on the link for more information about the State Prison, you get the address, phone number, a little box labeled "You also might like...Federal Correctional Facilities...," and lower down the categorization of the prison being both "Correctional Facilities" and "Attractions". There were no user reviews...
Out of curiosity, I searched the Draper Prison website to see if I could schedule a tour. After all, it wouldn't be a very welcoming entertainment location if they didn't at least offer tours. I found no easy way t
o do so and I did not feel inclined to call them somewhat jokingly. I was mostly deterred from making this call by the pictures posted on their website. Every time I saw a picture of the guards that worked there, they were at a firing range. I kid you not; I struggled to find a picture of a guard that was not wearing earmuffs and aiming a gun. Oddly enough, the targets were never pictured, so you really have no idea what these guys (and gals) were aiming at...So cross that off your list of "Things to do when I visit Utah". It may be theoretically categorized as an attraction and entertainment, but I think the jury's still out on such classification...
Continuing on in the news, I found a brief article mentioning a murder that took place in Pennsylvania in May. Two guys were arguing over a game, one had a gun, the other apparently thought he was Dirty Harry and his last words were, "Shoot me, shoot me,
you ain't got the..."The game that provoked the argument? Beer pong.
What makes this news scoop even more sad is that the Pennsylvania State Prisons do not appear to be listed in the Entertainment sections of any city guide websites, as far as I can tell. So Joseph Jimenez (who apparently did have the guts or gumption or whatever the other guy was about to say) is likely to spend some time in a prison facility that is not very entertaining. The good news for him is that I could not find a single picture on the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections website of gun-wielding guards practicing shooting things. And by the way, you can purchase a piece of furniture that Joseph might have made through the Pennsylvania Correctional Industries catalog, if you so desire...
If you don't go to that website, you're missing out on the very thing that will make your day a happy one.
Now back to beer pong. I'd like to note here that I'm firmly against drinking alcohol. Not being a drinker myself, I'm completely unfamiliar with drinking games. But I just had to find out what this one was all about. Some of you may be surprised to find that Wikipedia has a very extensive article outlining everything related to beer pong.
The general idea: bounce a ping pong ball into a cup of beer, then drink beer. There are, of course, MANY variations to this and usually there are teams. I'm guessing that most of these variations came about when the heavy drinkers vaguely recalled playing something that involved a ping pong ball and they recreated the game as best as they could.
Wha
t nearly stunned me (although I should never really doubt the almighty power of Wikipedia) was just how much detail its beer pong article explored. I simply cannot do this article justice. Diagrams, ideal trajectories (see picture on left of arc shot, fastball, and bounce shot), and my favorite part of the whole article, "The game is also played by high school students, despite the fact that supplying alcohol to persons under the age of 21 in the United States...is nominally illegal," (emphasis added). Right. Unfortunately for Joseph, murder is not one of those "nominal" offenses.On the bright side though, I bet Joseph can whip up a mean "Big House Laundry Detergent".
Pictures:
Prison
Prison Guards
Beer Pong
Beer Pong Ideal Trajectories
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