Downtown developments

A bit of continuation from last week's column, since I ran out of room to include these names. First, let me make it clear that I am not knocking churches, just pondering the names such as one way out in the county named Riverview. It is nowhere near any water, much less the river; therefore, it must take its name from something else? I thought about the First as in First Baptist or First Methodist and found, much to my surprise, that there are also second and third Baptist churches across the country but wonder how one church gets to be first, leaving the others to either come in second or third. Catholic churches are easy, as most are named for a saint or someone like that, but some names just boggle the mind. Just what does MT Transfiguration mean? There is Young Macedonia and Old Macedonia; are the churches old or young? What is a Cogic? The majority of churches are named for where they are located - a street, a subdivision, an area or a town - but what about Born Again Believers? Can one only attend if they are born again, and I thought everyone who went to church was a believer, anyway?

It is a rare occasion that I get out to other places at night. Mostly I am working, then just too tired to go out afterward, but sometimes it does happen. On one such occasion very recently, we noticed several, maybe five or six, rather buff young men in what appeared to be police pants and tee shirts with what appeared to be police emblems, walk through the door. Seldom am I impressed, but this time I was, so I paid selective attention to them. Turns out they were not certified police officers; they were corrections officers, and, according to SCDC, you do not have to be police-certified to become one; however, this is not the point. Even though they were not certified police, I would think they should be held to the same standards as police and us as regular citizens when it comes to following the law. As I mentioned, there were five or six of them, and over a 2- to 3-hour period, they consumed up to nine pitchers of beer. Each pitcher holds approximately five full beer glasses of beer, meaning that each man drank more than five beer glasses of beer, then walked out to drive home in their separate vehicles. The law, I guess, does not apply to them. From what I gather two glasses can make a person have a .08 alcohol level, which is the legal limit. It makes me wonder what the blood-alcohol level is after five or more glasses and just why they thought it was OK to drink like that and drive. Regardless of the disappointment in their behavior with the alcohol, it was a pleasure looking at them.