By  Steve Huff

(Continued)

Underwood made other posts in the alt.slack group that were strange, and in light of his arrest for Jamie Bolin's murder, chilling.

On March 4, 2002, a poster using the nickname "nu-monet v4.0" began a discussion thread in alt.slack about a bizarre diet that seemed to propose that drinking one's urine was a healthy thing to do, and could even lead to weight-loss. The link posted by "nu-monet" has since been taken off-line, but the response of a "Rev. Underwood," whose e-mail was subspecies23@aol.com was notable. Rev. Underwood posted the following later in the day on March 4^th:

"That's very interesting!  I may have to try it.  Especially if the weight loss thing is true.  It's not like I haven't drank my urine before anyway.  Many, if not most, animals drink their urine and/or eat their, or other animal's, feces. They drink their urine for the reasons mentioned in this article, such as to ingest nutritional vitamins and etc. their digestion may have missed the first time through. Getting the most out of limited resources.  Feces is eaten mainly for similar reasons, but especially by carnivorous animals because feces is very high in protein. Cat feces is very high in protein.  I read about a person who had a cat and a dog, and they almost never had to clean the cat box because the dog took care of it."

In another discussion begun by "Rev. Underwood," on February 28, 2002, a thread he began by making an odd observation about potato chips eventually brought the following response from Underwood to another poster who mentioned the beef snack, Slim Jims:

"Slim Jims are good, but I prefer jerky, and not that chopped and formed crap they market as jerky now. I mean real jerky, the rock hard, tough, slabs of meat that you have to be a real man with strong jaws and biceps to even eat. When I was in college my I would eat beef jerky and Banana Quick for lunch almost every day. Mmmmm, meat and meat by-products. I love Spam too...."

Casual reading of the fare published on message boards and web pages by devotees to the Church of the Subgenius shows a consistent vein of subversive and sick humor, often directed at provoking and offending the reader. It might be easy to read Underwood's posts in that light, were it not for other messages he left in the newsgroup, like this one, posted on February 27, 2002:

"I take this church very seriously.  I know some of the people that join up have varying degrees of seriousness to which they take this church: some people think of it as a complete joke, or a club, while for some people it actually is their religion.  I'm one of the latter.  I take it very seriously and I worry about it. With every report from Stang I worry more about the church's financial status and I worry that one day it may be forced to shut down. I know that even if that happened, the church would live on the internet and in the hearts and minds of its followers. The church would live on, but it would live in a reduced, crippled state.... If I won a million dollars I would donate a few thousand to the church, if I won more I would donate even more. I swear this on "Bob," "God," and all the rest.  I've been telling this to myself for some time now, but nothing's happened, I'm hoping an open declaration of my intentions will help.  So "Bob," help the luck plane slant this way.  I will be grateful and will prove it by giving you large sums of money.  As a gesture of good faith, tomorrow I'm going send the church a donation of $20, that's all I can afford at the moment.  Help me and you'll get more...."

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Steve Huff can be reached via the contact form at his weblog, http://www.HuffCrimeBlog.com/.

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