My Street Preacher Keepin' Busy

Every New Year's Eve for three years running between 2005-2007, I've encountered this one street preacher from Bellingham, Wash., on the Strip outside Caesars Palace. His name is Robert Ephrata and, yes, he's a carpenter just like you-know-who. I've written about him in the Las Vegas Weekly and in The New York Times, in part because he makes a fascinating point that between the Strip on New Year's Eve and the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena on Jan. 1, it is the largest concentration of people gathering in public in a 24-hour span in the world.

Well, I just got this email. Apparently, he's abandoned the kinder, gentler tone he struck in my NYT piece and is back to the hard-core "you're gonna get zapped!" message in some third-world country in Africa where I find it hard to imagine they have any idea what the magic words "Sodom and Gomorrah" even mean, translated or not.

Check it out. It's really sad on a number of levels.