From: "Willie Smith" <williesmith49@hotmail.com>

I would suggest a reenactment of the ancient Cajun fertility ritual of Mississippi mud beating. Prior to the Anglo takeover early in the 19th Century, this ritual was enacted as often as possible. It entailed a crew of 12 young male virgins who would "copulate" with a specified muddy area of a Mississippi bank down there in the delta. The apparent intent was to ensure the health and proliferation of the river's catfish, crawdads, eels, mud puppies, frogs, salamanders and other New World Gaullic delights. Unfortunately, the Anglos were so outraged by the proceedings, that their subsequent trashing of the native customs and religious practices has made it difficult to reconstruct details of the ritual with any degree of exactitude.
But I would suggest rounding up a dozen male virgins over the age of eighteen (well, perhaps they could be each "like a virgin"), issuing them gold lame jockstraps and handing each an uncooked hotdog skewered on the end of a Saab or Citroen antenna. Their instructions would be to flog hebephrenically the mud of a pre-selected bank of the MS, while chanting in falsetto unison: "Sling the mud! Bring the flood! Put the jerk to work!"
The reenactment would only, of course, be symbolic. Actual intromission by contemporary specimens into the river's mud - today's semen chocked full of toxins, radioactivity, oddball diseases, etc. - would in no way be safe for the wildlife still managing to inhabit the noble flumen. I should also like to point out that the third line of the chant, viz. Put the jerk to work! contemporizes the ritual with a not-so subliminal approach to the unemployment problem all along the banks of the river. I mean, if this symbolic group masturbation can increase the catfish population - is it too much of a stretch to feel it may produce some tangible reduction of unemployment among the human population?

Castrate religious nuts, Willie