News Item! Literature In 2011 Largely Contained!

The disheartening trend of early 21st century novels to be written by people with either one name or four continued this year, Publisher's Meekly reported in their annual We're Not Kidding edition. Writes editor Herman Candy Cane, "We encourage everyone this year to send us copies to read because it's really expensive for us to buy them ourselves. I'm not kidding guys!"

In Bavarian Poetry news, more verse about castles appeared on castle walls than ever before, despite the imminent collapse of the European Union & a healthy dislike of castles, as reported in Castles Semiannually. "At least they're not those hip-hop tags," says Castle Sales Manager Heinrich Rich at Royal Properties, Luxembourg. "They're just so gauche."

Reeling from not winning any awards for the tenth year in a row, former goat-cheese inhaler & now conservative novelist Newton Mean decided to boycott other writings this year, possibly even his own. "When I was in high school, & a white person was president, & Richard Dean Anderson smiled at me," he told his blog, "that was the America I wanted to write about."

A small group of book critics have, meanwhile, abstained from book reporting & end-of-the-year lists because "they just don't enjoy reading so much anymore." They join the Professional Blurb Writers Of North America in their disdain of modern letters. "You look at the title, you look at the writer's name," said Vice President Morey Moses, "& then you make shit up. No one cares."

Factual Truth! The Director Can Be Also An Actor!

Something unhealthy architects know to be true has also found its way to the theater, motion picture, & television industry (though not necessarily in that order). Former celluloid consumer Goodyear Blurp explains: "We have long assumed one is one where one is done & that is that, but I have seen that THIS IS NOT THE CASE."

Unhealthy speculation has long been a hallmark of the creatives and their ilk, but what observers have witnessed while voyeuristically watching a nearby spectacle has shaken up an already perennial flappable racket: actors directing, writers acting, set decorators suggesting dialogue, caterers fetching things, producers actually producing.

Stock car racers & former Hare Krishna apologists have led the field in active criticism of what former president G.R. Ferd calls "Cross-pollination in the worst cross-dressing way." News channels have rushed hungover reporters into the melee, asking questions like "How long has this been going on?" & "Does anyone hear that strange smell?"

To get to the bottom of this, many fictional characters have promised to tell "their side of the story" in the nutrition information box where high fructose corn syrup normally dominates. Meanwhile this tendency may have moved on to other walks of life, not limited to but including housekeeping, usury, & stripping.

Where will it end?

Factual Truth! Empty Town Opportunity!

In America, towns disappear all the time. But where do they go? It's the subject of a new Phlogiston Channel's "reality" series called "Waffle Station." Hosted by the star of the sitcom "Wombat," Clash Squeeze, the program examines communities & spends too much time napping in scenic graveyards. UFO Groups provide the commercial support.

Says Squeeze, "I never even met a woman who rollergirls or ultimate fights. There's just no way it's me dressed as a bimbo in those online galleries." Executive Enforcer Damon Mooser cites a 1997 clinical trial as inspiration for the series: "I have virtually no sense of spatial recognition & it has served me well."

American audiences can expect the show if they want, but previews in the former Soviet Russia as well as war-torn Canada have had little or no effect on the local economy. "If it's motor sports they want," critic Perl Gootbloot wrote in the San Salvadore Daily Hurrah, "it'll be like propaganda radio from World War Two all over again."

Already many small American villages have volunteered to abandon their townships in order for a chance to appear on the show. "We have even poisoned the soil with radioactive aluminum," said one resident of Dallas, Texas, before being carted away. "Waffle Station Fever" is a term no one has yet used.

Check your local listings.

News Item! Holiday Census Scandal!

Former mining executives have reportedly entered into a plea bargain with prosecutors in a case involving wild west-style saloons & bordellos. One lawyer for the flea circus, on condition of ambiguity, has issued a series of word balloons in an attempt to enliven the proceedings. Those still on the fence have been asked to get down.

Soon enough the government has felt the need to get involved. Former Census Taker & current Secretary Of The Interior Monologue, Herbert Umbrella, revealed previously unclassified, now redacted, documents which establish place, time & mise-en-scène but don't give away the plot in the manner of modern movie trailers.

"There are evil people in high places," asserts Umbrella, who holds a chain letter for no apparent reason. "Do you know how thin the air is in high places? No? Ask an Inca if you can find one. Or a llama if you're so inclined." Nearby a crowd of volcano divers passed out petitions for funding for a reality television series.

With Christmas this year grievously undermanned (but, tellingly, not underwomanned), officials unwilling to sit down & be still now charge representatives from rival parties with obstruction & conundrum. Experts warn now that the decision may end up at the Supreme Court, as if that's a bad thing, though non-experts can't say either way.

News Item! Photographers Overextended!

While taking digital snaps of a failed supercomputer in Maracaibo, veteran shutterbug Morey New Amsterdam had a revelation. "It's all this Saxon blood in me," he explained to representatives from the Children's Television Workshop. "I'm always apologizing to people for sending email when really a telephone call would be more appropriate."

This & other news rocked the photojournalism world in a week where paid & non-paid camera jockeys realized that they're more threatened by habitat loss instead of, as they previously believed, hair loss. The other news, incidentally, involved interesting facts about German South-West Africa that had to be seen to be believed.

As always, fear has its detractors. & no one detracts more than Marvin Demagogue, owner of Pete's Pictures & a part-time pizza pie admirer. "Listen, we can be afraid of Michael Richards or any other cast member from Seinfeld," he told a crowd of one admirer & her friends, "but at the end of the day we use flashes for light. We always have."

As a nearby building is demolished to make room for other nearby buildings, artiste & paparazzo alike gather sullenly to contemplate the end of an era, & fight over whose pictures of it are better. "We pretend we're older children," one darkroom veteran mutters grimly, "if only we'd been invited to all the spelling bees we never won!"

Factual Truth! Nothing Remains!

Somewhere near the American side of Lake Huron, the little camp where Balthazar Montgomery became a Boy Scout Junior Class lies undiscovered by modern methods. "How the green could grow over so many of my childhood memories is disconcerting," Montgomery said, his voice scarlet & quivering. "Can we blame Hitler?"

More people who live near the lake would rather blame Singapore, the country in which, in the 2010 National Day Rally, one junior minister who shall not be named twitted from his Tweeter account some vague disrespect for three girls he had met from Michigan who had no desire to return to his apartment to watch Thai ladyboy videos.

But in a Bingo Parlor with a condemned sign out front in Alpena, former grandmother Dorothy The Rain unlights a cigarette and commiserates with a reporter who hasn't won a single game yet. "It's not like people I used to know to take things so sensually," she tells him. "It's more like my former lovers in the Newark Tornadoes, rest their souls."

By used skyscraper salesman and H.P. Lovecraft impersonator Byron Coastal sees something like sentimentality in such earnest winsomeness. "Without vague remnants of our rumbling past," he says, "surely we're just another channel on Uruguayan television that some insomniac skips past before throwing up his dinner." He adds, "Aren't we?"

Factual Truth! A Failure Of Cogitation!

The phrase "lose one's mind" has an interesting etymology which no-one has tried to suppress, & that has bothered Rogue Linguist Betty Pebbles. "What good is transgression," she asks in her new portfolio, Sailor, "if it does not transgress - or to put it another way - I am nothing like my father or my mother you jerk!"

For many who are not, as the saying goes, "in their right mind," such polemics disrupt the natural flow of pith & gobbledygook. Fifteen people standing around no more makes a "flash mob" than seven people accidentally hearing "The Streak" makes a Ray Stevens fan base. There is no such thing as "vintage" prescription pills.

Some psychological grifters exist primarily among celebrity endorsements. Other mavericks in the head-shrinking game find it difficult to convince their CPAs that liquor and whores constitute a "deduction." While fashion travesties such as the "modern straight-jacket & tie" still sell in Milan, they rankle professionals here.

"Am I led to believe you believe everyone else is Batman?" asks prime rib enthusiast & oftentimes doctor Mel Goddard. In lieu of an answer, he also asks, "Why do you think they pay me for this clap-trap?" Controversy as circumlocution: when the checklist of sanity is only half-way finished, it gives the mind so much more to do.

News Item! Incidents On The Rise!

At the end of the last fiscal quarter, retailers & the abject projected another dismal round of economics jargon. Because someone who has read about the foreclosure crisis is bound to talk loudly, the uselessness of convincing family members was added to the by-laws. Meanwhile, in Osaka, three farmers watched their rice wine ferment.

When if ever did the legal profession hire as many prostitutes as in 2010? Data hidden on the government's computer are not suitable for children or the mentally giddy. One such program in Ames, Iowa, is teaching dollar bills to talk, cry, & fold themselves. It was, it turned out, a good year for organized crime & disorganized religion.

The FCC may ban programmers who chew gum & sing on the air. The current administration, somewhere rated as "impatient" to "hasty," wants more fines but is fine if "fine" is finally redefined to curb inflation. Two celebrity chefs suspected of insulting vegetarians were accidentally fed each other's feces without condiments.

Broadcasters & auto body repairmen alike bemoan our nation's tragic but inevitable declension. It will take more than everyone buying one newspaper a year to save the auto industry. Before this generation leaves its polluted lake of fire to its children, it must pause to reflect on how little is known about the colors on the average map.

News Item! Orlando Vanishes Overnight!

After the excitement of the latest "World Series Of Croquet," thrill-seeking time-killers are chasing another demonstration: high-flying illusionism. One buff fellow with a dyed cowlick explained, "Staying hydrated is fine, but it's just not enough for the mentally bankrupt, the upwardly moderate, or the tail-draggers anymore."

Meeting online & sometimes by your leave, these party-poopers-with-a-purpose delight in learning things & often forgetting them later. One small enclave in Washington Heights has spray-painted its ideas for pseudonyms on the side of the company van for seventeen days straight. Neighborhood vandals have complained to their union.

In downtown Salt Lake City, naked skateboarders frighten passers-by, but do-or-die DIY freak Headly Underwater applauds this audacity in a note read out loud anonymously: "We are passionate people in a passion-fruit world, drinking the very tea of ourselves without sugar or cream. We floss while we drive. Our teeth may be how you identify our corpses!"

With a movie discussed, an audio book listened to, & a new kind of snack to be added to popular "pub mixes," this spunky & vibrant movement predicts it has a future, albeit one that will happen later. Self-described "librarian" Amy Speck has written its "vision plan" on her neck: "It's none of your business how many jazz albums I own!"

Factual Truth! Area Friends Abandon Shaving!

Hirsutism is on the rise in many American cities including non-contiguous ones. While this makes the members of dozens-strong United States Association Of Delipatory Enthusiasts (US-ADE) optimistic, a strong contingent of the Non-Gay Hairdressers Society, as well as Scissors & Razors Unanimous, have pressed government agencies & well-meaning scientists to discover the cause before it's too late.

"I'm not queer!" wonders Atlanta barber-like person Irving Limp. "Just because I cut hair doesn't make me any more homosexual than you holding a notepad makes you a stenographer." His companion, a lovely piece of cheese named Mortimer, added, "You so hairy you like Cousin It hee hee." Customers to Limp's shop, The Straight Razor, have often left with more hair than they had when they arrived.

While physicists admit to hearing about this phenomenon on public radio, biologists & medical doctors play it close to the vest. "So what if some shaggy folks have decided to emerge from wherever the fuzzy live?" murmured famed life science model Dr. Elton Sorry. "Do you really think we give a hoot? What happened to all that government money anyway? Do you sometimes think I'd look better in blue?"

But what of those stricken with this generally uncomfortable condition? What options have are available to them? "We could donate their hair to children without any or little hair," says part-time philanthropist & former head-butter Christine Clocks. "Most children, through no dint of their own, remain stunningly hairless." With few solutions & almost certainly no problems on the horizon, a nation takes its own pulse.

Factual Truth! Trotskyites In Louisiana!

Everyone knows how Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, 1879-1940) died, but there are, as always, conflicting accounts on how he wiled away the hours. That inconvenient groups often gather to mimic his notorious moustache has been widely attested to, and even imitated in animation, but the rise of "Trotsky Cosplay Clubs" in Louisiana, almost an American state, has caused turmoil there.

Bobby Jindal, not the former governor but a female impersonator with the very same name, is among the fevered many who fear for their parish's livelihood: "Why Trotsky? Why now? Why not Mao? Why not Deng? I've seen the Stalinist Jazz Band down in Norleans, but Trotsky sang off key! Get these rabbits out of my house! I own a mansion & a yacht! If you're going out can you bring me more sugar!"

People who don't apparently have "indoor voices" notwithstanding, professional jailers like local celebrity Burton Gator appeared ambivalent: "Political theory is not my strong suit. My strong suit is armor. Like from King Arthur days. & King Arthur would tell you now, one, stay away from my wife! & two, Marxism was discredited by the rise of telemarketing & the fall of the Soviet fried chicken franchise. The end."

Since it's almost certain these assertions are false & just being reported to rile people up, this reporter has found no Trotskyites in or around the state of Louisiana, despite a few Leninists who have a bait shop in Texarkana. That's why authorities have arrested some long-haired Dungeons & Dragon players & made them confess to being male cheerleaders. As National Guard troops are prank-called, the story remains elusive.

Factual Truth! Extended Diaphonous Courtesies!

The number of sports teams in the contiguous United States has now more than quadrupled in earnings & emptiness. But did you know there was a time when a stick was a stick & a ball was a bearing? In a newly published "imagined historical treatise," Professor Kenneth Smash, DDS, attempts to trace the pantsless & sportsless United States of the Jeffersonian era to today, when sports instead of pants is the rule.

Critics are already spotty. An amateur chimney sweep & ESDN broadcaster who shall remain noseless has weighed in at two-hundred twenty-three pounds: "It's as fair as you can imagine but if you're going to get into a fight dude don't pick a fight with a judge, referee, umpire, or clown." The Americana Parcels, in a budge match with the O Canadian Pukes, issued separate statements of intent.

As summer turns overlappingly to autumn, meteorologists took time off from caffeine to meet in St. Louis for Judy Garland's sake. Ted "Doppler" Dopeler, winner of the prestigious "Colored Radar Stick" at last year's Weather Emmys, mentioned that history is not nor should be his strong suit: "You've heard that saying, right? If you don't like the weather around here, then fuck you!"

Can we learn from realities that really don't exist? Theologians look around furtively but prefer instead to have some tea. As websites explode with "other timelines," the profitable & obviously sleazy world of organized sporting prefers to look ahead to the next paycheck - & the next opportunity. Nerf Salesman Kermit Blurb says what others could be thinking: "If I didn't have sports, I might have other, better facts in my head."

Factual Truth! A History Of Long Names!

While everyone can name their first & most famous "long name," the Terrence Snoot Department at the on-air University of Curls has introduced its bold initiative, "The No Less Than Seven Syllable Project." Director of the center, Hans Dicks, explained, "Is this mic on?" His assistant, the quite striking Kate Quake, added, "See that red light? If the red light's on, the camera's on."

Not to be outdone, Chinese researchers chose instead to focus on the country's energy needs. Yet in India, where the Devanagari script has rebounded on the country's Linguist Market, huge strides have been made to increase the length of historic places by adding more attractive vowel sounds. Two factions have arose, but lack of funding & the need for more time with their respective families has so far prevented conflict.

Europe, too, has thrown their threadbare hat into the ring. Enlisting powerful Welsh elocutionists, the EU (European Utterers) has begun referring to thousands of place names with many more sounds than apparently necessary. Public reaction is mixed - the National Society Of No Time To Do That in Belgium has threatened, when available, to oppose this, while the Direction Givers Of Spain have embraced the change with gusto.

The President, aware of the United States' slipping rhetorical reputation, has asked his party to introduce a bill in Congress, or generally wherever the party may be, to rename Washington, DC, to a difficult (& frankly unprintable) fifteen-syllable tongue twister. As usual, the opposition has gone on television to discredit the idea, thereby creating hundreds of hilarious clips of stupid old men trying ridiculously to repeat the name.

The world has expressed its intense admiration.

News Item! What Television Is Telling The Government!

As the fifth unnamed choir leader is arrested this week for treason, churches with their own television stations are up in arms. Pastor John Plenty told an audience the Neilsen company estimated as "few" with the condition "if any" that he's "nearly out of his asthma medication" & "I do not, according to Bible precepts, tell my wife everything I am doing." The Christian blogosphere ate just enough till they were full.

This underlies the troubled relationship Americans have with cluttered faith. A diagnostician with the United Airlines Mock Medical Team told the Neww Yorkk Timess that he "didn't know scalpels blades were that sharp ouchy!" In tears, a mother of four told a father of six that too many people see colored maps of the world these days, but not enough know the secret story of Rand McNally, his wife Sally, & their hero dog Pally.

While certainly not justifying putting the words "Christian" & "cinema" together in any meaningful way, young digital camera auteur Burt Christ refuses to believe recycling isn't a scam. "Recycling, bicycling, streptocycline - aren't they all just made up by the devil or his Uncle Sam?" he said to a wall near his apartment. "Until the people of this country wake up, I will not reattach the snooze button to my alarm."

All in all, Americans love their televisions but treat them like their pets. Television on the other hand has settled out of court with the strippers they met in 2009. Both thrive on scandal, yet one also needs a daily fix of fast food advertisements. Does this explain how some Christian churches manage to foster unrest, terrorism, leprosy, hangnail? The President's Blue Ribbon Panel will undoubtedly forget to ask.

News Item! Does No One Remember Canada?

As an example or exercise, use the search engine of your choice and see if you can find Vancouver. At 6:43 am this morning, in a heavy downpour & with no hesitation whatsoever, oversleeping cartographers everywhere experienced what their spouses called "either an anticlimactic spasm or a half-hearted panic attack." The reason? Says Mason Longe, a Denver cartographer & pineapple spokesperson, "I couldn't find Canada!"

Several Canadians attempted to talk to the press but were not understood due to thick Newfoundland accents. One zookeeper, who was looking for a famous missing leopard in a New Jersey brothel, gladly sang to reporters & showed a tattoo of Chris Christie that he had himself drawn on his stomach. "I once sat through an entire television show filmed in Canada," he said. "Never again."

The President, who was bravely fighting off zombies in front of an unnamed model train store, refused to put down his shotgun & comment. The opposition, engaged in cosplay based on the new "Li'l Reagan" cartoon on Fox News, were both furious & pusillanimous. The Dungeons & Dragons game at Carl Thompson's house went off without a hitch - unless you count Teddy Hickens eating all the barbecue Pringles which Carl totally does.

Realizing they could now vote on their phone for pennies a serving, some teenagers refused to believe that there ever was a Canada. "Maybe it was an inside job," said Melody Hogg of Poughkeepsie, New York. "Like the Lincoln assassination. Or the Lincoln bedroom." More legislation will be proposed in Oregon, as usual. You can open the door now - it's only climate scientists & they've promised to be good.

News Item! Time For Children In The Holidays!

New computer applications can teach your children to tell the time in nautical miles, reports Consumer Consumer magazine. It's all part of the Autumn Christmas Fashion issue, available on bookshelves & of course in your grocer's freezer. A sneak peek inside the four thousand page, glossy-sided, highly combustible periodical reveals many pages intentionally left blank.

What of the families in today's economy who don't know how to make a stew with only a catalog & a handful of weeds? One charity program based out of an Evangelical church in a Mormon's basement in Dallas, Texas, provides a daily meal to the homeless consisting of a buttered bun & a small piece of candy stolen from a doctor's office. Complaints are met with a sharpened crucifix poked up against the jugular.

"We can't rely on churches to feed us," said famous fat person Link Download, "& of course the government forgot to hang up the phone so all we get is a busy signal. The solution is rich people!" He stood on a bluff outside Bob Dylan's Malibu estate as he instructed a ragtag group of hobos, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, & other classic rock fans to camp on his lawn until the singer-songwriter brought them the menu.

With nearly one in every other obvious group of children in clear distress, statisticians have a lot to answer for. An administration executioner declined to discuss leaked plans for another round of economic poisonings, citing the opposition party's strange glee in killing their own. As Christmas approaches, then, the laughter of Santa Claus may for many be the uneasy sound of a priest giggling at you.

News Item! More Information About Wresting!

In the crime-ridden sections of San Diego, California, shopping carts full of aluminum cans do not stand abandoned for long. Social workers with just one earring in the left ear & clipboards made out of clear plastic put pen to paper but hesitate & look around. Three officials from the United States Census Bureau, including one who can't help but look like a puffin, chat morbidly outside a condemned building about the recent Comic Con.

"An oxygen-rich diet is fabulous, but you need nitrogen, too," says former mayor & current automaton Ralph Metallic. "You could have been anything that you want to, & I can tell the way you do the things you do." But sandpaper forger & nude model Henry X. Furred sees it another way: "If it wasn't touched by Steve Jobs during his previous life, it's not applicable to my day-to-day."

While churches do not necessarily approve of half-naked youths grappling sweatily with one another while family members look on, the Manly Association Of Youth Pastors has lobbied heavily for adolescent wrestling. A Baptist youth minister from Phoenix, Jack Closet, has even put up a website with himself dressed as Jesus wrestling with pubescent boys in order to drum up support.

But what of the ongoing civil rights violations of Christmas hoarders? No one can say for certain which local non-profit has spent a few dollars looking for a lawyer. There's a drawing of a sea otter at the mouth of a large gutter which delights everyone who espy it. Which is not to say locals don't grumble about this & that; it's just that the air quality, especially from the Pacific, is not what it used to be.

News Item! Crumbling Infrastructure Opportunities!

It's the fourth bridge disaster in as many disasters. We have been told stories of people who like to watch things fall down on an empty stomach, but this record crowd of innocent & frankly quite guilty bystanders has set records for castastrophe attendance in dying Midwestern cities that the Sun Belt will have a hard time topping. Suffice it to say, fried bread sales are through the roof.

A Federal Marshall with a long face & a tie covered with Disney characters kept the peace with gentle verbal sparring & the occasional gunshot to the sky. Local anatomists with powerful binoculars competed in the identification of random body parts & the town's morticians conspired with swimming & drug-sniffing dogs for their own nefarious purposes. The Red Cross stood around talking to each other in racial terms.

Whom do we blame for this & other so-called national tragedies? One of the town's fat cats, who has renamed himself Jonathan Pemberton Citizens United III, put his cigar out in his butler's uncomplaining palm & told reporters in a stage whisper, "I will make more money rebuilding this bridge with serfs than with union members!" He then left for his morning jog & circus taunt.

Where then are the common people in this? The amount of free jelly distributed by the churches cannot & will not be tabulated by government regulators. One protestor's sign, which read, "An itch is not always accompanied by an scratch," won an award for Best Margin, while three journalists attempt to master the Etch-O-Sketch. We are happy to report that, so far, no narwhals have been harmed.

News Item! Cheese Mite Scandal!

Sad little news correspondents on a limited budget gathered in Modesto yesterday to win praise & blame from various corporate headhunters attending the annual Blood Sport Convention, sponsored by every cola on the market. This year's protestor, a fellow named Ted with a tattoo of a spider on his forehead on his neck, half-heartedly held a sign at the door that read in big red letters "Peace Of Mind!" There were reports of violence & lawbreaking, but they came from within the Modesto Convention Center.

Know-it-all science person Edwin Fancypants discussed the probabilities on access television: "First came radio, then television, then internets. Ever-so-slowly the blanket of information swaddled us, while time & corruption burped us, & that left only the leaflet of spanking to mush up the applesauce of learning & spoon it into our toothless, ever-wailing mouths of time."

Sometimes when you see a woman weeping on the street, they are tears of joy. Bringing the criminal justice system into a conversation or a family matter complicates things, especially if there are people in pantsuits with clipboards. One scholarly wag defied noted etymologist Charles Würd & declared, "All my speaking components can be traced back to Middle High Frisian!" & won a spot on a daytime television commercial.

But will the city settle for synthetic cheddar until the cheese mites can elect a new village elder? The children express their disapproval by stomping their feet & airing their parents' dirty laundry. The forbidden words "import/export" refuse to leave the lips of the more prudent, & of course it's the lactose intolerant who, as history bears cold witness to, suffer the most.

News Item! An Introduction To Slovenly Prostitution!

Thanks to the "Great Recession," the relatively easy-to-imagine occupation of prostitution may be granted "equal status" among other serf-like employments as clerk & person-who-fetches-things. Economists with low self-esteem have begun writing dirges to imagined fallen comrades, replete with exotic venereal diseases. Scores of terrifyingly made-up women whose only job hurdle was once the remoteness of logging concerns have now found themselves in major American cities.

Said one bespectacled fellow on the occasion of an understaffed news report: "Certainly new ideas ought & should be considered alongside the old ideas which we have frankly lost respect for. In this century, let it not be said we abandoned castles & keeps, but that we fortified like a daily vitamin the nutritiousness of our malnourished American system with the most important meal of the soul."

As expected, biker groups & the asthmatic have proven worthy adversaries in online simulations. The popularity of television-show-flavored mints & ammunition fueled speculation among the declining & the so inclined about whether "this" might make it all the way to "their town." A meeting of Republican governors resulted in a predictable arm-wrestling match, as well as three reported cases of pink eye.

Who among the citizenry might cleverly arrange the flowers of our times into a vast rainbow conspiracy? Even those who can't believe that John Denver is dead still manage to spend too much time looking but not touching. So too the woes of a country in a state of disarray have come to feel like a portly dentist faced with the meth-mouth of history. As expectations are properly bandied about, neutral observers watch, learn, & otherwise look a little smug.

New Items! Gas Stoves Of The Future!

A new study by one well-known political group that no one has bothered to discredit has those Americans who fondly remember Grit (America's family newspaper) well & truly up in arms. The flashpoint appears to be a small poem about natural gas "fracking" placed underneath a drawing of a brassiere from a 1895 Sears & Roebuck Catalog, sent as an attachment to an email advertising some coupon savings plan. It is, one source said, the worst disaster among America's excitable elderly since Medicare Part D got all freaky.

One senior group, Americans Who Are Older Than They Look, has sent out a press release in a bottle cast upon the waves of dissent. One member's grandson explained, "He was happy & he just got settled into the home, & now this? Will you look at this room?" A consultant & part-time representative for some seeing-eye dogs made the mistake of using words like "telegram" & "orgy" in mixed company, & was given a stern talking to, as well an elbow in the groin. Staff at the local mixed-media centers have frankly never seen anything like it.

"You see this all the time," staff member Edna Purviance, no relation except the name to the great silent film actress, said. "In the streets, on the avenues, down the boulevards & up the alleys." A member of the town's corrupt but likeable constabulary refused to comment, although he did give everyone a little half-sized business card which is apparently all the fashion, & which had a picture of him holding a taser & his blog's URL.

Sitting on their hands in Washington, sometimes with a male model nearby, the nation's Congressfolk have picked the absolute right time to ignore this. The cable news networks as well as the nation's modest but scrappy syndicate of late-night cable-access shows have chosen to invest heavily on scrying & other forms of fortune-telling. Reports have come in that that, as well as the fact that every night they really need to walk the dogs, will rob this issue of the momentum needed for resolution.

News Item! Your ID Card Is Your Only Friend!

The National Identity Administration, in association with the Bureau Of Personality, has announced the issuance of brand-new, holographic, only slightly radioactive ID cards, which you will need to carry with you at all times, especially if you intend to enter Sectors 1 through 94, or if you intend to rely upon the government for all your potable water needs.

A statement released anonymously by some fellow we suspect is Frank Butler, who lives on King Street in a very handsome ranch-style home which was built in the mid-1970s, asserts that the new ID cards will make you more popular with the opposite sex, if that is your wont, and will also keep police, palace security, and leftover Pinkertons from beating you to a pulp with truncheons if you display it when asked.

Critics who have been silenced point out that many of the new ID cards have incorrect photographs on them, many of them in fact resembling the photos one finds in new wallets of models posing as family members. This should not be a problem, since those checking the IDs will not be looking at any pictures. All security personnel have been trained in olfactory techniques which allow them with 72% accuracy to "sniff out" fraudulent cards. Beware of police officers with colds!

To obtain your new ID card, simply get in line at the new Identification Center in your neighborhood. There should be one on every street corner by the end of this week. Do not attempt to communicate with anyone until you get your new card. One the back are suitable topics for conversation which you can use when the next new ID card is issued in six weeks.

Remember to bring your coupons and have correct change if possible.

News Item! The Return Of The Euphemism

It's been too long, but the euphemism has apparently returned, and among its colleagues, it could not have been too soon.

"Oh indeed," said longtime friend Dooney, who stopped what he was doing long enough to talk to cameras. "I remember the first time, actually, which was the same as the last time. That's how important it's been and how much we've been feeling the lack."

Unrelated to the story, a series of disappearances of the nation's silverware continues to baffle both amateur laundromats and the ethical.

The euphemism could not be reached for comment, but you could leave a message with his service, who are very professional and businesslike and do not sound at all like they're in Nepal, which they are.

The President, who had spent some time with the euphemism before, during and usually after college, pretended not to hear the question when asked. When asked later what exactly the question was, the news squire who had asked it demurred.

The euphemism is reported to be in talks with the estate of Victor Mature about a possible collaboration.