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?"