Holy Frack!

The scene: Nebraska.  The dilemma: a radioactive tar sands field on fire.  The actors: unfortunate amateur thespians whose bus overheated on the way from Minneapolis to the Missoula Barn Theater.

Traveling in the bustling oil-spoiled area can be dangerous to anyone but drug dealers & pimps, but seventeen intrepid reporters, armed only with fully-charged iPhones, attempted one day last winter to set the record straight or at the very least set a record for straight men.

Fracking, or, as it is commonly known in the oil industry, "anal earth rape," continues to promote the economies of the areas in which it is used, as well as enriching the pocketbooks of the thirteen white men who own the World Oil Cabal, while also hastening the imminent demise of all life on earth.  Professor of Fracking at the University of North Dakota, Fracksburg, told the Associated Press in a strangely drooly manner that "This is the answer to all our prayers.  Have you been to North Dakota?  Now we're getting wi-fi!  & it's all thanks to fracking!  Frack you, tar sands!"

Meanwhile, the sixteen journalists, after mourning the loss of one of their own to a spectacular parked RV accident, decide to walk the length of the proposed Keystone Pipeline because it is the shortest way to get to their motel.  Environmentalists accompany them, &, in a surprising turn, mug them near the railyard & steal all their microphones.  One camera operator who is there recalls, "So much graffiti...  All that graffiti on the trains...  I used to love trains, I used to love graffiti...  But there's just so much.  Also, hobo prostitutes.  So many hobo prostitutes with prosthetics!"

It's far too early to say when it's far too late for people who once wished to watch the glacier in Glacier National Park melt away to reveal lots & lots of oil, but for this fiercely independent state, which will never suck as much as South Dakota, the attention it is now getting, from the media, from oil company moguls, from Alexander Payne, from a couple of attractive teenage tourists driving through Kearney, is ensuring that for the near-future, the entire state will, for once, have something to talk about.

UPDATE: the Minneapolis "Corny Shakespeare Players" hitched a ride with a trucker named Louise, who frankly believed that Christopher Marlowe wrote all Shakespeare's plays, & made it to Missoula in time to perform their "mash-up" All's Well That Ends Hamlet to a drowsy Tuesday night audience of seventeen, with only twelve of them being volunteers at the Barn Theater.

Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Sonnet

Methinks it's time to visit the dentist;
My teeth feel odd & in need of a clean.
Too long cavities my mouth have menaced -
My teeth should have a mien of glean & sheen.
What's this? Oh no! The doc's office has closed!
I must now look up my insurance plan -
This is not something to which I'm disposed:
Visiting dentists to find the best man
Or woman - I know, there's plenty of them;
But my hygienist I think I'll miss most.
Her hands treated me like jeweler does gem,
In her work she was happily engrossed.
My teeth feel weird, enamel to socket -
I'd hate to have to pay out of pocket!

Glorious Monstrosities

This readily obscured update from the National Foundation for "Science" (their quotes, not ours) brings oblique insights to those of us who follow the genetic mutilation of the human species with mild interest and/or on Instagram.

It seems a fellow of the Foundation named Irene Bean (who isn't a fellow at all, it turns out) has discovered a machine that splices genes in a keen, clean way, using a marine-animal based vaccine (it's from a gelatine substance excreted by the baleen whale), which, when injected into one's spleen will screen any so-called "queen" genes and regress them toward the mean, usually the lean, green state they were when the subject was a teen.  While this unforeseen treatment has been called obscene, its supporters say they don't intend to demean; the say this routine may help intervene with genetic worst-case-scenes.  What does it all mean?  We must wait until they reconvene.

Creditable geneticists have dismissed the report as gobbledygook, while a minority in the field insist it is simply poppycock.  But conspiracy theorists and the mentally bored have allowed it to capture their imaginations and to insist, as we have long suspected, that hospitals are intent on turning our senior citizens into monsters.  Prominent kook Adrian Pisser explains:

"We know that old people are often cannibals, eating their grandchildren kiss by kiss.  We also know they pretend to be frail, the better to sneak into your room and punch you very hard on the chest late at night while you are dreaming of sex.  Further, they complain often about being a drain on our resources and consequently following through.  If I were a scientist, or even a high school graduate, I'd gladly turn these human monsters into inhuman monsters if only for protection from the coming alien outside-invasion."

Calls and emails to the National Foundation for "Science" resulted in a visit from a social worker, who, after eating all of the cookies, promised not to say anything else if we just left them alone.

2013: The Year In Review (Part Seven)

Gender Roadblock, the genuflecting Head Cheese at the Normal Studies Corporation, contends that once a year has passed, it, like many things that are past, can no longer exist, not even in memory.  He/she cites as his/her main evidence for this confusing argument (which, if true, one shouldn't be able to recite it at all, since one can only have heard it in the past) the album Darkness On The Edge Of Town by Bruce Springsteen, which, of course, Gender Roadblock claims to not have any recollection of, since he/she first heard it as a teen in 1978.

However, in the interest of academic tomfoolery, the prankster-professor Jennifer "Physical Therapy" McGoo has spent long minutes listening to that album, long held to be a rock masterpiece by people who would rather have spent the time listening to Van Halen's debut record, also released that year.  Meanwhile, extremely snobby people with virtually no friends in common suggest that everyone should be listening instead to Kraftwerk's The Man-Machine, although of course the original German version & not the one with English lyrics translated by the band as a form of commercial abdication.

McGoo has concluded that she is strangely attracted to Gender Roadblock, although both ironically & therefore intellectually, rather than physically, which is understandable, since Roadblock has had so many gender reassignment surgeries (to be fair, some people gave him/her some of those assignments) that people fear she'll end up like an Alan Moore character in a comic book space tale.  McGoo's main fear is that Roadblock may forget the sex after they've had it, which would frustrate McGoo, as she requires her partners to blog about their experiences with her once they've had them, although she has in the past few months settled for a tweet or even a retweet.

At the newsdesk of the former Washington Flim-Flam, now the West Virginia Gotchernose, where the alleged coupling might take place, newshound Mary "Shelly" Shelley explains that all of this is in lieu of a standard year-end series of lists & pictures of celebrity nudity.  "Indeed," says Shelley, "I am so tired of getting things for free so that I can say nice things about them at the end of the year that I feel marginalized & not even middle-class anymore."  A lightbulb appeared over her head at this point, & she began pitching that particular story to major magazines, although she concedes it will probably end up on Salon.

So why then does Gender Roadblock feel the need to write column after column extolling the virtues of the past year?  He/she says it her/himself in his/her most recent column, guest-ghosted by her/his mother/father: "Those people who wear crowns & hold scepters just seem so nice, don't you think?"

Extemporary Contemporary

Herman Delgado, in his landmark study Learning To Live With Contempt, inadvertently outlined three things he felt absolutely necessary for geopolitical maneuvering.  These were (in the order he suggested, or close to it):

1) Bad writing
2) Mendacity
3) Sincerity

Audrey Mellonballer, in her review of the study for Whoa! magazine, parsed these three meta-ideas thus:

"Through bad writing we see lack of concern; through mendacity we see fear; through sincerity we see desperation.  Through it all, we seethe."

Kinnith Weasel, appearing on the cable access show "New Jersey Will Fuck You Up," got into an exchange with a telephone caller about the published work, although it appeared as though the caller had in fact gotten the wrong number:

Weasel: Don't tell me what to do or say, I was an aide to the ambassador to Vatican City for six years!
Caller: I just want to know if Brenda's there.
Weasel: I have two philosophy degrees and a tattoo of Wittgenstein!  This is outrageous!
Caller: Are you her Uncle Barney?
Weasel: You need to understand, retard, that not all Americans disdain the diplomatic niceties!
Caller: Can you tell her she left her underwear here by mistake?

It is not usual for tedious academic exercises to make their way into the popular culture, but at least three people (Delgado, his editor, and his mother) was shocked outright when the squabble over his paper made it into a Carson Daly monologue:

[Unavailable, as no one remembered to record it.]

This left the social scientist with some tremendous leverage for his upcoming projects, which included a novelization of the study, as well as a two-act play starring Sean Penn, and a new desk chair on which to sit while he looked at himself on television.

"This time," he reflected in his blog, "I might even get paid for the work I do."

2013: The Year In Review (Part One)

2013 has barely begun but social scientists and their friends have already begun examining prevailing and countervailing trends in order to write the first articles which get the big bucks.  Among them:

A suspicious acceptance of double- and treble-chins.  Despite the overwhelming disgust normally felt by pretty much everyone when shown a picture of an old, white man (typically a member of the United States Congress), people in 2013 have not demonstrated the disapproval - if not downright hostility - people in previous calendar years have with regards to flab under the chin.  Several print journalists have bemoaned the loss of Newsweek in 2012, as this would doubtless have made a good cover story in a week in which Jesus was not on the cover.

Food as illegal drugs.  A shocking development in the counterculture (believed to have been instigated by the behind-the-counterculture) is the rise of edibles as means of "getting high."  While meat and other animal products have often been sold in the black market in "developing" countries, the rise (no yeasty pun intended) of wheat-based comestibles as recreational drugs has baffled experts and not a few amateurs.  Youtube videos of surly youths "snorting gluten" cause at least one European nation to forget all about how scared they are of Muslims.

Climate sex change.  While climate change deniers spent the year getting lost at conventions for "The Vampire Diaries," scientists have begun to publish tentative reports about research which suggests that Mother Earth - long a caring, feminine planet - may have, some time in the 20th century - changed into a dude.  Deep sea exploration in the Pacific Ocean will yield controversial evidence of the discovery of "the Earth's scrotum."

Opera on the beach.  Scores of people who never ever go out into the sun and prefer to sing on stages in giant, air-conditioned buildings paid for by very rich people who wouldn't do it if it weren't tax deductible have decided to bring "the scolding art" (as Da Vinci probably never called it) to beach bunnies and surfer boys at America's most popular clothing-optional beaches.  The humidity reportedly ruined not a few expensive musical instruments, which were also filled with sand, as well as the voices of obese Italian men who are often mocked as "dying whales" by uncultured young toughs on whose sandcastles they inadvertently trod.

With only 364 more days in the year to go, futurists and speculators have already declared 2013 "a wash," but people who just bought new calendars and dayplanners are not as ready to make such a judgment.  At least half of them have clicked the box on the survey that says, "Ask me again in February."  It seems at the very least safe to say: developments may be forthcoming.

Not Safe For Work

In a small town in Ohio - let's call it Byhalia for the sake of argument, which is a real town but not the one we're talking about - a man with an incredible fear of horses was born.  Physicians with big teeth spent his childhood telling him that his fear of horses - equinophobia, it is called - will actually add to the quality of his life, since it will encourage him to do things to conquer that fear.  To that end, his parents enrolled him in an agricultural college.  This proved disastrous, as he was trampled more than once by horses who can, he insists, sense his fear.


It was at a horse show in Dubuque that he met both the woman he wanted to marry & the woman he did marry.  This was symptomatic of his life: there were things he wanted to do (stay the hell away from horses, marry a blonde massage therapist named Minday) & there were things he was told he must do (become a large animal veterinarian, marry his mother's best friend's chubby niece).  He also at this time began a love affair with automatic weapons & expensive chocolate.


"How many people," he told a journalist at his trail, "think night & day about killing the things they despise?  Because do not get me wrong, fear turns sour & that sourness is hate."  He practiced a sympathetic face in the mirror & even once, accidentally, told his wife in the throes of passion, with his eyes slightly tearing up, "I'm sorry for your loss."


This was back in the day when someone might be hanged for what he did, but instead he became well-known as one of the more caring large animal veterinarians in the county.  He insisted on autopsies of the beasts, but did them alone, so no one could see him hack into the creatures that caused him such pain & anxiety.  Early on there was an impulse to keep souvenirs from his dead enemies, talismans that perhaps could protect him, battle his fears.  He even began to think his father was right, that he was actually conquering a fear instead of becoming more & more mentally ill.


He might even have continued all his life, but his wife, feeling ignored & jealous, suspected he was having an affair, & discovered his murderous passion.

This Position, Up For Grabs

Three Barons vie for the same Ambassadorship.  They meet in the early evening on a rocky shore.  Only one of them remembers to bring a companion: a gospel singer.

"It is agreed," says one, "we shall endure the wind & the dust."

"This is the region," says another, "where heavy metal videos are frequently shot."

"Oh yes," says the third, "this is a shockingly inept piece of teen sexploitation."

Is there an election?  Are there rules for succession?  Whose bread must be buttered to make sure this matter is settled?

"Is that," asks one, "a bobsled I see in the distance?"

"I am exhausted," says another, "by the terrible tyranny of imaginary numbers!"

"Of the one hundred and thirty people I know," says the third, "I am the most intermittent."

Telegrams are dispatched.  Menus are updated after meetings with local suppliers.  It is explained to the First Lady what granite is.

"Stand down, sirrah!" demands one, "I have voyaged more fully than you have!"

"Alcohol poisoning!" counters another, "you are less than a Polish nobleman!"

"Revival & regret!" shrieks the third, "you smell & dance like the opposition party!"

Once the credit card scores arrive, the deliberations begin in earnest.  One orderly notices that no-one has checked the "geosciences" box at the top of official form.  Special recommendations by the press corps are faxed to members of the film industry.

"You will be magnificent," says one, "you have a lovely Van Dyke."

"After so much experience in retail," says another, "this will seem like jury duty."

"I must regretfully withdraw my application," say the third, "for I am now ruggedized."

Brief Conversations! Future Solar Eclipses!

Blue: The local municipality is woefully understaffed.

Adam: My what big hair you have.

Blue: Can you speak like a computer?

Adam: I can drink like one.

Blue: As the secrets unfold, they reveal deception & cruel truth.

Adam: How cruel?

Blue: Penguin cruel.

Adam: My god!

Blue: Shall we rhyme?

Adam: I told you I have only grudging respect for magicians & commuters.

Blue: & I told you I have become "something of a classic."

Adam: To what do I owe this pleasure?

Blue: The political party has since become more moderate, ignoring its revolutionary past.

Adam: I would never marry anyone who liked salmon.

Blue: The color or the fish?

Adam: What do you think?

Blue: I think if I took the throne, I could survive most but not all attempts at my inevitable overthrow.

Adam: Would you confuse - if you could confuse - your sons with your daughters?

Blue: It's a funny story - ask me about Lasik surgery.

Adam: Do you know Dave? He often says, "That's Latin for worm."

Blue: What can you get, you know, in your blood, that is bad?

Adam: Punishment, the military, toiletries.

Blue: I shall always be the last prominent supporter of new ideas.

Adam: We live with mixed reviews, though mostly negative.

Factual Truth! Same Time But Twice As Long!

The customization of the American television experience appears stalled out with the advent of mind-altering commercials. Too few people remember where they were when John Ritter died. In one study, the sex drive was amusingly confused with hunger.

Four-time Olympic hopeful Stamp Craig remembers the last time he endorsed a product. "Someone approached me with some food on a stick," he said, "& proceeded to paint a picture involving javelins & big booty girls in bikinis." He added, "It was the opposite of erotic."

Advertising executive Sam Jerky disagrees. "Whatever we say is sexy," he said, "is sexy. We create sexy. We once made eating a baby hippo sexy. How? We just did. A supermodel with a fork & spoon & even if she was crying it was sexy. Children downloaded it. That's sexy."

Children's rights groups could not be reached as it was recess time. One child who was, for good reason, left behind, pretended he was an extra on "Modern Family" & made faces that amused the production assistants in the crowd. Interns made bets on the intensity of his mother's obesity.

Where America's modern "Mad Men" will go from here will be outlined in an informercial on at 3 a.m. (no matter the time zone) from now until mid-July. Meanwhile, most regular viewers are encouraged to keep buying as much as possible. Virtually every product is guaranteed a stamp of approval.

Chin Chin Wasn't Just A Fox

Folklorists the world over (but mainly those who actually use the internet) were startled to discover, in 2011, a wholly new folk-tale which had escaped their attention, if not their notice. "Chin Chin The Fox," researchers revealed, was a hitherto unknown fable character with almost nothing in common with other folkloric foxes, nor those owned by Disney or Warner Brothers or Starbuck's (the coffee chain owns many children's story characters, but has chosen not to share).

Said self-styled "King Of Children" Reginald Hurry, "I recall I was sitting in my room tsk-tsking an article about Aesop when I see on the Porno Channel's news crawl that a collection of stories important to the Hoochie Coochie tribe had been unearthed by nosy Mormon missionaries, who took off with it on their bike. I told my parrot Erich Segal that surely this was a prank!"

Canadian leader-person Stephen Harper, whose house was down the street from the duplex where the manuscript was found, took two long breaths & privatized his old neighborhood. Twenty-three otherwise unassuming Canadians almost lost their methadone privileges. Said one inhabitant, "We've heard the stories around, you know, on the streets, sure, but sometimes we're too busy with our poutine which is, I assure you, as dirty as it sounds."

What are in these stories? Where did they come from? Were there pictures? Folklorists like pictures. Also strippers. To answer this question, several professional tale-gatherers left their favorite titty bar &, still a little drunk, with some glitter in their hair, appeared on the Cable Newsie Network's cross-cultural information spectacular, "Shambles & Lisp."

"Most foxes in folklore are, well, foxy, you know, clever, mischievous" said University Of Littleville Retroactive Professor Of Yesterday Elmer Elvis, "but not Chin Chin. He's hard-drinking. He rides a horse with three wheels. He's straight-talking, he gets the job done. In one story, he completely downsizes the entire Hoochie Coochie pantheon. Also, he steals a lottery ticket from his best friend, a squirrel, & doesn't tell him he won a few bucks. He's kind of a dick."

Adds famous clown Cody Blau, "What I was struck by was the way he chewed tobacco & swore like a priest. They told these oddball parables to their children! By all accounts, the kids who came into contact with Chin Chin's adventures grew up to be self-loathing sociopaths."

But scandal struck quickly, which was irritating, because someone was in the middle of a sentence. What if, suggested private story-collector & Ansel-Adams-lookalike Peabody Headhair, Chin Chin wasn't a fox at all? What if, as Headhair's reading posited, Chin Chin was a laid-off service station attendant from Bangor, Maine?

The uproar in this small academic community was almost audible. The etymologists downstairs actually considered calling the cops. But papers had to be written in order to be peer reviewed in order to be re-submitted with corrections (doesn't anyone use a spell-check?) in order to be queued in order to see the light of day in small, low circulation publications which collect dust on university library shelves.

These determined men & women of letters promptly went to work.

The Sad Plight Of America's Empty Clinics

In Danforth, Rhode Island (not the city's real name) (at least sources say), there is a Clinic For Hopelessness which also serves, perhaps appropriately, as the gathering place for Zumba refugees. Here, amid the stained, torn posters of Dance Dance Revolution & seventies teen icon Leif Garrett, a former doctor & television green-screen repairman named Henry Lickspittle remembers how to tie a shoelace & look directly into the camera.

"I am an odious man," he says, "but for all my life I've scorned people who collect aluminum cans."

When the Clinic For Hopelessness was thriving, dozens came to be treated & even more came to be mocked. Yet as the economy faltered - indeed, as hopelessness became its own world-view - the Clinic struggled, even once propping open its door to send the message that its doors were still open. This, says former janitor & part-time lisp dispenser Bald Hooligan, is how all the cats escaped.

"I miss them all," he says. "I miss Purrbox & Frown-Frown. I miss Snortstein & Speckles. I especially miss Too Much, Lap Dance, Flossylvania & Richie Rich. I didn't think I'd miss Gerberberry very much, & there were times I really wanted Salma Hayek to just run away, but I think," he sniffles as he wipes away a tear, "I miss those two most of all."

Across the country, in a clinic in the back of a grocery store in Van Capstan, Nevada, it's the pharmacists who have most to lose. Local pill-peddler Jake Potion shows a small delegation from Reuters where his former clients once got their prescriptions.

"The number of people who collapse in the aisles in our nation's supermarkets is growing," he says, tapping a picture of a brain on his tee shirt. "We don't know why it happens, or why it's always the Asian Foods section, or why everyone thinks it's freaking hilarious when the paramedics holler 'Clean-up on aisle ten!' We just know it's easier to wheel them back behind the dairy section & have a professional look at them there."

He has a downcast look. "Those robber-barons on Wall Street took all that away from us," he says.

But is that a fair estimation? One rich person, speaking pretty much on behalf of every rich person in America, says it's not. "Ha ha!" he says. "Tax breaks! Ha ha! Deregulation! Ha ha! Charter schools for our children! Ha ha ha! Job creation! Ha ha ha! I want a castle with a moat!"

In Texas there was once a clinic, called "The Never Say Die Clinic," inside the Alamo. In Louisiana, there was a clinic inside an alligator. In Nebraska, clinics could be seen for miles around after the corn fields had been harvested. Now, it's just a lonesome bison, perhaps, or a recreational vehicle being used to cook meth &/or make pornographic videos.

Bartbleby Oath said in a speech to children earlier this month, "If you want to see how broken is our health care system you can look no farther than fat children breaking their grandparents' arms & hearts with their obese kind of love. I have been meaning to say something about exercise but I am winded. Does anyone know of a low-cost place that doesn't cost an arm & another arm like a hospital emergency room, an intimate place where a health care professional might look at me without the need to be transported by ambulance? No? Not any more? Well, spit."

One of the last remaining clinics in the Pacific Northwest, the Hamster Clinic, survives thanks to private donations, mainly from wealthy rodents. But Lucius Hamster, the clinic's only employee & quite possibly a doctor, knows even his days are numbered.

"You can only make so much money treating pets," he laments. "I wish human beings would come in for health care. Perhaps I should change the clinic's mascot."

What will happen to all the empty clinics in this nation in decline? The "hazardous materials" trash receptacles do look, as some pundits have noted, rather tacky in a deli. Most are too small to support a roller rink. While many of the nation's mail carriers have eyed them voraciously, the postal service in Washington has reminded them they, too, are closing up many shops.

A troubled nation tries to find its insurance card &, with a sad sigh, drives to the nearest religious-themed hospital.

Inconvenient Prophecies! New Year's Irresolution!

Banish yes the furthermore thoughts of ill-repute in this divine sector of soul galaxy number one! Sub rosa ab ovo the fiercest of charlatans will converge on chatter-town & blatherskite within mere moments of the veil-lift in upper lower & sideways round! Come ye closer no more to always hear what lies aboveboard resisting both law & urge as scoop reveals what stab cannot!

Brethren? Is that thee? Hasn't harpies made killjoy of arse all? Sit if you can't stand, stand if you must, but one more glowing comet in the sky hand-shackles the dimly-lit mind of human racers! Didst thou not ken it were an competition? Sit or stand as my main man unfolds the map of the plan on the bandstand hand-to-hand & back again! The soundtrack of your laughter!

Were you never called Betsy as a rule? Didn't someone ever break a rose in your face? If wine makes you cry, do you keep bottles filled with winter & dew? When someone takes your pulse, do they hear the roaring twenties? Let us now in effect disregard the efficacious yes/no question as volcanoes ignore somnambulism! Let us give the slip to the on/off switch in print form!

Didst thou they think thirsty & thin thieve & thump in thy youth? Then it turns out there's no money in puzzling the proselytized! You have been given an entirely new year for manhandling, fondling & freakiness, faithful flukes - scratch out in greatest detail what graffiti has been painted in the brains behind your eyes! O indignity shake my left hand heartily! O grateful animals we!

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.