Embedded Files
English Teacher Resigns In Disgrace After Using “Seen” Without A Helping Verb
Cresco, Iowa— Fifteen year veteran teacher Robert Buckner tendered his resignation to an infuriated Howard-Winneshiek school superintendant after a mid-morning grammatical gaffe Tuesday.
Witnesses of the blunder allege that Buckner was speaking to a group of teachers from neighboring districts at a convention hosted by Cresco’s Crestwood High School about the importance of proper speaking when he allegedly stated, “As a young boy, I lost respect for many adults when I seen them use improper English.” Apparently, a collective gasp electrified the teachers in the room at this flagrant faux pas, and Buckner looked around in confusion amidst the hushed murmurs rippling through the room. “When he finally got his bearing on the situation,” said attendee Fred Scantorloque of neighboring Le Roy Ostrander High School, “he mentally recited what he had just said and realized his error. By then, however, it was too late. We all heard him say it. At that point he hung his head, quietly gathered his papers in defeat, and walked out of the room to boos and hisses. I noticed a strand of thin, ragged hair falling over his eyes in dejected misery, and I couldn’t help thinking, ‘good riddance.’”
Buckner had no comment other than to lament the death threats he immediately began receiving when his comment made the local news that night. Buckner’s wife denied rumors that she was leaving town stating, “When a woman promises ‘For better or for worse,’ she’s hoping it is more ‘better’ than ‘worse,’ but it doesn’t get much worse than this. It’s a sad day in any girl’s life when she realizes she married a loser with no future. I especially feel bad for the kids.”
The Buckners have three children who are all counting down the days until they are old enough to join the military and put this episode far behind them.
-The Editors
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Urban Mother Finally Goes Too Far In Naming Child
Flint, Mich.— In a time when many names given to urban babies cannot be found in any baby book, few names can still shock nurses, but last week one woman went beyond the pale, exhausting even the margins of the birth certificate application.
LaVern Williams gave birth last week to MajaroniquavalieondeLaDashaQuesharominithaLarachellshandrikamyraquamviona Joy Williams. “It’s a family name,” said Williams, proud mother of the tongue-twistingly-named child. Williams explained that the name is a blend of names from both her and her husband’s families. MajaroniquavalieondeLaDashaQuesharominithaLarachellshandrikamyraquamviona was seven pounds and nineteen inches long, fit as a fiddle, and screaming from her first second in the big new world as though she knew the challenges she would face in life when simply trying to introduce herself.
Indeed, when other children learn to write their names atop their artful creations in kindergarten, MajaroniquavalieondeLaDashaQuesharominithaLarachellshandrikamyraquamviona will undoubtedly be left to draw anonymous pictures for lack of alphabetical mastery. The naming of this child has raised the obvious question: can naming a child thus possibly be legal? Attorneys assure us that yes, it is legal, and that although MajaroniquavalieondeLaDashaQuesharominithaLarachellshandrikamyraquamviona is welcome to change her name when she is eighteen, her parents have sole authority over her legal naming process until then. Williams announced that she would not tolerate nicknames or “familiar” names for MajaroniquavalieondelLaQuesharominithaLarachellshandrikamyraquamviona like “Maja,” “Maviona,” or “Larachellshandrikamyraquamviona.”
“To call her anything else would be an insult to her and her heritage,” stated Williams. “It’s not that difficult of a name—Majaroniquavalieondelond . . . I mean Majaroniquavalieonav . . . or was it . . .” Williams trailed off, but her message was clear: learn my daughter’s name, or else.
-The Editors
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Man Compulsively Stocks Up On Cereal, Spurns Offers From Overeaters Anonymous
Warren, Mich.— Marv DeScall, resident pog-donating temporary local celebrity and binge cereal eater, has stuffed his pantry and surrounding closets full nigh unto bursting with sugary cereals such as those satirized in the formerly syndicated comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.
DeScall, who regards with withering scorn those who do not meet his standards of cereal stockpiling, maintains that having enough cereal on hand to feed the Red Army at any given time is the only civilized thing to do in this unpredictable world.
DeScall recently visited his brother and sister-in-law’s house to celebrate their baby’s dedication and immediately began rifling critically through his brother’s pantry and cupboards. “I wondered what he was doing,” said DeScall’s brother, “and then he said to me, ‘Where is all your cereal?’ and I pointed to the box of Frosted Mini Wheats on top of the fridge. He then said, ‘that’s all you have?’ and I told him I had a box or two in the pantry too, but that we only eat one box at a time. They go stale if you open up too many at a time. Then he says angrily, ‘that’s ridiculous’ and storms off muttering something about how pathetic his family is.”
DeScall’s wife spoke with reporters and informed them that DeScall will travel to Meijer stores all over the Metro Detroit area when a certain cereal he likes goes on sale and will buy dozens of boxes, maxing out on the limits at every Meijer he patronizes. “One day,” said the cereal slurper’s spouse, “someone tipped him off about a sale on Wheaties Fuel at Big Lots, and he came home with over forty boxes of it.”
DeScall brushed aside allegations that he had been contacted by Overeaters Anonymous and hunched at his table so his head was hidden behind the box of cereal he had just filled his bowl with. Those on location reported hearing “inhuman sounds that must have been cereal mastication but sounded closer to the frenzied gormandizing of a pride of lions messily devouring a wildebeest.” Despite DeScall’s caginess, a spokesperson from Overeaters Anonymous confirmed that they had made an offer that DeScall disdainfully rebuffed.
DeScall is currently working his way through his Wheaties Fuel supply but is actively filling his basement with replacement cereals.
-The Editors
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Confused Amnesic Rogue Agent Reverts Back To Training
Prague— In the age-old tale of covert, top secret missions going terribly wrong, a botched experiment is running loose throughout Europe wanting nothing more than to be left alone.
It all started as a brainwashing experiment on a poor young man at the end of his rope and ready to end it all. Soulless Washington agents pumped this pitiable boy so full of martial art training and expert knowledge of everything from super driving to running at top speeds for a mile flat that at the end of his training he was more machine than man, ready to kill on command without hesitation, mercy, or remorse. As is usually the case in such experiments, something went disastrously wrong, leaving this young man to wonder who he was and why he was a veritable superman.
They should have left him alone.
After hunting him down and killing his girl like an animal, trained agents still sought to kill this ill-fated youth who just wanted to be a real boy but quickly learned that once you take the trip to Pleasure Island, the transformation to superhuman freak is permanent. The trail of carnage and death along the cold trails that Washington elites followed to try to close up this embarrassing chapter left a poignant and indelible reminder to shadowy, evil government heads: top secret projects that “don’t exist” and amnesia don’t mix.
At this point, the trail seems to have run cold and the project is officially dead, but somewhere out there is an unstable, unpredictable man-weapon who seems to want to live in peace but will probably find some reason to endure future adventures when the price is right and Hollywood runs out of other ideas.
In the meantime, reader, get some sleep—you look tired.
WAAAAT! WAAAAT! WAAAAT!
-The Editors
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Hipster Defies Mainstream, Steadily Increases His Caffeine Intake
Hanging out in the formerly smoke-filled coffeehouses of pretentious, yuppie suburbia in the Metro Detroit area, Orrin Buuswaggle doesn’t just soak up the Royal Oak or Birmingham atmosphere, he soaks up coffee as a statement to the establishment.
Buuswaggle, wearing neon pink skinny jeans, a black and white checkered fedora, a t-shirt with an ironic statement on it, colorful slip-on sneakers, and a pair of Elvis Costello horn-rimmed glasses, ordered a venti black coffee during an interview he granted us “since nobody reads [TSR] anyway” (and could therefore be considered “underground”) and requested the drink be lukewarm so that he could chug it faster and get to his second, third, and fourth cups. “Dude,” said Buuswaggle, apparently addressing TSR reporters, “everybody is always like, ‘don’t drink so much coffee! It’ll totally stunt your growth!’ and I’m like five-foot-eight almost. So I’m like, ‘all the big cats On Wall Street have their coffees, and it’s totally cool, or whatever, and so I’m just going to drink as much as I can.”
When asked if he was trying to make a statement, and if so, what it was, Buuswaggle looked confused and shrugged his shoulders. Then, seeming to grow bored with the conversation, Buuswaggle slurped down the rest of his drink and got up for another one, stroking his scraggly chin growth that couldn’t pass for a beard any more than Howie Mandel’s head could pass for Marv Albert’s toupee.
Unfortunately Buuswaggle got caught up in a debate about which little-known cartoon of the 80’s was best and ignored TSR’s reporters, but during the course of the evening, Buuswaggle drank a total of five venti coffees and visited the men’s room seven times. Buuswaggle’s life choice to drink so much coffee remains an inexplicable anomaly of the hipster subculture that may never be fully understood, but with willing coffee houses and convenient restrooms readily accommodating Buuswaggle’s bursting bladder, the chain drinking has no end in the foreseeable future so long as there are still burning disputes about obscure 80’s music and entertainment to be resolved.
-The Editors
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Comedian Gets Material From Ice Cream Carton
Burr Ridge, Ill.— Thomas Bellington, aspiring comedian and ice cream lover, overlooks nothing in his vigilant search for comedy material—not even household dairy products.
In a comedic environment that rarely smiles on comedy derived from everyday objects, foods, and events, Bellington found a bit that “killed,” and the catch is—the entire bit revolves around the ingredients found on the side of an ice cream carton.
Said Bellington, “I was in was what we in the business would call a dry spell. I hadn’t come up with many good bits in the past month or so. I was so desperate that I am ashamed to admit I went Online for some inspiration and got lost in a site featuring ‘yo mama’ jokes. I was near despair, and, ironically, it was that despair that led me to my material. I had wasted hours on the Internet, and usually I don’t eat past 10:00, but I was so depressed that at about 2 a.m. I went to the freezer and got out a carton of Moose Tracks ice cream. On a whim, I turned the carton to its side as I ate right from it with my spoon and looked at the ingredients. Some of them I recognized, but must were odd words and chemicals that didn’t sound very appetizing, and it got me thinking, who in the world was the first person to have the bright idea to say, ‘Hey, you think maybe guar gum might taste good in ice cream?’ I mean, I am picturing a bunch of people around a huge board table at the Ben & Jerry’s headquarters in New York or whatever, and the CEO says, ‘You know, we have sugar, milk, cream, and a little corn syrup, but what could we do to really improve our flavor?’ and some little sycophantic nerd looking to move up in the company pipes up, ‘Hey, why don’t we try adding a little carageenan and some mono or even diglycerides?’ Then some other guy tries to outdo him and pipes up, ‘That’s an OK idea, but what would really make our ice cream pop is cellulose gel and polypropylene glycol monoesters.’ And the CEO is like, ‘Brilliant! I love it! Let’s get right on that and have a prototype for the taste team to try by month end!’ I don’t know,” continued Bellington, “it might not translate on a news site, but over at the club, the audience was eating it up, if you’ll pardon the pun. I hadn’t had a response like that since late 2007 before the economy crashed.”
Bellington is a regular at the amateur standup comedy club Jokes On You in nearby Cicero. Bellington’s dream is to one day perform in Chicago’s Second City and hopes that this latest bit will get him discovered and be his ticket to fame, fortune, and possibly love. Meanwhile, the lid of comedic possibilities has been blown wide open for Bellington, and he will continue to look for comedy in obscure and unexpected places.
-The Editors
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