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Community Leader And Respected Family Man Creeped Out By Kitty
Sterling Heights, Mich.— Controversial Sterling Heights mayor pro tem Lawrence Taynandez has been fraught and unsettled recently because of the outré behavior of his cat.
Taynandez claimed he and his family had been living in relative peace with the feline until it began its recent bizarre behavior. Taynandez said, “I was standing there shaving, getting ready to go to work for the citizens of Sterling Heights, fighting against the evil forces of ignorance regarding smart meters and other local mayors, when I thought I felt eyes on me. I started and glanced around, but I knew my wife was still in bed and our two young children were sleeping soundly. Then, I slowly looked into the shadows and saw the two green, glowing eyes of our kitty staring forebodingly at me. It was very eerie because she never usually is around in the morning.”
Taynandez claimed that the incident was just the first of many subsequent, kitty-centered incidents to haunt him during the past several weeks. “I’ll be enjoying a bowl of my favorite sugar cereal,” continued Taynandez, “when BAM, there she is, just staring at me from the top of the couch or on the TV. Sometimes when I turn on the light in my room, she is just staring at me from atop the armoire. You can’t imagine how disconcerting it is, and then the rest of my day I am all jittery.”
Taynandez can’t say for certain why his kitty has begun acting this way, but he thinks it might have to do with the new lighting in his basement: “I think she finds it too effulgent for her sensitive eyes.”
Taynandez’s wife thinks such a reason is ludicrous and blames Taynandez himself for not emptying the cat’s litter box often enough. “He is such an idiot,” she added.
Regardless of the cause, Taynandez hopes he can get to the bottom of the cat’s inexplicable behavior soon before his nerves are completely fried and his work begins to suffer. “The good people of Sterling Heights spoke loud and clear in this last election, and I don’t want to be sidetracked from fulfilling my civic responsibilities because of the cheekiness of a creepy cat.”
-The Editors
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Sign Language Rant Goes Unheeded In Dark Room
Milwaukee, Wis.— Patricia Borshivko expressed her frustrated outrage in vain after someone flipped the lights out in her dormitory room.
Borshivko, a blind student attending Marquette University, was allegedly going off on her two deaf roommates in one of her “signature sign language tirades” when one roommate surreptitiously sneaked over and turned off the light, trying not to snicker.
“She was mad because someone had moved her shoes again,” signed roommate Jennifer Karcewski, “and she was saying that it took her over twenty minutes to find them. She knows she has to speak to us in sign language, but we were all trying to sleep, and we had seen this lecture before about how inconsiderate we all were, so I just turned the lights off and let her continue.”
According to the roommates, Borshivko seemed fine after a good night’s sleep, leading them to believe their ruse had succeeded. Karcewski claimed adamantly that they held no ill will toward Borshivko but that sometimes Borshivko could be “just a tad temperamental.”
Borshivko, a fine student, is working toward a degree in deaf education. The girls claim that despite the obvious obstacles, they generally get along quite well using the agreed upon methods of communication.
-The Editors
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Man Commits To Mumbling To Self “As Long As It Takes” Till Wife Thinks He’s Crazy
Bethlehem, Penn.— Duncan LeFluer has, if nothing else, tenacity. LeFluer, who has been happily married for eighteen years, has taken to mumbling to himself whenever his wife is in earshot.
“I don’t know,” said a contemplative LeFluer, “I just say nonsensical stuff or talk about what outfit I should wear as I pick it out for the next day. sometimes it’s just saying things while doing housework like, ‘I’m aware they used oil on it, but if I did that every time they wouldn’t believe me anymore!’ and then having a drawn-out argument with myself in hushed tones so she can just pick up snippets of the conversation—just enough so she gets an idea of what I am saying.”
LeFluer claimed that his wife, Rhonda, at first laughed and thought it was funny, “but after a few weeks of it she started getting angry.”
LeFluer hopes that his commitment can eventually convince his wife that he is full-on cracked up. “At that point,” he said, “I guess I’ll tell her I’ve been acting the whole time, but that could be years from now. I just hope she is a good sport about it.”
LeFluer requested we did not interview his wife since doing so might “give it away.”
-The Editors
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Teacher Constantly Inserts Phrase “Hilarious Hijinks Ensue” Into Lectures
Kentwood, Mich.— Students at Franklin Middle School say history teacher Patrick Ballenski is “weird.”
Ballenski, easily recognizable around campus in his black-rimmed glasses and Looney Tunes ties, allegedly describes historical situations as though they were forgotten comedies from the 80’s and 90’s.
“He’ll be teaching us about, like, the Reformation,” said eighth grader Kyle Stranner, “and he’ll be like, ‘Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door at Wittenberg . . . and hilarious hijinks ensue when the Pope finds out.’ Or maybe the hilarious hijinks ensue when Cortés directed the systematic destruction and leveling of Tenochtitlan. It just seems that everything with him involves ‘hilarious hijinks.’ Not everything is hilarious!”
Other students agreed with Stranner’s editorializing and questioned the appropriateness of Ballenski’s catch-phrase. “I don’t even know what ‘hijinks ensue’ means,” said seventh grader Kelly Carlson, “but things in history don’t just get less boring if you call them ‘hilarious.’”
So far Ballenski stands by his comments and claimed, “historical hilarity and hijinks is all a matter of perspective. It’s like the hilarious Youtube video of hundreds of women crashing their cars in unfathomable ways. Probably not funny to them at the time, but looking back from your perspective or mine, it’s pretty knockabout.”
School officials were unavailable for comment.
-The Editors
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Controversial Sign Adorns Shop Catering To Disrespectful, Teen-Something Skater Punks
Portland, Ore.— One glasses-garnished, suit-wearing, briefcase-bearing businessman was horrified to find himself and others like him ostracized and discriminated against by the sign on a skateboard store: “No Squares Allowed.”
Charles Laine said that he was on his way home after a long day at the office when he noticed the store and decided to obey an impulse that had been gnawing at him for years—the impulse to ditch the briefs and files in favor of the carefree, rollicking, devil-may-care attitude of the skaters that had long grinded, skated, and ollied themselves into the wistfully affectionate heart of the city, from the illegal parks of the early eighties to the city-wide parks now featured in this skater-punk Mecca.
Laine, who doesn’t consider himself a true square inside, feared that, based on his dress and appearance, those in the store would “jump to the erroneous conclusion” that he was a square and would make him feel unwelcome. By his own admission, Laine suffered great discrimination at the hands of skater punks when he grew up in the eighties “just because [he] preferred chemistry sets to skateboard ramps” and claimed he was horrified to have the same bilious feeling he had when he was young rise in his stomach when he saw that sign.
“I don’t know,” said Laine, “I guess I just hoped that after this much time they would accept me.” Laine claimed he walked away from the store “disheartened” to the snickers of skater punks laughing at his suit.
Red Swijta, proprietor of the store, stated that he had “no intention of taking the sign down,” nor did he believe the sign to be offensive.
-The Editors
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Local Man’s Recurring Nightmare Comes True Until He Wakes Up
Clinton, Mich.— John Maharay woke up to find he really was back in college under extreme pressure to get all his projects done and facing either infestation by lice and bedbugs or giving himself a huge shot and holding it in for over a minute before he woke up to find it was all a dream and that he was going to be late for work.
Maharay has been having the dream about being back in college for some time now, but it wasn’t until last night before he awoke that he realized the dream was a reality. Maharay attended college in New York where he graduated nearly a decade ago. Since then he has been working for a tire company in Michigan, dodging lawsuits from disgruntled Ford Explorer owners.
For most of his career so far, his work has been rather humdrum. His daily routine is fixed and leaves little room for surprises. He is married with three children, all of whom are under five, and although he claims he is happy in his job, marriage, and home, the nightmares about being back in college haunt him relentlessly.
“Sometimes,” said Maharay, “I’m just in my dorm and realize that I have a huge paper due the next day that I haven’t started on; sometimes I am in a huge lecture hall and realize I am in my underwear; and sometimes I will be at one of the jobs I had at college trying not to get fired. Most recently, I was at one of those jobs and was told I had to stick myself with a six-inch-long needle and then leave it in my arm to allow the chemical to enter my blood stream in an attempt to stave off an infestation of insects. It was horrible, but when I realized that this time it was real, a diabolical anguish settled permanently in my stomach.”
Maharay continued, “Thankfully, right after that I woke up.”
Maharay expects he will have the nightmare again, but he hopes that it will never become reality as it did last night before he woke up.
-The Editors
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