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Uneasy Babysitter Hopes Each Set Of Passing Headlights Belongs To The Waxmans
Beverly Hills, Mich.— Sam Schoier, a middle school-aged babysitting veteran, stared at the lights dancing across the wall in glassy-eyed vexation as he lay on the couch wondering what was taking his hosts so long.
Schoier, who is the Waxmans’ go-to babysitter and a neighborhood favorite, fed, bathed, read to, and put to bed the three Waxman children who range in age from four to eight while their parents attended a charity benefit hosted by Marla Waxman’s communications company.
“They usually go out to eat and then to see a movie,” said Schoier who makes it policy to never judge his employers’ destinations while babysitting their children, “and they warned me that this night would be a little later than usual. I almost asked how late I should be expecting them, but I didn’t want them to feel rushed, so I just left it at that.”
Schoier lived to regret his lack of assertion however, although he admits that he took full advantage of the ice cream Mrs. Waxman invited him to help himself to in the freezer, despite finding it “slightly freezer burned,” not to mention the hot fudge was a few weeks past its expiration date.
Nevertheless, Schoier did his duty with fastidious care to follow all instructions and clean up after himself before sitting down to some well-earned TV at about eleven p.m. After the children were long asleep and Schoier tired of channel surfing, he grew anxious about the hour. “I’ll admit that at midnight, I thought they’d have been home already. At one, I was starting to get pretty nervous.”
Schoier alleged that the Waxmans finally pulled into the driveway of their large, wooded lot just after 1:15 a.m., and that he felt “a cool wave of relief” when they walked out of the laundry room adjacent to the garage and into the kitchen, her heels clicking on the kitchen tile and him holding his sport coat.
Schoier said that they seemed “surprised he was still awake” and claimed to have contacted his parents and made provisions for him to stay the night.
Schoier claims that he fully intends to continue babysitting for the Waxmans, but he said that he hopes they will not make a habit of staying out so late.
-The Editors
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Kid From Sixth Sense To King George VI: “You’re A Stuttering Stanley!”
When fiction isn’t strange enough, sometimes truth has a way of making up the difference. Viewers of the Oscar-winning movie The King’s Speech may have wondered about the young boy who stood up during one of the King’s stuttering, stammering debacles and pointed to the King accusingly while chanting, “Stuttering Stanley! You’re a stuttering Stanley!”
Producers say the boy, played by a young Haley Joel Osment, was an actual young boy who taunted the king during his halting fiascos and was the inspiration behind the 1999 M. Night Shyamalan suspense thriller. “[The boy] almost got left on the cutting room floor,” said director Tom Hooper, “because we didn’t think people would buy it, but we wanted to be truthful to the actual story. I guess it didn’t hurt us too bad,” Hooper continued with a smug smirk, making obvious reference to the four Oscars the film nobbled.
The scene perplexed some audience members who thought it didn’t fit the general tone of the movie. “Other than that,” said an average and representative film viewer, “it was decent. I guess the big surprise ending was that Colin Firth was not dead the whole time. I mean, I got it, but they left that a little ambiguous at the end.”
-The Editors
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Piglet Runt Raised As Pet By Farm Girl Slaughtered For Delicious Easter Ham
Calhoun County, Ill.— “The pig that captured America’s heart” met a grizzly end last week and supplied the Culbertsons with a succulent and dazzling feast on Easter morning.
“Herbert,” a two-year-old pig whom little Betsy Culbertson saved from certain death when the piglet was just a scrawny, squealing runt of his litter, lived out most of his subsequent days in relative ease and comfort as the doting family’s adopted pet before he grunted his last languorous grunt on his way to a fateful meeting with the old family meat cleaver.
“Herbie din’t suffer hardly none,” pointed out Henry Culbertson who himself heaved the mighty instrument of death. “He mostly squealed on the way [to his execution] a’cuz I stirred ‘im from ‘is nap. Once I skewered his jug-lar, he din’t make much noise a‘tall. I sliced ‘im up fer ham an a whole heap-a bacon fer fryin’. Betsy came roun’ once she got at that bacon, and I think she’ll even start a-talkin’ a-gin perty soon here.”
Conspicuously absent was the shocked outcry from the surrounding townsfolk who had just over a year ago rallied behind the famous pig. “That’s how it goes here on the farm,” funned Farmer Fred Fletcher from flanking Fletcher Farm. “Here it’s, ‘Pig today, ham tomorrow.’ You-all city slickers wouldn’t unnerstand.”
Since Easter, life at the Culbertson farm has carried on as usual except for Herbert’s now-vacant stall where Betsy has taken to sleeping in the fetal position while rocking back and forth and moaning forlornly.
-The Editors
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Expert Child Psychologist Advises “Try Not To Be Born To Criminals”
Stanford, Cal.— David P. Nihoff, Ph.D., professor emeritus at Stanford University, and author of over forty books on child psychology, gave these words of wisdom in a PBS interview last Saturday.
The interviewer asked the wizened, graying psychologist if, after all his years of study, he could give the children out there a little advice to help steer them away from a life of crime, what would he say. Dr. Nihoff stopped, gathered up the scratchy richness of his sagacious voice, and said with a chuckle, “Try not to be born to criminals.”
When the interviewer asked the savant to elucidate, Dr. Nihoff stated, “When I watch COPS, I can’t help but think about what idiots these people are and how little a chance their offspring have to ever turn out at all normal or to contribute anything to society other than a heavier burden than their parents did. It’s the classic, ‘monkey see, monkey do’ syndrome, and I have observed that most criminals tend to raise criminals. So kids,” continued Nihoff after turning slightly and addressing the camera with a wagging finger, “don’t be born to criminals!”
The interviewer seemed to scramble to pick up the interview after that point but had to break for a commercial before remembering that PBS ran no commercials technically, but certainly ran multiple-hour-long fund-raising telethon harangue-fests in which they pled, shamed, contrived, importuned, petitioned, demanded, beguiled, goaded, cajoled, wheedled, and whined until they got viewers like you to give them money and wish they were watching a good, old-fashioned commercial ad because at least it would be clever, humorous, and entertaining, and he had to stammer and stutter through the end of the interview.
Although this theory is a new one, experts are already pointing out its merit and praising Nihoff’s forward thinking in articulating it.
-The Editors
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Woodburn, Ore.— A dearth of rain has demoralized local hippies in Woodburn’s most prominent hippie farm.
The farm, which is home to nearly eighty bare-footed, greasy, long-haired, acid-tripping, skinny, drug-abusing, garden-growing, anti-American, war-protesting, VW-driving, round-eyeglasses-wearing, tie-dying, peace-signing, man-burning, androgynously dressed, bell-bottomed, Kerouac-reading, unwashed, unshowered, unemployed, government-assisted, establishment-hating hippies, reflects the level of optimism and happiness of its good-natured inhabitants by the number of smiley faces and peace signs they draw on the brick outside the compound each day.
Last week, after the fifth consecutive week without any precipitation, farm hippies lamented their withering weed plants by drawing only three peace signs on their compound. Local sheriffs who enjoy daily tormenting, antagonizing, provoking, and badgering the hippies thought it odd that the hippies stayed indoors and refrained from any normal protests or “guitar-strumming weirdness.”
The hippies fear that the famine could destroy their entire crop and “totally ruin our opportunities to get in touch with higher levels of consciousness, man.”
-The Editors
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Teacher Resumes Haughty Stance, Regrets Asking Students To Throw Him A Pen
Columbus Grove, Ohio— Benjamin Macintyre did his best to recover his normal bow-tie snootiness after ducking under a hail of school-related projectiles hurtled toward him while he taught.
Last Monday, the third-year accounting and general math teacher had assumed his normal teaching position of sitting on the edge of his desk, swinging his crossed ankles under him, and leaning slightly back while resting his palms, arms locked, on the desk behind him before he made the fateful error.
Students describe his lectures as “rambling and convoluted stories that have little if anything to do with the examples in the book” and allege that he will often substitute larger, more obscure words for the obvious ones in his sentences, even if he has already gotten halfway through the first word.
“He juts his freckled chin just so to the side and wags his head all hoity-toity as he teaches,” claimed junior Nick Norczyk, “and most of the time I don’t even know what he is talking about.”
Macintyre, a flaming redhead who slicks his wavy hair into an impeccably parted, perfectly tapered coiffure, traces his roots through the marble halls of the nation’s finest universities all the way back to the Scots Gaelic clan from which he sprang back to the early eleventh century.
Halfway through his lecture, while most students were having a preemptive go at their homework as Macintyre was still introducing the lesson, he started to work out an equation on a notebook he was holding for the students to see when his pen ran dry.
“I asked the students if someone could toss me a pen,” said a contemplative Macintyre, “and knew I had misspoken before I even finished the sentence. The glint in their eyes was akin to that a soldier must see after walking into an ambush and having absolutely no defense before the enemy opens fire on him.”
Macintyre stopped speaking and took a moment to collect himself before describing the harrowing scene in which students jumped from their seats grabbing “handfuls of pens, pencils, markers, protractors, compasses, calculators, and desks” and began gleefully and lustily heaving them toward him as he tried his best to protect his head and thus-far unmarred face.
When all items not bolted down had been thrown and the dust began to settle, Macintyre spent the next eighteen minutes before the bell rang trying to regain his composure and pretend nothing had happened while the students, meanwhile, “panted and shook” as the adrenaline slowly abated.
Macintyre stated that he learned “an important lesson” that day and chuckled as he revealed a suitcase full of working pens just in case he ever needed one again in a pinch.
-The Editors
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