EDITORIAL

Mandatory Helmet Laws Should Not Include Fishermen

(Gunnison) A recent flurry of control mechanisms churned out at the state level now require that fishermen operating in Colorado wear protective attire. Included on this dubious roster, along with safety shoes, plastic gloves, custodial eye-ware and eco-friendly bait, are helmets. While we might even accept that the others are functional additions to the fishing costume, the helmet fiasco borders on the ridiculous

Certainly if the angler is riding a motorcycle, doing heavy labor, listening to politicians or worried about objects falling from the sky the helmet may make sense but in most cases this is not the situation. The fisherman is simply standing on the bank or standing in the water or or sitting in his boat trying to relax and catch dinner. Why then should the gov’ment get involved? It doesn’t matter to the fish. They don’t wear anything.

Either way starting in 2013 when a fisherman buys his annual license it will include stipulations as to his ensemble while on the water. Fees have increased to include proscribed gear, tips, and little maps of streams and lakes. Out-of-state anglers will pay slightly more but will be presented with the official Colorado safety helmets at the time of purchase. Local anglers can purchase these too but will have options such as using football helmets, military issues, fruit bowls or bucolic cerebral precautionary devices created out in the garage.

Of course the situation changes when we look into fly fishing, commercial fishing, ice fishing and fishing for compliments. Then the helmet might be a necessary accessory considering piscatorial limits and the desire to keep one’s head in an emergency. But to require a poor angler to don a helmet stinks  of fascism and abuse of power.

It is reasonable to assume that the use of life vests in open water and the classification of artificial lures are subject to annual review by such institutions as the Division of Wildlife and the Denver Water Board but it’s time to stop forcing Front Range morality on simple people whose sole intention is landing a fish. If they suffer a head injury delivered from the pole or a fall on slippery rocks how much will a helmet detour? If a fisherman is the victim of an attack by a rapid fish or another angler will the wearing of a helmet protect what is important? If a tree falls in the forest what are the chances it will hit a fisherman? If an aggressive bear enters the picture a helmet won’t help.

Of corpse we concur with the authorities when it comes to stupidity on the water,. Who can forget the case of a Mancos woman who was consumed, while netting piñon sardines, by a carnivorous snail darter in heat on the waters of the Dolores just last September. Had she been wearing the suggested attire would she be with us today? And what of the soggy tennis shoe , warm beer and the swiss cheese sandwich that she left behind? A It’s a sad legacy to a life wasted through inattentive sportsmanship.

But this pathetic tale is not the norm and we should not be forced to live in the shadow of deceit, the facade of security.

– Margot Rotweiller

Nutritional Statement

San Juan Horseshoe

“Edible soy-based ink and hygienic paper from synthetic dogwood bark”

Per Serving: LOVE – 40

Serving size: 32 pages. No frills on domestic flights.

Servings per container: Enough to chew on and spit back out

Calories: Color pages only

Protein: Not particularly detectable in laboratory rats

Carbohydrates: More than a little but slightly less than a lot

Fat: Kinda but it’s late and I’m drunk.

Percent of calories from fat: Divide current body weight by IQ

Polyunsaturated: …*

Saturated…* See above

Cholesterol: Big dog

Sodium: *

Percent of recommended daily allowance (U.S. RDA)

Contains less than 2% of the nutrition of the average school lunch consisting of french fries, hot dogs and chocolate milk. Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Thiamine, Riboflavin, Niacin, Calcium and Iron forcibly removed.

*not applicable without corresponding postal code or return address

This information on fat and cholesterol is provided for individuals who, on the advice of a physician, are modifying their monthly intake of meaningless information found on labels.

“The capitalists” says Awkins with the angry gulp, “the capitalists pays (stet) the priest to tell you all abaout (stet) the next world, so you won’t notice what he’s doing in this!”

-Awkins in The Guests of a Nation by Frank O’Connor

Redes de estudio ermitaño poco

(Gunnison) Un intento de ultra-censo de entrevistar y catalogar a los ermitaños de la región ha sido declarado un rotundo fracaso por los burócratas que “ya cobraron el cheque”.

      De los más de 100 ermitaños contactados en sus casas entre diciembre y febrero, solo uno habló con los investigadores.

      “Y quería fumar un cigarrillo”, dijo un miembro del personal abatido. “La mayoría de estas personas ni siquiera vendrían a la puerta si tuvieran una”.

      Los ermitaños que estaban acorralados a menudo miraban sin rumbo cuando los científicos sociales y nutricionistas del personal les preguntaban. Muchos solo miraron sus relojes de pulsera ficticios por temor al cierre de la reunión.

      “Estaban a la altura de sus pequeños trucos de ermitaños tímidos, pero somos sabios con esa acción”, dijo Lolly Zippee, ella misma una ermitaña en recuperación. “¡No están tratando con idiotas aquí!”

      Según los informes, muchos ermitaños trabajan de noche y no eran bienvenidos en su lugar de residencia durante el horario comercial. La mayoría no tiene teléfonos ni redes sociales.

      “Me sorprendió lo bien que vestían”, dijo un pasante. “Uno generalmente piensa en un ermitaño como alguien con una barba larga, un bastón y un saco, lo que sea que eso sea.

      Un mezclador After Hours está programado para más adelante en el verano. Los organizadores esperan que pueda atraer a los ermitaños para que conozcan a otros ermitaños.

      “Si esto no les llama la atención, los citaremos”, se rió Zippee.

Ex-Governor Toole Feeling Fine After Amputation

(Cody, WY) Former Dakotese Governor, Melvin Anastasia Toole was pronounced to be in good condition after the emergency amputation of his head. The radical surgery was employed after attempts to halt the spread of infectious thinking failed at the eleventh hour, according to hospital accountants.

     The said infection, which ran from Toole’s mouth to the politician’s occipital muscle and onward through his cerebral flax, was found to have degenerated beyond reasonable therapy and doctors quickly agreed to amputate the offending member, or in laymen’s terms throw out the baby with the bath water.

     Besides the primary infection Toole was found to have exhibited chronic gout breath and hints of frontal gangrene.

     “I had no idea that I was in such shape,” laughed Toole hours after the procedure. “Had I known I was walking around with all of those parts in my head I might have been more careful.”

     Doctors, at the urging of political officers here, had been treating the malady with heavy doses of television in an attempt to shock the patient back into the prescribed fold.

     “The governor stubbornly rejected our remedies and continued his attempts to sabotage the status quo,” said Dr. Simon Lackluster, attending physician at the Mao Clinic here. “When he hurled two television sets through the window and trampled another in his bedroom slippers we had had enough and decided to cut.”

     Toole had only recently alarmed allies and colleagues in Colorado when he suggested that government stop lying to the people and work for the common good of all.

     “Those, my friends, are the words of a monster, a bad apple talking that must be removed from the barrel,” quipped Lackluster. “I didn’t spend all of those years in medical school for anyone’s common good.”

– Rex Montaleone

“While playing golf today, I hit two good balls. I stepped on a rake.” — Henny Youngman in a high-pitched voice.

Pea Green’s hemp-fed cows get buzz

“They just seem happier”

Local bovine that are eating hemp seem happier, more ambitious and quite well grounded, with an improved appetite say unreliable ag-sources. Although there is no discernible level of thc in the crop the animals seem more upbeat according persons knowledgable on the subject.

Beginning as an accident last spring, the change in diet has been lauded by cattlemen who say hemp is fortified with essential cow vitamins is often cheaper than hay in the long run. 

The folks over at the Lazy P Ranch, were first in creating the sustainable project, backed both by the Nature Compliance and Region Zen. Others followed suit.

“It seems to me the critters already eat like pigs. They’ve had a love of the pasture and its edible treasures since your mother was a boy, said one bored observer. “Who is talking better appetites here? Give me shelter,” he spat.

The trapdoor experiment linked to a fouled doctoral thesis has lead to combine break downs and concubines walking out. Aside from fiscal and husbandry concerns the fishwives have it pretty good already according to recent surveys.

One of these creatures, Mercurial Menendez, defensive canner and award-winning flan sculptor told The Horseshoe that the cows out there seem happier. I spend a good six hours a day watching them eat. I should know.”

At the county level nobody’s mooing as bureaucrats scramble to verify that the hemp is legal and determine how to tax the ancient crop.

-Grace O’Malley

NAACP Cool to Back to Europe Movement

(Denver) The Colorado NAACP has reacted cautiously to a call for the redistribution of white people to their geographic origins in Europe. These Caucasians, currently living in the United States, would be shipped back to their native lands if the plan is adopted.

“The majority of Blacks in this country can trace family heritage back to the 16th and 17th centuries,” said Rev. Abraham McCarthy, an associate of Rev. Al Sharpton and former welterweight boxer from Harlem. “Despite the plague of evil slavery, our people can prove landed immigrant status far before most of the white folks even got their feet wet in the Atlantic. 

Slave ships, which did little to chronicle the lineage of its human cargo, arrived on these shores centuries before the Colonial Revolution giving Blacks basic squatter’s rights and a valid claim as the continents second Americans, following the indigenous group of former Asians who have been here since the before the Dark Ages began in Europe.”

The plan, which seeks an atonement for slavery as well as a restructuring of the power base in this country, calls for the forced migration of all Europeans back to their ancestral homelands despite political upheaval and creeping overpopulation there. It is modeled after the notorious Back to Africa Movement which was introduced before Jin Crow and during the Civil War, reputedly fought over the practice of slavery in the Confederacy. Abolitionists such as Abraham Lincoln flirted with this solution even though history remembers him as the great emancipator. 

“The Back to Europe Movement is more logical and certainly a valid approach to problems in this country,” said McCarthy who is said to favor certain exceptions such as the Irish and Italians who faced similar discrimination, but not technical slave status, upon arrival in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Possession is nine tenths of the law and we were the majority in many locales during the early days. This is nothing more than retro democracy in action,” he smiled. 

“Our plan is not meant to be punitive but rather a prudent proxy to the problem of overpopulation,” continued McCarthy with bold alliteration. “After a few decades when the dust settles, Whites in good standing can reapply for citizenship in the New United States of America.”

Most Caucasoid groups have pledged to fight the proposal while it is still in a fledgling state. Transportation logistics, cost and the status of mixed race citizens had not been undressed at press time. 

“The initial implementation and monitoring of the shift may be a bit tedious as first,” explained McCarthy, “but after a century or two things should fit back in place quite nicely. I myself have always wanted to own an antebellum mansion, sipping lemonade under a sweeping magnolia tree ”

– Shondelle Washington 

“The (economic) revolution will not be televised, not least because Ireland did not yet have a television station” (in 1957).

-from We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole

Many Rockies Embrace Vegetarianism

In what appears to be a soft-sided protest against the owners of the franchise, many Rockies players have turned to vegetarianism. The primarily symbolic change-up in eating lifestyle comes after another year dawns without suitable pitching and with no plan to upgrade.

Controlling interest in the team is held by the Monfort Brothers, Charles and Dick, also known as “the meat men” in cynical circles on and off Blake Street. Starting with a few head of cattle during the Great Depression the Monfort family built an extensive meat empire centered at Greely, Colorado.

Along with several other minority stockholders the family acquired the Colorado Rockies baseball franchise from Mickey Monus in 1992. The latter had become embroiled in scandals related to the shady corporate pharmaceutical dealings and off-loaded the team.

“It began with meatless team meetings and burgeoned into vegan batting practice and games of pepper sans steak. Now it appears to be a subtle revolt against bad pitching and horrible management decisions. (Nolan Arenado and Trevor Story for starters).

Despite the best fans in baseball the bosses are still dragging their feet, desperately signing washed up sluggers and sub-par players to disguise their incompetence. The Rockies have consistently underperformed and, although the farm system has shined, have failed to create a winning culture in the Mile High City. While Denver sportswriters whine and fans fume, the players have been chewing on tofu and brown rice along with assorted fruits and vegetables that had been missing from the training table until recently.

How much of it is political is anyone’s guess.

Sleepy (but nice guy) Manager Bud Black, was brushed back by the development. He called it a passing fancy but a puffy administration has raised the red flag saying the players could eat what they liked as long as they kept their mouths shut on upstairs business.

“We’ve already seen the entire infield go vegan,” said one middle management source. “What are we supposed to do, sit idly by the hot dog stand while the whole team chows down on Poori-Sabzi and falafel? They’ll never survive the weight room without red-blooded protein! This not some vague fielder’s choice. This is a threat to the game.”

In an alleged attempt to steer the movement off course the Monforts have agreed to host an information night called The Humane Slaughterhouse sometime before the All-star break. Meal vouchers start at $150 not counting beer. Season ticket holders are invited free of charge.

“We’ll be carefully screening future prospects so as to spot potential troublemakers on and off the field,” said yet another team administrator. “If they don’t eat hot dogs there is no place for them on our roster.”

 -Rocky Flats, Sports Editor