All Entries in the "Featured Peeks" Category
HACKERS RELEASE CONGRESSIONAL EMAILS
(Washington) Hackers have successfully breached Congressional security, making public direct contact data common to the legislative group. Moments after forced entry, the hackers announced that emails, social security information and even home phone numbers would now be available to citizens of the world.
The cyber break-in, one of the most extensive to hit the United States, promises to send piercing shock waves through world governments either allied or at odds with the governing body here. Even the White House has been put on alert in apprehension of further interruptions and potential sabotage.
It is feared that identity theft is already in motion, blurring the partisan image across the aisle and making it virtually impossible to tell the elected officials from lobbyists that congregate each day just outside the sanctimonious doors of the Capitol.
The sensitive information now floating in cyberspace could pose serious security issues but will also allow constituents unprecedented access to their elected officials. Already many Americans have called their Congressmen at home to suggest action or complain of undoings.
“We have reached a new plateau of freedom in this nation in that these coyotes and their entourage are now forced to be responsive to the needs of their constituencies,” said an unreliable source who has reputedly been on the phone all night. “In the recent past they would simply release a double-talk statement through their attorney or public relations department. Now they will have to talk directly to their fellow countrymen who, as the early returns suggest, are not pleased with the workings of their gov’ment.”
It is not known if this development will lead to a rational exchange and elected officials might start listening instead of talking.
“All most of these elites care about is themselves and their reelection,” said the source. “Now the tables may have turned.”
For all of you that called in: We do not know how the hacking will affect the popular Win Lunch with Your Congressman Contest now in progress all across the land.
– Mario Swervo
ASK MR OUTSIDE
Mr. Outside, a recent arrival to Ridgway, doesn’t actually live outside but there are many here in what was once small town America, who would prefer that he did so. Mr. Outside doesn’t excel at winter sports or offer any services. H just likes the name, that he calls his brand. Despite his less than impressive resume people write to him for information, advice and consul.
Here are the official discussion questions for February 1 meetings.
Do your homework now and avoid tedious monologues and floggings later:
*What is smarter: a wallaby or a walleye?
*Who invented hibernation? Who pays for it?
*If you were hanging out at a chippunk bar and wanted to buy a round for the mouse what would you do?
*I just moved here from Moline. Where do I buy earwigs?
*Does taking my daily herbs and way with a jigger or two of Cork Gin negatively affect the potential health benefits of the herbs? What abut the vitamins? What about blowing ups all of the Starbucks in Europe this winter?
*Earwig Farms near Mañana offers the highest quality earwigs in the Rockies due to an intricate, highly neurotic mating process rarely observed by humans
AI Scalp Massage. Weekly packages start at $300 inclues flu shot and tickets to Rockies spring training if you can pitch. Complete follicle emersion. 40-day money back guarantee.
NO ROOM LEFT TO FIGHT TRADITIONAL CIVIL WAR
(Richmond VA) Historians have been predicting another civil war in this country since half past Appomattox Court House. Yankee academians save their projections for smoky rooms and snifter back parlors. Wide-eyed rebel saga sharers in Dixie lead with the idea of a third American Revolution.
This time they come out on top.
While impulsive reenactments boom off tediously thin walls on both sides of the former Mason-Dixon Line, students of the conflict in classrooms and coffee shops, are faced with a stark impediment to resuming the war:
Space.
Before we could pick up our muskets and resume the canon fire we would have to figure out how to assemble a force the size of the Army of Northern Virginia or The Army of the Potomac anywhere east of the Mississippi. Sure, the battlefields have been preserved as National Parks but the surrounding area has become the resting place for exploding populations, fast food chains, textile mills and suburbs.
Bring back the Monitor and the Merrimack.
“Lee could not have placed his entire army in the field at Chancellorsville,” said Dr. Orem Welldigger, a fellow at Virginia Military Institute. He had 60,000 up against Hooker, the Union general with a noted tolerance for camp followers. Hooker himself had 120,000 troops,” he said. “There is no physical possibility of all of these soldiers alone fitting into what’s left of the countryside.”
Professor Walter Burnside, of the State University of New York at Plattsburg agreed, pointing to a newly erected mall near the battle of Chickamauga. At that site in September of 1863 the Confederates won a victory and trapped the Union troops in Chattanooga.
Burnside, claiming direct descent from General Ambrose Burnside, who orchestrated the hopeless attack and suffered a subsequent defeat at Fredricksburg, says the South would not have defended today’s town quite so vehemently.
“The Fredricksburg of today still sits on the Rappahannock which is but a dribble to its past glory. Everywhere interstate highways zig zag across the landscape,” he said. “Too many people and no vacant land to stage a mad confrontation of epic proportion. At Chickamauga there’s a few tourist shops hosting visitors who think they’re in some state’s rights’ Disneyland. In Gettysburg they don’t make shoes or study Latin anymore. In Vicksburg they rarely celebrate the Fourth of July “
Arthur Grits, a self-taught enthusiast of the War Between the States suggests that the next conflict could be fought in Nevada, Utah or Northern Arizona…maybe even Canada.
“I just drove through the Great Basin and believe you me there’s nobody out there,” he smiled. “Maybe it’s because there aren’t many bathrooms but I think the reason is actually the lack of water. Imagine if you will Union troops taking the high positions adjacent to nuclear waste dumps while the Confederates charge through the sagebrush and the pinon trees. Now that place has the room to house all the armies since the French and Indian War. Canada has space as well,” he added, but barefoot Rebel troops would be hard pressed to put up much of a fight during the winter months.”
Antelope burgers for 300,000?
Unfortunately for Civil War purists the Western solution just won’t do. Would the new battle of the Wilderness be fought on the shores of Lake Powell. Would Sherman burn Las Vegas? How could Confederate troops dig trenches in the caliche of the Great Salt Lake Desert?
Travelers chronicling the engagements of the Civil War often discover poorly marked Union and Confederate graveyards dominated by burger outlets, and cannonballs lodged in ancient trees cut down to make room for football stadiums, factory outlets or convention centers.
“It’s that damn Yankee arrogance that has resulted in the rape of Southern culture,” says Welldigger, who refers to the recent sprawl as “the second Yankee colonization of the South”.
“Not only did the Northerners move right in to our better neighborhoods, but they brought with them all of the trappings of federalism including welfare, television, competitive wages, liberalism and pollution. The Spanish moss, the cotton fields and the magnolia trees are hanging on by their teeth.”
Burnside disagrees saying that many of the corporate entities slammed by Welldigger had origins in the South.
Look at the biggest cultural disaster, Wal-Mart,” he chided. “That blight began in Arkansas. Look at Colonel Sanders. Does he appear to have abolitionist tendencies? Then there’s the Black-Eyed Pea and Popeye’s.”
Maybe simple physics will deny us the chance to settle unfinished business here in North America. Maybe that’s why we can’t keep our nose out of the Mideast. Is it all that barren land?
“If Pierre G.T. Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter today he’d risk hitting three franchise pizza parlors, an IRS office, two malls, a ring of interstate highways, the corporate headquarters of Mr. Doughnut and some poorly constructed town houses along Charleston Harbor. His politically incorrect behavior might net him a summons for discharging a weapon within city limits and would certainly hurl him into a legion of lawsuits.”
Grits agrees adding that for now sworn enemies will just have to settle for fighting scrimmages in their living rooms and unfurl their blood-letting charges within the confines of video games.
“Just remember,” said Grits, “that just because our cadaverous campaigns are constipated by space restrictions there’s no stumbling block when it comes to blaming each other for the current state of affairs in this nation.
– Kashmir Horseshoe
Snoring Machine Perfected
(Ouray) A solar-powered, alternate current snoring device is ready for the assembly line according to inventor Beth Otis, of Red Mountain Town. The contraption, created from rusty, discarded mining tin, brass pipe, circular fans and dangling tin foil, sports tiny speakers and a heat detection gadget that sets it off when intruders, human or otherwise, approach.
“It sounds exactly like the snoring we discover during Colorado Rockies’ games and monotone political speeches,” said Otis, “with woofers and tweeters pushing compressed oxygen into the pipe caverns and the fans taking it from there.”
The inventor plans to market the product to people who want to keep bears, and other predators away whether out in the woods or at home. The machine requires simple installation. It can be mounted on one’s RV or easily staked into the ground adjacent to a tent.
“Right now our main focus is the audio,” said Otis. “It has to sound authentic or the bears or they won’t be detoured in their marauding. It has to sound like another animal is on the premises.”
Otis told The Horseshoe that the machine will cost approximately $400 which he said is cheap compared to dancing a two-step with a bear.
“One resident up here has his entire deck destroyed by a large sow in search of food. (Her little cub was reportedly munching from a box of Sugar Crisps when authorities arrived). Another man woke up to find his yard furniture and monogrammed pissing cherub fountain completely totaled after an angry bear was denied entry to the kitchen and threw a tantrum,” he explained.
“Quiet people who are confronted with bear while sleeping in a tent could face even more serious consequences,” he said. “We just want to make the night a safer place.”
-Tommy Middlefinger
“Donald Trump is a human algorithm, always ratcheting up antagonism. He’s a personification and exploiter of all the things creating anxiety in people’s lives.”
– Maureen Dowd, New York Times
SACRED COWS EXEMPT FROM GRAZING RESTRICTIONS
(Washington DC) Interior Secretary Runn Rabbit today admitted that a long list of sacred cows will be spared the confines of an innovative new public grazing bill that resides somewhere under his desk here.
Although Rabbit did not elaborate on the list, he promised that all the one-dimensional fringe groups that make up the Wheatfield Coalition would soon be appeased, even placated, by his new plan.
“If your average sacred cow wants to graze in the National Forests, there is little we can do to stop it from pursuing that end. Of course,” he said, “sacred cows come in all different shapes and colors depending on the region of the country one may reside in.”
Critics such as Sen. Oral Noise (Unitarian-CA), insist that Rabbit has ignored the fact that sacred cows do not graze at public expense in many locales east of the Mississippi since there is a short supply of grass and far too many people there.
“The simple fact is this,” mooed Noise, “cows, sacred or otherwise, don’t feel comfortable grazing in the more urban areas of the East due to the mass congregation of people, concrete and houses. In addition, they don’t enjoy standing outside at all hours in the Midwest due to the lousy weather,” he smiled. “Out here on the West Coast they don’t feel safe pasturing due to gangs and random violence. That leaves the Rocky Mountain states,” he continued, “as the only feasible spot in which even the most sacred cow can achieve any level of peace in the 21st Century”.
Responding to his critics, Rabbit has promised new legislation aimed at curtailing the population boom that now threatens the lifestyle of people living in the Rockies. He assured those in attendance in a bread line outside his office that the Brady Bill should end violence once and for all in America and that the ACA will easily end disease leaving a lot more time to concentrate on the plight of livestock.
“Everyone has faced a little barbed wire and a few essential cattle guards in his life, even if he lives in New York or Los Angeles,” declared Rabbit. “All the government has to do is back up the existing barriers with fortified walls and deep moats inhabited by piranhas and Republican-eating alligators,” he explained. “We’re currently dismantling our defenses along the Mexican border, due to the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement. We think these safeguards can be implemented to save the Rockies from overgrazing by man and/or beast.”
Rabbitt would not comment when asked how many cows have actually read the fine print in that particular document.
– Rory Lyons
Earth is sole planet says Vance
“And global warming is no threat”
(Middletown, Ohio) Vice Presidential hopeful J D Vance told a group of intergalactic oil drillers here that earth was indeed the only planet in the solar system and that their efforts at oil extraction in outer space were good for America.
Saying that “God told me” Vance went on to discount earlier findings that the solar system was crammed with heavenly bodies.
“Show me one place in the Bible where they talk about Mars or Martians invading the earth,” said Vance, to a chorus of laughter. He quickly turned serious then added that with the Martian threat gone the administration could now focus wholeheartedly on the War on Liberals. Silence.
The Kentucky denied allegations that his comments reflected a conflict of interest due to former associations with the oil industry. Frowns.
“Back when I was at the helm in Ohio we were subjected to the same kind of harassment by narrow-minded people who think the earth was created to be preserved. What nonsense. I don’t remember reading about any environmentalists crossing the Red Sea or fighting with the Philistines.”
Again Vance got a throng of guffaws, mixed with tearful laughter.
When asked about Martian landings by unmanned spaceships and an assortment of high tech photos that have been collected over the past five years Vance said that he could not answer in that the activity in question was a matter of national security.
“I’ll say this: He smiled. “If I was a passenger on a United Airlines Flight to Disney World I’d be far and away more comfortable with Donald Trump in the cockpit than I would his Democratic challenger.”
Vance ignored countless questions by reporters as to his immigrant status, that of one time Briar Hopper turned Buckeye.
– Sergio Jingle
