All Entries in the "Featured Peeks" Category
GATHERERS ARRIVING DAILY
(Montrose) The airport, no sooner back to normal with the last of the out-of-towndeer and elk hunters vamoosing, is now inundated with another nightmare anthropological group. This year the annual migration of rifle totters is accentuated by the presence of more than 100,000 gatherers.
The gatherers, the secondary component to the ancient order of humankind, have long been linked to hunters, making up a precedent to agrarian sects, Sumerian brew masters and the more sophisticated Puritan-Abolitionist-Yankee Insurance Linkage Conspiracy.
The gatherers, a rough, hungry looking pack of beggars, wasted no time in their struggle to feed themselves and their shabby offspring. Roots, berries, small trees and shrubs fell before the mighty onslaught. Later in the afternoon the barbaric hordes confiscated parking bunkers, lights, road signs, county commissioners and even bits of asphalt before moving on to high country redoubts along the Uncompahgre Plateau, rainy Dry Creek and the painfully crooked Straights of Colonese Guinea.
“Frankly we’re happy to have these folks around this time of the year,” quipped Melvin Toolini, executive director of the Chief Colorow Soil Conservation District. “Not only do they haul out a lot of debris but they keep the hunters in check.”
Gatherers, associated with hunters since before Freud, are quieter and usually far more sober than the average orange-clad meat seeker. They travel in small bands (often without a decent bass player), shadowed by teeming ox carts crammed full of everything from discolored banana peels to rusty snuff cans to impartial elk droppings to soggy balls of string to curious Spam tins to discarded passages of the United States Constitution.
“We observed one hunched-over gatherer attempting to digest the Bill of Rights just the other afternoon on Simms Mesa,” said Toolini, “but the federals happened by, and with the aid of complacency, succeeded, in driving the madman off into the dark Forest of Illiteracy.
For the uninitiated, the Constitution and Bill of Rights are very dangerous documents that, falling into the wrong hands, could threaten our way of life here in Corporate America. Recreational application of this kind of propaganda usually leads to heroin use.
The gatherers are expected to remain in the region until everything is gathered. Then they will move to the Confront Range where their massive warehouses are located.
– Kashmir Horseshoe
Earwigs, Boxelders Say Thanks
(Ouray, CO Don’t Bug Me Press November 24, 2016)
Local earwigs and boxelder bugs say thanks for another great season. Both species claim record growth despite the dry weather of the early summer.
Late rains saved what might have been a disaster for both species. The resurgence of activity in August alone topped last years’ numbers and sets a positive precedence.
Most say they are already looking forward to spring.
The crawling insects are currently preparing to go back down into the ground where they will spend the winter months. Although often quite tedious at times, the teetering relationship between human and insect continues to spew a live and let live attitude.
Local fruit bats, tired of a constant diet of mosquitoes, have announced plans to sponsor a going away dinner for the bugs. The exact date and time were not disclosed as the flying predators want it to be a surprise.
-Syd Fardt
“Next to a circus there ain’t nothin’ that packs up and tears out quicker than the Christmas spirit.” – Ken Hubbard
Packer Reunion Set
(Lake City Daze Gone By November , 2016)
The semi-annual Alfred Packer family reunion has been rescheduled to the last weekend in November to be more in keeping with the original weather from momentous occasions gone by.
According to the Hinsdale County Sheriff’s Office more than 400 people, who claim to be at least shirttail relatives of the famous cannibal, will enjoy baked beans, potato salad, corn-on-the-cob, coleslaw, Jell-O salad, watermelon, lemonade, and marshmallows.
Meat in any form was conspicuously missing from the menu.
Participants have already filed for a permit to use some 30 acres in the nearby San Juan National Forest, east of Creede. All have filed documents asserting that they have not and will not engage in survival activities that might be deemed offensive, even repulsive to mainstream America. Relatives will host an open house on November 15 to answer questions and calm fears as to plans in the woods.
Cannibals are people too, in fact it can be argued that they are super people,” said Gayle Packer, a supposed great, great grand niece of the famous Packer. “I am here today to tell you that all cannibals are not bad.”
A tongue-in-cheek vegetarian barbecue, featuring carrots, barley, broccoli, asparagus, corn, squash, potatoes, black beans and rice as well as a freshly fattened vegetarian (cooked over a bed of simmered coals) will be served free of charge on Tuesday night.
Expected at this year’s reunion are descendants of the victims George Noon, James Humphrey and Israel Swan (all alleged Packer finger food). All of these men had managed to procreate before meeting up with Packer, thus insuring that their surnames, at least, survived the nauseating picnic.
Former Civil War veteran Al Packer was indicted in 1883 after he confessed that he had murdered Shannon Wilson Bell in self-defense (for the second time) and had eaten several Democrats in 1874, during an aborted journey from the Ute Camp of Chief Ouray to the goldfields of Breckenridge, some 125 miles away. Although convicted of every crime within his reach he reportedly died in his bed of indigestion in Littleton in 1907.
As to Packer’s odd capacity for survival, he not only escaped from jail in Saguache (certainly no small accomplishment) but he also managed to hideout until March of 1883 when he was once more arrested in connection with a banquet of crimes. He subsequently served 17 years at Colorado State Penitentiary where he was a model prisoner.
He finally won his release in 1900 thanks to attorneys for the Colorado Restaurant Association that, figuring he was more of a public relations problem in jail than out, paid the legal fees. Further memory places Packer back in Littleton where he was hit by a tourist bus and succumbed to injuries in 1909. Other accounts record him successfully winning the Hinsdale County Commissioners race in 1906, barely edging out professional wrestling standout Tub “No Neck” Carl Sr. by 3 votes.
– Uncle Pahgre
“One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.” – Andrew Carnegie
Claimants Grow in Galleon Find
(Salvador, Bahia — Por Favela Favor — November 12 ,2016)
The number of persons filing Rightful Claim on all or part of the estimated 7.6 million dollars recovered from a sunken Portuguese galleon has doubled since last night. The treasure, in Portuguese reales, dinhiero, Malacca Sebastieo and silver rupees, was recovered last week off the coast of India, near Goa, a former Portuguese colony.
At last count over 300 persons and entities have claimed the prize. Some are nautical, some are fortune chasers, but one local man has what appears to be a valid, albeit bizarre, link to the recovery deep on the ocean floor. Melvin Toole, a retired coal stoker from Colona, says he has a right to the entire booty due to family connections.
“I am the direct descendent of Amal Santa Villa Cabralia, the love child of the homely Queen Maria I of the Braganza Royal Family and the suave Domingos Antonio de Sousa Coutinho, the Portuguese Ambassador to Brasil in 1807,” said Toole.
The entire Portuguese court, all 1500 of them, had been relocated to Rio de Janeiro so as to escape the clutches of Napoleon Bonaparte whose armies were quickly closing in on Lisbon from the north. Prince John VI, who would become reigning monarch upon the death of Maria in 1816, refused to bless the union, calling for the head of Coutinho who fled to Salvador and out of harm’s way.
“That makes me the great-great-great-great grandson of Maria I,” snapped Toole carefully doing the math on his fingers. “I don’t see how there can be any other explanation. My Uncle Wilbur de Sousa, a notorious womanizer in his own right, spilled the beans on this story back when I was a kid but I thought he was just a senile old man babbling along. Now I wish I would have listened to him.”
Toole will undergo painful DNA testing tomorrow in hopes of putting the matter to rest. He has until next week to show further genetic proof that he is the heir to the fortune or the entire $7.6 million will go to the Portuguese Humane Society.
– Mr. Ha Ha
