All Entries in the "Fractured Opinion" Category
GARDENING EDITOR WOUNDED IN KNIFE FIGHT
(Gunnison) prominent gardening voice in the Gunnison Valley is recovering from a pointed altercation suffered outside of a local nursery yesterday. According to police, Melvin Toole will survive the injuries although he is having trouble holding water at present.
The fight reportedly precipitated over the definition of perennial and in no time had exploded into violence as threats were realized and knives were brandished.
The assailant, a 93-year-old Gunnison grandmother identified as Mabel Singleton, allegedly rushed the unsuspecting Toole as he fondled a tomato plant, stabbing him repeatedly. Singleton, a retired botanist, once employed by the Pentagon, said she could not tolerate Toole’s condescending attitude toward the philodendrons. She is being held at the Alamo/Pizza Mountain Mental Health Clinic for psychiatric observation. If convicted she could face pruning and lifetime banishment from gardening operations in the Tomichi Sector.
In a related piece, the same newspaper’s obituary editor, Rocky Flats, dropped dead just after deadline on Friday. Flats has only recently won the Mormon Lottery. His winnings will be split up between his ex-wife, Frieda, a Paraguayan traffic cop and his brother Red who once raised giant shrimp near Parlin.
– Estelle Marmotbreath
“Good Lord! I almost slept through cocktail hour.”
-Kashmir Horseshoe, on the pros and cons of the daily siesta in South America
Talking Baseball in Ecuador
Nobody gives a damn about baseball in Ecuador unless you are eating lunch at Café Hatuey.
A small marble staircase divided the plaza from the upstairs Cuban restaurant with its shady balcony and high ceiling fans. It was a perfect redoubt for a dining-alone gringo wandering the colonial streets. One could watch the entire plaza from up here.
The black bean soup experience would have been sufficient invitation.
The waiter, a handsome Cuban of 24 years, brought me a Havana Club and a menu. I asked for his recommendation. He nodded. There was a soccer game on the television. I asked him who was ahead.
“I don’t know,” he flinched. “I’m a baseball fan and it’s Opening Day up in America. Is that where you live?”
I told him that I lived in Western Colorado and that despite the six-hour drive I made it to several Rockies’ games over the course of the season.
“The Rockies, huh?” he said. “A streaky team, prone to injuries with questionable relief pitching and a strong fan base.”
“You’ve done your homework,” I acknowledged, apologizing for my limited baseball jargon in Spanish.
“Then let’s speak English,” he snapped saying he had learned my language from his old baseball coach named Adolfo Luque, who had enjoyed a brief career in the Big Leagues prior to the Revolution.
“The food came out and we shared a feast of past Cuban players who had excelled it to the Majors. Tony Taylor, Luis Tiant, Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro accompanied my Fabada Asturiana (beef and bean stew), three tamales, a cup of black bean soup, plantains and fried yucca. Then he brought rhubarb pie and asked why a heated argument on the baseball field was called a rhubarb?
“I think it’s something like a catbird seat or the bull pen,” I said. “Most of those terms came straight from the lips of tobacco chewing bench jockeys waiting around for the next pitch. After a few seasons these words became the jargon on the diamond.”
He said one of the cooks had met Hank Aaron in Miami after the Braves’ slugger had broken Ruth’s home run record.
“All three of the cooks are baseball fans. Come and meet them!”
We walked into the kitchen and returned to speaking Spanish. I told the first cook that I too had met Aaron and that I had his autograph on the same score card with the signature of Pete Rose and Tony Perez.
“Perez was a great one,” offered the second cook who was patiently monitoring the progress of a large pot of pintos. “He was one of the great players to escape Cuba after Castro. “He came to the United States along with Tony Oliva, Camilo Pacscual and Bert Campaneris. The Cuban government was not happy about this heralded exit from its socialist paradise.”
“Castro was quite a pitcher too,” offered the third cook who wore a Yankees’ hat atop his baldhead. I saw him play in Santiago de Cuba while on the Las Barbas team where all the players wore a beard. He might have played pro ball except for politics. The Cleveland Indians were after him in the Fifties. He could hit too.”
But what about Minnie Minoso?” chided the waiter. “How can we talk Cuban baseball players and not mention Minnie?”
“And Sandy Amoros and Tito Fuentes and Cookie Rojas!” yelled the bean watcher from the corner of the kitchen.
“What about Jose Canseco, Rafael Palmeiro, and Orlando Pena,” chimed another cook.
“Don’t forget Leo Cardenas,” I said and the kitchen went silent.
“Wow,” said the waiter. You do know your baseball.”
“I grew up in Southern Ohio” I admitted, “and Cardenas played shortstop for the Reds for fifteen years.”
Now that I had the floor, I asked them if they thought Fidel Castro would have been a better baseball player than a President.
They all laughed,
“Fidel is Fidel,” one said. “The United States is the United States. Castro is eating well even if the rest of us on the island are not. So much for punishing the Communist Party with the Great Cuban Embargo.”
All of the cooks had family back in Cuba and they missed them very much but opportunity was better in Ecuador.
“If you didn’t go along with party ideas there was no future in Cuba,” frowned one.
“My daughter is a doctor in Havana and barely makes enough to survive, said another.
“My son is twelve,” offered the waiter. “He’s the best hitter ever to come out of Trinidad (Cuba). I hope some day that he can come to the United States and play for the New York Yankees. He stands proud at the plate and waits for that big, fat pitch.”
Everyone smiled and nodded in agreement.
The restaurant was filling up. The owner stuck his head in the kitchen and frowned at his employees then smiled at me since I was spending money. I returned to my table. The lights are coming on in the plaza.
– Melvin B. Toole
China to send aid to Puerto Rico
(San Juan) In what leaders in the US are calling “provocative action” the People’s Republic of China has pledged to send disaster relief to the island of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States.
Despite the saber rattling in Washington, China is stockpiling food, water and computer parts destined for the weather-riddled Caribbean colony that has received little or no “up north” help since the days of Donald Trump and Hurricane Nicole.
“We see an opportunity to extend our influence in the Caribbean,” said a Chinese news release, “and are responding to our humanitarian sense of justice. The United States has dropped the ball and we are simply kicking it onto the beach again.”
It was not clear if the gesture would provoke positive response on the part of the US or if an ongoing global feud would once again leave the needs of the populace in the dust.
Meanwhile locals say that any help would be appreciated and hoped for egg roles and installation instructions in Spanish, the common language on the island.
“We remind China of the protectorate it never has had,” said one victim of tropical storms who has yet to receive a thatched roof that was promised back in 2021. “My name is Monroe and my doctrine is a simple one: Talk is cheap. Building supplies are not,” he said.
-Pepper Salte
“…Report us fairly
how we slaughter
for the common good”
–Seamus Heaney in “Kinship”
RV Zombie Zone Designated
Enjoy a drive over Red Mountain Pass before the tourists show up in their little dogs and RVs. Always remember: June through August is tourist zombie season and must be considered every time you make a road trip. Here we see a stretch of Ruby Wall in 1962 when the world was quite different.
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.
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
