All Entries in the "Lifestyles at Risk" Category
Mayberry Ghost Visits Police Academies
(Malfunction) The ghost of Andy Taylor paid a call on a host of Colorado police academies this week expressing concern over the current state of affairs between law enforcement and the people.
The legendary lawman and longtime sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina told recruits that the us vs them philosophy was all wrong and that the public were not a bunch of criminals like they are told at the academies. He encouraged the police to adopt the concept of serve and protect instead of the current line which separates both parties.
Students at Police State here questioned the validity of the visit saying that if the citizenry simply stayed in their homes there would not be a problem.
“We never had any of those academies in Mayberry or even over in Mount Pilot and everything seemed to run smoothly,” stressed Taylor. “If I needed a deputy I had Gomer or even Guber in the wings. They already knew everyone in town and could perform their job without prejudice or profiling. Even little Opie knows what the result will be when we start banding together in armed camps.”
Speaking at the Augusto Pinochet Police College in nearby Fruita, Taylor told anyone listening that the people are not the enemy and that the police were losing the respect of their constituency.
“The cop on his beat is a thing of the past,” said Taylor. “Now they just drive around looking for drunks.”
– Barney Fife
A PUNCTUAL EAVESDROPPING
(The following is an opportunity to listen in on grammar where it lives, in the sentences and paragraphs of the English language. Herein you will be privy to the insider’s access as punctuation marks discuss another day on the job. Caution: Please be quiet so as not to frighten the commas or startle the semicolons.)
Comma: Crap. Can’t these people get it straight? What with these run on sentences I can’t get caught up. Don’t they know when to use a period? Back when I was in school they taught you how to construct a sentence and determine who was doing what to whom by the placement of the predicate and the action verb without concern for a lot of fluffy adjectives and dangling participles that had to be diagrammed up at the chalk board while the teacher looked on with that dangerous pointer in her hand and…
Question mark: What?
Period: Hey, comma, don’t bring periods into this. Sure, I’m on call but I don’t even put my pants on until the sentence is completed. There’s a sense of finality. At the end of the day, I can see that my work has been finished.
Parenthesis: Socrates, Pericles, Xerxes…Aristophanes, Sophocles,
Oracles…Parentheses. Pretty good company, heh?
Comma: Ego…eeeze. All she does is enclose part of the sentence, which might easily have been omitted. It’s not as if she’s really making a difference, creating anything…but she’s attractive all right. Just look at those curves.
Period: Mindless. It could be worse. There could be two of her. Then we’re dealing with interpolation independent of the surrounding syntactical structure.
Semicolon: That sounds like a clause for alarm. Get it…clause?
Hyphen: Move out of the way. Move out of the way! I’ve got to get to the end of this line. We have got broken words down there. Quite a mess, you know. Move aside, gangway…
Question mark: Where?
Comma: I used to be a hyphen, before I went back to night school. I just couldn’t imagine a lifelong career linking compound words.
Period: Bush league at best.
Comma: Tedious. All that running from one line to the other just to link words that have expressed a desire to remain independent. The language is forever emerging, changing. You savvy?
Semicolon: Yes, I’ve had graduate study…How do you think that top dot got there?
Question mark: How?
Period: I thought it was a typo.
Apostrophe: Cut the proprietary whining. You guys carry far too much baggage but no real weight. I’m the one who substitutes for omitted letters and shows possessive case in nouns. One little mark in the wrong place changes everything.
Comma: Nouns…They are so self-centered, so predicated.
Semicolon: I once knew a verb who could twist herself into an adjective, then back to an adverb, before returning to her original status. Talk about tense! I could tell she was a bit irregular but when I found out she was intransitive I knew it would never work.
Period: Was she copulative?
Question mark: Who?
Semicolon: None of your business. She was in limited contexts, but finite was not in her vocabulary. I don’t know if I was in love or just eager to conjugate.
Dash: Sudden breaks! Sudden breaks? I used to be in demand. Now I’ve got to hustle work. What is this English language coming to anyway? It’s bad enough most of them can’t speak in the proper verb tense and often use the wrong word in speech. It’s downright embarrassing to watch them spell phonetically, never mind mastering another tongue…
Comma: There will always be brackets and principle clauses to take care of these kinds of people. Just be glad you’re a punctuation mark and you’re ruled by very distinct circumstances. These people who use us are still trying to figure out where to put the period…in the case of quotation marks…”
Quotation mark: “Did someone call me?”
Apostrophe: Pompous ass, talking in quotes. Before long he’ll be speaking in italic.
Parentheses: You mean like this?
Quotation mark: I just don’t get the attraction or the slant as it were.
Exclamation point: Sentence construction at eleven o’clock! All hands on deck!
Question mark: When?
Period: Is that an indirect question? Don’t just stand there: It’s probably one of us that they want at the end of the sentence. Grab a couple of commas and a semicolon and follow me!
FULL STOP
Making fun of lepers in bad taste
EDITORIAL
Hey, I like a good laugh as well as the next guy but making sport of lepers goes too far. Just the other day we witnessed this kind of abuse with a rock throwing incident in one of our National Forests where lepers had camped for the night. Sure, you may not want to camp near them but there is no call for violence. This is ugly. What will these lepers tell their friends back home about their vacation in Colorado?
The refusal of one visitor to rent a jeep after it had been used by a leper is nothing short of malicious and reprehensible. Name calling, metaphorical and otherwise, is inexcusable.
Granted, we do not have a sizable leper population but the ones we do have should be respected.
Don’t these people have enough with which to contend without insult and injury hurled from fellow humans? Bigotry aimed at these unfortunates is ignorant and hateful. It is the offspring of misunderstandings and fears generated by parents, schools and society as a whole. Like it or not, lepers are just like you and I and deserve a break. After all they don’t generally create problems. Most hide out from the sunshine in black timber redoubts far away from the threats of the modern populace. Most love their dogs. Most pay taxes. Most are not to blame for their condition.
Now we’re not suggesting you sleep with one or share toothbrushes but at least allow them to breathe the air, smell the roses, wash their raggedy clothing in streams and rivers and live out their pathetic lives. A complete cure for leprosy, but not stupidity, is right around the corner.
– Kashmir Horseshoe
For a related news piece see “Lepers Banned from Local Streams Until Fall” on Page 49
“We do not want to sell a foot of our land. That is the opinion of all. The Whites can come and take gold and then leave. We do not want them to build houses here.” – “Chief” Ouray
Colona Demands Variance
Designated clairvoyants in Colona are demanding a variance calling for relocation of Colona and a rewind of Highway 550. They say the increased intrusions of the modern world are a threat to the fragile and protected Wildcat Creek Cultural Zone — past, present and future.
“We need to distance ourselves from deep state asphalt, traffic noise, chuckholes, rogue moose, cheeky flatlanders and shallow thinking on these matters,” snapped a Committee for Public Safety member. “We won’t rest until the powers that be in the county lend an era to our undertaking.”
“Any diversion as to the quantity equal to the square of the standard deviation could set off a mad skedaddle for safety nets,” said a county official. “Do you think we’re just gonna sit here and let our black sheep cousin dictate policy?”
Colona is now officially at variance with other hamlets, real and imagined, in the region.
“CDOT Maps and documents are not cohesive with Uncompahgre topo maps or what the river does in the middle of the night when everyone is fast asleep,” explained the architect of the specified variance* requests. “After a century of digging there may be man-made cirques, deep shafts and meandering stope excavations under the whole valley. What happens when it all caves in? Colona seeks to be on the right side of history here.”
“If we can’t get the attention of them up in Ouray we’ll join the West End,” he cranked. “That’ll fix their wagons.”
– Uncle Pahgre
Former Nuggets sixth man, Bruce Brown, is slated to earn $44 million on a two-year contract with the Pacers: $100,000 to play basketball the remaining salary ($43,900,000 for living in Indianapolis).
“Basically the purpose of life is happiness.”
– Dalai Lama
