All Entries in the "Reflections on Disorder" Category
CB-Telluride Parking Marathon Slated
(Crested Butte, CO — Park Tomorrow For Tonight — March 22, 2016)
The long awaited Crested Butte-Telluride Winter Parking Marathon is just a few days away with over 1000 contestants still trying to qualify for the final heat and the big payoff.
Already three persons are a lock here with two spots still up for grabs on the San Miguel County team.
The Marathon, donned The Park-Off by local participants, will pit the finest parallel parkers in the land in a three-day, non-stop parking competition. Here’s how she works:
Day One: Telluride drivers will be airlifted above Mt. Crested Butte where they will descend via parachute to Riverbend (just south of CB) far below. Immediately upon touch down surviving participants will scurry to their vehicles and begin looking for a place to park on Elk Avenue. Sanctioned areas include the main street as well as the first blocks of 2nd and 3rd Streets.
Simultaneously the drivers from Crested Butte will be whisked into Telluride by limo. The objective here is a duplication of the action in Gunnison County. Colorado Avenue, Fir Street and Pine are all designed as Official Parking Zones. Meters and many bothersome street people have been pulled for the event.
“While we realize that the three-day time limit could be seen as stringent but we can’t tie up traffic for more than the weekend in either locale,” said former Telluride resident Randy Sublett, “but one must remember that these are some of the best parkers in the world.”
“Our people are primed for this,” said Mark Reaman, Sublett’s counterpart in Crested Butte. “We have even replaced doors with hood ornaments for better visibility.”
The rules are simple yet confining: No saving parking spaces and no collisions with other cars. Persons who hog two spaces will be disqualified. Idling is illegal. Cutting of flatlanders is OK. Parking in bus or fire zone is OK unless one is caught.
Last year the slopes were all but empty during the Parking Marathon lending credence to beliefs that the public is ready for a more varied approach to spectator sports and that diversification could be the panacea to the fumbling ski industry.
– Fred Zeppelin
Front Range Communities Blown to Kansas
(Windy Point — Aurora Borealis — March 14, 2016)
Due to incredibly high winds and a staggering arctic front most of Arapaho County is now in Kansas. Gone are the suburbs, the lawns, and the water-sucking golf corpses that have defined much of the affluent neighborhoods. Gone are the temples to progress, the pollution, the crime, the gangs, the litter and the noise common to the poorer sections.
The Manifest Destiny of thirsty populations is now little more than clumps of windblown sagebrush and a host of hardy rocks…just like before the white folks moved in.
Sources in Western Kansas are none too pleased with a surging refugee population on what once were empty wheat fields. Most express frustration as to what action should be taken in this natural disaster. The only known precedent occurred in the Thirties when a merciless Dust Bowl wind drove Oklahoma to Bakersfield and Fresno, California. Soon after that Merle Haggard was born.
Bovine kisses in the Andes
It has often been said that Colombian females are not too shy, and so it was on this bright afternoon in the hills outside of Manizales in Caldas. (Toole of the Andes Photo Service)
Federal Government Discovered
(Mt Vernon, VA March 5, 2016)
Anthropologists near here have this month unearthed what many believe to be the mythical United States Government. This morning they chipped away at more evidence of the ancient site finding decayed chrome bumpers with election year stickers, roll upon roll of red tape and what appears to be an archaic shredding machine.
“We can’t just pull these relics out of the ground like a bull’s horns in July,” said Earl Allen MacAdoo, former bull rider now bankrolling the excavation. “We have to be careful. This is one-of-a-kind junk here.”
The scientists are convinced that they will find proof of a sand-swept political system that went away and was replaced by credit cards. Many feel that there are still remnants of this magnificent yet crude society still living in caves along the Ecuadorian Avenue of Volcanoes and, no surprise, in Nashville.
In Maryland anthropologists stumbled onto the ruins of the city that housed the centralized power entity. In most cases blue-lipped bureaucrats still sat overstuffed and snuggly at their neatly arranged desk while just outside filthy vagrants snarled at each other, sleeping on the subway grates (preserved for posterity) imbedded into the hard sidewalks of yesterday. Most of the gothic-extravagant architecture, unlike that in Berlin and Rome, was still standing, albeit 40 feet under the surface of the planet.
Teams began digging in the proximity of the Potomac and the Patuxent Rivers in 2120 after good taste dictated that a “seat of civilized government” once operated here. Although some of the more radical winged of this Seat cult suggest that the entire matter has been put to rest, in ancient tabloids we find countless parallels to this once great Capital.
– H L Menocken
“Get weal,” – Elmer Fudd
Dinosaur Bones Found in Tavern Sink
(Special from The Crested Butte Fossil and Relic – February , 2016)
The skeleton of what scientists believe to be a dwarf stegosaurus was found in a back-up bar sink by patrons searching for large martini olives here yesterday. The mysterious bones, excavated at the now extinct Frank and Gal’s, have been called one of the most important archeological finds by paleontologists since the discovery of a giant spinal column of a rare Dark Canyon Brontosaurus at the Toke of the Town Tavern in May.
On-site Triassic experts, many of them dinosaurs in their own right, are on loan from the Rocky Mountain Marmot and Wildflower Institute at Gothic.
The bones are considered to be an essential and intrinsic piece in the genetic jigsaw puzzle that could someday determine the validity of leading theories on human evolution. Luckily the newest dinosaur carcass was safely removed from the sink by and delivered to a safe research lab at Western State Colorado University.
Attempts by this newspaper to interview customers at the bar failed since patrons were engrossed in a Broncos’ game and did not notice the detour from the normal routine.
– Fred Zeppelin
“The big loser (in the recent GOP “debate”) was participatory democracy all the way back through history to Pericles…I have heard more coherent dialogue from cats mating in an alley.” – Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine.