All Entries in the "Soft News" Category

Hermits to host mixer

(Howardsville) A local hermit-support group here is planning a gala social mixer on August 29 and 30 at the Stony Pass Armory, according to a press release received this morning. The solitary souls say they expect over 100 persons to attend the two-day affair.

Although attempts have been made to draw recluse elements out of their mountain redoubts in the summer, organizers say the mixer might be better scheduled for January when there aren’t so many out-of-town visitors around.

“Our invited guests are somewhat timid and not accustomed to a lot of fanfare,” said Eva Stinkweed, of the Molas Lake Stinkweeds. “If we aren’t careful and don’t present the proper setting most will run away and the shindig will fall on its face. The final decision to hold the mixer in August was based on such elements as accessibility and the weather.”

Organizers of the event hope that everyone on the invitation list shows up and that an annual, or even monthly mixer might emerge. In addition, they are optimistic that the fringe element of non-registered hermits will show up too.

“There are plenty of people hiding out between here and Lake City that may decide to shake it for our party,” said Stinkweed. “We even have arranged for an etiquette consultant, transportation and blended food for attendees without teeth. Plus, a volunteer barber will be on location for the afternoon preceding the mixer. If nothing else it’s a chance for hermits to come out of their caves and meet people of like-minded philosophies.”

Some people in Silverton have expressed doubt as to the potential success of the event saying that anti-social behavior is inherent in the make-up of the authentic hermit.

“We’ll be seeing plenty of hermit wanna-bees,” one said.

Other non-hermits from around the mountains are, of corpse, invited to attend but they will be expected to provide their own costumes and personal hygiene. 

We think we have all of our ducks in a row,” continued Stinkweed, but what does a hermit wear to a party?”

“The human sense of compassion was throttled in countless court-martials, turning everything back to right, so very American right: My Lai is now a tourist destination. There are promo posters in the hotels VISIT MAI LAI. Hearts and minds cast the soul. Herbicides and defoliants. Have the ancestors deserted us for the spirit world? Are they the ghosts in our dreams?

– GI Joe, in Sons of the Morning Star.

Dog Day Canceled at Hot Springs Pool

(Ouray) The first annual canine swim, slated for September 29 at the Ouray Hot Springs Pool has been canceled due to low response. Reasons for the deletion also included perceived loss of revenue, the threat of violence, parking, locker room security and health considerations.

Thankful canines hit the water back in 2019

According to Ouray Recreation Department officials Dog Day was the brainchild of several local mutts who felt they were being denied access to the pool simply because they walk around on all fours.

“We wanted to show everyone that we were not the product of prejudice,” said one lifeguard. “We were sincere. It was the dogs who dropped the ball.”

The money lost by closing the pool to humans for the day was estimated to be substantial while the presence of a pack of naked male dogs in the pool threatened the peace. Then, according to unreliable sources in the deep end, the state health department got wind of the experiment and started sniffing around.

“Those people are like pit bulls,” barked one tail wagger. “We’re quite disappointed in the response among the dog population but most of them thought the whole thing was a joke since they’ve never been allowed to use the facility before.”

Whether or not this episode will affect Cat Day, planned for October 15, was not clear at press time.

– Dag Katz

Day 17 – Local Man Still on Hillcrest Roundabout

Marvin Alamo left his home on 4988229933551177 Road at 4:15 pm on July 9 to get a bottle of wine. Along with him in the pickup was his dog who is also known as Marvin.

When he approached the roundabout at Hillcrest and Miami it seemed clogged and cumbersome and he entered despite his better judgement and acute survival instincts learned during his 50 plus years working for the gov’ment.

That was 17 days ago and both of the Marvins are still going round and round unable to exit the roundabout, even at night when traffic dies down.

“I could have taken Townsend Avenue but the traffic is backed up to Otter Road,” he said during an interview with KBLA, an oldies station that dabbles in local news. “With all the unbridled growth here, somebody needs to figure out the flow. Highway 550, out of the city’s jurisdiction is a potential disaster.”

On day 11 Marvin’s wife, Evelyn, managed to get close enough to hand him a two ham sandwiches (one for the dog) and a thermos of coffee. 

Marvin blames the incident on his momentarily hesitation to negotiate San Juan Avenue earlier in the day.

“I lost momentum and was swallowed up,” he quipped. “I just kept yielding and yielding.”

He almost made it out on Wednesday but a Dodge Ram with a weasel at the wheel cut him off. Later he barely escaped a collision with an onion truck that had just entered the fray.

Meanwhile round and round he goes on the merry-go-round of asphalt screaming “Cree el grade!” at the top of his lungs to the bewilderment of passersby.

“After 56 years together, I didn’t even know Marvin spoke Spanish,” said Evelyn

Local authorities, concerned that the incident could hurt tourism plan to rescue Marvin tomorrow from above the round-about employing three helicopters and a runaway truck ramp on loan from C-DOT.

-Jack Spratt

“Never interfere with an enemy in the process of destroying himself.” 

– Napoleon Bonaparte, former French Emperor before his team was destroyed in Russia.

What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to Ignorance?

By Paul Krugman

New York Times Opinion Columnist

As everyone knows, leftists hate America’s military. Recently, a prominent left-wing media figure attacked Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declaring, “He’s not just a pig, he’s stupid.”

Oh, wait. That was no leftist, that was Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. What set Carlson off was testimony in which Milley told a congressional hearing that he considered it important “for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and widely read.”

The problem is obvious. Closed-mindedness and ignorance have become core conservative values, and those who reject these values are the enemy, no matter what they may have done to serve the country.

The Milley hearing was part of the orchestrated furor over “critical race theory,” which has dominated right-wing media for the past few months, getting close to 2,000 mentions on Fox so far this year. One often sees assertions that those attacking critical race theory have no idea what it’s about, but I disagree; they understand that it has something to do with assertions that America has a history of racism and of policies that explicitly or implicitly widened racial disparities.

And such assertions are unmistakably true. The Tulsa race massacre really happened, and it was only one of many such incidents. The 1938 underwriting manual for the Federal Housing Administration really did declare that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.”

We can argue about the relevance of this history to current policy, but who would argue against acknowledging simple facts?

The modern right, that’s who. The current obsession with critical race theory is a cynical attempt to change the subject away from the Biden administration’s highly popular policy initiatives, while pandering to the white rage that Republicans deny exists. But it’s only one of multiple subjects on which willful ignorance has become a litmus test for anyone hoping to succeed in Republican politics.

Thus, to be a Republican in good standing one must deny the reality of man-made climate change, or at least oppose any meaningful action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. One must reject or at least express skepticism about the theory of evolution. And don’t even get me started on things like the efficacy of tax cuts.

What underlies this cross-disciplinary commitment to ignorance? On each subject, refusing to acknowledge reality serves special interests. Climate denial caters to the fossil fuel industry; evolution denial caters to religious fundamentalists; tax-cut mysticism caters to billionaire donors.

But there’s also, I’d argue, a spillover effect: Accepting evidence and logic is a sort of universal value, and you can’t take it away in one area of inquiry without degrading it across the board. That is, you can’t declare that honesty about America’s racial history is unacceptable and expect to maintain intellectual standards everywhere else. In the modern right-wing universe of ideas, everything is political; there are no safe subjects.

This politicization of everything inevitably creates huge tension between conservatives and institutions that try to respect reality.

There have been many studies documenting the strong Democratic lean of college professors, which is often treated as prima facie evidence of political bias in hiring. A new law in Florida requires that each state university conduct an annual survey “which considers the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented,” which doesn’t specifically mandate the hiring of more Republicans but clearly gestures in that direction.

An obvious counterargument to claims of biased hiring is self-selection: How many conservatives choose to pursue careers in, say, sociology? Is hiring bias the reason police officers seem to have disproportionately supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, or is this simply a reflection of the kind of people who choose careers in law enforcement?

But beyond that, the modern G.O.P. is no home for people who believe in objectivity. One striking feature of surveys of academic partisanship is the overwhelming Democratic lean in hard sciences like biology and chemistry; but is that really hard to understand when Republicans reject science on so many fronts?

One recent study marvels that even finance departments are mainly Democratic. Indeed, you might expect finance professors, some of whom do lucrative consulting for Wall Street, to be pretty conservative. But even they are repelled by a party committed to zombie economics.

Which brings me back to General Milley. The U.S. military has traditionally leaned Republican, but the modern officer corps is highly educated, open-minded and, dare I say it, even a bit intellectual — because those are attributes that help win wars.

Unfortunately, they are also attributes the modern G.O.P. finds intolerable.

So something like the attack on Milley was inevitable. Right-wingers have gone all in on ignorance, so they were bound to come into conflict with every institution — including the U.S. military — that is trying to cultivate knowledge.

Solar Energy Spill Cripples Pacific Coast

(Waldport, OR) Still sketchy reports describe a massacre of petroleum proportions when a hoard of generally docile windmills, ambivalent as to the black and white of their very existence, revolted against overseers and finally the entire coastal garrison, blowing several pipers and a drummer boy into faraway Utah.

Police have cordoned off parts of the Alsea River and beaches from Yachats to Wakonda in apprehension of followup tremors and possible jerkquakes and sandslides. Tourists are urged to wear lots of sunscreen, and stay in the town’s many bars until the system passes into the interior. Crabs are encouraged to come out of their shells only after dark. Consuming massive quantities of bluegill and crappie has been lauded as the most responsible response at this time.

The spill will take the snap of a finger and no money to clean up.

Area affected by solar spill

“We’ve warned the American people of these kinds of disasters if we fall away from our dependence on fossil fuels, meat and broken promises,” said one former congressman now a lobbyist for two oil conglomerates (or is it three?).

Speaking under the duplicitous veil of anonymity, the source added that he had “three or four Congressmen and one Senator in his back pocket and was expecting a little more action since the bank has “now reopened”. 

“If this keeps up I’m gonna have to get more pockets,” he laughed.

 – Pepper Salte

“We hauled these marmots in here!”

– Melvin Bedwetter Toole, 1977

Horseshoe Denied Flight License

(Blue Creek Canyon) The San Juan Horseshoe will not be offering pilotless glider flights over Blue Creek Canyon according to Gunnison County Commissioners. The summer adventure, prompted by the construction and partial closure of Highway 50 through the scenic canyon, had been scheduled to begin June 5.

Sources at the Horseshoe told reporters that the service was a sure bet and at a reasonable $60 per head beat sitting in traffic or driving an hour out of the way along the North Rim of the Black Canyon.

“We had it all mapped out right down to the landing zones and the parachutes,” said one disappointed neophyte who plans to initiate guided ice fishing trips this winter. “If it would have been C-DOT’s idea it would have been approved.”

The State of Colorado has tentatively okayed a sophisticated system of seasonal bamboo zip lines that run from the top of the Alpine Plateau to the Anthracite Range. Sadly, this route does little to relieve the traffic clogging in the canyon.

Meanwhile many local residents think the construction was a bad idea considering an economy still reeling from Covid-19. Truckers, venders, tourists and many others are already hard pressed to keep agendas straight and products on the move.

Others, who promise “to stand our ground like Leonidas at Thermopylae” plan to boycott Blue Creek Canyon until their demands are met. 

They eventually plan the construction two hotels, on each side of the canyon for people who didn’t read the website. (Pending permit)

“The entire construction project is about as worthless as a tuba in a cowboy quintet,” quipped Earl MacAdoo, a hall-of-fame sheepherder from Sapinero who halt the project by undisclosed means on the Fourth of July.

“If we had the water we could just fold the place,” he laughed. “That’d show them.”

MacAdoo joins a growing chorus of people who feel that Highway 550 from Montrose to Ouray deserved prime attention and that the Blue Creek Canyon Project is just bureaucratic bungling.

– Kashmir Horseshoe

“I’d trip my own mother if she was rounding third to score against us.” – Leo The Lip Durocher, who managed the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs.