All Entries in the "Soft News" Category
Postcards: Last Dollar Road Storm
Winter makes another visit to Dallas Divide
Power Surges Plague Elderly
(Montrose) A recent jump in power surges is the result of increased inactivity and an embrace of the sedentary lifestyle says a noted physician. According to Dr. Simone Lackluster, stacked up idle hours sooner or later add up to a major discharge of displaced energy. Speaking at the Armenian Association Symposium for the Tone Deaf, Lackluster further focused his conjectures and postulates saying that the elderly (and those who think they are elderly) were particularly at risk in this arena.
“Older people tend to remain inactive more than the general population as a hole,” quipped the doctor. “Then, when a given situation demands action they jump, on again, off again, herky jerky, up and down, in and out in a here-today-gone-tomorrow performance that not only creates undue stress but often results in hamstring and groin injuries.”
One 87-year-old colleague tells us that his power surges often come in the afternoon but usually after a workout or bike ride. “This Lackluster might know his groins but he doesn’t have a clue as to my power surges,” he spat.
Another medical spokesperson agreed, saying Lackluster is an idiot.
“Imagine the inside of this doctor’s head as a cranial hydroelectric plant,” he offered. “Now imagine an ice storm slamming into his frontal lumbar region and dripping out through his ears. The results are galvanizing.” Our elderly source, demanding that he remain an agronomist, confirmed that Lackluster had suffered voltage disturbances in the nursery when a sadistic nurse dropped him on his head as punishment for wetting his diaper. The nurse, whom he later married, was never brought to justice.
“Admittedly we are forced to rely on some questionable witnesses in these stories,” said an under-editor at The Horseshoe. “C’mon, we can’t check out every source. That would be ridiculously time consuming. Next you’ll expect us to proof read this mess.” San Miguel Power, the local electric company that has been unfairly implicated in the surges, suggests that people unplug appliances when they feel a surge building.
“Look up at the sky. If it looks like a big snow is on the way unplug your appliances,” says the handy brochure I received with my bill last month. “Then plug them back in when the sun comes out. If you need the use of appliances during extended storms try a generator.
February Tip: Save on eclectic bills by keeping doors and windows closed during the winter.” For a related piece turn to Candle Sales Through the Roof later on “Frog Legs and Butter”
LEVITATIONAL PARKING PLANNED AT CRESTED BUTTE
(Gothic) Instead of spending money to improve lifts, Crested Butte Mountain Resort has erected several new hotels in what was the area’s sole parking lot. Sound silly? Read on.
Officials at the ski area have contracted Snow Guru International, a firm of freelance swamis from the nice part of Calcutta, who claim the capability of successfully suspending automotive vehicles in thin air! These gifted mystics will go to work Thanksgiving weekend and continue to ply their strange trade until the ski area closes in April.
“We figure we have extended our top occupancy ceiling to about 500,000 cars per day considering predetermined air space and a desire to let the sun shine in,” said a marketing source who asked that she not be included in this story by name. “I don’t know how this applies to skier days or if it will even work at all on heavy powder days.”
The source then went on to admit that she had no clue what skier days might be but was quite familiar with powder days.
Across the Elk Mountains, principals in Aspen have been conducting underground tests with levitation and suspension since September. They would not talk to our reporter despite a lot of whining. In Steamboat Springs excess vehicles and skier baggage will be stored on the James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge and skiers will be hauled into town via open-air tuna boat.
Imagine skiing down Jokerville or Twister at Crested Butte and looking up at your car hanging high above the resort silhouetted against the winter sky! What a rush!
“Look mom! It’s our Explorer!”
Parking fees will fluctuate depending on the size and weight of the vehicle with out-of-state skiers getting a sizable break when they purchase a package. Old Volkswagens and beat up pickups will not qualify for the uplifting since the area is concerned with its image and “does not seek to clutter the horizon with a bunch of decaying jalopies”.
In addition to the parking arrangements the Snow Guru International hopes to provide a top-drawer coat and hat check, bonded baby-sitting, a convenient lost and found and a sexy cocktail lounge for people waiting for their vehicles to return to earth.
To date there have been only a few accidents involving reentry and not that many people have been injured by falling cars to date. One such disaster was narrowly averted as a 3/4-ton GMC pickup was inadvertently dropped through the roof of what once was the Alpenhof Cabana, coming to a complete rest in an somewhat unoccupied men’s room.
The service is restricted to vehicles operated by persons with a valid ski pass. No AARP discount will be extended and motorists driving RVs are asked to leave the same in Almont.
“We’re really excited about this concept, said the above secretive marketer. “Now a lot of the tourists will have something else to look at besides themselves parading around in their ski fashions all day. Hell, some might even get motivated and take a few runs or at least a lift ride or two.”
The Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte Councils have tentatively approved the plan while BOZO is firmly against, and has always been firmly against, deterring from the laws of nature. Insiders suggest that if CBMR executives will only paint themselves a sweet and sour Victorian purple everything will be alright over at BOZO.
Despite early support by other government agencies, consumers are privately urged to take Alpine Express or town bus up to the mountain until further tests are concluded.
-Barb Wire
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Part II
As our reader may recall: In the January 4 posting Ma MacElliot was thrown in jail after an indictment for her sixth DUI. In addition to the inconvenience of the slammer, Ma is now forced to deal with a troupe of bothersome, deadweights trying to better their haut monde standing by living in her dilapidated trailer and feeding her cats (creatures which she does not quarter there, nor tolerate on the premises). Now the pests have taken to visiting her behind bars further invading her privacy.
The next morning the visits continued. Apparently Thursday was Visitor’s Day too. A tearful, hunched over figure in black emerged from the shadows of the minimum security visiting station. It was Ma’s grandmother. She was crying.
“Oh hello Margaret, what is it this time? Loose a tooth? Break a nail? Accidently drop a faulty nuclear device on Grand Junction?”
“Hello, Ma. I can barely stand to see you like this. I heard what happened and just wanted to visit you. Is there anything you need?”
“Fewer visits would be nice. I have had most of my kin here already asking for favors. What do you want?”
“Want? Oh please my dear. I don’t want anything. I just hoped to….”
“Hoped to feed my cats, water my plants, drive my car around?” said Ma.
“Well, the place is empty for four months and I am tired of the shelter,”
was her frustrated response.
“No, mom. My trailer ain’t much but at least it’s standing. What about the doublewide I gave you in 2006? How about the money that was supposed to pay your electric bill last fall? As long as you like Polish vodka more than American heat I will refrain from investing in your comforts.”
“Well you insolent, unappreciative daughter….just like your father, no respect for the woman who brought you up in this cold world. I must have been insane to come here. You’ll see me no more!”
“Good. I just got rid of my lazy husband and now you all have descended on me. OK, you win…I have $47 in an STP can on the porch shelf. Take it all, unless Merle snatched it on his way out the door. I don’t have anything but that lousy, old trailer house and the clothes on my back. Do you want those too?
A prison guard approached Ma’s cell and told her she would be receiving a call from her son, Blacky, the next day. He wanted to talk about what she would be doing with her trailer for the next four months. He was the worst of all of the MacElliots.
“I thought he was doing time on an honor farm in California,” she muttered back.
She remembered when they had stayed with her, not all at once, but a few at a time, eating her food, drinking her beer, using her toilet paper, sleeping on her furniture. If even one of them had offered to pay me back…or even taken out the trash it would be different.
First cousin Sal moved in for a few days back in 1988 and it was 1989 before I could pry him out of the place. Thanks to my good biker buddies, the Lil’ Sons of Bitches, over in Cortez, he won’t be coming around again.
Then it was an in-law, Little Eva and her seven or eight kids, none of whom are potty trained. I’ve had whiners and wannabees, bullies and bullshitters, muscleheads and moochers, thieves and gladhanders…and all from one family!
“They can’t be after my paltry Social Security check, can they?” she pondered. “Fortunately most of them have yet to figure out where that money comes from and none know quite how to go about cashing something like a check.”
“You gotta work some to get the check when you get older,” Ma tried to explain to Eva. “And you have never worked so chances are you won’t be getting a check.”
Then the second wave hit. Unbeknown to Ma the brood, with legal and extended bloodlines, had stuck around for scene two. The visits increased and length and intensity. Her sister complained about her cousin. Her aunt could not stand her brother-in-law. Her son had flattened his uncle’s nose. There was nothing to eat. They were cutting off the power on Tuesday.
They had yet to cross the threshold to her tin palace but they were camped all around it. They were perched, waiting for her to blink. Waiting for her to cave-in to their demands. She would not.
One thing about sitting around a jail cell all day is that it makes one stubborn. It also gives one a lot of time to think things through. Aunt Cecile has rented a studio apartment in town so as to be close for visits. Uncle Al has hooked up a shower in the barn. Eva had registered her seven or eight monsters in the local school.
“I had my ducks in a row, damn it,” mused Ma.
The next afternoon Ma recounted her family trials with her prison counselor, Samuel Dulles Sharpe, who offered a supportive ear. He was so tired of But I’m innocent hard luck stories told in the bowls of another failed institution. He was so bored. This woman sitting across from him was an imbecile. She saw the world in black and white and he desperately needed diversion. He decided to encourage her, willing to clean up the mess afterwards. Besides, he would be retiring in eight months and he began to see that a stirring of this particular pot would be a fitting farewell to the prison hierarchy.
Sharpe smiled and told her that since she had only violated a state law she was sent to a state lockup and that since she was considered low security risk she had ended up here. He said that she would have committed a more serious offense she would be in the cat bird’s seat, and doing her time in maximum security, much nicer digs than the county jail.
She listened without a word.
“Or if you had really done it up and committed a federal offense, like, say, advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government, you’d be sitting in a bright, new cell. Clean sheets and a view! Watched over by G-men who would monitor you for terrorist leanings and anarchist tendencies.
“You’re stock would skyrocket if you were a federal prisoner,” said Sharpe muffling a smile, who had grown cynical after 30 years in the system. He saw no rehabilitation or much attempt at helping the convicts prepare to reenter society.
He laughed out loud.
This whole façade is just a holding tank where petty criminals make all the right connections so as to learn the tools of the trade and prosper later when they rejoin the real world, he thought.
“Or you could bribe and guard, or plan an escape…or maybe tie a bed sheet out your window,” he whispered to Ma, his puffy, red eyes darting back and forth in silly apprehension of snoops and eavesdroppers.
Further obsessed with her immediate enigma, Ma meekly asked about the food at the federal joint and wondered if her family members could ever find her in one of those bright, new cells.
He laughed again.
After Ma asked enough legal questions to pass the Bar the session came to a close. Ma had learned three things:
First, if she had committed a felony she’d have done more time but maybe in a max security facility that severely limited visits, maybe even solitary confinement if she earned it. Second, if she had violated a federal law she would be going to a shiny federal prison somewhere between Homestead and Nome where they’d never find her. Third: It wasn’t too late to secure a little peace – Advocate the violent overthrow of the US government? That doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
Sharpe, now enjoying his bit of system sabotage, accompanied Ma to the prison library where she consumed everything she could about political subversion, bomb building, militant history, civil disobedience, Lenin, Trotsky, Huxley, Mencken, Orwell, Pearse, Einstein and Darwin. She had never been motivated to read anything but supermarket tabloids and lottery tickets before but now she was on the verge of dismantling her previous existence and embracing a new life as a political extremist! She now had a purpose. It felt good.
To be continued on February 4 posting
JUST A LITTLE OFF THE TOP AND WATCH THE EARS
by Uncle Pahgre
by Uncle Pahgre“Omnibus notum tonsoribus.”
(Every barber knows that) – Horace
“This is a man’s world.” – James Brown
Did you ever wonder where the late James Brown got his hair cut? Was it in some fastidious beauty salon in Atlanta or New York, or some dusty, corner barber shop along the roaring Salkehatchie in his home state of South Carolina?
We presume he went to the barber shop — a place where those of his gender can let relax and converse in one of the few male havens not under siege by the righteous forces of political correctness.
Most of the people who pay attention to the comings and goings in this country have expressed concern over the direction it is headed. They have used terms like breakdown of traditions, social decay, moral collapse and detachment in a futile attempt to categorize just why we can’t all get along. History tells us that the ancients had similar concerns. One of the first references to barbers (barbe translates as beard in Latin) was in Rome, where barber shop was hallowed as a place of gossip and discussion.
The surviving social icons become even more important when we consider the homogenization of life and they mass-hype that is becoming inherent to our culture. We need something to hold onto. We need something constant, something real and consistent, like the corner barber shop.
Hey, we know there are plenty of these hideouts left all over the country but we also know that most of these redoubts are squarely in the path of progress. Someday all the scissors in the world will be wielded by some McDonaldlike hair cutting corporation in New York or Chicago. Straight razors will come with warnings and disclaimers. That barber that boys knew as a kid will be gone, his son selling paint at Wal-Mart. Stop.
Most males that have evolved past rudimentary stone age thinking are aware that this is not a man’s world. Why would men want it? James Brown is simply taking poetic license, isn’t he, or did he lose that too in another scrimmage with the cops?
Our only contention is that barber shops are healthy, nostalgic escapes for males. Since men make up roughly 47% of the current population, it stands to reason that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Most men would rather get a good follicle chop at the hands of a tobacco chewing ex-Marine than go under the scissors of some bimbo who doesn’t even know the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Sorry, but sometimes the truth takes no prisoners.
I remember the first time my father brought me to the barber shop on a Saturday morning and I was accepted into the inner sanctum. It was my bristly coming out party, a babe in the barber chair, my one-and-only whiskered debutante ball. No women were allowed, not even a nurse who might bandage up a sliced ear or heaven help us, an botched Adam’s Apple.
Speaking of nurses, did you know that the barber pole represents the bandages wrapped around a barber chaired patient prior to bloodletting? Barbers were surgeons before King Henry IIIV prohibited such procedures. He also forbade surgeons from barbering. For centuries barbers had to make ends meet by cutting hair and pulling teeth. Finally the law was rescinded during the reign of George II. 17th century barber, Jacques Jasmine, supplemented his income by singing to patrons. A Provencal poet, he is known as the last of the Troubadours. He is also known as the Father of Barber Shop Quartets, or at least we think so.
Saturday morning was never like this. Imagine a little kid, primed for a buzz cut, swimming in that giant revolving chair. The barber wraps tissue paper (also known as barber paper) around his neck, followed by a draping in a semi-immaculate, often pin-striped sheet. Then he looked at the dad for instructions anxiously waiting for the word buzz. Then the scissors flew. (Editor’s note: If the child in question had the devastating fortune of going to the barber shop with his mother this subtle exchange never happened and the language was sterile. The unfortunate experience was known to have led to serious psychological problems down the road.)
But in this man’s world, customers spoke freely, spit tobacco and passed wind, making no attempt to edit their colorful language. I’m sure 90% of the boys who grew up in the Fifties learned to curse in barber shops. A clandestine pile of dirty books was stored under the Popular Mechanics and the Sports Illustrated, the latter still years away from its heralded swim suit issue. Etiquette, if you weren’t shaving age, was to keep your trap shut unless someone asked you something.
Witch Hazel was in the air. Personalized shaving mugs hung from above the mirror. We even had an altruistic trimmer who would make lots of scissor noise above the heads of bald customers, whack the curly locks off wailing babies and marvel at the manly sideburns thriving in the pre-pubescent peanut gallery.
The Cincinnati Reds were on the radio and everyone smoked at least three cigars at the same time. Sure, some of the ball games were on TV but barbers hated TV since they couldn’t watch a double play unfold and administer a symmetrical flat-top at the same time without a one act taking the backseat.
The conversation between barber and customer was sacred, like the lawyer-client or priest-confessor privilege. It ran from politics to romance to cars to sports. One always knew he had made conversational strides when the barber kept talking, after the sheet was removed and the Brylcream applied.
One sullen barber, who has probably been six feet under for some time, was famous as a roustabout. He had been carrying on a romance with the bottle since his twenties. The inside joke in our barber shop was to yield to a newcomer when that barber’s chair opened up, especially if he needed a shave. Soon that straight razor looked like a wobbly guillotine, the prestigious and effective hair loss apparatus employed during the later stages of the French Revolution. Lord only help the customer who wanted his nose and ear hairs trimmed too.
In the Italian barber shops young barbers were instructed to shave everyone around the ears and neck. It was believed that this service insured the growth or healthy hair there and invited repeat business when the customer got older. That, according to our reliable source, is why so many older Italian men have tufts of hair on their necks. Ask the shoe shine boy.
From ducktails to dreadlocks barber shops have been a part of our culture since the Sumerians first invented scissors. Remember Figaro, the Barber of Seville. What about Floyd Larson, Mayberry’s main male gossip? These guys knew how to celebrate life’s small treasures. The King of Kansas City knew all about it too when he sang: …I got credit down at the grocery store and my barber tells me jokes. Try that tune the next time you check out at City Market or visit the hairstylist, the only rooster in the hen house.
– Kashmir Horseshoe
