All Entries Tagged With: "Ouray"
Yuletide Duels #449
“Sir! You offend the feminine gender of the state of South Carolina with that careless talk of hoop skirts! I challenge you to a duel!”
And with the slap of a riding glove in Charleston, Count Marcourte set into motion a series of holiday duels unprecedented in American history. His opponent, a rank industrialist from Boston, was shot squarely through the forehead the next morning
A sellout crowd observed from a nearby hill.
The victim’s name was never clear. It was either Hazelrod or Hazelbloom, or something designating yellowish brown or worse. Count Marcourte had won the day and he revelled in his lopsided victory through the holiday season.
“No Yankee can hold a candle to a Southerner when it comes to combat,” said Marcourte. It was early June 1860.
The victorious count fought three more duels that year, winning all of them in the fine fashion displayed on that Charleston morning. In 1861, with the attack on Fort Sumter, Marcourte joined the Confederate Army and later lost an arm at Fredericksburg. After the war, he returned to the sport he loved so well and became a local legend as the finest one-armed dueler east of the Mississippi.
Finally, on Christmas Day 1879, Marcourte was struck between the eyes by an insubordinate clay brick of unknown origin. He lasted only moments.
SANTA TO DO BIC SHAVING COMMERCIAL
(North Pole) Santa Claus has agreed to appear in a series of television advertisements on behalf of BIC Corporation, makers of plastic, disposable razors.
Filming will begin after the Christmas holidays.
“We couldn’t think of a more famous beard than that matted, white mop that Santa displays on his cheeks and chin,” said a representative from BIC. “Sure, it would have been more effective to have him shave in November and do his thing without the beard but we don’t want to disappoint his younger clientele.”
According to the famous elf, his wife wanted him to shave last year but he refused. It was not clear whether financial considerations changed his mind or whether he just got sick of looking at all that hair in the mirror every morning.
“It’s no big deal,” said the BIC spokesman. “He’ll grow the thing back by March.”
The last time Santa shaved was way back in 1968 when he was concerned with being mistaken for a hippie. It was that same year that he was detained at the border until authorities could determine that he was who he claimed to be.
“It was an embarrassing situation for all of us,” remembers a border guard who questioned the elf back then. “The guy attempts to sneak across the border, then he insists he’s Santa Claus. What would you think? He has no paperwork, no identification, no visa. If it were not for that red suit and the reindeer we might never have made a positive identification.”
Groppo the Elf
White Flower Soup
December 11, 2016
Handsome, ambidextrous bagpiper will skirl a tune for weddings, funerals, graduations, mud wrestling competitions, breakfast meetings, alcohol seminars, brandings, shopping sprees, tree plantings, hangings, extra-marital affairs, forced marches, military interventions, homecomings, banishments, bachelor parties, giant slalom events, EMT classes, book burnings, race riots, exorcisms, lingerie modeling, final exams, looting excursions, engine overhauls, fragile tooth extractions, instinctual migrations, wanderlust. Look for our ad in the Jello Pages under Bagpiping.
Skullduggery by the half hour. We have been at it for 50 years and probably knew your father even if you did not. Ophir Wetlands. No strawberry pirates.
Sell Goldfish in Palembang! Unbelievable as it may seem openings exist! A self-degrading career in the magnificent world of tropical fish can be yours by tomorrow! Just mail in the cards from your gov’ment imposed reeducation lecture series #611, marked 3, 17 and 29 (18 and 30 if you are incarcerated). Failure to comply will result in doing time in a hard labor camp pegging lobsters while naked in the dark.
Self-motivated outdoorsman with a sharply pointed head needed for drilling operation in Wyoming. No Mother Frackers. Uniform provided. Must submit to drug tests. No smokers. Mud Pump Drilling, Gillette.
Anyone with information regarding an explosion at the Grizzly Bear Mine on November 2, 1895 is asked to wire the Ouray County’s Sheriff’s Office promptly. Reward adjusted for inflation.
300 effective gum massage techniques over the phone for just pennies a day. Dr. Oral Floss, Ant Farm Vista, Bicuspid Mall. Shopping for a new root canal. Dr Oral was a submariner!
For sale cheap: Cases of Beaujolais Nouveau that survived the Titanic and now the Democratic Convention. Emotional attachments. Bottled under the provisions of the 2016 Platform. High altitude squash and tomatoes too. Corkscrew Sally, Gladstoned.
Remember: Snow inspection is mandatory in Colorado!
Wanted: Hot Mama to view Star Trek reruns this winter. My social calendar is open Captain Schmirk, Starship Enterprise, Moline, IL.
Antidote for mistletoe in the wings?
After more than 50 years in the laboratory scientists think they may have stumbled onto an effective antidote for mistletoe. Sure enough, it’s nothing more than a strand or two of Creole Garlic! The researchers suggest wrapping one’s Christmas tree with the stuff, like the popcorn stringing ritual, and hanging the remaining garlic all around the house. One scientists says he even hangs a clove or two from his car mirror. Besides repelling unwanted advances of the opposite sex over the holidays, the garlic adds another decorative dimension when carefully interspersed with Christmas lights, bulbs and icicles. In addition to all this, most researchers say that holiday visits, and vampire traffic in general, drop almost in half when the garlic is displayed. Have a happy Christmas.
NOT TAUGHT IN HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY CLASS
(Bogota Fun With Fruit Review December 10, 2016)
In 1928 The United Fruit Company (fruit company from Louisiana) had banana plantation in Colombia; and the workers organized a strike against them. They demanded written contracts, eight-hour work days, six-day work weeks and the elimination of food coupons. The strike was one of the biggest strikes in Colombian history, and many communistic and Liberal parties participated.
U.S. officials in Colombia, along with United Fruit representatives, portrayed the worker’s strike as “communist” with “subversive tendency”. In telegrams to the U.S. Secretary of the government, the United States of America threatened to invade with the U.S. Marine Corps if the Colombian government did not act to protect United Fruit’s interests.
An unknown number of workers died after the conservative government of Miguel Méndez sent the Colombian army to end the union. An army regiment from Bogotá was dispatched by the government to deal with the strikers, which it deemed to be subversive. Whether these troops were sent in at the behest of the United Fruit Company did not clearly emerge.
The troops set up their machine guns on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square, closed off the access streets, and after a five-minute warning opened fire into a dense Sunday crowd of workers and their wives and children who had gathered, after Sunday Mass, to wait for an anticipated address from the governor.
General Cortés Vargas, who commanded the troops during the massacre, took responsibility for 47 casualties. In reality, the exact number of casualties has never been confirmed. Herrera Soto, co-author of a comprehensive and detailed study of the 1928 strike, has put together various estimates given by contemporaries and historians, ranging from 47 to as high as 2,000. Survivors, popular oral histories and written documents give figures 800-3000 killed, adding that the killers threw them into the sea.
LETTERS
Doth he not suffer the fool gladly?
– Oltorf, Lesser god of the Finn Jasmine Norse
Dear Horseshoe:
The Atomic Pet Waste Projectile that was advertised in your summer issue is a piece of garbage. Not only does in backfire but it leaks. Your recommendations, as usual, suck. I’ll never believe in you again.
Dag Katz
Crested Butte, CO
Dear Mel:
A few years back a friend of mine from Malibu received a lovely set of porcelain designer cat dishes. As one could easily imagine, she cherished them. Well, over the years normal wear and tear dictated the present condition of the remaining set. One saucer broke in Europe and a formal serving dish exploded in Bali. Another piece disappeared while we were surfing in South Africa in 1982. Anyway, I’ve searched the world over for a replacement set to send her. Do you know if any of the Montrose boutiques would carry something like that?
Muffy Floorburn
Telluride
Dear Muffy:
First let me just say that I enjoyed your Festival piece that appears elsewhere in this issue. You have a lot of talent. Want to go to the drive-in come spring? In undressing your correspondence, I suggest you try the animal shelter, Pets-Are-Us or the Cat’s Meow. If all else fails stop by the Salivation Army. Items like this have a way of surfacing there.
Dear Editor:
I must take exception with an article entitled “Presidential Notes” which appeared in your last issue. For your information, Richard Nixon played the electric guitar and not the cello as you repeatedly asserted. In addition, Gerald Ford mastered the triangle while in gym class at Michigan, not while sitting in Congress. While you were correct in your assumption that Jimmy Carter played the harmonica, you were remiss in your failure to mention his love affair with the washboard. It was at a washboard gig that he met both Teddy Kennedy and Walter Mondale in 1973.
The breakdown of Presidents and their musical instrument of choice follows a simple enough pattern. Some 22 Presidents, including Adams, Monroe, Tyler and Lincoln played the violin while another 30 enjoyed the piano. Teddy Roosevelt could really lay down some ragtime. Two played the tuba (Cleveland and Taft) and seven (including Bill Clinton) have chosen the saxophone as their preferred instrument. The only Chief Executive that did not play a musical instrument was Millard Fillmore who was completely tone deaf and spent his brief two-year stint plowing through Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”, which he inadvertently left behind when driven from the White House. His successor Franklin Pierce could not make heads or tails of the book and subsequently gave it to his sister-in-law for her 50th birthday in 1853.
Thumbellina Etchabarron
Cimarron, CO
Dear Consumer Person:
Let him without guilt cast the first stone, heh? Before you throw your hands up in disgust at the irresponsible fiscal behavior in government you must ask yourself: What is my credit card debt? If Mrs Jones makes $40,000 per year and owes $50,000 to Citibank, she is effectively bankrupt and will never dig her way out of the hole into which she has fallen.
Deficit spending. Tighten your belt.
Credit card abuse is one-way street and a deadbeat is a deadbeat. You have to be a standup person. It is not a good bet that you will win the lottery and Jesus will not pay off your credit cards for you down the road, no matter what they’ve told you.
Stop pointing the finger and wake up before it’s too late!
Arthur C. Mothchild
Pimpco Brokerage and Grill
Geneva
To the editor:
Recently a Hashishistani Prince was neutered to keep the family out of power. Although seen as somewhat rash in some circles it was swift and effective and kept quarrelsome tribes from collective throats. The media coverage however, was deplorable with only the alternative press in attendance.
Now instead of a royal ascendancy they have a peasant’s paradise where everyone gets to be in charge of everything for at least one full day during his/her lifetime.
Perhaps we should try it here too.
Everett Throckmorton II
Ditch Warlock
Downtown Delta
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