Across Difficult Country

Someone should force America’s mollycoddled poor to take a long, hard, look at these pictures : Those fun loving knuckleheads trying to pick a fight with the airplane that's photgraphing them are completely self sufficient, and they do it without modern conveniences, like government cheese or pants. Despite never having been given free educations, they appear to have produced a monumental breakthrough in the field of cryptozoology by befriending some sort of half-human she-ape (girlilloid?) belonging to a species undreamt of by Western naturalists.* *That may be a Maricoxi .

From Wetwang comes word of a brick attack in Wetwang . Anyone with information please contact the police at 0845 6060222. With the fallout from her remarks about the RFK assassination still lingering, Sen. Clinton may have triggered a new controversy when she announced another reason she would not drop out of the presidential race was the remote but very real possibility of Obama suffering a brick attack in Wetwang . “We all remember that brick attack in Wetwang . I don't understand it. But like you, I remember it.” Locally, a sad-faced man in a bar was overheard lamenting modern romance: “I had no idea she would leave. It came out of nowhere, like a brick attack in Wetwang .” A Long Island businessman admitted giving Isreali Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “ $150000, mostly in cash stuffed into envelopes ,” but denied ever giving Olmert a brick attack in Wetwang . The Barack Obama campaign said the candidate misspoke when relating the story of a great-uncle who rescued Jews from a bri...

An owl in North Carolina killed a woman then framed her husband for the murder . The man now sits in jail, while the owl is free to flap about in the woods. Think of this the next time you hear some jackass gurgling about how wonderful nature is.

The newspaper alerts me to the publication of a literary masterpiece, a novel called The Art of Racing in the Rain , by Garth Stein. Here the narrator of this momentous new book, Enzo, waxes philosophical : “I am ready to become a man now, though I realize I will lose all that I have been. All of my memories, all of my experiences. I would like to take them with me into my next life—there is so much I have gone through with the Swift family—but I have little say in the matter. What can I do but force myself to remember? Try to imprint what I know on my soul, a thing that has no surface, no sides, no pages, no form of any kind. Carry it so deeply in the pockets of my existence that when I open my eyes and look down at my new hands with their thumbs that are able to close tightly around their fingers, I will already know. I will already see. The door opens, and I hear him with his familiar cry, "Yo, Zo!" Usually, I can't help but put aside my pain and hoist myself to my fe...

For the third Mother’s Day in a row Major League Baseball players used pink bats in order to raise awareness of breast cancer. Over a year ago I sent Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig a number of emails suggesting on Father’s Day baseball play games using pink baseballs, in order to raise awareness of testicular cancer. He still hasn’t replied. Meanwhile in Senegal it’s time for the annual ear harvest .

The accursed town of Whitby has been busy upgrading its infrastructure. To retain the element of surprise most of the improvements are still secret, but it's now known the East Pier has been modified to deliver painful, potentially lethal electric shocks. So far only a dog has been zapped , but Whitby’s civic leaders are confident warmer weather will bring plenty of children and tourists out of doors and down to the pier to be electrocuted.

Let us try to remember how fancy works in children; with what selective partiality it reads, leaving often the bulk of the book unrealised, but fixing on the rest and living it; and what a passionate impotence it shows - what power of adoption, what weakness to create. It seems to be not much otherwise with uneducated readers. They long, not to enter into the lives of others, but to behold themselves in changed situations, ardently but impotently preconceived. The imagination (save the mark!) of the popular author here comes to the rescue, supplies some body of circumstance to these phantom aspirations, and conducts the readers where they will. Where they will: that's the point; elsewhere they will not follow. When I was a child, if I came on a book in which the characters wore armour, it fell from my hand; I had no criterion of merit, simply that one decisive taste, that my fancy refused to linger in the middle ages. And the mind of the uneducated reader is mailed with simila...

Huge ape-like beasts of a type unknown to science are terrorizing the Hindu Kush. Locals call these “illusive,” Bigfootish creatures Mande Burung : The colour of the hair is reported to be black or blackish brown. It has some kind of foul odour/smell emanating from the body. It has a footprint/pug mark size from 13 inches to 15 inches in length. It may be around 7’5" to 9’ tall. It may weigh around 300 kgs. It is noted to be herbivorous creature, who eats banana, tubes, tree roots, fruits, berries, barks of some trees, sawe trees and is also reported to eat crabs. It walks on two legs (biped). (As reported in 2002 sighting). It sleeps in the nest built on the open ground (as reported in 2002 sighting). It is shy and is basically harmless (as reported in 2005 sighting). It is a creature with phenomenal strength. A perverted female Mande Burung once forced a man to suckle its teats. The milk, he says (whenever anyone will listen, I imagine), tasted “sour with a mixture of bitterness...