Across Difficult Country

In the spring a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove, and in Ochopee, Florida a young Bigfoot’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. Dave Shealy, Bigfootologist and RV park owner, explains : There are seven to nine Skunk Apes [Bigfoot’s “smaller, smellier cousin”] currently living in the Everglades and right now is the best time to spot one because it’s their mating season. Lately, he’s heard lots of campers report strange sounds coming from the swamps…it’s the Skunk Ape’s mating call, which sounds like a low-pitched dove cooing. Though Skunk Apes are generally shy, Shealy says women on their periods should be careful when hiking the area because the cryptoids are attracted to the scent of menstruation. They’re also aroused by used lingerie, so female campers shouldn’t hang their panties out to dry because, in his words, “That’s like raising a flag and inviting them in.”

Mystery lights roam the skies above Phoenix and Florida . Are they visitors from space, or portents of disaster ? Or both? A boy named Brandon Puckett saw the blazing orbs, and describes what it was like : "I looked up and it was like these two fiery balls like flying across the sky, sort of in formation. They were like flying toward each other." (In honor of Earth Day this entry is 100% biodegradable.)

I’ve become so inured to vehicular assaults perpetrated by oldies I hardly paused after reading of the septuagenarian who fights “ illegal drug use, out of her car ” that slammed into an apartment building yesterday in Florida. And then an hour later I had one of those flashes of insight only great minds are capable of: with war in Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush having left our troops stretched thin, couldn’t we deploy our oldies overseas? Imagine thousands of horrendously bad elderly drivers , off our streets and behind the wheels of armor plated vehicles, rolling in erratic zigzag fashion across the plains of Afghanistan, turning unpridictably to crush suprised Talibani hiding in the weeds or in apartment buildings. Many oldies are so bored they would happily volunteer for such a mission. There are many more so addled they wouldn’t notice any difference between driving a Buick from the retirement home to the IHOP and driving a Humvee from the barracks to a Taliban encampment. The re...

Two weeks after she went missing, the corpse of a Florida woman was discovered “ wedged upside-down behind a bookshelf in her room in her family's home .” Apparently she’d been there all along, getting stuck while trying to “fiddle with a television set's plug at an outlet behind the bookshelf. Police said they suspect [she] was unable to breathe in the position and suffocated.” After reading of this bizarre tragedy I felt compelled to check behind my own bookshelves for dead bodies. Thankfully I found none, though I did find some sea otter carcasses, which I intend to mail to the editors of Cat Fancy magazine with a note reading “Murderers.” Elsewhere : The Chadian army has retaken Abeche .

The Purple Flare, a real-life costumed superhero, will no longer be fighting crime in Key West, Florida as he’s been arrested . Bonus: My most popular entry ever: World’s Most Deadliest Killers .