Apr 27, 2011

Escaped Boxing Kangaroo Runs Amok, Somehow ‘KO’s” Whole Dern Town!!

In yet another crushing blow to small town America in general and Eastern Washington in particular, the entire town of Lamont was rendered senseless in a matter of minutes after a cute, sweet, lovable kangaroo just passing thru with a travelling circus got loose and proceeded to ‘open up a couple of cans of whoop tush’ for no doggone reason, late Tuesday. The circus, one of those small outfits that travel from town to town bringing joy and happiness to millions of children, somehow got lost and ended up on that fateful Highway 23 that runs right past Lamont, a town that has enough problems without some doggone animal that ain’t even from America pummeling the entire citizenry into unconsciousness in less time than it takes to throw a couple of shrimp on the ‘barbie’ or whatever, for Pete’s sake.

“Well, I am not sure what triggered him! We’ve never seen him just go nuts like that before!” said Martin Weaver, the stunned circus owner. “We noticed him getting a little antsy in has cage the closer we got to Lamont, but as soon as we passed Lamont Road, he just picked the lock, hopped down the road towards the town and the next thing we knew there were bodies laying everywhere. Oh, it was horrid. It was like he just sensed that something was just not right there and in some sort of heroic animal sort of way, I think he was trying to protect humanity from whatever it is about Lamont that makes it – well – Lamont” he said with a mixture of pride, admiration and some residual fear. “Kangaroos are peace loving animals. We just can’t understand what set him off!” he concluded.

'So, I heard a knock on the door and I just assumed it was one of those boys who drive all over town day or night trying to borrow money that they will never pay back - when the next thing I knew this tall, lanky brown blur gave me a couple of jabs to the bread basket then an uppercut that sent me to the tattered carpet I have been meaning to replace in my living-room" said Melba Festoon, 82, an area farm/ranch matriarch and general busybody/nose bag. "And the next thing I knew I heard this hopping sound going down my sidewalk and there was a similar knock on Old Lady Bodine's door next-door. I hope that dern kangaroo really let her have it for stealing my peanut butter battered rocky mountain oyster recipe and giving it to all her friends! I'll never forgive that woman over that one!" she fumed, holding a piece of liver to her now blackening eye!

“Oh, nice! That is all we need right now!” said a former mayor who asked not to be identified with the town. “Sure, when I was the mayor, we had issues like firefighters not wanting to use a million dollar fire hydrant system – and then everyone got mad when we painted the fire station after 60 years of decay, and there was a minor rancher revolt when we bought the first town vehicle after 98 years of being a town, and there was that little insane event related to people protesting getting a new library and folks wanting to park fire trucks in the darn thing right next to the encyclopedias! Yeah, those were bad enough – humiliating to all Americans, in fact, but at least on my watch the entire citizenry didn't get their butts kicked by some travelling marsupial with an attitude problem and a sense of social justice! Oh, thank goodness that didn't happen on my watch! Oh, every cloud does indeed have a silver lining!” he sighed thankfully.

Apr 24, 2011

Town of Lamont On “Short List” For 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, Insiders Report

The Town of Lamont, a humble berg with fewer than 100 souls nestled tightly against the icy bosom of the Scablands in the eastern portion of the Great State of Washington, once again is drawing international attention after their new, highly capable mayor (and who says that actually doing something cannot ever be an asset, even in this part of the Wheat Belt!) and a largely reshaped Town Council finally managed to get a binding agreement ensuring fire hydrant usage in the town, thus ending the so-called 'Hydrant Wars", in spite of the fact that many local citizens and a sizable portion of the area farmers/ranchers (many of them fire fighters or having fire fighters in their families!) were dead set against using the doggone things in case of a fire emergency because that would be 'doing something new', for crying out loud! (This is Lamont, after all! It took the town 98 years to buy their first vehicle!) This ‘rapprochement’, if one may be so bold as to use a foreign word that means ‘coming together’ or something like that, has drawn the admiration and appreciation of peace advocates as diverse as Jimmy Carter, Bill Richardson and, of course, Santa Claus himself. (I mean, how many years can the whole darn Greater Lamont Metropolitan Area (GLMA) be on the ‘Naughty List’ because a few lazy, backward-looking people don’t want to use a fire fighting device that has been in common usage across the globe for well over 100 years, for Pete’s sake?)

“Well, given the decidedly irrational and quite stunning opposition to and hatred for an inanimate object (the lowly fire hydrant!), and the very fact that a vast majority of the area laggards now agree that using the darn things in case of an emergency is suddenly a good idea, especially since the tax payers forked over more than $1,000,000 for the things a few short years ago, well, this is surely one of the biggest peace break-thrus we have seen since the end of WWII or whatever!!” said Sven Norseberg, a rosy-cheeked Nobel prize spokesperson from one of those crazy Scandinavian countries that now give away fancy prizes instead of what they have historically unleashed on the civilized world - sending a bunch of big, hairy, smelly, somewhat cranky Vikings to hack things up with battle axes while in search of plunder or whatever! “And Mr. Nobel, who, as we all know, invented dynamite that has sent millions of people to the great beyond thru war and botched train robberies (Editorial Note: Hey, don’t forget about how easy it is now to get rid of a stubborn tree stump! Way to go, Nobel dude! And what is more fun than blowing stuff up?) – anyway, Mr. Nobel is smiling in his grave right now over the new peace that has descended between the Town of Lamont’s fire hydrants on the one hand and a bunch of angry people who don’t see anything wrong with filling up a truck with water, even in winter, and carting it to a blazing inferno even though there is a fire hydrant right next to the blaze! Now, if the Arabs and Israelis would just follow Lamont’s example here, maybe we could spend less time down there in the doggone Middle Eastern desert where it gets to like 200 degrees or whatever and the only meat comes from a smelly goat! Oh yeah, and you know how we Scandinavians get sunburned really easily. Heck, five minutes in the sun and the wife calls me her precious ‘little lobster’ while pinching my scarlet cheeks or giving me a good thunk on the back with her quite sizable open hand!! I just hate that! It is all very undignified and quite unnecessary!! I don't see that blasted woman getting any "Peace Prize" anytime soon, at least not if I have any say in the matter! No sir! Not with that attitude and careless disregard for the pain and suffering of others!!” he fumed indignantly, thankfully not working himself up into one of those Viking ‘berserker’ rages or whatever those Vikings worked themselves up into when they terrorized the whole darn known world! (Well, if they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama for no obvious, easily discernible reason, they are obviously just passing the dern things out over there like candy or whatever! So what is wrong with giving one to that Viking dude's wife with the huge hands? Heck, why not? That just seems unfair somehow!)

Apr 16, 2011

Area Man Thinks ‘Feng Shui’ Is Name Of That Crazy Dictator Guy Who Runs ‘One Of Them Dern Korean Countries’ Over Yonder

In yet another chilling tombstone in the vast learning graveyard that is the modern American education system, (at least in these parts, anyway) an area man, Skeeter ‘Punch Bowl’ Bodine, 44, an area farmer/rancher, also known by some in the local area as some sort of ‘smarty pants’ and/or a ‘dadburn bookworm’ because he currently serves with distinction on an area church board and often reads the whole church bulletin front to back (when he ain't leafing thru some hunting or survivalist magazine!), threw caution to the wind and began delving into the relatively deep waters of international politics when he quite brazenly declared “Who the heck do you think you are, Mister Feng Shui, that dern dictator feller of ‘East Korea’ or something?” when nicely asked by a humble, unassuming town official to clean up some of the 30-odd junk cars in his yard and to keep his dogs, (a sad-looking bunch that appears to have some coyote or badger of something unnatural in their bloodline) under control so that they do not become a nuisance to the Town. “Heck, if I didn’t come from a long line of draft dodgers and others who could not legally join the military because of their quite shocking and extensive and varied criminal records and/or the fact that they were actually in ‘The Big House’ at the time that war started, my family would have fought in that there Korean war over there in the Middle East or whatever and we would not even have some dern dictator like Feng Shui to mess up the American hegemony (pronounced ‘hedge-ER-moan-EE’), for Pete’s sake!” he rambled incoherently yet with the passion of the hopelessly ignorant. “This is America! If we want to junk up the place, lower property values for our neighbors and allow our dogs to attack school children, then that is what this here Democracy allows us to do – unlike what that little fancy-pants Mr. Feng or Mr. Shui or whatever that little dictators dern name is would have us to do while marching in that there ‘Red Square’ or where ever that place is with all them funny looking buildings and old, serious looking guys with gray coats and really massive moustaches or whatever!” he concluded, mangling the already overburdened English language to a degree rarely achieved by sober, sane native English speakers in this or any other age.

Apr 11, 2011

Legal News: Greater Lamont Metropolitan Area (GLMA) Sued For Copyright Infringement By Producers Of ‘The Dukes Of Hazard’ TV Show

In a troubling case of intellectual property rights that is almost certain to land Lamont in front of the quite understandably disgusted US Supreme Court for the third time in as many years, (On 3 completely different cases, for Pete's sake! What are the chances?) the producers of the hit TV show ’The Dukes of Hazard’, (a mindless story about a bunch of ‘Good Old Boys”, never meaning no harm, who were, as is commonly understood, in trouble with the law from the day they were born or whatever) – anyway, this copyrighted material is subject to the intellectual property statutes of the United States and the producers feel that Lamont and the surrounding area have infringed upon those rights by shamelessly attempting to copy almost every aspect of the show in their normal, routine, civic discourse.

“Well, as hard as it is to believe, it would appear that one of the smallest towns in the State of Washington has taken an extraordinary and quite suspect step to mimic and infringe upon one of the most successful (and annoying!!!) hit TV shows of the 1970’s and 1980’s” said Melvin Finklestein, a lawyer for the TV producers. “Now, it would not be surprising to find, thru sheer statistical chance, a town with a small number of overlaps with that TV show - but Lamont seems, in our learned legal opinion, to have crossed that line in a very actionable way. I mean, the TV show had ‘Cooter’ and Lamont has at least 5 ‘Scooters’ (and 3 'Skeeters", for Pete's sake!! Oh, and who knows how many 'Bubbas' - almost half of which are women!!), the show had Boss Hogg and Lamont has that largely mean-spirited and incompetent guy who tries to run everything and belong to every conceivable organization and governmental entity even though he does not even live in the town and his ranch is going to hell in a hand basket! The list just goes on and on. But the kicker involved that small screen icon – Daisy Duke. I think that any reasonable jury would conclude that the sheer number of area women, regardless of age or whatever, who somehow cram themselves into ‘Daisy Duke shorts', (Oh, some things are just so wrong!) regardless of the weather, is a clear violation of our intellectual property rights! And I won’t even mention all of the local grease-covered throw-backs who, in some sad and pathetic attempt (although obviously successful in these parts!) to impress the local females want to drive around in brightly colored gas-guzzlers that went out of style well over 40 years ago. To say that is random chance just stretches the very fibers of credulity, for crying out loud! If the Lamont area, (mostly outside the town) wants to base their whole lives on some fictional TV show set in a mythical Hazard County, GA, that is their business, but we need to be compensated for it, that’s all!” he concluded while brushing off a piece of cow manure from his $400, hand-tooled Gucci loafers.

“Well, sure, the wife, (who he affectionately calls 'Daisy!) especially since she got on the shady side of 40 and went on that all carb diet like some sort of religious zealot or something – anyway, sure, she became overly fond of ‘Daisy Duke shorts’ in all weather conditions and regardless of the social occasion, but who is to say she got that idea from what just happens to be the best dern show in the history of the whole doggone world??” said Goober Festoon, wiping his hands on his grease-covered overalls that probably haven’t been washed since the show was thankfully taken off the air in the mid-1980's. "And yeah, having a yard full of junk cars is kind of ‘Hazard County’, but who in their right mind doesn’t feel rich and successful by having a bunch of rusted hulks in the front yard for the dogs to sleep under? How would the tetanus shot industry stay in business without people like us?” he mused thoughtfully, showing a surprising level of social sensitivity. (And why do bad dogs, bad kids and junk always seem to come together, anyway?) “And yeah, my sons do drive all around this country, giving the ‘Rebel Yell’ (and the middle finger when they ain't feeling too lazy and/or the Sheriff ain't about!) and throwing up gravel when they should be working but that is half the fun of being on welfare in the good old USA! That is what made this country great! This is just one of them lawyer tricks to try to squeeze a few shekels from the backbone of true Americans, if you ask me. And as for that whole Boss Hogg thing, a town like Lamont needs a strong-man in order to stop any 'big city' progress (like flush toilets and using fire hydrants in case of an emergency requiring a whole lot of water in a hurry!!) and allow the place to decline and decay faster than it normally would if left untended! So if he just so happens to put more than a few dollars in his own dadburn pocket by giving his uneducated wife a make-work job with every unfortunate organization he supposedly serves/destroys, what is wrong with that, for Pete’s sake?” he stammered with at least feigned outrage, given that the two men go to the area cow church together and you know how they are. “But now we got that new, smart, college-educated (pronounced ‘ed-U-cated’!!) mayor so it looks like the heady days of Hazard County in Eastern Washington might be coming to an end on their own" he said sadly. "So it don’t make no sense bothering that poor US Supreme Court none, if you ask me!” he concluded before unleashing a huge stream of tobacco juice at an unfortunately curious ground squirrel.

Apr 10, 2011

Area Leaders Jittery After Dramatic Increase In ‘Background Chatter’ Amongst Local Radical Bovine Extremist Groups

As if the 2nd smallest town in the State didn’t have enough to worry about with its citizenry’s general disregard for the benefits of fire hydrants, a truly shocking level of tooth loss and the sad fact that it does not even have a single dadburn store, security insiders who keep track of those sort of things raised the alarm after clandestine intelligence sources embedded in the fundamentalist herds confirmed a dramatic rise in “chatter” amongst bovine organizations long known to be committed to the violent overthrow of “The Great Satan” himself – the ranchers who have long exploited their very lives for some tawdry and seemingly unfair personal gain or whatever. “Well, we ain’t exactly sure what all them alert colors are supposed to be or nothing, but we feel that we got us a real tiger by the tail here, so what the heck – let’s just pick one – I always did like red – it reminds me of my brothers behind after my pappy got done with him when we was kids” chuckled Scooter 'Skid-King' Festoon, an area rancher and Director of the somewhat overrated Lamont FBI – the Farmer Bureau of Investigation. “Heck, cows may look dumb and all, but they are as crafty and conniving as all get out! And you go getting some outside cow raised in one of them countries over yonder that don't even speak no English and use all them curlicue letters or whatever, and the next thing you know the whole dern herd has got their tails all in a snit and they start demanding the abolition of fences, access to green pastures 5 times a day, where their heifers are denied the salt-lick and where they all clamor to be governed by something called “Bovine Law”! It’s just plain craziness, I tell you! And we ain’t two doggone shakes of a lambs tail away from the ultimate cow jihad tactic of them all, a full-fledged, earth-pounding, hoof-churning stampede, for Pete’s sake!” he sniveled annoyingly while dragging 8-10 cases of cheap beer into the storm cellar for his family to subsist off of should things go south in a hurry or whatever! “Heck, all we need now is some crazy preacher someplace burning their holy book or what not – the “Cow-ran” – oh, that is all we need right now!!! We’d have the mother of all stampedes and their ain’t no telling where the whole dern mess would end up at” he whined pathetically – wondering why he never decided to raise sheep like his really smart brother did.

(Editorial Note: Oh, please tell us he DID NOT just say that about the 'Cow-ran'!!! He DID NOT just go there, did he? (BTW, he lives on Elvis Presley Road outside of town - not within the Lamont limits itself! So go trample or head-butt or cow-patty something out there - not in Lamont proper. Thank you!) We at the Lamont Blog respect all belief systems, so as long as you taste darn good coming off the grill, we don’t care what your various little 4-legged beliefs are! It is shockingly backward-looking views like those put forth here by the Lamont FBI (just look at that hairdo! Whoa!!) that got this whole doggone world into the stinking mess it is now in! Come on, people! Can’t we all just get along? And please quit hogging the A-1 sauce down there, for Pete's sake!! Thank you!)

Apr 4, 2011

Area So-Called ‘Pathetic Losers’ And ‘Do-Nothings’ Saddened & Dismayed By All The Good Things Going On In State’s 2nd Smallest Town

In yet another stunning example of how crushing failure can be its own doggone reward, a cabal of area failures, disappointments, laggards and malcontents realized the source of their internal demons when it became obvious that all the good things going on in Lamont were the very well-spring of their crushing insecurities and nagging sense of self-loathing – to say nothing of their simmering anger at the whole stinking world, for crying out loud! “Well, I realized shortly after Lamont made the front page of the Spokane newspaper for all the improvements going on in the place that I began biting my nails down to the quick again – regardless of how much cow manure they had on them!” said Wilber Bodine, 56, an area pathetic loser and farmer/rancher who doesn't even live within the town limits of Lamont, for Pete’s sake. “Oh yeah, and then Lamont got an outrageously generous grant from Whitman County for a new library and one of them fancy flush toilets and I’ll be dadburned if I didn't start having night sweats and began whimpering for my mommy in the wee hours just about every dern night!” (Editorial Note: Too much 'mommy' is what got this whole problem started in the first place! I mean, come on!) said the proud 8th grade drop-out who really is pretty much of a total waste of human potential due to crushing laziness, a desire to see others fail and just a generally anti-progressive world view that somehow includes a hatred of flush toilets.

“Oh, but when they painted that doggone fire station after watching it decay for 60+ years, that was just the last dadburn straw! That is when me and my rancher buddies had to all team up together and draw the line in the dadburn sand since we are too scared to act individually (like real men will do! They let their women do the talking for them, and how! Talk about a clammer! Talk about 'babble' in a truly biblical sense!) outside the safe confines of a genuine (pronounced ‘gen-U-wine’!) mob (oftentimes drunken!) or whatever! Not on our watch, mister! No sir! What is next, giving our kids an actual education as opposed to spending all those limited tax dollars on sports so that all my kin can draw a salary driving bus and/or being a worthless chaperon and all! Sure, I am trying to live vicariously thru the sporting achievements of the modern youngsters since, of course, I was a pathetic loser when I was in school, too, but what in the heck is wrong with that? Plus, if you fill up those kid’s heads with all that fancy book learning and math and science and reading then the next thing you know they will be demanding flush toilets and libraries and access to the Internet and fire hydrant usage in case of a fire emergency and all of those other lures of the very devil himself! As my area cow church teaches dern near every week, anything that doesn’t somehow directly or indirectly benefit cows and thus the ranchers that own them is a complete waste of time and effort and is the very fruit of the devil’s tree!” he fumed with righteous indignation not seen since the heady days of the Spanish Inquisition! (Editorial Note: At least this crowd was so inattentive in school that they never learned about burning people at the stake for their differing beliefs! See, every cloud does have a silver lining, indeed. Thank you!)

“So yeah, me and my total loser friends, none of which live within Lamont itself, by the way, (go figure!) and who all seem to be in favor of absolutely nothing in general and against almost everything in particular are more than a little bent out of shape – and not just because the people who actually live within the town limits have seen thru our outrageous nonsense and shameless double-speak and no longer give us the time of day – let alone attend our so-called 'community events' where we quite graciously invite 'the little people' who don't even own cows over for a bland, starchy, gravy-covered meal so we can shamelessly bad-mouth the town leadership and municipal direction and try to convince the cow-less saps that our Luddite-like, destruction-oriented, decidedly inactive ways are best for them even though they quite obviously seem to be and in fact are designed to work against their own best interests, (like increasing property values! Whoa!) for crying out loud!! Enough is enough already! This town just needs to go back to rotting and decay like it should have been allowed to do in the first place! The darn town is making our rundown ranches look bad, dagnab it!! We just cannot let that stand! No sir!” he concluded while disgustedly kicking the toe of his manure-covered, multi-colored, high-heeled cowboy boot (with all that fancy stitching and flowery designs and what not that looks like it came from one of those countries that still allows bull fighting and where bribing the police is a more or less daily occurance!!) into the closest mole hole where some innocent mole, minding its own doggone business, for Pete's sake, now has to spend the next several hours pushing the dirt out of its hole and trying to vainly remove that manure smell that usually lingers after even the briefest of exposures to one of this underachieving rabble who seem to be against everything in the world (Including personal hygiene! Whoa!!!) except themselves and their petty, short-sighted, narcissistic little plans and schemes where someone always has to lose in order for them to feel like they have somehow won - however fleeting the victory may in fact be!