Lamont's Blue-chip Engineering Firm, Century West, Decides To Land On Moon ‘In their spare time’

In another testament to the outrageously deep talent pool that is sported by the premier engineering powerhouse in the Pacific Northwest, those go-getters at Century West Engineering just decided to take a little road trip given that things were slightly slower than usual in the normally bustling office due to the unfortunate reality of one of those annoying and all-too-frequent holiday weekends. This firm of engineering professionals, who have nothing to prove to the world, EVER!!, given that they successfully installed a new water system, built new roads and managed a library construction project in Lamont, Washington, (As if any sane person can believe they were actually able to accomplish all those amazing things in Lamont of all places!!!) – anyway, these engineering types just decided to not let a few minutes slip by unharnessed so, while multi-tasking, they basically re-engineered the entire Apollo program from scratch one afternoon in the coffee break room – but they, of course, had the good sense to skip that whole ‘Apollo 13’ thing and all of that unnecessary drama that it brought to the beleaguered nation’s doorstep, thank goodness. (Like we didn't have enough to worry about back then with all of those brightly colored yet malodorous hippies marching everywhere, that soul-crushing Sonny and Cher Show with all that mesmerizing glitter, and that annoying 'Soviet menace/Commie hoard' thing!)

“Well, at this point, nothing that company does that pushes the envelope of human understanding and endurance could surprise me, no sir!!” said a former mayor from the 700 block of Spokane Street who asked not to be identified. “I mean, a moon landing is awesome and all, but is that really that big of a deal given that they had to put up with our citizenry during three major projects, not including the best small town flagpole anywhere! Use your head! Sure, the moon with its 1/7th Earth’s gravity, huge temperature swings and complete lack of atmosphere can seem pretty inhospitable and daunting, but during our road project we had any number of local females marching up and down the streets in short-shorts and bippy tops, shouting 'hey ya'll' and trying to sell the construction workers soft drinks for $2.50! Oh, it was horrid! (The Lamont Blog hasn't consumed a soda since!) And then, when they added the new water system, people would flock out into the streets in fuzzy slippers and tattered bathrobes in -10 F weather, making suggestions on how to dig a hole. Oh, and that poor engineer and the library project! I cannot even imagine what a 'living hell' that poor soul went thru, given that he had to manage the volunteer effort to erect the thing! So yeah, travelling to the Earth’s major celestial satellite that controls our tides and makes people go crazy (I won’t even mention that whole werewolf thing! Yikes!!) is pretty impressive, but their real achievements took place right here on ‘terra firma’, if you ask me!” he said resolutely. (Editorial Note: Hey, who is asking you? You ain’t mayor no more! That Ruth Simpson is running the place, and thank goodness she is! Look at what a ‘pig’s breakfast’ you made of the job! But we have to agree with you on one thing and one thing only. Working in Lamont is a magnitude of difficulty greater than landing on the measly moon. Thank you!)

Town Contemplates Seceding 'To' Denmark After Former Viking Stronghold Elects Total Babe As Prime Minister

The Town of Lamont, a perplexing yet humble hamlet with a heart of gold (and a weird, deep-seated set of sympathies for the Vikings with all that pillaging and rapine! Whoa!), is contemplating finally leaving the USA in favor of throwing their quite questionable prestige behind some small European country most famous for that Hamlet guy who got chased around by ghosts or something and where everyone speaks that fancy kind of English – or at least it seemed that way in some black and white movie we saw once. Lamont, whose loyalties to the USA have been in some dispute for around 40 years given its pro-lawlessness, anti-education, and decidedly anarchy-friendly world view, seems to think that attaching themselves to some country that was founded by the Vikings with all of those raiding parties, burning stuff down and taking things that don’t belong to them might, in fact, be a better fit for the town than the USA with all those laws, expectations to perform and other rules that just seem to put a damper on their natural urges to drink mead all day long, live communally with women in long, wooden houses, smash up stuff they don’t like and never bathe, insiders report.

“Whoa! I always felt part Viking in my heart, but after I somehow caught a glimpse of that Helle Thorning-Schmidt person, I realized I was born in the wrong doggone country!” said Goober Bodine, 56, an area farmer/rancher and school board member. “Dang, in this country we get Hillary as some sort of so-called leader – but those doggone Danes obviously have their heads screwed on straight, unlike those stupid Americans. (Those? Ain’t you a dadburn American no more?) “Who cares if she is from some Center-Left coalition – heck, she could be a dadburn commie for all I care, but if she put her hair up in braids and donned some of that Viking body armor I would follow her anywhere – even to do battle with her ancient enemy Schleswig-Holstein!” he stammered pathetically with some sick, puppy-love look in his beady little eyes. (Editorial Note: The Lamont Blog does not endorse this sickening devotion to outward appearance and feels certain that Ms. Thorning-Schmidt is more than worthy for this challenging position based on her political savvy and above average intelligence. Just because she fits everyone’s conception of the ultimate Viking warrior goddess of old, like some attractive blending of ‘Heidi’ and ‘Joan of Arc’, should in no way hamper her very real contributions as a democratic leader of one of Europe’s most stable nations! This is the year 2011, for Pete’s sake! Things like outrageous, unbelievable, almost supernatural beauty should not matter now! Thank you!)

“Well, living in the town just down the road from Lamont, I ain't so sure them moving over there to one of them European countries would be such a bad thing for them, if you ask me!” said a civic leader from a neighboring town. “Well, most of Lamont is somewhat normal and law abiding, (What???) but there are a few ruffians who don’t have an education and spend all of their lives stealing gas, racing around in loud cars of uncertain ownership and causing trouble, so if you get rid of Lamont, you get rid of the reprobates, too! I just wonder if there ain’t some way we could somehow help move this thing along, you know, as some kind of community service event or something” he concluded hopefully.

Tourism News: Lamont To Position Itself As Haven For People Seeking Release From Anything Developed After The Year 1700

The humble town of Lamont, still licking its wounds from the shellacking it received at the hands of that doggone vacation wonderland Long Beach, WA (Editorial Note: Thou shalt not mention that name!!! We smite thee! Oh, cursed be that vacation wonderland Long Beach! May the plagues of Egypt be like a mere Sunday stroll compared to Long Beach's coming judgement for crushing the lowly and largely unattractive Lamont with its lack of basic amenities, things to see/do and spotty population density! Oh, we curse thee, you delightful, tourist-friendly Babylon with some really great places to eat and all those cool kites! May the fleas of 1000 camels infest your charming, well-managed Town Hall!! May your fancy high speed network develop vapor lock and may enormous clams clog up your delightful downtown business district, too! Whoa, I'm running out of curses here! What the?!?!?! Long Beach must have hexed me!! Well, may you be forced to endure all those other curses I cannot think of right now, too!!!), decided their only hope at generating tourist revenue was to fall back on its inherent strengths (okay, it only has one, so that should be ‘strength’), a complete and total rejection of modernity and all that entails and a desire to return to a more simple, fire hydrant-less era without all that fancy medicine, hygiene, transportation, communications and where being uniformly and aggressively ignorant of the world was the norm and not the embarrassing exception.

“Well, Long Beach, although a harsh task-master, taught us a very valuable lesson. When you run with the big boys you are liable to get trampled under the slashing hooves of your municipal betters!” said Chester Snopes, an area farmer and the guy most single-handedly responsible for keeping Lamont pressed tightly against the loving bosom of the pre-industrial age. “Sure, we rose above our station when we tried to compete against a charming seaside paradise that actually has stores and restaurants and a beautiful beach with real sand, but let one never say that Lamont cannot learn from its crushing defeats and will not always spring back to fail spectacularly in some other area! We may be laggards, but we are scrappy laggards!” he said proudly, stubbing the toe of his manure covered cowboy boot with all that fancy stitching into one of the few healthy-looking clumps of grass in Bug Tussle Park – the town park named after the original home of the Beverly Hillbillies – if you can believe that. “So, we all got together in Scooter Bodine’s still unpainted (after 72 years!) and manure-filled barn (last shoveled out when Truman was President!!) and decided that enough was enough. Why should we continue to swim upstream like some over-achieving salmon and all when we could just stop swimming and let the current flush our bloated municipal carcass out to sea where it belongs and where metaphorical crabs, seagulls and other critters could pick our bones clean and put an end to all this nonsense once and for all” he said, voicing one of the 2 or 3 most coherent sentences he ever produced in all of his 56 years of torturing the poor English language.

“But then we realized, if all us here farmers and ranchers feel this way about this crazy modern world and all the demands it puts on a feller, there has to be others like us, so why not position Lamont to be a place where people who fundamentally reject the modern era and refuse to bathe can come to blow off a little steam and stick their heads in the local sand with like-minded folk?” he beamed proudly! “Heck, it is just a matter of being true to one’s own nature – and the good part is we won’t have to change a doggone thing to make this place 16th century friendly, neither! Sure, I was the one who lead the fight against using them new-fangled fire hydrants, which was my duty as a local fire fighter, but we can just cover them up with little hay stacks or something and people will never know they are there. It ain’t like we ever planned on using the stupid things anyway, although we promised the town we would! So yeah, we can now be the new ‘Anti-Long Beach’ where people come not to eat and gaze upon some beautiful ocean and stay at swanky hotels or whatever, but where simple folks can just dig a hole or something for shelter, scratch and pick and complain about how the world has gone wrong! There has to be at least a dozen or so people in this here country that would snap at the chance to return to some pre-soap, pre-flush toilet, pre-book learning era where men were men and, as a rule, they all smelled pretty darn bad! (You should see these guys when they show up for town business meetings with outsiders! Yikes! We wish we were making this up!) I think we are really onto something here!!” he said proudly before scattering the chickens as he marched up to his sod cabin to tell the wife (not that he had to tell her anything about his plans!!) to put an extra pig’s foot in the pot just in case some Luddite-like laggard got the word already and would show up for dinner in the new vacation Mecca for the flotsam left in the wake of America in the 21st century, for crying out loud!!

Century West Engineering Remains Strong, Resolute, Vibrant In Spite Of Long-Term Relationship With Lamont

Century West Engineering, a rock of stability for good in a world gone totally mad, has somehow managed to survive and even flourish in spite of the fact that they have been involved with the 2nd smallest town in the Great State of Washington for well over 6 years. This almost unheard of feat of emotional, organizational, interpersonal and psychological stability goes a long way in explaining why this regional engineering powerhouse has almost single-handedly improved the infrastructure of the entire Pacific Northwest, to say nothing of providing outrageously pure drinking water, paving over half the town, engineering a quite impressive flagpole and facilitating a new library in Lamont; a forlorn, some might say half-baked hamlet nestled up against the forbidding scablands in the otherwise beautiful Palouse region of Eastern Washington.

“Good gravy, man! We have thrown every bit of inane dysfunction we have at them and it didn’t even make a doggone dent!” exclaimed Wilber Festoon, 56, a area farmer/rancher and self-proclaimed 'civic leader'. “I mean, normally when organizations get the “Lamont Treatment” with all that entails, it is only a matter of weeks or months until catastrophic organizational disintegration takes place, the home office gets boarded up and whatever investors there are that have not committed suicide sell everything they own, change their names and move to some unfortunate village in Costa Rica that doesn’t even have running water or electricity. But somehow Century West Engineering (CWE) just seems to get better and better, doggone it, regardless of how much insane tomfoolery, scatological inefficiency, convoluted misdirection and political and social backwardness we throw their way! (like the local firefighters not wanting to use fire hydrants from a new $1.3 million water system!!) That just ain’t right!” bellowed the flummoxed Mr. Festoon, a local firefighter and the President of the brazenly oxymoronic “Greater Lamont Business Development Association” (GLBDA). “It just seems that regardless of what we do they just continue to be happy, focused, professional and eager to get the job done! It’s like they ain’t even human or something!” he concluded with a shudder while grasping his crucifix and spitting three times to ward off the evil eye!

(Editorial Note: When Century West Engineering first became involved with Lamont, Lamont’s water system was on the verge of being condemned, but CWE acquired a water planning grant and then planned and of course implemented one of the most awesome water systems in all 50 states. (with 82 psi) Then, when the citizens were dropping like flies due to excessive road dust (so, what was the problem there?), Century West came in and thru an outrageously generous grant from the Transportation Improvement Board (TIB) (thank you Greg Partch and company!) managed to pave over half the town. And then, when Lamont needed to add a flagpole to prove once and for all that they did in fact belong to the United States of America (there is still some debate on this point!!), Dennis Fuller and his team of go-getter experts provided the critical calculations (the base for this monster needed to be over 6 feet deep, for Pete’s sake!) and finally, Lamont was the only town in Whitman County without a library or flush toilet (go figure!) and CWE has been instrumental in consulting on the purchasing, planning and implementation of this library project – a project that in other normal towns would have been a seemingly straightforward thing but in Lamont, assuming CWE was not involved, would be more akin to a modern military campaign like D-Day ending in crushing defeat against a smaller, more primitive opponent that doesn’t even know how to use metal and runs around with blue face paint making strange guttural noises like in that 'Lost World' movie or whatever. So yes, CWE is amazing, and their surviving and succeeding, even in the crucible that is Lamont, is a lasting monument to their excellence and astounding human endurance for all future generations to gaze upon with reverent awe and wonder! Thank you, CWE, for setting the example for us all - oh yeah, and for that new library flush toilet thing after over 100 years of being a town!! Oh, and for putting up with us even though we are crazy! And for all those complex water reports you help with that the State makes us do! Oh yeah, and for that nice woman who always answers the phone so sweetly when we call with really stupid questions. And thanks for putting up with us given that we are crazy!) (you said that already, you loon!!)

Town Deploys Multifaceted Public Awareness Campaign Aimed At Improving Quality Of Life

The Town of Lamont, a town so small that it was necessary to combine town-sponsored public service messages in order to save precious tax dollars given that they are putting in a new library this year, is attempting to foster the all-important ‘human experience’ of living in the 2nd smallest town in the State while also vainly attempting to stomp out the unspeakable scourge as represented by some frightening, creepy, unnatural, ‘other-worldly’ canine abomination – known politely in some circles as the common “Pug”. This communication effort, consisting of a saturation campaign utilizing colorful (yet disturbing!) flyers (printed on recycled paper!) being taped to every telephone pole in town and left on the windshields of all the cars that will still move under their own power (Editorial Note: This is only about 22% of the total vehicles in the dern town, for crying out loud!! This stupid ad campaign should say “Hugs, not old rusty hulks that make your yard look like heck and make everyone think of a bad ‘redneck’ joke”! Come on, people! Focus!) Anyway, this ad campaign is expected to run until the town actually starts hugging one another and also refuses to buy dogs whose faces look like they ran into something as a puppy or the town leadership moves onto some other stupid boondoggle of an idea, or both, insiders report.

“Well, as I see it, the town has two main problems. Number 1 – we don’t like each other and hope everyone else catches a terminal disease, and number 2 – having weird looking dogs is unnatural and tends to depress people as they walk around the town and/or go get their mail or whatever!” said a town leader who has a normal looking dog of uncertain parentage, although it does have unconfirmed behavioral issues involving pant legs. “So, we just decided that promoting hugs, although unreasonable and farfetched in reality given our citizenry, was a step in the right direction and, of course, discouraging people from acquiring those so-called dogs, the pugs, is a good idea on too many levels to discuss here, believe me. So, the only question was how to communicate these very important concerns to a citizenry who is notoriously hard to reach. Sure, we could have advertised on the Jerry Springer show and would have captured 98.6% of the town (many in the audience!!), but with a budget of $10.00 this was deemed cost prohibitive. Then we considered an ad on Google, but no one in town uses the computer so that would have had a poor cost-to-target-market-reach ratio. So we just decided to print up about 25 flyers and have one of the teenagers walk around town and put them on any car that they think is still running. All we can do now is hope for the best, I guess. We certainly don’t expect some unholy ‘hug-a-thon’ like a hippie convention or nothing, but if we can keep the town from being overrun by a bunch of snub-nosed ankle-biters, we will, of course, declare it a huge success!” she concluded optimistically while pulling her dog back from some unsuspecting pant leg.