Town of Lamont Wisely Changes Name To Reduce Potential For Spelling Errors

The Town of Lamont, a humble, unassuming, decidedly educationally challenged hamlet nestled up against the icy, unforgiving bosom of the Jurassic Park-like Scablands in the otherwise beautiful and fruitful Palouse region of Eastern Washington, has decided to adapt to the harsh taskmaster known by the name “Reality” and address a long-standing problem related to the general education level of the area citizenry – a chronic and pervasive inability to spell, do math, comprehend history, embrace the modern era and basically adapt to the Industrial Age, insiders report.

“Well, let’s be honest here, we have a local School System run by ranchers at the School Board level, and any dern fool knows that in these parts, the dumbest son inherits the ranch, so you don’t have to be some genius to realize that after a very few generations of bad decision-making that the whole educational arrangement would go to hell in a hand basket…” said Clem Festoon, an area rancher and obviously a man who knows of what he speaks, given that he inherited his daddy’s ranch in 1996 after all the smart brothers moved away. “Anyway, after we got done educating (pronounced ‘Ed-U-Cait-In”) them little rascals, we realized that not a one of them could spell worth a dern– and that led to them not even being able to tell folks like the police or whoever where they lived when they get arrested 8-10 times a year, (whoa, that seems a tad light!) not if they had to write it on a police report, anyway. It was just a mess. Sure, Lamont has a whole bunch of letters in it, so it only made sense to tighten the thing up a bit to cut down on those all too frequent mistakes that made the American education (pronounced “Ed-U-Cay-Sion” Whoa!) system look bad, that’s all!” he rambled on, looking like an old Billy-goat chewing on a hornet or something. “So we all got together and decided to jettison one of them dern letters and to see if that solved the problem. We were going to get rid of 4 of them, but some smarty-pants pointed out that there is some town somewhere called “LA”, so we figured we’d start off small and modest, as is our nature” he said expansively.

“Well, statistically speaking, by Lamont discarding just one of the letters in their name, that reduces the chance of a spelling error by a whopping 16.67%. That may not seem like a huge percentage, but 16.67% is 16.67%, any way you slice it.” said Dr. Winston Finklemeyer, an area mathematician and the guy who helps the area ranchers count their cows when it is ‘cow counting time”. “So, anyway, this may seem like a quite unnecessary gesture by an educationally challenged town, but changing the town name from “Lamont” to “Lamon” can only reap dividends in the long term, especially since the farmers and ranchers on the school board spend a vast majority of available discretionary funds on sports as opposed to the “3 R’s” (Reading, writing and ‘ranching’?)” he said, putting his handy solar powered calculator back in his plastic pocket protector with the little atom logo on it. (Atom as in atomic – not Eve’s husband from the bible or whatever!)