The kooky and somewhat 'off kilter' town of Lamont, quite possibly the nuttiest, quirkiest, most out-in-left-field town in the history of the Great State of Washington (especially until a few short years ago! Whoa!), made a major breakthrough late last week when a team of harried, over-stressed and genuinely quite brave abnormal psychologists and sociologists specializing in municipal deviance (Talk about risking their own sanity and psychological well-being by exposing themselves to us!! Whoa!!! What professionalism! What devotion to the higher goal of municipal sanity and the nation's mental health!!) managed to trace back the one unifying root cause for all of the town's problems - both past and present - a feat rarely accomplished in the so called 'soft sciences'. This one singular trigger event, although buried under decades of repression, ignorance, poor language skills, blind pro-cattle sentiment and just a general lack of self-awareness and concern for things going on around them, was, tragically, rooted in the very cow culture of the Palouse itself. "Well, I just remember my poor old momma telling me 'you either eat this dadburn cow tongue sandwich or you're gonna get the business end of my belt! If I can turn this thing on your good-for-nothin' father when he don't tow the line to my satisfaction, I can sure turn it on your scrawny rear-end!" recalled Jethro Festoon, 56, one of the more 'unique' area farmer/ranchers. (And what a group to pick from! Its like an all-you-can-eat buffet of 'charming' idiosyncrasies, for crying out loud!!) "Oh, what a choice that dern woman left me! (Hey, that's your momma, boy!) And I remember telling her that at least Festus Bodine's momma peeled the skin off the dern thing - but my loving although somewhat authoritarian (Editorial Note: Somewhat authoritarian? Good gravy, man! She makes Stalin look like Mary Poppins on muscle relaxers! Oh why, historically, have some of the women around here felt the need to be so domineering and unpleasant? Hasn't anyone seen "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" for strong female role models on the unforgiving frontier?) momma would proceed to tell me that cow tongues are like potatoes, all the dadburn vitamins are in the skin! Who can argue with obviously superior logic like that? So I ate them. Yes, I'll admit it!!! I ate them and I acted like I liked them!!! I am not proud of it, but those were the days before them fancy 'One-A-Day' vitamins and all that dern mess" he said, showing a surprising level of local knowledge for human health in general and vitamins in particular. (Editorial Note: 46% of the town believes Vitamin C comes from mosquito bites - thus ensuring that our scurvy levels are off the national charts and people show way too much skin in the summertime - especially right around dusk!)
"Oh the humanity!!! Gag!!! Argh!!! Oh, that is just so wrong!!!" bellowed the mayor who was not raised around here and who gets a little 'green around the gills' just thinking about all those parts of a cow that people around here eat with gusto on a regular basis!!! (We won't even mention 'gelding time' and/or those unfortunate 'Rocky Mountain oysters'!) (Oh, why did you have to mention those? Gah! Ugh!) "Oh, half the time plain-old hamburger gives me the creeps! I mean, what the heck is in there? But that is okay on some level because all the pieces are so small it does not take the most fertile imagination to imagine that they are all Filet Mignon versus some snout or whatever. But a tongue! Gah! Excuse me! Ugh!" he stammered as he bolted from the room before returning several minutes later with his pallor a few more shades of gray!. "Anyway, so it turns out that every single person in this whole dern town ate tongue sandwiches except me? And their supposedly loving mothers made them? Oh, the cruelty! What horror! But oh, now THAT explains a lot, doesn't it! Why couldn't someone have told me that years ago when I got roped into this dern job! Do you realize how many 1000's of man-hours I have spent trying to explain the unexplainable and rationalize the profoundly irrational that is the foundational 'Elemental Table' of the town of Lamont? Oh, whoa, I need to go lay down" he stammered after visualizing a wriggling cow tongue between 2 pieces of Wonder Bread! "Why would anyone who is not starving so willingly eat all those creepy parts of a cow that I shudder to even think about? But people around here gladly woof down these culinary calamities and then brag about it to everyone they know!! Oh, thank goodness I was born in California!" said the big squeamish sissy who will always be an outsider until he can come to grips with eating parts of the cow that may not be pretty but have a certain chewy character all their own!!
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