The chicken used to make Food Festival store-brand chicken soups for the past three years has been reported missing from the United Canning Co. plant in Sharpsburg. Police say that the chicken will probably be disoriented and surly, and is likely to smell rather ripe, not having had a bath in three days. Anyone with information on the whereabouts of the chicken is requested to contact the United Canning Co. directly or through the customer-service counter at any Food Festival supermarket. A reward of 29¢, in the form of discount coupons for store-brand soup, is offered for information leading to the successful recapture of the chicken.

An English teacher at Blandville Area Senior High School was disciplined by the school board today after it was revealed that she had allowed her students to read a “novel” entitled Don Quixote by an obscure Spanish writer.

“Students need to understand that ‘novels’ are nothing but claptrap and lies,” said Superintendent of Schools J. Pillington Bleek. “The very word ‘fiction’ indicates that the writings so designated are not true.  Non-fiction reading is the only kind of reading required or permitted by modern educational theory.”

The unnamed teacher has been placed on probation, but is permitted to keep her current pay grade under the condition that she assign as her next class reading the instructional manual for the classroom’s new 48-inch flat-screen television.

Scandal erupted at the University of Pennsylvania today when it was discovered that, for more than twenty years, the campus bookstore had been selling wirebound notebooks decorated with the university arms in which the first and last words of the school motto had been obliterated. The former motto, “Leges sine moribus vanae” (“Laws are vain without morals”), was thus somewhat altered in meaning. In a quickly convened emergency meeting, the trustees voted to alter the “outdated and patriarchal” official motto to match the one printed on the notebooks, “acknowledging the latter as a better reflection of current conditions in university life.”

Strong objections were registered yesterday by Israeli, Arab, Pakistani, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Iranian delegates as the UN prepared to vote on a resolution defining bacon as a basic human right. In emergency conferences, the various Islamic nations quickly negotiated peace agreements with Israel in order to cooperate in fighting the common danger. Later in the day, the UN General Assembly rejected the proposal by a margin of more than two to one, and celebratory wars broke out all over the Middle East.

Meanwhile, bacon-demanding crowds in Pyongyang deposed the government of Kim Jong-un and set up a parliamentary republic dominated by a coalition of dissidents calling themselves the BLT Party; but according to government radio the participants in the short-lived experiment all surrendered voluntarily and have been successfully reeducated, joining the Reformed Class Enemies Choir in a stirring performance of “No Motherland Without You” that brought tears to the eyes of the Supreme Leader and earned the performers two beans each with their evening rice.

Sir: It has come to my attention, and in a manner so forceful as to compel a response, that our current system of education is a cesspit of appalling futility. Young Americans of the most impressionable age are being seduced, at the public expense, into the most pernicious habits imaginable, merely (as far as I can tell) to flatter the vanity of some incompetent fool with an education degree who desires the whole world to be as foolish as he is.

The matter came up when I was attempting to hire a few workers to staff my small but growing chain of Bob’s Burger Yurt regional fast-food restaurants. I interrogated each candidate closely with respect to his or her education, and I discovered that, with dismaying uniformity, they had all wasted ten or more years of their lives learning absolutely useless trivia.

It seems that, if the schools had their way (and I include private and religious schools here as well as public schools), our children would all be raised to be novel-reading geometers and historians. Of what earthly use is it to read books that are avowedly false? In what way will knowing the area of a right triangle speed the frying process? Does knowing the date of the Battle of Bull Run get the customer his bacon cheeseburger any faster? Lists—lists are what children should study. They should read lists and study them until they are able to glance at a list and name each item in order. Then they should be released from the drudgery of unnecessary schoolwork and move on to a lifetime of productive employment serving customers and getting their orders right.

I call for—nay, I demand—a thorough overhaul of our educational system along strictly practical lines. In first grade, let children study and memorize lists, over and over, until they can recite them with confidence, with all the items in their correct order. In second grade, let the children apply those lists to practical endeavors. The third grade and beyond may be abandoned as useless, and children may be assigned directly to shifts at convenient Bob’s Burger Yurt locations.

Now, I already hear some whining daydreamer complaining that I would deprive children of their childhood. Nothing could be further from the truth! On the contrary, I would have them assigned to tasks that require small and nimble fingers, so that, far from being deprived of their childhood, they would be given an opportunity to turn their childhood to some account.

This is all I can write at present; it is nearly three in the afternoon, and I must take my station on the porch to make sure no sniveling brat gets away with taking a shortcut across the corner of my yard on his way home from school.  But I urge our school boards and professional “educators” to consider their positions before dismissing my suggestions.

——Sincerely, Zangrulf Canker, Owner, Bob’s Burger Yurt.

The entire Tuesday issue of the Dispatch was incorrect. President Obama will not be appearing in the role of Isolde at the Week of Wagner Festival in Sewickley. Hurricanes are not caused by overuse of mechanical egg beaters. The population of Rankin has not doubled in the past eighteen minutes. Governor Corbett was not the star of a popular science-fiction program on the Dumont Network. Two and two do not make eighteen under certain limited circumstances. The Dispatch regrets the errors and promises to try to do better tomorrow.

The Law Offices of Rufinus and Rufinus are delighted to announce that Mr. Martin Rufinus, Esq., has been reinstated to the bar again, and will therefore not be forced to reveal which prominent local judge he happened to see sharing an intimate dinner for two with a known cabaret singer at the Common Plea.

The corporate-law firm of Rippin, Bingley, and Pratt announces that, for the entire month of December, all attorneys on the second through thirty-seventh floors of the Rippin, Bingley, and Pratt Building will be on sale for 10% off the regular hourly rate.

As the holiday season approaches, won’t you consider giving generously to the Public Defenders’ Legal Defense Fund? Your donation may be all that stands between an indigent public defender and a Thanksgiving spent in jail for contempt of court.

Be it known that the honorable Judge Melvin Rattle of Superior Court does hereby and herewith inform the metropolitan legal community that the word “balderdash” will no longer be tolerated in his courtroom, and this means you, Pratt.

—

WHAT DO YOU GIVE THE CAD WHO HAS EVERYTHING?

The Crimes of Galahad, now available in paperback, for Kindle, or for Nook.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Sir: As we all prepare to vote in this historic election, I hope every one of us will remember one thing: Our current president has actually apologized for America. He has had the effrontery to suggest that Americans in the past may have done things that were wrong. Worse than that, he has even suggested that people in other countries may be almost as good as Americans.

Would you tolerate that kind of behavior even in a six-year-old child? Of course not. If my son Liutpert ever admits to having been wrong about anything, I beat the tar out of him till he says he’s sorry. Then I really lay into him, because I want him to grow up knowing that a real man never apologizes for anything.

Yet our president, the most important person in our country who is not a talk-show radio host, regularly indulges in behavior I wouldn’t tolerate in my own six-year-old son! Nor is that other guy any better. Why, I hear that, only last week, the opposition candidate (I refuse to mention his name) bumped into a voter in Ohio and actually said “Excuse me.” “Excuse me”! Do you want a President of the United States who goes around saying “Excuse me” every time his country accidentally wipes out a city or two in some dirtbag foreign country?

This is why I’m voting Fascist in the 2012 elections, and I urge all right-minded, patriotic, unapologetic American citizens to join me. Or at least get the hell out of my way.

In an interview in yesterday’s Dispatch, artist Bennett Worrell, a member of the Artists’ League of North America, described the purpose of art as “the creation of beauty.” A spokesman for the Artists’ League has informed the Dispatch that Mr. Worrell’s statement was incorrect. The purpose of art is to convey uncomfortable truths to the bourgeoisie through the medium of offensive images. Mr. Worrell has been convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. The Dispatch regrets the error.