Blood...Blood Everywhere
DAVENPORT, IA—In what eyewitnesses described as some kind ofterrible dream come true, a warm and viscous liquid identified only as blood…dear God, blood…spilled forth from every conceivable direction Monday.
According to sources still able to speak, the blood first appeared shortly before dawn, horrifying dozens of citizens stirred awake by its ceaseless dripping. While many details remain unclear, including why, why won't it stop and is that…are those…Judas Priest look, the situation has by all accounts only worsened with time.
The blood.
"It's everywhere," said area resident Phillip Reynolds, who claimed he never knew such cold and unrelenting fear. "The blood is everywhere."
Accompanied by an odor at once familiar and yet strangely foreign, the blood has reportedly begun to flow from the walls, the floors, and, in several isolated incidents, has emerged from a child's sandbox. In addition, no, no, oh, no…what happened to all the lights?
"Please, get it off me," said grade-school teacher and mother of three Janice Wilkins, who appeared to be floundering in a crimson pool of unknown fluids. "It's in my hair. Oh, sweet Lord, it's in my mouth. Please."
The blood, which appears to flow as if from hell itself, is only one of a growing number of concerns for residents. Living city council members said that unless someone manages to extinguish that fire, and whatever it is that is down there stops multiplying, little else will matter once night falls.
Dozens of civilians have reported missing loved ones, and many more have been unable to contact friends and family members since all telephone lines are currently not functioning, either from overuse or the result of a power grid coated in human gristle. Furthermore... Brian—is that you? No, Brian, don't!
"Just make it go away, I beg you," said David Mitchell, who added that he and another passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. "I can't stand looking at it anymore. I just can't stand it. What have we done?"
According to what sounded like a passing loudspeaker, all men and women are being urged to remain calm, seek immediate shelter, avoid contact with all rodents or small dogs, and, under no circumstances, to answer their front door.
Before becoming unintelligible, the loudspeaker is also believed to have instructed all residents of faith and moral conviction to please begin praying.
Local residents look on in—oh, no, this can't be happening.
"I never thought it would end this way," said 43-year-old Charles Deere, one of countless eyewitnesses who now wish they were blind. "If only I had been among the first to go. One of the lucky ones."
"Added Deere: "Oh, no, here it comes again…"
Despite working closely with a number of law-enforcement agencies, emergency medical units, wastewater-management specialists, disease control centers, and several of the nation's leading cryptozoologists, authorities said they will not have any more information until some fresh batteries can be found, or that girl who burst screaming into the hospital emergency room late last night regains consciousness.
With hope reportedly fading, a number of citizens nonetheless remained optimistic, and insisted that help is—help has to be—on the way. In addition, the few residents still with heads claimed that this will all be over any minute now, and that very soon everything will be back to normal.
"They're coming to rescue us, I just know it," local nurse Teressa Harding said over the din of that terrible pounding noise as she sat with surviving neighbors in her attic. "It's only a matter of time. We're all going to be okay, I promise."
As of press time, the window, the window, the window—What the ? What is that awful thing in the window?
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Stop Making Movies About My Books
- On the fourteenth of March, in towns nationwide,
- In every cinema, multiplex, on every barnside,
- Gleamed another adapting of one of my books,
- CGI-ed and digitized by another sly crook.
- Horton, my favorite—look how he's been treated!
- Stuffed with tinsels and tassels and promptly excreted!
- The puns! And the filler! The script fees you must save!
- While I tumble and grum-humble around in my grave.
- Did you learn all but squat from The Cat In The Hat?
- Please tell me you fired the prick who made that.
- I would have stopped writing, maybe sold Goodyear tires.
- If I knew one dark day I'd costar with Mike Myers.
- And Oh!
- Oh, dear! Oh!
- My poor Grinch, what they've done!
- They crammed in live-action and snuffed out all the fun!
- It's icky, it's tacky, it's awkward, it's wrong.
- The Whos look like ferrets, it's an hour too long.
- What a rotten idea to spend millions destroying
- This masterful tale kids spent decades enjoying!
- But still you keep making them!
- Just how do you dare?
- Sell my life's work off piecemeal
- To every Tom, Dick, and Har'.
- Why it's simply an outrage—a crime, you must judge!—
- To crap on my books with this big-budget sludge.
- My books are for children to learn ones and twos in,
- Not commercialous slop for Jim Carrey to ruin.
- Have you no respect for the gems of your youth?
- To pervert them on screen from Taiwan to Duluth.
- Even after you drag my last word through the dirt,
- I know you, you pirates,
- You'd cut out my heart for a "Thing 1" T-shirt.
- For eighty-some years I held you vultures at bay,
- knowing just how you'd franchise my good name some day.
- Not yet cold in my grave before you starting shooting
- the first of my classics you'd acquired for looting.
- Mrs. Seuss, that old stoofus, began selling more rights
- to Dreamworks, Universal—any hack in her sights.
- First The Cat In The Hat and then this, that and Seussical
- without a thought to be picky, selectish, or choosical.
- So to Audrey, you whore, you sad sack of a wife:
- Listen close. Pay attention, for once in your life.
- You give Fox In Sox to those sharks who made Elf
- And so help me, I'll rise up and kill you myself.
- No Sneetches by Sony—
- No One Fish: On Ice—
- Burn that Hop On Pop II script not one time but twice.
- Don't sex up my prose with Alyssa Milano…
- And no Green Eggs And Ham with that one-note Romano!
- This must stop! This must end! Don't you see what you're doing?
- You're defiling the work I spent ages accruing.
- And when it's dried up and you've sucked out your pay
- There'll be no going back to a simpler day,
- When your mom would give Horton a voice extra deep,
- And turn the last page as you drifted to sleep.
- Instead you'll have boxed sets, crap movies, and… well,
- You'll have plenty to watch while you're burning in hell.
Farmers Planting Less Corn
Despite a record demand for corn caused in part by ethanol fuel, American farmers are expected to plant 8 percent less corn in 2008 than they did last year. What do you think?
Dawn Patterson,
Personal Trainer
"I'm sorry; people have been putting corn in their cars? Did I fall asleep and wake up 500 years in the past?"
Sam Reese,
Systems Analyst
"I'm surprised how quickly the farmers were able to master OPEC-style supply and demand manipulation."
Larry Kemmis,
Secretary
"I knew the day would come when a corndog would lend me an air of affluence."
Report: Nation's Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened By Aristocratization
WASHINGTON—According to a report released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, the recent influx of exceedingly affluent powder-wigged aristocrats into the nation's gentrified urban areas is pushing out young white professionals, some of whom have lived in these neighborhoods for as many as seven years.
Multibillion-dollar castles like this one have been popping up all over Brooklyn.
Maureen Kennedy, a housing policy expert and lead author of the report, said that the enormous treasure-based wealth of the aristocracy makes it impossible for those living on modest trust funds to hold onto their co-ops and converted factory loft spaces.
"When you have a bejeweled, buckle-shoed duke willing to pay 11 or 12 times the asking price for a block of renovated brownstones—and usually up front with satchels of solid gold guineas—hardworking white-collar people who only make a few hundred thousand dollars a year simply cannot compete," Kennedy said. "If this trend continues, these exclusive, vibrant communities with their sidewalk cafés and faux dive bars will soon be a thing of the past."
According to Kennedy, one of the most pressing concerns associated with rapid aristocratization is the drastic transformation of the metropolitan landscape in a way that fails to maximize livable space.
"A three-block section of [Chicago neighborhood] Wicker Park that once accommodated eight families, two vintage clothing stores, a French cleaners, and a gourmet bakery has been completely razed to make way for a private livery stable and carriage house," Kennedy said. "The space is now entirely unusable for affordable upper-income condominium housing. No one can live there except for the odd stable boy or footman who gets permission to sleep in the hayloft."
Many of those affected by the ostentatious reshaping of their once purely upmarket neighborhoods said that they often wish for a return back to the privileged communities they helped to overdevelop just a few years ago. Among the first to feel the effects of the encroaching aristocracy have been local business owners like Fort Greene, Brooklyn resident Neil Getz.
"Around here, you used to be able to get a Fair-Trade latte and a chocolate-chip croissant for only eight bucks," said Getz, who is planning to move back in with his parents after being forced out of the lease on his organic grocery store by a harpsichord purveyor. "Now it's all tearooms and private salon gatherings catered with champagne and suckling pig. Who can afford that?"
Incoming aristocrats are easily spotted by their distinctive dress and taste for chamber music.
"It's just a terrible shame," Getz continued. "There was this great little shop right across the street from my duplex apartment where I bought my baby daughter a Ramones onesie a couple of years ago, just after she was born. That whole block is an opera house now."
The aristocracy has adamantly dismissed claims that the sweeping changes are detrimental to the merely wealthy who have been displaced, and many persons of noble blood have pointed to aristocratization's benefits. These include lower crime rates attributed to new punishments, such as public floggings and the pillory, which are primarily meted out for maintaining direct eye contact with members of the highest class.
"These accusations are pure, slanderous rubbish," said Lord Nathan Dunkirk III, the owner of a prodigious manor house that, along with its steeplechase course and topiary garden, sits on what was once the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. "If anything, the layabouts and wastrels have been afforded a veritable glut of new and felicitous opportunities as bootblacks and scullery maids."
Other aristocrats have echoed Dunkirk and have additionally deflected blame onto regification, a process by which they say they were priced out of their vast rural holdings by kings who wished to consolidate property and develop monumental palatial estates.
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