Transcribed below.

Freshman congressman Albert Cardoon, responding to allegations that surfaced in news reports shortly before his swearing in, has admitted that some of the statements he made during his campaign were not strictly accurate. In particular, Cardoon did not invent penicillin; he was not the “mastermind” behind Doctors Without Borders; he did not write thirty-nine plays under the pseudonym “William Shakespeare”; he was not the first American to walk on Mars; he is not a full-blooded Appomattoc chief; he did not obtain doctorates at Oxford and Cambridge simultaneously; he did not win Super Bowl XLVII; he did not write the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation; his parents were not killed in the 9/11 attacks; his sister was not killed in the Johnstown Flood; his son Herbert was not killed in Pompeii in a.d. 79, but is still in the seventh grade at Blandville Junior High School; his Uncle Al is not the same Alexander who conquered Persia; and his wife is not Lillian Russell. Cardoon insists, however, that it is true that his family “in the direct ancestral line” was expelled from the Garden of Eden for what he terms a “very minor offense.”

Sir: I asked for a cup of tea at the coffeehouse around the corner, not the one where they have the mimes, but the other one, and they handed me a foam cup with a teabag in it, and the teabag had a tag dangling from it. And this was the message on the tag: “Trust your identity; be in touch with your reality.” Well, my reality never calls. It never even sends a postcard. My reality and I haven’t spoken since 2014, when I told my reality to take a hike. And my identity was stolen by Slovenian hackers last October, so I certainly don’t trust that. So I think we should tell these big tea companies, first of all, you can just keep out of my personal life, thank you very much, and in return we won’t ask you about your relatives. And second, it’s not “tea” unless it’s made from Camellia sinensis, okay? So don’t go telling me peppermint and licorice root and dogbane and lawn clippings all stuffed into a little bag make “tea,” because you’re not fooling anybody but yourselves. —Sincerely, Name Withheld Against My Will.

Sir: It is clear that whoever runs the National Weather Service is a complete incompetent. Yesterday it snowed. In December! Yes, there was free crushed ice all over the ground—in the middle of December, when the temperature was twenty-eight degrees outside. I don’t need ice everywhere when it’s cold outside, for Pete’s sake. I need it in August, when it’s hot as blazes. But no—every August I end up having to buy my own ice. Then December rolls around, and they start giving it away for free. No wonder the government runs on a deficit. I’m tired of paying taxes for giant entitlement programs that benefit literally no one. I wrote my Congresswoman at the Capitol, but the letter was returned marked “NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS,” so I’m writing you instead. Either we should sort out the mess at the National Weather Service and get the right weather to the right places at the right times, or we should just give up on weather and let private enterprise take care of it. Also, if it’s not too much trouble, could you run a missing-persons ad for my congresswoman? —Sincerely Zimmerman P. Zummer, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Canning, Duck Hollow University.

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