Posts filed under “Press Clippings”

IN SPORTS NEWS.

The China National Native Produce and Animal By-Products Import-Export Corporation having chosen not to renew the naming rights to China National Native Produce and Animal By-Products Import-Export Corporation Stadium, formerly Acrisure Stadium, formerly Heinz Field, the Stadium Authority has sold the rights to Canabeer Corporation, which plans to name the stadium for its moderately priced higher-alcohol brand, Pansy Malt Liquor. If the sale is finalized, the Steelers will be playing in Pansy Field beginning this fall. Team sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, report that several members of the team have been placed on suicide watch.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

Sir: It is very clear that a lack of kindness is the fundamental problem facing society today. All the violence, all the ill will, all the political gridlock and mutual suspicion could be cured by a little kindness spread out through the general population.

How shall we deal with this problem? Clearly the time for timidity has passed. If Americans will not exercise a little kindness on their own initiative, then kindness must be rammed down their throats.

To make a beginning, much can be accomplished even without government action. I am a firm believer in the power of volunteer work. When enough of us have decided that kindness will be expected and demanded from the people around us, we shall quickly see the effects of our new attitude. But those effects will manifest themselves only if we are consistent and inflexible in our intolerance of unkindness in the people we meet. I recommend sarcastic mocking as a start. If that fails to produce kindness in the subject, shouting is the obvious next step, and for intractable cases physical violence should not be ruled out.

Ultimately, however, the problem affects us on a national scale, and therefore the national government will have to take responsibility for it sooner or later. A useful beginning could be made, and volunteer work toward our goal encouraged, by establishing a national register of unkind persons, so that ordinary citizens can check the register and see which of their own friends and neighbors are to be treated with contempt and disdain. That is only a beginning, however, and I think it is high time our government took the example of Singapore to heart and instituted a schedule of corporal punishments for stubbornly unkind persons. I do not mean that first offenders should be caned, of course; for first offenders, it should be sufficient to empower our fine police officers to give them a warning in the colorful language that comes so naturally to law-enforcement professionals. After that, though, bring on the birch.

Are these strong measures? Yes, they are. But this is a national emergency. The very future of the Republic is at stake. At this crossroads in our history, it will not be possible to solve our problems if we continue being nice to unkind people. If they will not conform to the grand old American tradition of kindness and polite decency, then they must be made to suffer. —Sincerely, Natalye Paquin, CEO, Points of Light Foundation.

NEWS UPDATE.

It has been reported that the four scoutmasters at Camp Rusty Waters have been freed without serious injury. Forty-three Cub Scouts have been sent to bed without supper, and the camp’s supply of duct tape has been removed to an undisclosed secure location.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

Sir: Last night I purchased a bag labeled “Everything Salad” from a certain supermarket which I shall call, for the sake of convenience, “Whole Foods.” A superficial examination of the contents through the transparent plastic was, of course, all that was permitted me by the packaging, but I took the label at its word and spent my $5.95.

When I opened the bag at home, what did I find? Not a single 1957 Dayton trolleybus token in the package! I carefully sifted the contents, but there was not a Ruckers harpsichord to be found. If the Virginia House of Delegates was hidden in that pile of lettuce and cabbage, I certainly failed to locate it. I did not see a badminton shuttlecock or a terrarium. I did not even find a single pulsar, which ought to have been quite easy to locate if it had been in there at all.

In short, the salad, in spite of its deceptive packaging, did not contain everything. I will say that I do not blame the manager of the store. He agreed to refund my money after I had spent half an hour explaining the problem to him, and indeed he seemed quite eager to make sure that I left his store happy, or at least that I left his store. But still, fraud is being committed in the packaged-salad industry, and I think it my duty to inform other consumers that packages labeled “Everything Salad” may not in fact contain everything. Thank you for providing the forum in which to do so. And, by the way, just how celebrated is this magazine? —Sincerely, Melville P. Gaspipe, East Liberty.

IN BUSINESS NEWS.

The De Fitte Motors Corporation has announced a recall of all De Fitte De Lay sedans, coupes, and station wagons for the years 1963 through 2024 inclusive. Consumer organizations have reported numerous incidents of brakes failing, axles rolling away, steering wheels breaking off at the stem, and rhinoceros attacks on De Lay vehicles. Owners of vehicles affected by the recall are instructed to return their vehicles to the nearest De Fitte dealer, where an interlock will be installed that will prevent drivers from operating the vehicles if they (either the drivers or the vehicles) have been in contact with a liability attorney.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

Sir: I am appalled. I am also outraged. It would not be too much to say that I am incandescently furious.

What is the object, you ask, of my white-hot indignation? I have forgotten. It has been years since I was able to specify the cause of my appalledment. All I know is that I have been appalled for a good long time now, and in those years I have built up heaps of appalledness, a fortress of appalleditude, an appallation mountain as it were. I am appalled when I rise in the morning. I am appalled while I eat breakfast. I am appalled at work all day; I am appalled when I come home to my efficiency apartment; I am appalled when I lay my head on my pillow.

It is, in short, my state of unrelenting appalledification that gets me through the day. But I was not always so fortunate. I had to teach myself the skills I have so laboriously built up: no one taught me to be appalled this way. In school, outrage was not even a whole class, let alone the main focus of my education. Only in history classes was any kind of outrage specifically taught, and even then only in conjunction with very limited subjects, like slavery. Anyone can be appalled by slavery! Where’s the skill in that? It would not be too much to say that it took a lifetime of careful training and desensitization for the slaveholding classes not to be appalled by slavery.

What we need is a complete reform of our educational system. Throw out all the useless detritus of the past, which only a misguided reverence for tradition keeps alive. Children don’t need to learn math, because we have calculators on our phones. Children don’t need to learn to write, because we have artificial intelligence. Children don’t need to learn to read, because we have YouTube. What children do need is the skill to be appalled all the time, without the need of a particular subject to be appalled about. They need to learn the art of nonspecific outrage. Perhaps, if I may offer a suggestion, they can be taught to be appalled about their own education, and then it will be easy for them to generalize from there.

—Sincerely,
“Mad Marvin” Blitzmueller, M.Ed.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

Sir: I write to address the most egregious example of senseless discrimination and thoughtless bias in the modern United States. I refer, as your readers will already have surmised, to the naming of sport utility vehicles, or SUVs as they are known in the trade.

Just run down the list of SUVs marketed in the United States. Chevrolet Tahoe, Hyundai Santa Fe, Jeep Wrangler, Kia Mohave, Hyundai Tucson, Toyota Sequoia, Kia Telluride—one after another, we find vehicles named for places in the American Southwest, or for things associated with the Southwest.

Where are the SUVs named for places and things in the American Northeast? It is the most populous part of the country, and yet in the whole list of names I could only find one, Acadia, that might arguably have something to do with the Northeast. We search in vain for a Buick Utica, or a Subaru Sebascodegan, or a Hyundai Connoquenessing. We find no Jeep Stockbroker or Toyota Prothonotary to romanticize the typical native occupations of this land of legend and adventure.

Now, I could make the economic argument. I could point out how citizens of northern New Jersey would flock to dealers to be first in line for a Nissan Perth Amboy. I could enlarge upon the surefire appeal of a Chrysler Throop in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. I could make an unanswerable argument that a Kia Nantucket would revitalize the languishing limerick industry not just in the Northeast but nationwide.

But I prefer to stand on the moral high ground. This is a matter of elementary justice. A whole quarter of the country is suffering, and what shall we do about it? Shall we not say to the people of Fitchburg, “Yes, you are good and valuable people, and worthy of having an SUV named after you”?

And also, can we please stop beating around the bush and just call them station wagons? We’re not fooling anybody, you know. —Sincerely, Anne-Louise Cabot-Lowell, President, Acmetonia Chamber of Commerce.

FROM YOUR BOROUGH POLICE.

On the advice of expert consultants in law enforcement, your Grant Borough police department has decided to implement Broken-Windows Policing. The results have been gratifying. So far we have broken the windows of five stores on Grant Avenue, all of which had failed to contribute to the Police and Troopers’ Lifestyle Improvement Fund in January. In related news, we are pleased to report that contributions to the Police and Troopers’ Lifestyle Improvement Fund for February were up 238%.

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Unusually cold temperatures caused a water-main break in the Twenty-Second Ward early this morning. The Water and Sewer Authority has sent a truck full of cheap red wine for affected residents to drink until the situation is resolved.

The Allegheny Extinguisher, Document Safe, Fireproof Tile, and Asbestos Safety Curtain Company warehouse in Chateau burned last night with a loss of all contents.

Two employees of the city accounting department, fired on Thursday, were reinstated this morning after it was demonstrated to the Deputy Director’s satisfaction that “percolation” and “peculation” are not the same thing.

In the latest reorganization of Catholic affairs in Pittsburgh, all Latin Rite churches are scheduled to become Byzantine Rite on March 14, and all Byzantine Rite churches will become Latin Rite on the same date. Maronite churches remain unchanged for the present.

Acrisure yesterday terminated its agreement for naming rights to the football stadium. The naming rights were purchased on the same day by the China National Native Produce and Animal By-Products Import-Export Corporation.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

Sir: Owing to some embarrassing misunderstandings, it has become necessary for us, the members of Citizens Against Poverty, to explain our organization’s purpose and goals. Misinterpreting the name, some people have conceived the notion that we intend to fight poverty by making everyone uniformly prosperous. If we indeed held such a risible notion, we should deserve all the derision they could heap on us. Even if we lived in a science-fiction socialist utopia, it would still not be possible to make truly uniform prosperity a reality. Instead, it is our purpose to address the problem of poverty in a much more practical-minded and feasible manner by killing all the poor people. Some may call our program cruel, but a thinking citizen will see that it is in fact the opposite of cruelty to put the miserable out of their misery—to remove them from a world that has demonstrated that it has no use for them in the most concrete and unambiguous fashion possible: namely, by making them poor. If there are among your readers any forward-thinking, compassionate, and above all rich citizens who would like to see an end to poverty in our lifetime, they are earnestly invited to submit a membership application with signed credit report to our secretary, Mr. Grenville Handel-Barre, in care of Citizens Against Poverty, Fox Chapel. —Sincerely, Astoria Handel-Barre, President, Citizens Against Poverty.