The Drowning Howl: Saturday July 9, 2022
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5:22am Good morning - unless it's the afternoon or evening. Time for another weekly recap at the Drowning Howl. Our top story, after extensive testing, the popular new Smorgasburger was finally deemed safe for consumption yesterday. Authorities had acted on research that connected the fast food option's world-wide appearance with an average two-inch increase in waist size across the population. According to the lab report - sponsored by Foodstuffs - high concentrations of sugar and fat, though present in the sandwich, pose absolutely no threat to your health, as long as you eat nothing else for the rest of the day and follow up with strenuous exercise for four to six hours. They insist that it must be something else making people fat, such as using too much salad dressing. Our future prosperity rests upon firm theoretical foundations, say the mathematicians of Fiscal Foresight, a think tank devoted to economic problem solving. Currently experimenting with lottery jackpot odds, they believe that paying off the country's astronomical debt in one massive step may actually be possible. In the same way that jackpots produce instant means where none existed before, a 'lucky' government investment could conceivably return sufficient dividends to catapult us right out of our crisis. All we need is patience, though one may try to improve one's own luck by catching a fish or, perhaps, by wearing something red. Our correspondent tried to interview the team, but was told that they had all gone to the track for the afternoon. Speaking of prosperity, statistics confirm that national unemployment fell to an astonishing all-time low over the last financial quarter. Tens of thousands of new low-paying positions open up every month as the government aims to create at least two jobs for every citizen of working age, both of which are needed to forestall homelessness and eventual starvation. To critics who say the plan indicates an even lower low in our ever decreasing standard of living, the government points out that a seventy-hour work-week will soon make them too busy to notice such things, and, more importantly, too tired to figure out who's responsible. On the Eastern front, with no end to hostilities in sight, some are wondering how it all got started. It started when a young democracy was invaded by its former occupier, a large autocracy, in the latter's apparent bid to recover territories lost since 1991. Now, we all know that democracy is bad, but autocracy is much worse. The simple freedom to complain that we Westerners love so much does not exist in an autocracy. Instead you go to prison for uttering a banned word in a public place. Cannabis use is largely decriminalized here, but they send you to a Siberian gulag for twenty years if they catch you with so much as a roach in an autocracy. Thus, the expansion of such an autocracy threatens our very way of life. We must oppose it, if only for the right to party. That's it, all right? Never mind how they still permit abortion. That won't last. And, in our spotlight this week, a self described time traveler with no identification has made a unique appeal for public support. He says he was sent here with a specially trained crow that was supposed to cause a key politician to duck from a scheduled assassination attempt at the critical moment. None of us were supposed to even know about this, but he thinks that he may have slightly miscalculated on his bearings and missed his target, so radically maligning the timeline that returning to the future has become unthinkable. He and his feathered companion can always try again, but he says he needs to make some expensive adjustments to his time vessel, and our ATM's don't accept his debit card. He has set up a commercial website to gather funds. The fate of the world may hang in his balance. Wait a minute, doesn't that leave the rest of us trapped in a doomed timeline? Oh, well, I suppose it can't be news if you knew it all along. And that's all for another week. Happy weekend from the whole population here at the Howl. |
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| © 2022. Scripts by David Skerkowski. All rights reserved. |
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