PLATTEVILLE, WI – A Platteville man was detained by Police today after neighbors spotted him riding naked down the street on his John Deere lawn tractor. Police would not comment on the matter pending investigation, but neighbors interviewed reported that 57 year old Mike Winkleman had begun acting strangely as recently as late last month. “The wife and I saw him out there during the last snow storm trying to run over his snow blower with an SUV – the thing had stalled in the middle of the driveway and he just went nuts, crying and screaming something about ‘the season that Satan had brought’,” said Ned Puckerson, a long time Platteville resident. “I guess the winter just got to Mike so that when spring finally came he got so excited he couldn’t hold it in any longer and he just cracked.” Other neighbors reported that they could hear Winkleman making “inappropriate comments” to the lawn tractor just before he allegedly rubbed his body against the rear of the device, stripped off his clothes and then mounted the tractor to ride it across his lawn and out onto the street where he resides.
Platteville Journal, April 2, 2010
ORANGE, CT - In what onlookers described as the most bizarre act of animal behavior they had ever witnessed, a cat was seen here today attempting to mate with a full grown Springer Spaniel. The cat, a male Canadian Hairless named Tootsie, had reportedly chased the confused and frightened dog along the fence line of its owner’s property until the cowering Spaniel became too tired to move and ultimately succumbed to the cat’s advances. When questioned about the incident Florence Depgen, the owner of both the cat and dog, seemed not to be too surprised. “Oh that’s just Tootsie being Tootsie,” she said. “He’s such a little love at this time of year. Yes, he can get a bit hormonal at the beginning of the spring but if Hildegard could talk, I believe she’d tell you that once she gives in she actually kind of enjoys it.” In related news, two female squirrels, a ground hog and full grown male deer were spotted today in the parking lot of the Milford Mall rubbing their bodies against each other and writhing on the warm asphalt in what one Animal Control specialist described as “what the spring mating season might look like at the end of the world.”
The New Haven Register, April 7, 2010
MOUNTAIN VIEW , CA – Investigators say that a 43 year old wife and mother of four was found today approximately 400 miles from home with a lap top computer and 200 pairs of new shoes in a harbor side San Diego motel where she had been living since disappearing on April Fool’s day. The woman, Patty Flapcastle, was known by everyone in the idyllic town of Mountain View as a “churchgoing woman and a perfect wife and mother,” until the first week of spring when her husband and children report that she began “parading around the house in skinny jeans and a tube top that really didn’t fit her properly.” Apparently, Mrs. Flapcastle had not made dinner or done any food shopping for more than a week and when asked by her husband and children when they might expect their next meal, she smiled blankly and simply drove away in her Chevy Suburban. When questioned by police, the proprietor of the Happy Sailor motel where Mrs. Flapcastle was found is quoted as saying, “This gal really seems to have slipped her chain. The maids tell me that she spent a lot of time searching Facebook for old boyfriends and when she did leave the room I heard that she cleaned out a bunch of the local shoe stores before going down to the pier to stop sailors and write her cell phone number on the backs of their hands.” Local police say that that they haven’t seen a case of spring fever this pronounced since April of 1943 when a desperate 36 year old woman accosted an 85 year old wheelchair bound priest after every other eligible man in town had been drafted.
San Jose Mercury News – April 9, 2010
BERNE, NY – A row of vacant lots next to a housing development was the scene today of Mother Nature gone mad when a small field of dormant Honey Suckle, Clematis and English ivy exploded overnight to completely cover five adjacent houses. “We opened our window to do our spring cleaning and it was as if a flowering, leafy wall of destruction had been built around our property,” said Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Bolognese. “We couldn’t even get out the front door. It took us almost nine hours to hack our way out to our car and when we finally got back into the house the ivy had already made its way up the stairs and into the bathroom where it was wrapping itself around the toilet.” Other affected home owners say they cannot cut down the spring growth fast enough and many have decided to simply abandon their homes for safer climates. “I have to get away from this spring insanity once and for all,” said 68 year old Matilda Furblad. “A lot of my friends have retired to Florida to be someplace warm, but that’s just crazy. I mean during spring they have swamp weeds down there that grow as fast and big as freight trains. I’m too old to be in a fight to the death with an Asparagus Fern so I’m moving someplace frozen where nothing green can grow and the Honey Suckle that I found in bed with me this morning will never find me again.”
Albany Times Union – April 13, 2010
NEEDHAM, PA and SOUTH BEACH, FL - the days between late March and mid April – filled with spring breaks and long weekends - are generally acknowledged as the unofficial start of the spring season for millions of children and young adults throughout the United States. Less acknowledged, however, is the toll that the hormonal activities and sexual escapades of spring can take on teachers, parents and local law enforcement. No one knows this better than Missy Higgins, a fifth grade teacher in Needham, Massachusetts, “At this time of year, the kids just go off their rockers,” says Elliot. “I had one eleven year old boy actually run up the side of a wall and hang off the top of a light fixture for a couple of seconds before falling to the floor in hysterics. And the girls are no better. The giggling and squealing that goes on every time one of them looks a picture of that anorexic teenage idiot-boy from Twilight is enough to make you want to stick a pencil in your ear. Sometimes I wish I could put the whole class to sleep with a low dose of sedatives.” Elsewhere, in Florida spring break hotspots from South Beach to Miami, romantically supercharged teens and twenty-somethings have been found in the most improbable places, apparently incapable of stopping themselves from fondling each other’s bodies. “We found one pair of them inside the hotel’s walk in freezer,” said Sergeant Horace Espinoza of the South Beach police. “They were nearly frozen solid and we had to separate the boy’s head from the girl’s chest with the hot water sprayer at the dishwashing station. Then there was another pair of them that we found - so help me God - at the bottom of the pool taking turns breathing heavily through a garden hose.” But it is Bob Piddlebuck, a dentist in Needham, MA, who seems to have summed it up most succinctly when he said, “I’ve have three kids between the ages of 12 and 20 years old and when spring rolls around each year I want to hide under the hatch of my Bilco cellar door. I mean spring is a beautiful season and all, but sometimes - between being called into school to talk to my kid’s teachers and the Massachusetts State Police extraditing one of my kids back from Florida - it’s so beautiful that I can hardly stand it.”
US A Today – April 16, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Dear Pope Benedict . . .
“VATICAN CITY – At a solemn Good Friday service, Pope Benedict XVI's personal preacher likened the tide of allegations that the pontiff has covered up sex abuse cases to the ‘more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism’ . . . . Victims say Benedict — both as a former archbishop of Munich and later as a Vatican cardinal directing the Holy See's policy on handling abuse cases — was part of a culture of cover-up and confidentiality basically devised to protect church hierarchy.” Associated Press, Friday April 2, 2010
Dear Pope Benedict,
I am a father of a different sort. Our faithful wander with me where I go, Holy Father. These followers trust that I believe in the good over evil embodied by Jesus; they believe that I have been chosen among them to pick up his path and portray those simple miracles that form the ever living, unquestionable grace of our lives. I am seen as protection by those of faith, Holy Father, a wall between their souls and the ache of surviving, and a window into the glory of heaven that awaits them. But, Holy Father, there is a boy - a child really - one I’ve baptized and on whose tongue I first laid the body of your son and, God help me, that boy’s body is in my hands now. This morning we are hidden in the half light of a sacristy and he is withering under the wickedness of my touch, unsure as to the meaning of the smiling wine-stained lips and teeth that I will use to talk my way into his body and eat out the center of his soul. Oh, Holy Father, you let me appear to this child and then you hid me behind the smoke of dogma and commanded that our flock look away into the mirrors of faith arranged to hypnotize them into immaculate acceptance. So I am not just a monster, Holy Father, I am your monster concealed in a dark closet filled with sacred vestments. I am the blemish of your fingerprints creeping up the sides of our chaste silver chalices. I am the shepherd you have put in charge of our innocents, untying my hood to reveal the dripping fangs of a wolf. Even our God is begging you to stop me, Holy Father, because even He knows I cannot be changed with His love and that I will never be able to look at a child and see one of His lambs, only a lamb for slaughter, because. . .
I am a married man, Pope Benedict. I epitomize the suit and tie, Catholic propriety of a rock-solid husband ribboned into the heart-shaped bows of his wife’s love . . . and her love alone. I shave myself clean each Sunday morning to prowl the nave of our church for those younger married men who need counseling to understand what paradise has in store if they can deny their sexual urges outside of marriage and the making of babies for God. If ever there was a man who could prove that holy men should marry, Dear Pope Benedict, I am that man. If ever a man could make the case that our priests are better and more stable within the sexual boundaries of a woman’s love - that our children are safer in the care of a man given safely to the warmth of intercourse - that man is I. Except that I am not that man, Pope Benedict. Despite being wedded to a good woman, I am a sinner’s sinner, a heinous criminal with short eyes and a deep longing to possess the bodies and minds of young boys. This will only end when the good of our church find me out and I am staked to the walls of a prison. So stop me if you can, Dear Pope, but don’t – as some might say – believe that the marriage of your priests will be the panacea of your church’s downfall. You can bludgeon the College of Cardinals into ordaining that priests might marry; you can allow thousands of those rectified devotees to jump the sanctified bones of each and every bride of Christ, and still it will make no difference to me or to them. Married or not, we who prey, will prey still. So put your hands together and pray for us sinners Dear Pope Benedict and after you pray get up off your knees and do something to stop us and to show that . . .
I am a German Jew. Do not believe that I had a hand in killing your Christ, Joseph Ratzinger, and I will refuse to believe that you had any part in killing six million of my brothers and sisters. And while we are not believing, Dear Joseph, here is something else that I ask you also not to believe. Do not believe for an instant that the persecution you endure today for turning your back on millions of children will ever be anything like the persecution and slaughter of my people – those people of God who share the same Holy Spirit as those children of God you have forsaken. With God as my witness, Joseph Ratziner, I will spit at your slippered feet if ever again I hear your chosen preacher stand to defend you in the sacred pulpits of the Vatican on the cusp of our holy days by comparing you to the victims of those rabid Arian animals. You are not a thug, Joseph, and you are not a Nazi. But you are also not a child burning in an oven, nor are you a dying wife forced by jackals to bury her own husband in the mud of Auschwitz, nor a man chocking to death on gas simply because the Star of David over the door of his butcher shop was a threat to your conquest of the earth. You with your soft bed and your body guards, Joseph Ratzinger, with your elegant meals brought into you on china and your princely attendants brushing aside every crumb of discomfort, you will never be the same as these men, woman and children who suffered the unspeakable tortures of a Fatherland celebrating the insanity of its final solution. I am a witness to the past, Heir Joseph, and I stand for all people, for all children, and . . .
I am a 50 year old man living in the homespun fields of Pennsylvania. I will live and die and be buried in this countryside, Your Holiness, and I will consider my life complete because of it. I am the great grandson of a Polish pilgrim who came to this new land as a true believer in Jesus, proudly praying his Latin out loud in guttural vowels at the masses, baptisms, marriages and funerals of those of us for whom he turned the fields and brought his baskets to the table. My religion runs deep, Your Holiness. It goes back to those days as a Catholic school boy when our sisters and mothers superior taught us catechism beside white streaked green slate and abacuses that were as binary as the good and bad of God and Satan. And abuses were as common as colds back then, Holy Father, with those discouraged, under loved women banging wooden rulers against our temples and bodily lifting us from our seats to fling us black and blue into coat rooms and baskets of trash. But these abuses might have been acceptable as a price to pay for a decent school, if not for what was done to me by those other holy fathers that you and your predecessors let swing unhinged in the basements and backrooms and confessionals of those schools and churches that were supposed to be our sanctuaries. Tonight I am drinking in dark tavern, Holy Father, wrestling with your ignorance as I try not to throw out our baby Jesus with the dirty bathwater of our holy mother church. That priest that touched me and bled dry my youth is dead now and – even though there are still times that I need this whiskey to take the edge off the knives of memory in my mind - I have nearly made my peace with his filth and with the lies he told at seminary in order to corner me over and over again. But the liquor in this bottle will not really save any of us, Holy Father and so here is my prayer for you - I pray that someday every child who was ever used to gratify the urges of a deviant army of god will get to hear your confession. I pray that God gives you the wisdom and the strength to enter that dark box and tell us all how you have sinned and how you will do all in your earthly powers to guaranteed that this kind of harm will never befall any of us again. And then I will absolve you Holy Father, because, after all, you are just a man, imperfect and deserving of forgiveness , and because . . .
I am God your father sitting in judgment over you, my Son Joseph, and if you believe in me then believe it when I tell you that I am watching you and that we are waiting for you to stop thinking about how you will protect your church and start thinking about how you will protect those children who you will someday soon need to fill it. Because I love you and all my children, Joseph, and I am waiting . . .
For ever and ever, amen.
Dear Pope Benedict,
I am a father of a different sort. Our faithful wander with me where I go, Holy Father. These followers trust that I believe in the good over evil embodied by Jesus; they believe that I have been chosen among them to pick up his path and portray those simple miracles that form the ever living, unquestionable grace of our lives. I am seen as protection by those of faith, Holy Father, a wall between their souls and the ache of surviving, and a window into the glory of heaven that awaits them. But, Holy Father, there is a boy - a child really - one I’ve baptized and on whose tongue I first laid the body of your son and, God help me, that boy’s body is in my hands now. This morning we are hidden in the half light of a sacristy and he is withering under the wickedness of my touch, unsure as to the meaning of the smiling wine-stained lips and teeth that I will use to talk my way into his body and eat out the center of his soul. Oh, Holy Father, you let me appear to this child and then you hid me behind the smoke of dogma and commanded that our flock look away into the mirrors of faith arranged to hypnotize them into immaculate acceptance. So I am not just a monster, Holy Father, I am your monster concealed in a dark closet filled with sacred vestments. I am the blemish of your fingerprints creeping up the sides of our chaste silver chalices. I am the shepherd you have put in charge of our innocents, untying my hood to reveal the dripping fangs of a wolf. Even our God is begging you to stop me, Holy Father, because even He knows I cannot be changed with His love and that I will never be able to look at a child and see one of His lambs, only a lamb for slaughter, because. . .
I am a married man, Pope Benedict. I epitomize the suit and tie, Catholic propriety of a rock-solid husband ribboned into the heart-shaped bows of his wife’s love . . . and her love alone. I shave myself clean each Sunday morning to prowl the nave of our church for those younger married men who need counseling to understand what paradise has in store if they can deny their sexual urges outside of marriage and the making of babies for God. If ever there was a man who could prove that holy men should marry, Dear Pope Benedict, I am that man. If ever a man could make the case that our priests are better and more stable within the sexual boundaries of a woman’s love - that our children are safer in the care of a man given safely to the warmth of intercourse - that man is I. Except that I am not that man, Pope Benedict. Despite being wedded to a good woman, I am a sinner’s sinner, a heinous criminal with short eyes and a deep longing to possess the bodies and minds of young boys. This will only end when the good of our church find me out and I am staked to the walls of a prison. So stop me if you can, Dear Pope, but don’t – as some might say – believe that the marriage of your priests will be the panacea of your church’s downfall. You can bludgeon the College of Cardinals into ordaining that priests might marry; you can allow thousands of those rectified devotees to jump the sanctified bones of each and every bride of Christ, and still it will make no difference to me or to them. Married or not, we who prey, will prey still. So put your hands together and pray for us sinners Dear Pope Benedict and after you pray get up off your knees and do something to stop us and to show that . . .
I am a German Jew. Do not believe that I had a hand in killing your Christ, Joseph Ratzinger, and I will refuse to believe that you had any part in killing six million of my brothers and sisters. And while we are not believing, Dear Joseph, here is something else that I ask you also not to believe. Do not believe for an instant that the persecution you endure today for turning your back on millions of children will ever be anything like the persecution and slaughter of my people – those people of God who share the same Holy Spirit as those children of God you have forsaken. With God as my witness, Joseph Ratziner, I will spit at your slippered feet if ever again I hear your chosen preacher stand to defend you in the sacred pulpits of the Vatican on the cusp of our holy days by comparing you to the victims of those rabid Arian animals. You are not a thug, Joseph, and you are not a Nazi. But you are also not a child burning in an oven, nor are you a dying wife forced by jackals to bury her own husband in the mud of Auschwitz, nor a man chocking to death on gas simply because the Star of David over the door of his butcher shop was a threat to your conquest of the earth. You with your soft bed and your body guards, Joseph Ratzinger, with your elegant meals brought into you on china and your princely attendants brushing aside every crumb of discomfort, you will never be the same as these men, woman and children who suffered the unspeakable tortures of a Fatherland celebrating the insanity of its final solution. I am a witness to the past, Heir Joseph, and I stand for all people, for all children, and . . .
I am a 50 year old man living in the homespun fields of Pennsylvania. I will live and die and be buried in this countryside, Your Holiness, and I will consider my life complete because of it. I am the great grandson of a Polish pilgrim who came to this new land as a true believer in Jesus, proudly praying his Latin out loud in guttural vowels at the masses, baptisms, marriages and funerals of those of us for whom he turned the fields and brought his baskets to the table. My religion runs deep, Your Holiness. It goes back to those days as a Catholic school boy when our sisters and mothers superior taught us catechism beside white streaked green slate and abacuses that were as binary as the good and bad of God and Satan. And abuses were as common as colds back then, Holy Father, with those discouraged, under loved women banging wooden rulers against our temples and bodily lifting us from our seats to fling us black and blue into coat rooms and baskets of trash. But these abuses might have been acceptable as a price to pay for a decent school, if not for what was done to me by those other holy fathers that you and your predecessors let swing unhinged in the basements and backrooms and confessionals of those schools and churches that were supposed to be our sanctuaries. Tonight I am drinking in dark tavern, Holy Father, wrestling with your ignorance as I try not to throw out our baby Jesus with the dirty bathwater of our holy mother church. That priest that touched me and bled dry my youth is dead now and – even though there are still times that I need this whiskey to take the edge off the knives of memory in my mind - I have nearly made my peace with his filth and with the lies he told at seminary in order to corner me over and over again. But the liquor in this bottle will not really save any of us, Holy Father and so here is my prayer for you - I pray that someday every child who was ever used to gratify the urges of a deviant army of god will get to hear your confession. I pray that God gives you the wisdom and the strength to enter that dark box and tell us all how you have sinned and how you will do all in your earthly powers to guaranteed that this kind of harm will never befall any of us again. And then I will absolve you Holy Father, because, after all, you are just a man, imperfect and deserving of forgiveness , and because . . .
I am God your father sitting in judgment over you, my Son Joseph, and if you believe in me then believe it when I tell you that I am watching you and that we are waiting for you to stop thinking about how you will protect your church and start thinking about how you will protect those children who you will someday soon need to fill it. Because I love you and all my children, Joseph, and I am waiting . . .
For ever and ever, amen.
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