it was one of those weeks1

MEANWHILE, the noted cryptozoologist J.M. Beilue, having just returned from an expedition to the farthest, darkest reaches of Lowest Georgia Street in search of two-headed cats and Abominable Snowmen, found on Tuesday an even more exotic species in La Ciudad Yellow: people voting in the Democratic primary. He couldn’t yet bring himself to think of them as actual Democrats. Maybe they were mischief-making dittoheads, or maybe they were just doing it for “the guilty pleasure of going to the other side”—the electoral equivalent of Baptist wives who role-play dominatrixes in the privacy of their bedrooms. Most of all, he thought of these voters as Obamanable Snowman², a “harmonic convergence,” the frogs who fell from the sky in Nostradamus. Like Democrats in the Panhandle, those frogs just didn’t belong in the sky. And yet there they were. If you read it in Nostradamus, you could believe it. Nostradamus was the Amarillo Globe-Republican Newsroom Ghost of his day.

On Wednesday, students across La Ciudad Yellow took the English-Language Arts TAKS under a new threat: the Texas Education Association had realized that many students had them new-fangled camera phones. This was a grave threat to the integrity of the TAKS as students could takes pictures of their test and send them to…um…someone. Never mind that all students in Texas take the test on the same day; somehow the Texas Education Association knew that it would be a disaster if pictures of the test got out. Students were warned that the entire test—everywhere in Texas—would be shut down if even one ringtone rang, and they would all have to come back in the summer to take it. At the editorial desk of the Amarillo Globe-Republican, John Q. Kanelis looked smug. I told you those phones were a menace, he said to the Ghost, who declined to give his opinion.

Damnation! thundered Lester Simpson on Thursday. The newsguy, George, had scooped him again. George had once again broken new journalistic ground by printing a story about what to do if you were infected with a computer virus. Lester had wanted to print a story about computer problems ever since the Amarillo Globe-Republican computers were brought down by the Y2K Bug, late in 2005. We need something equally innovative!, he shouted at the Ghost. Maybe an advice column written by a woman with big hair.

It was one of those weeks.

spacedark

¹For some of our slower readers, this piece is satire and is largely made up. Except for the quotated material. That, unfortunately, is real. Also, the T.E.A. conspiracy theory about cell phones. That’s real, too.

²Though we wish we could take credit for it, the term “Obamanable Snowman” was coined by Reyne Telles’s niece. Reyne is an Austin friend of PTS.