Ripped From The Headlines!
True stories from the 1901 Chicago Tribune, presented to you totally without context.
February rolled out like a runaway train of bad news: nonstop rain in California, earthquakes in Chile, a certain ex-president who—well, that’s too much to go into, and Travis Scott has a temper tantrum at the Grammy Awards show. Let’s take a breather from our twenty-fourth year of 21st century mayhem, and voyage into the past with the Breaking News Time Machine—which regretfully returned from the early 20th century with headlines sans stories, leaving us only to speculate what shocking events reverberated the world over in 1901.
First, a hard-hitting exposé of the time-sinus continuum.
Nothing is more terrifying than nasal expulsions covertly commandeering forward thrust of the minute hands on your great-great-grandfather’s pocketwatch. That said, as chilling as this notion can be—dare I say, chilling enough to catch a cold—we must keep our personal radars on high alert elsewhere, because…
Keep a close eye on vertically challenged youngsters. They are specialists in wreaking havoc. Thank heavens John Law is on the case. Yet some police are quite busy these days, albeit not in virtuous manner, for…
Is this “protective association” a criminal underworld organization for sight-impaired porcine Black Handers with corrupt cops on their payroll? Perhaps. After all, the animal world can be cruel, as we see in our next headline…
Nothing is sadder than a once-popular entity now on the decline. Just ask Travis Scott. Still, there is hope for our society…
At last! The link that connects our human existence with the animal world is found in one neat package, the result of an apparent coital moment between an amorous monkey and a lusty owl. However, the government naturalists making a full investigation of this evolutionary leap must be careful, lest they end up being the architects of their own troubles, like the hapless Mitchell King…
Goodness me oh my! The twin rages of a gourmand genus ursus and the inferno of an ignous flama. Cross-cut saws, as we know, are the true saviors of society. It’s a pity that there was no noble cross-cut saw to have forestalled the terrible events which unfolded when…
Granted, the rascally pet genus sciuridae did give the aforementioned small boys a chance for redemption.
Brief commercial break
And now, back to the headlines.
Nothing says “mission accomplished” quite like cornering a tiny peromyscus leucopus whilst giving it rousing chase upon a nix rutrum-crested mountain top.
It takes cunning, determination, and perhaps a touch of enchanted talents to pull off such an operation. That said, beware of anyone employed in the apothecary trades blessed with extrasensory gifts, as their powers in alchemy might not be availed with the purest of intent. Consider the human-to-pavement transforming vengance delivered by the conjurist of this next item…
Imagine being that poor individual who merely wants a soothing tincture, but instead finds himself hunted down by a ruthless apothecary who transmorgrifies his hapless victim into a paved boulevard as preceived vidication for an unnamed slight. It’s enough to make you lose faith in humanity. Just ask the victims of our next villainous cad, a miscreant who goes by the name of “Dowie”…
One can only envisage the grave disappointment of these truehearted individuals. Not only have they been plucked: as we learn in our next story, their presuppositions of celestial homesteading and affray have been hornswoggled, leaving the faithful devoid of five cents each…
As if missing out on a compatriot within lunar dwellings, Martian warlords, and being lighter in pockets by five pence was bad enough, the Faithful have just absorbed the precognitions of Charles Wesley Dean, as predicted in the wake of a proclamation by the all-powerful Earthbound Tetramand Overlordess Mary Baker Hadden.
Yet there is hope, for their foregoing dispondancy over lack of subterranean lunar masculinus was a possible premature presentiment. For you see…
As the Bard himself put it, all’s well that ends well!
And so we bid adieu to the breaking news of 1901, where time-bending sneezes led to roving gangs of small boys and pigs with dark glasses and white canes controlling law enforcement, thus destroying the sartorial stylings of Belgian hares. Gone are the days when the greatest minds of science explored prehistoric couplings of owls and monkeys, while wicked pet squirrels blocked automobiles and white mice fled across frozen mountain tops whilst on the run from would-be captors, leading us back to the traffic jam which might be traversing over the denied joy of a former seeker of healing potions, now metamorphosed into a boulevard via the black arts of vindictive apothecaries. No more shall we dwell in a world where the roguish Dowie taints the lily white hearts of true believers, now filled with melancholy and depleted of a quintet of coppered Lincoln bas-reliefs for lack of brownstones beneath the lunar surface and intergalactic warfare on Mars while fearing the end of our existence, only to rejoice upon discovering that their greatest hope for the dream hypogean dwellings on our codependent organic and orbital neighbor in the night sky has been fulfilled.
We return to the 21st century, where the billion dollar streaming service industrial complex is ponying you up for more scratch, an airplane door can pop off like a malevolent Jack-in-the-box, evil grammarians demand that their students diagram the sentences of the previous paragraph, and Travis Scott just can’t get a break in this town (and for good reason).
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