It has been a hectic week here at NewsBlog 5000. I must apologize to you, our readers as we are going to be forced to shutdown for a couple of weeks. I can assure you, however, that this shutdown comes as just as much a sadness for me as it does for you. I was very much hoping to get the scoop on the story of the Iraqi spammers who were promising increased penis size for those voting in the elections.

I will briefly give you a rundown of the situation in which we find ourselves. I know it may seem unprofessional to air the dirty laundry of our little company, but as professional journalists, airing dirty laundry is what we do best.

To start out with, I was called away for some high level meetings in the Scranton offices of the Sincmil News Network. Therefore, I had to make a quick decision on who was going to fit my rather ample chair.

Perhaps in retrospect, I should have picked our intern Skippy. He does write the lion’s share of our articles, and seems very calm around the office. But, I decided to promote Adrian Chevelle to assistant weekend editor. To the casual observer, Chevelle would make the ideal editor; he is a professional man of leisure that has to nominally hold down a job to receive money from his grandfather’s trust fund.

What I did not adequately predict was that this would put Skippy into a funk, and he would not be able to write no matter how coerced. While this constitutes insubordination, it is hard to fire Skippy as his position is not paid.

But this is not the reason for our shutdown. Adrian tried to take up the slack and although his skills lean more towards the public interest pages, he managed to deliver a story yesterday.

Sadly, while trying to keep the news fresh, Chevelle forgot to handle one of his main responsibilities; that of keeping Alice Humbees from my liquor cabinet. Now, I don’t want you all to think of Alice as a tortured soul with an alcohol problem, but rather as a modern day Otis of Mayberry.

Needless to say, the supply of liquor was diminished at an equivalent rate to Alice’s reasoning capacity. The last we heard of an Alice Sighting, she was headed for the Mexican border with a case of my best scotch and my grandfather’s dueling pistols. Chevelle and I have loaded into NewsGalaxy 500 and are now in pursuit. We can only hope to catch her before she crosses the border, as because of past misadventure her citizenship is uncertain at best.

My only hope for you, my readers is that Skippy can somehow hope to forgive me and write the occasional article, for like myself, the news is in his blood. But at the time of this writing, he seems totally despondent.

Dr. Ryan Maynard, Editor

posted by NewsBlog 5000  # Tuesday, February 08, 2005