Dude, it's Minot. What else is to be said?

Those are bread and butter stories for small town reporters everywhere. I loved writing those.

I happened across my neighbor's missing overbred mutt staring up at me bug-eyed through the pond ice behind my house and spread the news far and wide. I was 7 but had already seen way weirder and thought this was hilarious, especially the details of chipping it out with an axe and missing. I went wrong somewhere, maybe that was it.

fnord wrote:

I've been thinking about what warped me, and decided it was a series of events that happened within a one or two week period when I was 7.  My class was shown a graphic film about meat processing, from killing to final products.  This was followed within a few days by a film that showed starving Jews, piles of dead Jews, and items that resulted from Jew processing.  A few days later I saw JFK killed repeatedly on TeeVee, followed by seeing Lee Harvey Oswald killed on TeeVee.  There were bizarre events both before and after this series, but I think this is when the warping became permanent and unfixable.

Interesting to hear you specify this particular date, Fnord. I used to frequent a dark & smokey dive bar in Brooklyn called O'Connors. So dimly lit was this joint that you wouldn't really notice the debris stacked up in the corners or side room. One afternoon the bartender there showed me an edition of the New York Post from the day after JFK was shot, he found it when he was moving some shit around. The bartender was a stereotypical ham-fisted Irishman, quite a conservative fellow adrift in his own time, we mostly discussed jazz & books. I'll always remember his memory of JFK's assassination triggered by seeing the newspaper: "That was the day the world went insane."

fnord wrote:

There were bizarre events both before and after this series, but I think this is when the warping became permanent and unfixable.

I knew as a barely verbal infant I could trust neither parent and had to fend for myself.

Lima, Peru in the late 50s looked a lot like NYC in the 20s, if you pretended everyone was Catholic and llamas were horses. Gypsy buses vied with street cars and street vendors of every description, every commodity negotiable. Fireworks were cheap. School recessed at noon every day for siesta and resumed at two. Walking back tardy one afternoon, a classmate passed me on his bicycle, hurled a amused insult and crossed the intersection ahead of street car, pretzeled his front wheel on the train track, fell and got lunched. I spent what seemed hours retelling the same story to cops, reporters and the coroner but forgot to tell my parents. Next day's Spanish language news story got every last detail right except my name and I was in heaven, lost in the road kill detail. I've since pretzeled two front wheels the same way, none the worse for wear.

Banjo wrote:

And the excitement continues.

http://www.chron.com/news/article/Illin … cmpid=hpts

See, there's a reporter doesn't know his warm fuzzies from a frozen hole in the ground. Peacocks are nasty, brain the size of a... well, a pea-cock. Got to start with a pet pig, at least.