Never Promised You An Olive Garden
As news broke of an agreement to use roaming goats for eliminating the invasive of autumn olive on open land in Bridgehampton, an obscure group calling itself East End Shrub Huggers (EESH) began inundating the local media with pro-shrub propaganda. News outlets reported that their phone and fax lines were jammed with irate autumn olive enthusiasts calling to condemn the goat-centered effort to curb what they referred to as “a peaceful, fun-loving” species of pricker bush. Later in the week, police discovered an EESH encampment that had sprung up in a field of autumn olive, where pro-shrub activists promised to make a last stand against “shrubicide.” As of press time, police report little progress in negotiations with protesters. The protesters, in the meantime, vow, “If the goats want to eat the autumn olive, they’ll have to eat us first.” When reached for comment, the goats expressed a willingness to try this approach.
Not A Pretty Picture
In a public relations promotion turned fiasco, Old Man McGumbus, Shelter Island’s 104-year-old WWII veteran and Trustee for Life, invited members of what he thought was his adoring public to tweet photographs of themselves taken with him. The resulting images, tweeted using the hashtag #myMcGumbus, proved an embarrassing revelation of McGumbus’s history of intrusive and disturbing behavior, and have put McGumbus back in legal jeopardy. One image shows McGumbus, trusty flame-thrower in hand, setting fire to a pile of books marked “Hippie Filth” while a shocked librarian stands helplessly watching. Perhaps most shocking is the photograph submitted by the official North Korean Minister of Tweets showing McGumbus with his arm around North Korean President Kim Jong Un at what appears to be a cockfighting arena. Police are trying to identify various anonymous sources of the photographs to begin questioning “McGumbus’s victims.”
Populace Replaced With Strangers
Several local residents called police over the weekend in a panic, convinced that the inhabitants of their East End village had been removed and replaced with persons unknown. From the transcript of one Sag Harbor call: “I walked up and down Main Street several times and did not recognize a single person. There were entire families with children and grandparents, and I didn’t know them from Adam!” After a preliminary investigation, police were able to report that, in fact, some of the local villages do appear to have undergone some sort of population shift, but it’s unclear where the former inhabitants are.
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