Sunday, June the 17th, 2007

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hear this 

The Huffington Post

Whenever bumpkins gather of an evening in the shack at the end of the lane, sooner or later their talk will turn to the Huffington Post. It is not uncommon for the peasantry to fixate upon minutiae, of course. We think of Old Farmer Frack, obsessed with his bellowing cows, or the eerie barn at Scroonhoonpooge, or any number of pig-related outbreaks of countryside mass hysteria, often focussed upon something as insignificant as the shape of a newborn pig's snout or trotters. Yet the bumpkins' preoccupation with the Huffington Post was curious, for to the untrained eye it looked like any other fencepost or stake or piece of paling. I dare say you or I would pass by that post without giving it a glance, and the prattle of the bumpkins of an evening in the shack at the end of the lane would sound to us nonsensical. But rustic wisdom is hard won, and only a fool would dismiss the bumpkins' shack chatter as drivel.

On a balmy evening one such fool blundered into the shack at the end of the lane and, hearing the bumpkins bandying the profundities of Huffington Post lore, took it for the idiocy of defectives. With his briefcase and bowler hat it was clear the fool dwelt in a city. Clear, too, that he could not tell the Huffington Post from any other posts and stakes and pales thumped into the muck for fencing the fields. His manner and his smirks were disparaging of the bumpkins, and when he left the shack and was making his way to the railway station, they waylaid him and carried him off to the eerie barn at Scroonhoonpooge. And as they had done with others who came to mock, they coated him in farmyard slurry and tar and poked him with pitchforks, and when they were done with him they buried him at midnight under the Huffington Post.