The saddest day

While I was searching for a souvenir for a recent post, I ran across several treasures in my souvenir boxes from my youth that, like it or not, I'm going to share with all of you.

For our first stroll down that memory lane, here is a letter to the editor of The Lookout, the Los Alamos High School newspaper, that I signed that Brian Lanter and Colleen wrote. I thought that I was going to get to help write it but they apparently didn't need (want?) my help. (They needed to use big words, some of which I still don't know, so I guess I couldn't have effectively contributed to the letter.) I don't remember whether it got printed.

The newspaper had printed a story about a recent snowfall that made the local skiers and their Snow God very happy. Colleen, Brian and I were not fond of snow and took umbrage (how's that for a good word, Colleen?) at their promotion of one (false) god over another.

So, on this saddest day of the year, the day the sun leaves our hemisphere for six painful months, here's our letter to the editor.


OK, here's a quibble. "Spalpeen" seems to be only a noun but was used as an adjective in the letter. And "morrhuol" doesn't show up in any dictionary I've found (either on my computer or on the Internet), though it is defined in the Google results. Somebody liked to show off his or her vast vocabulary.

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Hey, did you notice the use of "there" where "their" should have been used? Boy, I'm glad I didn't have a hand in that letter!

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Just because I had a few spare minutes, here's the letter for search engines to index (typos and all):

Dear Editor,

Actually you're not all that dear, and this is not going to be a nice letter (no, not at all nice). We, the disciples of the Sun Cult, are incensed! Why? You ask why, after what you've done to us? As an established religious cult, we stand adamantly behind our constitutional rights to equality. We therefore resent, sir, the blatant bigotry and callous treatment that have been our lot at the hands of your unworthy rag. You spalpeen miscreants, you fatuous hypocrits, have you no sense of social propriety, have you no vestige of civilized decency, have you no cognitive faculty, have you no rubber galoshes?

Three issues previous, in this moribund mouthpiece of corrupt winter promoters, you deemed it appropriate to glorify the snow god, while failing utterly to extend the Sun God those aggrandizements and encomia due so august and resplendent a diety.

What insensate gawks you must be, to allow the tramontane vagaries of vehement vituperators to violate the vestal virginity of verisimilar verbalization. Only the willing pawn of the basiliskine juggernaut of unbridled press would have refused to publish our supplicatory epistle, in which we requested equal representation.

Therefore stand warned that our glorious leader has revealed unto us his divine design for the demise of the snow god and the subjugation of his followers. Those who have slighted the Sun God to curry favor with the snow god shall be hoisted by there own petard. Resistors will be calcined by his refulgent wrath as they writhe in the mucilaginous morrhuol of moral decay.

Be it also know that the last true snow melted before the presence of our lord on Sunday, March 4. Any subsequent appearance of “snow” is but an illusion, drawn up by the ignoble snow god to tempt the followers of the True Lord.

For as it is written in the Book of Truth: “WE LIKE TO EAT (Oh yes, we do), BUT MOSTLY WE LIKE TO GET VENGEANCE!”

Yours Truly,