Half Whitt Out of Control

I got back from my vacation, got a cup of coffee, kicked up my feet, and read the trusty Sneezeville Sentinel to see what had happened in my absence. I always expect Half Whitt to do something I’ll have to fix, but this time he let his fingers on the typewriter get so far ahead of his brain, it will take years to fix. Not only that, but our Editor, I. Vontit Now, expects me to be responsible for him. He always says, “I don’t care what that half-wit Half Whitt does, just fix it.”

Half doesn’t understand that just because we are fictional, things can’t be changed without a reason and when they are you have to explain why.

On a positive note, this gives us a whole new bunch of folks to write about. Paine N. D’Rear attends all of the county meetings and disagrees with everything that is done. He never runs for office because he knows he can’t win and if he did, he would have to do more than complain. His specialties are complaining and distorting. He is a regular contributor to our competitor, The Sneezeville Social Register. We anticipate a duel or at the least a law suit in the near future.

If you read Half Whitt’s column last week, you already know he changed the name of The Sneezeville Sentinel to The Stump County Sentinel and expanded our territory. That should be great for business but he shouldn’t have done it like that. First of all, this means you won’t get the column on our being run out of Sneezeville. You also won’t get the one on how the Bored Supervisors voted to change the name of Slump County back to Stump County.

In researching county history, Dusty Drawers discovered an error in the county records. In about 1825 an unknown person went through the county records and erased all of the cross arms on the “t” s. This happened about the same time Mayor Slump’s grandfather ran for tax collector. At that time, nobody really cared what a county was called. You were born wherever you were born, lived there, died there and if somebody liked you, you were buried there. Nobody ever moved in. Nobody knew we were here. Occasionally someone would go to school past the fifth grade and learn the three R’s: Reading, Writing, and the Road to Rich City. All that education would go to their heads and they would decide there was more to life than they could find here. We’ll never know where they told people they were from, so like I said, who cared what the real name of the county was. After the Great War of Northern Aggression, (don’t even try to tell me it was the Civil War, there was nothing civil about it.) People started moving here. They didn’t care what the county was called either. They just wanted to get away from where they were.

Now that we have grown to six towns and even have a representative in Rich City we needed to get the name corrected. Of course, Otis Sneezleweed, grandson of Sneezeville founder, had a problem with the change. Otis is so concerned with change that he only carries folding money and spends only even dollars. “It was good enough for my father and it was good enough for my grandfather so it’s good enough for me.” When he realized his Grandfather lived in Stump County and his father lived in the same home but in Slump County, he was very upset.

He spent an entire week sitting on a stump in the cornfield mumbling to himself. He emerged pale and trembling and announced, “If it was good enough for my grandfather, it SHOULD have been good enough for my father and if it was good enough for them then it is good enough for me.”