Christmas Greetings To All Our Friends In Sarasota

To all our dear, dear friends in Sarasota:

Thanks for all the golden rings; you have the found the true meaning of Christmas giving.

We are absolutely positive that the coming year is going to be HUGE! And we don't want any of our close friends in Sarasota to be left out of this sure-fire opportunity to make serious money.

Guaranteeing you big returns in '10,

Art, Marian, John, Neil & Beau


PS. Don't forget to put it on "full screen."

Sarasota County Slaps Neighborhood Santa With Cease and Desist Order

For over a decade, Mr. and Mrs. Ray Sevigny have played Santa and Mrs. Claus to the delight of the Bunyan Street children, dressing up as the famous Yuletide figures and holding court in their decoration-festooned front yard. Every night, the lights come on and the couple sit in Ray's homemade sleigh and wave to passersby and talk to enthralled children.

Or, they used to.

This year will be the last hurrah for the Sevignys, as they are ending their run on Dec. 23rd. "Just like everything else--too much politics," explained Ray. "I got notices from the county about having no permits, about traffic issues, about code violations, about noise issues. I even got a notice from animal services about keeping reindeer without a permit. They're plywood, for crying out loud! I'm a 75-year old retiree. I can't afford a lawyer and I can't afford the fines they threaten me with, so the hell with it."

In years past, Ray said he would get letters from some area churches complaining that he was missing the true meaning of Christmas, as well as letters from the ACLU threatening legal action because some of his yard decorations were Christian.

Teachers complained that he was perpetuating the myth of Santa Claus instead of true meaning of the holiday--supply-side economics.

Ray's wife reminded him about the time a group of pagan Druids showed up and demanded equal time in his front yard for their winter solstice celebration. "I tried to be open-minded," said Ray, "but I threw them out when they built the bonfire, took off their clothes and were just about to do who-knows-what to that poor goat they had tied up."

"Oh, I've had shouting matches with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Unitarians, all of 'em. The worst, by far, are those Mennonites and Amish from over on Bahia Vista. They just ride back and forth, back and forth on those damn tricycles, not saying anything. Just watching. Staring. Like they're looking right through you. It gives me and the missus the willies."

Sevigny has had run-ins with Sarasotans of French descent because he should have looked more like Pere Noel, Brits who wanted Father Christmas, Russians wanted Grandfather Frost, Italians wanted Babbo Natale, and Tea Party Conservatives who wanted Glenn Beck.

He's also been the recipient of a nasty campaign by Sarasota's Public Arts Council, who called their Christmas display "tacky, tasteless to the point of being revolting and an affront to art lovers everywhere." Arts maven, Virginia Hoffman, suggested that Sevigny take his "wretched bit of vulgarity and set it up next to that hideous statue of the nurse and sailor, so we could, at least, keep all the crap together."

The two area malls have sent letters in years past threatening legal action over taking business away from their "official" Santas. "Hell, I never even knew there was such as thing as 'official' Santas until some big guys showed up here one December telling me that I had to join the union--the Amalgamated Federation of the Brotherhood of Santas --if I wanted to keep doing this," said Ray.

"Fredd Atkins led a protest march one year because we didn't have anything about Kwanzaa and we don't have any black people in our sleigh. It seats TWO--me and my wife. The tree-huggers were here because they objected to us putting lights on our pine trees; they said it was 'demeaning' to the trees. Other environmentalists complained that we made too big of a carbon footprint, created too much greenhouse gasses and used too much electricity."

"Florida Power & Light, on the other hand, has sent us a nice Christmas card every year since we've been doing this."

Sevigny says he's selling all his yard decorations, lights and even his plywood sleigh to Langdon Wishek, the creepy loner who lives by himself in the spooky old house the end of the street, who vows to keep up the neighborhood tradition.

"Wait'll they get a load of the new Santa......"

North Port To Bill Family Of Dead Man Left Beside Road For 16 Hours For Code Violations

The City of North Port announced that it will continue its aggressive pursuit of code violations by assessing the family of a man found dead beside a city roadway for numerous infractions incurred during the 16 hours the body remained there from the time North Port 911 was first notified of its presence. Remarked one city official, "Everybody gets treated the same in North Port; it doesn't matter whether you're dead or alive."

A passerby found the unresponsive Brian Wood, 55, while on his way to a friend's house with his girlfriend in an unpopulated area without street lighting. Reluctant to get out of his vehicle, 19-year old Mark Minisci, Jr. drove to a nearby 7-11 and used the pay phone to call for help. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of calling 911, instead.

Minisci informed North Port 911 operator, Nadia Kashitskaya, about a man lying along "Lovebird" or "Lovesong" Road, to which the operator curtly informed him that she had no such street name listed. Undeterred, Minisci gave her turn-by-turn directions to the site, to which the operator again curtly informed him that, "Our system doesn't work like that."

Now bewildered, Minisci gave up. He probably thought 911 was going to ask him to go back and check on the guy's vital signs and call back to determine whether it was an emergency or if it could wait until somebody had some free time to go look for themselves.

Curiosity got the better of Minisci, so he took some friends back to the area the following day and, lo and behold, the corpse was still there--some 16 hours after he had called 911. Armed with the correct spelling of the street this time, he again called North Port 911 to report a body beside LOVEring Rd.

Only, by now, the body had a string of Christmas lights around it and, this being North Port, several code violation notices tucked behind its glasses, as well as traffic barricades on both sides of it.

North Port Police Chief, Terry Lewis, proudly announced, "From what I have been able to determine so far, it appears it was operator error and the 911 system worked." By "worked," the chief meant that someone picked up the phone when it rang.

He also cited underfunding as a reason why the 911 operator could not make the connection between "Lovering" Rd. and what the caller supposed was "Lovebird" or "Lovesong" Rd. The Chief explained that in instances where an operator can't find a street name on the 1987 Texaco Oil Co. map that the city uses, the operator has instructions to call longtime resident, Wilma Kaminsky, who knows most of the city's streets, having worked as a mail carrier in the area for 22 years.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Kaminsky was babysitting her two grandchildren at her daughter Sylvia's home the night that this particular call came in and hubby, Ed, ususally doesn't answer the phone when Wilma's not home, since it's almost never for him and Ed's not much of a talker anyway.

The Chief blamed neighborhood hooligans for putting the Christmas lights on the body of the man, but praised the Public Works Dept. for installing the traffic barricades, calling the placement of one on either side of the 'hazard' a "textbook example of traffic safety."

The North Port Public Safety Dept. is already reeling from the dismissal of two of it's fire dept. personnel for choosing to continue to coach a youth soccer game instead of responding to an emergency call while on duty. "I don't know what more the public wants from us," complained one emergency responder. "We get in trouble for driving a fire truck out of our assigned area to coach soccer and not answering a call. I mean, it's not like we didn't go check on this guy. We did. Eventually."

The city's legal department said that the late Mr. Wood is being cited for, among other things, impeding traffic, camping without a permit and having an illegal Christmas display on a public right-of-way. "It doesn't matter to us who put the lights there," they explained, "the deceased is responsible and, ergo, his heirs and assigns are accruing the accompanying fines daily. And we won't take a settlement, so don't even ask!"

It was also learned that the city's road crew was also in the area the next day doing some sprucing up of the neighborhood's streets and, according to unnamed officials "may have inadvertently impacted" the lifeless body of Mr. Wood.

"Impacted", as in:

Obligatory Tiger Woods Post

Only because it's Christmas.

Featuring Elin Woods as "The Nutcracker." Sweet.....

Sarasota Spinsters Accuse Golf Legend, Arnie Palmer, Of Past Affairs

Five Suncoast-area women, not ones to let the bandwagon of financial opportunity and, perhaps, their last best chance to claim their fifteen minutes of fame, pass them by, have told anybody who would listen--and even those who wouldn't--that they all had dalliances with the King of Golf, Arnold Palmer. The scorned tarts, all currently living in the Right Handy To Heaven Rest Home on State Rt. 72, tell a sordid tale of steamy secrets, licentious liaisons and naughty nights spent with the famous linkster in days gone by.

Berea Cowpens, 82, said they had never come forward before to tell their story out of a deep and abiding respect for Mr. Palmer and his family. Upon hearing about the outrageous sums of money that some of the alleged mistresses of fellow golf legend, Tiger Woods, are getting, Mrs. Cowpens opined, "I worked for 43 years as a high-school librarian in a little hick town in Georgia and when I found out how much those cocktail waitresses were raking in for a People Magazine interview, my support hose started to roll up and down. Our deep and abiding respect for Arnie doesn't pay our bingo tabs, now does it, girls?"

Added 91-year old Clover DeBordieu, "I'm about due for my third artificial hip and this will help me afford the JRC-77 model, instead of those generic pieces of Japanese plastic-and-cardboard crap they used on me before. I'm ready for an upgrade."

"You know that Harry Maguire movie with those two boys, Dom Cruise and Cutie Gooding, Jr.," chimed in 88-year old Hilda Gaffney McBee. "Well, we say "Flow us the honey!" I wasted the best years of my life married to that blowhard, Mr. Braswell McBee, and what do I have to show for it, God rest his soul. Three ungrateful kids and a bunch of snotty grandkids who never come to visit their old grandma. Who needs 'em, anyway? Just 'Flow us the honey, sonny!'"

"Well, back in the day, I was quite the catch," reminisced Monetta Smoaks, who is a spry 98-years young. "I knew Arnie when he was just a boy growing up in Latrobe. He used to work at the country club there and I would play a round weekly. Once he and I got to know each other a little better, though, we played around a lot more, if you catch my drift. And, I can tell you that it was never weakly, either!"

"I can assure you girls that I was his favorite," gushed her younger sister, 89-year old Augusta Smoaks. "We would just laugh and laugh when the newspapers would write about my Arnie playing the Masters, with headlines like 'Arnie Takes Augusta' or 'Arnie Pounds Augusta' or 'Arnie Has His Way in Augusta.' He was such a scamp, my Arnie was."

"And that famous line that his wife, Winnie, used on the Tonight Show about "kissing Arnie's balls for luck," that was my line, except that I wasn't talking about his Titleists when I said it. And, yes, it certainly did make his putter stand up...."

"Ah, dear, dear Winnie," said Mrs. Cowpens. "My stars, could she be a spitfire. Don't you think for one minute that Tiger Wood's wife was the first jealous woman to beat out the windows of a car, trying to put a divot in her husband. That Elin Woods doesn't hold a candle to Winnie. Driver, sand wedge, irons, didn't matter to her; she'd whale away until they broke, then just go get another club out of the bag and keep on swinging."

"Don't get us wrong," explained Mrs. DeBourdieu, "we don't begrudge these bleach-blonde, no-account Las Vegas floozie cocktail-waitress-and-hostess tramps for whatever they can shakedown poor Mr. Woods, but things were a lot different in golf, as well as in life in our day. We all had respectable lives and some of us even had semi-respectable husbands, but this was Arnie. We all just knew he'd be big someday."

"But, back then, we didn't just jet off to Australia or even Vegas. When the tour would come to our towns, we'd meet up with Arnie in some very strange places. Sometimes it would be in a motel, sometimes it would be in a deserted locker room, sometimes it was in the back of that rickety old 1958 Plymouth he drove around in. One time, we even did it in a sand trap. That was pretty awful. Do you know how long it takes you to get sand out of your..."

"Did I ever tell you girls about the time Arnie's wife broke the windows out of Braswell's Buick?" interrupted Mrs. McBee.

Iceberg Strikes Australia, Continent Sinks, Great Loss of Life Feared

A massive iceberg rammed the continent of Australia earlier today causing the great island nation to sink into the briny depths of the Pacific Ocean. Due to the massive scale of the disaster, stunned authorities are unsure of the number of survivors, but fear that the greater portion of the population of 22 million may have perished.

Scientists who had been tracking the wayward ice floe for several months continued to assure anxious Aussies that they had nothing to fear as the iceberg was on track to contact the Australian coast with no more than a glancing blow south of Sydney, near the capital of Canberra. The Australian government sought to reassure both nationals and foreigners that the iceberg would have no more impact on the continent than "an errant shrimp falling off the barbie on any given day."



"I find it incomprehensible that anyone could believe in this day and age that a melting block of ice could affect a titanic land mass like Australia," said lead scientist and glacioligist of reknown, Neal Young.

Dr. Young stood awestruck upon the deck of a ship monitoring the iceberg when it came ashore some 75 km. south of Sydney Harbor. A shower of ice fell onto the beach, much to the delight of the assembled onlookers, as they rushed to scoop up frozen souvenirs.

A short time later, a report from downtown Canberra, seat of the Australian government, indicated that hundreds of fissures in the earth had suddenly appeared across the countryside and that seawater was spewing forth from them in frightening quantities. Dr. Young huddled with his fellow scientists and quickly determined that this new development was strictly coincidental and posed no threat to life or property whatsoever.

Over the next few hours, however, similar reports from various corners of the nation continued to arrive in alarming quantity and increasing frequency. Low-lying areas in the southern half of the country had been evacuated and were now completely underwater. Shipboard colleagues of Dr. Young noted that the throng of people that had been on the beach when the iceberg struck, had disappeared, along with many kilometers of the beach itself.

Governmental disaster agencies called for calm, urging everyone to head overland in a northerly direction or to secure passage on a seaworthy vessel of any kind and make for Tasmania or New Zealand. Pleas for assistance of any nature were flashed round the world and ships of every register sailing in the South Pacific were implored to come to the aid of the clearly sinking continent.

Communications from the coastal cities of Sydney in the east to Perth in the west were lost and television stations broadcast this image from downtown Canberra just before they, too, fell silent.
Reports of wholesale looting and panic in the streets poured in from those areas not yet underwater, as the masses tried to get their families into any craft that floated. Boat dealers, marinas and pool supply stores were inundated with terrified residents looking to save themselves. Police departments were overwhelmed and lawlessness prevailed in this nation that, ironically, was once a penal colony.

Some older residents preferred to wait quietly for the end to come, simply sitting on their porches with friends and family, drinking beer and reflecting wistfully on what bearing these dreadful circumstances might have on the upcoming Australian Football League playoffs.

Then, shortly before midnight, the northern coast of Australia raised up into the night sky and then silently slipped under the waves of the unforgiving sea. Shipboard observers there watched in horror as the Darwin Symphony Orchestra played "Nearer, My God, To Thee" on the beach as the lights of the city flickered then disappeared beneath the surface of the water, teetering for a moment as it scraped against the Great Barrier Reef before plunging into the cold, black depths of the Pacific.

An eerie calm befell the area, as the waves lapped against the sides of the assembled flotilla and the slight whimpering of children aboard rescue vessels was the only sound to be heard in the starlit night.

Dawn revealed only a gargantuan debris field and but a few survivors clinging to empty kegs of Foster's Lager beer. Here and there, a koala floated by on a sprig of eucalyptus tree.



Noted environmentalist and former American vice-president, Al Gore, predicted ecological chaos from the continental-sized mass of floating garbage. "While I appreciate the trememdous toll in the loss of millions of human lives with the sinking of Australia after being hit by an iceberg that had broken off from a melting Antartica, let me just say that, I told you so."

Mother of Steeler LB James Harrison Suspended For Remainder of Season

Mildred Harrison, 62, was involved in a bench-clearing brawl at the Akron VFW while watching her son, All-Pro linebacker, James Harrison, and his Pittsburgh Steeler teammates lose to the Cleveland Browns on Thursday night. Police were called to restore order after the pushing and shoving inside the building spilled outside and VFW employees could no longer contain the situation.

Akron Police Capt. Wyatt Christy offered this version of the events:

"Witnesses at the scene stated that there had been on-going trash talk during the week leading up to the game between Mrs. Harrison and Dorothea Walters, mother-in-law of Cleveland standout RB Joshua Cribbs, a graduate of nearby Kent State. Apparently there has been a long-simmering feud between the two women and it all came to a head when the Browns upset the heavily favored Steelers on Thurs. night."

Midway through the third quarter, following a long gainer for Cribbs, Mrs. Walters began her "Browns Boogaloo" victory dance, setting off Mrs. Harrison, who blindsided the shimmying Walters, knocking her to the floor. Mrs. Harrison stood over the prone Walters, taunting her to get up and "take it like a grandma," at which point the head bartender, Belmont 'Butch' Van Wert, flagged Mrs. Harrison for a personal foul and, following a brief consultation with the other bartenders, ejected her from the establishment."

"At this time, several Browns fans surrounded Mrs. Harrison and made physical contact with her, causing an equal number of black-and-gold clad supporters of Mrs. Harrison to engage the Browns fans. Soon, the entire crowd at the VFW was involved in the scuffle as the bartenders attempted to isolate Mrs. Harrison and escort her out of the building. Once outside the VFW, spectators in the parking lot began throwing beer bottles, snowballs and, at least, one tire from a 1984 Honda Civic, wrapped in a vintage Jack Lambert jersey."

"Akron P.D. were notified and responded, arriving on scene at 22:20 hours. The melee was in full swing by that time and the VFW parking lot violence had spilled over into the Tastee-Freeze parking lot, which is closed for the winter. Back up assistance was called for and arrived in the form of the Akron Fire Dept., which began hosing down the crowd, causing them to cease and desist in their hostilities and subsequently disperse. Unfortunately, due to the severe cold at the time, 38 people had to be treated for frostbite and hypothermia and there were a number of injuries from falls on the ice that formed from the sprayed water."

"Mrs. Harrison continued to be aggressive and had to be Tasered numerous times before arresting officers were able to handcuff her and place her in a patrol car. Two other persons were also transported by officers to the downtown lockup, where they all were arraigned at night court on a charge of assault."

Officials at VFW headquarters in Washington, DC, have notified Mrs. Harrison that she is forthwith suspended from all activities at the Akron VFW until further notice, including holiday events, bingos and their annual Chinese auction fundraiser in January. Said her famous son, "Look, watching football at the VFW is a violent world. I know my mother and I'm sure her emotions just got the better of her. I also know that I was glad I was getting my ass kicked playing football in Cleveland rather than getting my ass kicked by my mother in Akron. They don't call her 'Mildred, the Mauler' for nothing."

Police sources say that when 62-year old Mildred Harrison was being booked into the Akron jail, she defiantly lit up a cigarette, causing one detective to admonish her, "There's no smoking in here." Mrs. Harrison coyly replied, "What are you going to do, arrest me?" and uncrossed her legs, revealing her lack of undergarments and resulting in the spontaneous evacuation of the Akron Public Safety Bldg.