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childhood hobbies, general strangeness, newspapers, retrospective, this explains a lot doesn't it?
But not, you know, really very, because I’ve already done this one: four kids of about seven and nine, sisters and cousins, typing like little sugar-loaded, two-fingered keyboard monkeys from hell and trying to get out the 2nd (or maybe it was the 3rd?) edition of the infamous Webb Road Newspaper. Sound familiar?
Yes, you remember this one. You don’t want to, maybe, but you know you do. I went on for quite a while, there.
So why am I coming back to it, you ask, with perhaps a faint tone of desperation?
Well, because I got a pretty awesome present this Christmas from my sister that I, being easily distracted, have only now gotten around to putting into digital form.
*gasp* [added for verisimilitude: I don’t have a studio audience or a laugh track, so I do what I can.]
That’s right: there is now concrete evidence of my youthful inability to distinguish between homonyms, my cousin Katie’s amazing ability draw illustrations of fish and our collective belief that there was nothing more interesting than the occasional appearance of a pheasant or the fact that one of our neighbors went to a rodeo.
Witness:
We hadn’t quite made it to the computer at this point. I think it took an issue or three before we felt comfortable trusting ourselves to technology. But soon thereafter:
I’m not about to transcribe the entire thing (hell, I snorted a very nice fizzy mixed drink out my nose just reading it to myself last night), but just to give you an idea, the red-circled section states:
“Chester Sue and Doug Webb’s springer spaniel got a haircut. He looks like he is sculptured. Sue cut Chester.”
(Grammatical construction and punctuation weren’t high on my list of fields of expertise back then either, as it turns out.)
I particularly like the catfish illustration: I’d forgotten that we felt compelled to provide visuals, just to be sure we really hammered the point home. This catfish was meant to look both innocent and unappetizing, as my father didn’t want the report of the presence of catfish in our pond to inspire anybody to eat one.
Anyway, there you have it. 🙂