Archive for: April 2014

Fighting Chickens: Tragedy or Comedy?

By Coma News Staff

Tragedy struck Coma’s first all-animal rendition of the famous Ancient Greek comedy “Lysistrata” Monday when one of the players assaulted the director.

Shane Darvis, the former director of CATS, was recovering at home Monday night from a series of defensive wounds he received earlier in the day from one of his lead actors, Gary, a descendant of Coma’s famous fighting chickens of the Civil War. Gary is one of several chickens Darvis recruited for the play, which also includes cats and dogs.

Gary, pictured here, is a decedent of the original Fighting Chickens of the Civil War.

Gary, pictured here, is a decedent of the original Fighting Chickens of the Civil War.

“We didn’t think the chickens would fight on stage,” said Darvis. “Apparently, unleashing the aggression breeding instilled in their forbearers is more important to them than providing quality theater.”

Darvis recruited the chickens and other animals after he was unable to convince any Coma women to perform in the play.

“Women are pretty important for this play but certainly not indispensable,” said Darvis, who plans to play the lead character, Lysistrata. “However, dropping the chickens is going to be a big loss.”

Dee Collins, sometime actor and screenplay author, said she turned down a role in the play “mainly because Lysistrata is kind of boring.”
Several other veterans of the Coma Players, said daily activities, like “washing my hair” were more important than any level of involvement in the play.

Robert McGuiness, a former Coma News reporter, said the impending play “was never that great to begin with and of course we are going to do it in such a shitty way as to render it unwatchable.”
The production continued to grapple with numerous additional challenges, Darvis said. For instance, several of the characters portrayed by dogs have gone into heat, which resulted in behavior inconsistent with the play’s central theme.

“Animals are, at the end of the day, painfully stupid,” Davis said. “But it’s still a cakewalk compared to working with human actors.”

Opinion: I Went to School with Billy Joel

Opinion: Went to School with Billy Joel But Not Sure if he is the Famous One

Stan Bargmeyer

I went to high school with a guy named Billy Joel but I’m not certain if he is Billy Joel the famous singer and songwriter. I’ve asked some friends and most of them say it probably isn’t the same Billy Joel who had commercial success in the 1970s and 1980s with hit songs like “The Man Who Plays the Piano” and “Thriller.”

How likely is it that there would be two people with the exact same name?

billy joel hs

Even after looking at my old high school yearbook, I can’t tell if the Billy Joel I went to high school with (left) is the same one who made a lot of successful music (right)

The Billy Joel I knew from high school didn’t graduate. He was into small engine repair and I heard he got a job at a lawnmower repair shop a few years after high school.  He liked to party and had a big Rottweiler dog who once peed on the tire of my car.

Billy Joel just laughed and told me that dogs like to piss on car tires.

I’ve never seen pictures of the famous Billy Joel with a Rottweiler but that doesn’t mean he didn’t own one at one time. I’ve also not seen anything about the singer Billy Joel regarding a passion for re-building small engines and juicing-up lawnmowers. But again, that’s not proof that it’s not the same guy I went to high school with.

The Billy Joel I knew had four or five children with several different women. I also know that when he was 30 he suffered some severe burns on his face after throwing a gas can into a bonfire. Again, when I ask people if they know if the famous Billy Joel had these things happen to him, they will say no or they aren’t sure.  It is frustrating because it makes me feel like there is a chance it is the same Billy Joel.

I don’t remember my Billy Joel singing songs or writing music, but maybe he liked to keep that private and only do it on the radio or in front of thousands of people.

After more than 25 years of research, I don’t know if the Billy Joel I went to high school with is the same one that wrote the song “We Don’t Start Fires.”

I think it’s suspicious that he wrote a song about fire and the Billy Joel I know had most of his face burned off.

Is that just a coincidence?  Or was the song autobiographical?

Stan Bargmeyer, Coma News Intern

Coma Weekly FREECYCLE Digest

Freecycling is when a person passes on, for free, an unwanted item to another person who needs that item. From silverware to mobile homes, people worldwide are choosing to freecycle rather than discard.

[FreecycleComa] TAKEN: several tubs of butter and a cow

Cow-Appreciation-Day

the butter was fresh and taken right off my porch. someone stole the cow too. not sure how that’s possible.

please return the cow. the cow was not part of the offer.
Andrea Reynolds

[FreecycleComa] OFFER: architectural column

column (4)

got this from our neighbor who used it inside his house. My plan was to weather-proof it and use it in landscaping, color it, add some flair but I changed my mind. can’t figure out what to do with a tall architectural column. It’s fairly heavy, the paint is rubbing off. Hollow inside (see pictures). you could hide stuff in the hollow area.

 

contact Sandy townofcoma at gmail.com

 

[FreecycleComa] re-offer – 9 foot patio umbrella

 

Farm1103_Umbrella

Faded from the sun and the pole is a little bent, but it works fine. It doesn’t have a crank, you raise it by hand. The umbrella is broken. Probably not fixable. Carport pick up. Last person who saw it didn’t want it even though it’s free. Good for a project minded person or someone who wants something broken that they can’t fix.
email for pick up. only serious people who want something broken.
townofcoma at gmail.com

Luke Michaels to Triumph in Coma Dirt War

By Thomas Steven John, Coma News future beat reporter

 

 
Luke Michaels will win an unexpected victory in Dirt War Saturday, by uncontested acclimation.
Michaels’, 10, victory over his older brother Sean, 12, came to this reporter in a sweat-soaked fever dream.

The younger Michaels’ victory followed a day-long dirt clod-throwing battle at a residential construction site, known between the brothers as “The Hills.” Although Luke was generally on the run throughout the day, a desperation handful of dirt will momentarily blind Sean and elicit the universal surrender “you cheated, I’m going home.”

boynoun
Although the boys’ mother declined interviews with them for this article she expressed relief “no one’s gonna lose an eye.”
“Usually its a victory for their dad and I when we’re able to pry those computer games out of their hands for half a second and get them to go outside,” she said. “But I guess, either way, there’s a price to be paid.”
The victory by the younger Michaels will be short-lived, however, as months of further fighting between the brothers in nearby streams, woods, and the neighborhood pool will follow the mysterious incapacitation of their families’ Xbox gaming system.
“That sounds awesome,” said Jimmy Cracker, 10, a sometimes ally of the younger Michaels, when told about a coming battle–featuring BB guns and M-80s taped to tennis balls–which the brothers will lead. “But I gotta go because I’m not supposed to talk to strangers. Especially ones who smell weird.”

A C-Cup Space Station Streaks the Sky

The following is one in a series of intermittent excerpts from Coma residents’ blogs published by Coma News as a community service

 

By Sadie Cracker

 

Yesterday I went to Bear’s Biker Bar- where the smell of  stale tobacco smoke and disappointment mingles with the last breath of Americana– with my friend Robert McGuiness.

Robert’s a good friend mainly because his unemployment gives him the flexibility to meet whenever I can corral babysitting and because I like his Scottish accent.
Among the many topics of conversation was the recent miserable failure of my cross-country  Kerouac-style, run-away-from-my-life-with-two-screaming-kids trip.  Kerouac just had himself and a trunk full of alcohol. I had two boys, non-stop potty breaks and three bloody noses, for which no one would take responsibility.

So Robert and I were discussing this when Charlie, a local  biker and Coma  librarian who’s into tattoos, wandered in with his guitar over one shoulder.
Charlie stood at a makeshift bar stage (several tables threaded together- legs sawed off) and started playing Freebird‘ on his guitar.
He stopped mid-way through the chorus, “But if I stayed here with you girl, things just wouldn’t be the same, cause I’m as free as a bird now and this bird you cannot….”
“Hey Sadie, show us your B cup,” he said and pointed above the bar, where a line of bras were threaded through a clothesline.
“Take it off!” said Charlie to the soccer mom.
Robert was no help. “Take it off,” he said.
The line of bras seemed like a line of soldiers that hoist up and highlight things forever fallen by pregnancy and the passage of time. I looked up at those bras staring back and me. Judging me.
“It’s a C cup!” I said.
barBut then I couldn’t figure out how to keep my shirt on and take the bra off. Even with Portia, the burlesque dancer behind the bar, showing me how easy it was to avoid a nip slip. Ultimately, my suburban rebellion was quashed by my fear of what my fellow misfits would see when they saw my Haines cotton Target special with a wire that had worn through the middle that is constantly stabbing me.
They would see the truth: A woman stuck in the past, who cannot let go of the old and the cotton, and who is afraid to be free.
Back home, I let the sitter go and brought the boys outside to sit on a blanket and watch the stars. The spacestation was set to streak through the sky and we sat silently waiting.
“Mommy, where’s the spaceship?” said Ben.
spacestationThe sky was filled with stars and endless black space, and then something bright streaking across the sky.
“We should run.” said Joe, my oldest. And so we ran with the spaceship across the yard, with my bra stabbing me the entire time and me laughing so hard it hurt.

Council Pounces on Badger Pipes

By Coma News Staff

The Coma Town Council hopes to snuff out the retro appeal of badger pipes to Coma’s children.
Use of the animals to smoke tobacco was invented in Coma in the 19th Century and recently returned among young adults bored of hookahs, bongs and e-cigs. Town leaders have raised concerns that the use of adorable badger pups and rainbow-colored badgers may encourage underage use of the tobacco paraphernalia.

 

The 'Just Say No to Badger' campaign will kick of at a rally sponsored by e-cigs in the next month.

The ‘Just Say No to Badger’ campaign will kick off at a rally sponsored by e-cigs next month.

“Badger smoking is an obnoxious, rebellious habit and one we must ensure our children avoid–at all costs,” Councilwoman Natalie Peters said at this week’s Council meeting.
Peters suggested offering bounties to eradicate the animals from Coma. But Councilman Bob Smith-Smith warned that users would just use the Internet to order the smoking implements from Canada.
One more reason the Internet is dangerous, folks,” Smith-Smith said about the woodland smokers.
Some local teens said they were unaware of badger-smoking until they were asked about the Council’s safety concerns.

“Are badgers the ones with the stripe?” said Chase Donovan, a local teen and Coma News intern. “Sorry, dude. Not ringing any bells.”
Coma News has featured badger smoking in its history coverage.

An Edge for ‘Moms’ in Boost-Off 2014?

By Coma News Staff
The women’s team hopes a secret weapon will give them the edge in Coma Boost-Off 2014, the parent-fan competition that just started a new season.
Competitive Moming hopes to reverse its fortunes from last season, when a three-judge panel of Coma leaders awarded the over-the-top parent booster crown to Digdeep Dads. What’s the moms’ secret this year? An Internet detective to ferret out any booster shortcomings among the dads.

 

Sports are competitive but not as competitive as parenting.

Sports are competitive but not as competitive as parenting.

We can spend 25 hours each and every week attending soccer, baseball and basketball practices and these guys get the same points from the judges just for showing up at a couple games and yelling inappropriate comments,” said Dee Collins, captain of the Moms.

 

Competitve Momming can only do so much to win when they don't actually like to watch baseball.

Competitive Moming can only do so much to win when they don’t actually like to watch baseball.

Marybell Davis, owner of LOL Detective Agency, said her preliminary investigation of the Dads has already identified weaknesses.
“They may have made the opening games this season but most have already made other plans for the coming weekends,” Davis said. “Their wives have posted the Dad’s’ schedules on Facebook.”
But what the Dads’ lack in consistency they make up for in intensity, said Jax Owen, captain of the Dads.
“My youngest son is my retirement plan,” Owen said about six-year-old Trigger Owen. “Seriously, I haven’t saved a penny, so if my son doesn’t get to the Majors then I’m gonna be homeless when I retire. And you better believe he knows that.”

Tourism Campaign Draws Criticism

tourism ad 3

By Coma News Staff

A new Coma tourism ad campaign has drawn criticism for its  depiction of Mayor Dave Anderson with a host of scantily clad women and a suggestive tagline with “scandalous undertones.”  The sexually-charged ads debuted in weekly newspapers across the midwest last weekend.

According to Anderson, the ads were designed to “sexy up” the small town in an effort to attract visitors from across the country by suggesting a “reasonable expectation of sexual intercourse.”

“Sex sells,” Anderson said.  “We need to get people walking around our streets, staying at our motel and spending money. The ‘Spring Break’ initiative worked well and this is the next step.”

tourism ad 4

The ads feature the mayor with female models in a variety of situations with the suggestive tagline “You’re about to get laid.”  While critics say the ads promote unsafe sex and tarnish the city’s reputation, Anderson said the ads highlight the many fun activities the town has to offer and that the sexual undertones are subtle and nuanced.

His critics disagree.

“I’ve seen more nuance on a children’s cereal box,” councilmember Bob Smith-Smith said.  “I thought it was an ad for an escort service.”

tourism ad 5

Jax Owen, a local used-car dealer and head of the Coma Tourism Commission, developed the campaign and said that ultimately the ads should be judged on the results.

“If I was sitting around some little shithole in Albequerque, Mexico and saw an ad like this guess where I’m going to be once I clear customs?  I’m going to be in Coma to get laid by a paramedic or a lady selling jeans,” Owen said.

tourism ad 7

Anderson, who recently suffered a setback on educational reform, said that while he was disappointed with the reaction to the tourism campaign, he was in the “you’re about to get laid” business for the long haul.