RUBBERY SHRUBBERY Post 41
This is the Rubbery Shrubbery blog, where you’ll learn how Yachats (YAH-hots), Oregon, acquires a Major League Baseball franchise. To learn more about Yachats and its inhabitants—called Yachatians (yah-HAY-shuns)—please go to this page or go to GoYachats.
Again Edgar Allan Spindlehopper reports to you from Wart Wallow, Oregon, as he continues from the last post. Perhaps you remember that when we last heard from Edgar Allan he had accused Mayor Cramp McSnort of harboring a fugitive from justice.
Why There Are so Few Ferraris in Wart Wallow (See Fig. 1)
by Edgar Allan Spindlehopper
WART WALLOW, OR — Before I called the sheriff to have the mayor pinched, I made a dash up the stairs to the Wallow House historical museum to see the very rock that Warton Wallow used to pound nails when building this very same Wallow House.
Once I recovered from the jolt of seeing Willow Wallow, Wart Wallow’s ex-widow, propped up at the top of the stairs, the rock was easy to find. Bathed in spotlights, it was displayed in an unbreakable case in the middle of the room. Two security guards stood on each side of it. I was awestruck. What a story that rock could tell if only it could talk!
After gazing at the rock for a good half hour, I suddenly remembered that I had justice to uphold. I hurried downstairs where I found Mayor McSnort calmly waiting for me at his desk in his office. I confronted him and his bear skin rug sternly.
“Mr. Mayor, I’m calling the sheriff. You’ve sheltered your murderous bear skin rug long enough. It’s time for you and it to come clean.”
McSnort countered. “Now, hold on there, young fella. This particular bear skin rug has an airtight alibi. First of all, it was at the Wart Wallow Bear Skin Rug Cleaners and Renovators at the time of the alleged death of Wart Wallow. Second of all, it was dead at that very same time. That’s a double alibi.”
Suddenly I was overcome with embarrassment. There are few things in this world as bad as blame wrongly cast. To make matters worse, I couldn’t think how to shift the blame to McSnort’s secretary.
Figure 1. Ferrari in Wart Wallow.
So I said, “Okay. Tell me about your efforts to get baseball in Wart Wallow.”
Fortunately, I caught McSnort right in the midst of an attention deficit. He replied, “Well, Wart Wallow has always loved sports, but we don’t have any teams to satisfy those gambling needs. So, for years Wart Wallowers have done all their betting on Bo von Gletzendorf’s hog, Rocky. Exciting enough, but we hungered for more variety.”
“Of course,” I replied. “You wanted more for your sports dollar. When you learned that Duck Egg is getting a minor league baseball team you volunteered to host Duck Egg’s home games.”
“You bet. We knew that Duck Egg, being a 100% witness protection program town, didn’t want anyone to know where the town is. Duck Egg went along with our idea, but we ran into a snag. For a new stadium, we needed a plot of ground that was level. Not easy to find when you live in a canyon.”
“I can see that would be a problem.”
McSnort shrugged. “But we had a solution. There’s a large meadow up under Rumbling Rocks Ridge. A large herd of woolly mammunks used to graze and cavort there until Daisy Dawdle decided to have a flower farm. Daisy is usually at least half Sasquatch, and she just walked out into the field and shooed the mammunks hard. They panicked and have never returned.”
“So it belongs to Daisy now?”
“Yep. It’s Daisy Dawdle’s Daffodil Farm. A beautiful sight. Daisy isn’t one for hard work, though, so she put in Plastiposies™ artificial daffodils.”
“Is Daisy willing to sell her property so you can build the stadium?”
“Nope. Wouldn’t budge. So we resorted to eminent domain. That means we yank the farm right out from under her. And we would except she’s poor and elderly and…we’re all terrified of her—those mammunks knew what they were doing. No one in town has the stupidity to tell Daisy we own her land.”
“Oh, oh! You have no place to build your stadium, then.”
McSnort broke into a self-satisfied smile. “But we remembered that Jezebel City, just over the mountain from here, has plenty of flat, level land. We bought a plot and we’re planning to build a multipurpose stadium. We can host the Duck Egg Toxic Sox and have our own college football team (we’ve started an online college for this purpose)*. All our problems are solved.”
And this takes the pressure off Rocky, too.
* Wart Wallow College Widowmakers will play in the Big Concussion Conference next fall. And on New Year’s Day the Wart Wallow stadium will host the first annual Aspirin Bowl Game.
Next time: We’ll return to Yachats where there’s some exciting news regarding the Rubbery Shrubbery Stadium roof, which is currently on loan to the Seattle Mariners™.
NOTE: The recent discovery of an ancient cave painting showing a pedigree chart for the woolly mammunk has mammologists flabbergasted. The chart clearly shows that the mammunk is a triple hybrid—a cross between the chipmunk, the woolly mammoth, and the American lion. “The lion in the mix is a complete surprise,” said noted expert Professor Rafferty McDaff. “This explains a few mammunky things, though, such as their tendency to sleep most of the time and why they occasionally pounce on unsuspecting Ferraris.” (See Fig. 1.)
NOTE AGAIN: Dave Baldwin and Eric Sallee claim that the Rubbery Shrubbery blog is the result of hanging out with the wrong crowd.