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Now
that the election is over and Mayor Frank Pruner has happily been returned
to office, we feel that no harm can come from revealing to you the truth
about our whereabouts over the past several months. It is no doubt
apparent to you that there has been no issue of the Nooz for some
time, and rumors have unfortunately begun to circulate that we had been
shut down by the government or gone bankrupt or something. Well,
we are pleased to be able to lay those rumors to rest. The fact is that
the entire Primate Nooz staff secretly flew over in October to Hellmouth's
beautiful sister city in the USSR, Braty-Bublinsk, under the auspices of
a United Nations exchange program with the Russian national primatology
newspaper Primatsiya Primatsiya. Our goal was to visit the
Lenin Monkey Institute and participate in some seminars at the 44th Universal
Primate Symposium and Hunting Show in nearby Novgorod, but the major part
of our trip was an unparalleled opportunity to observe the competent and
sometimes sober workers of this great Euro-Asian publishing conglomerate,
which really makes the Nooz look pretty sick!
So, we plodded along them behind them
like innocent dunderheads, but all the time we were eyeing their every move.
We noticed the terrific advances they have made in the field of primatology newspapers, and we were inwardly envious of their shiny new equipment,
which could only have come from Lithuania. We learned how their
veteran reporters would have covered such stories as last year's discovery
of the strawberry pine lemur or the recent decline in the number of Australian
pouched langurs living in the basements of people's houses. We were
with them each step of the way as they shaped and crafted and polished their
newspaper, doggedly yet lovingly, as a mailman will often reach down and
pat his pet spaniel on the head before leaving for work.
We came back to Hellmouth full of ideas
on how to improve the Nooz, and this issue is the result, carefully
modelled on the long Slavic tradition of primate newspapers, incorporating
many of the new concepts and philosphies we picked up over there, and written
in the manner of that great Ukrainian primatology correspondent Pavel Bublev.
We were able to snoop around and get some good stories while they
weren't looking, and we have tried to give our little journal some of the
flavor of its large cousin Primatsiya Primatsiya. We are sure
you will appreciate the advances we have been able to make in just one issue,
and we promise that there will be more to come. Meanwhile, as they say in
Russia, "So long as the government is not for you looking, is it a
good year!" |
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