RECENT VISITORS TO OUR GLORIOUS MUNICIPALITY - Mister and Missus Oliver Wendell Oggsnotz of Western South Wolcott and their lovely daughter Inharmonia passed through town recently en route to deliver their high-spirited offspring to Frau Krinkheimer's Finishing School in Upper East Roxbury. Mister Oggsnotz is well known as the owner of Dreck's Furniture, a bustling establishment in his sleepy hometown, although his wife Crescendo is even better known, being the Town Crier and all. Mister and Missus Oggsnotz condescended to alight from their barouche and speak to the common people of this burg when they halted for lunch at Wee Willie's Winery in the Mayonnaise Building. As the lovely Inharmonia had expressed the strongest (one might even say violent) reservations about being handed over to the tender mercies of Frau Krinkheimer, she remained in the barouche, trussed up like the Christmas goose. The Oggsnotzes entertain the hope that the regimen of cold baths and hot lectures will cure their charming offspring of her Bohemian ways.

Doctor and Missus Doctor Socrates Grogswiller, lately of Bunkum's Three-Point-Five Corners, a hamlet in the northwest corner of southeastern Granby in this state, halted in town for lunch recently whilst en route home from Frau Krinkheimer's Finishing School with their lovely high-spirited daughter Disingenua. As Miss Disingenua's spirits were too high for even the stern likes of Frau Krinkheimer to file down into something more generally acceptable in polite company, Frau K. threw in the towel and invited the Grogswillers to remove their daughter from her premises posthaste. The Grogswillers alighted from their caleche in front of Wee Willie's Winery just as the Oggsnotzes arrived, and for the next hour, the two couples exchanged harrowing stories about their daughters.

However, Disingenua, who was chained to the left rear wheel of the family carriage, prevailed upon a passer-by to release her and her fellow sufferer to-be, the fair Inharmonia, from their confinement, whereat Disingenua wielded the cosh which she had secreted in her bustier and rendered the wouldbe Average Samaritan unconscious. The two young women thereupon made off in his 1928 Hispano-Suiza J12 and have not been seen since. Their parents, while upset about having to replace the automobile, are, nonetheless, greatly relieved to be shot of their joint problem children.

The putative rescuer, S. Quincy Balderdash, Professor of Psycho Numerology & Holder of the Froaderick Fronkensteen Chair in Disembodied Notions at the Dog River Academy for Wayward Boys, and Visiting Professor of Swedish Massage & Ribald Banter at Frau Krinkheimer's Finishing School (where he was acquainted with the aptly surnamed Miss Grogswiller), made a rapid, if somewhat embarrassed, recovery and has resumed his varied duties.

LOCAL HERMIT RECEIVES MIXED MESSAGES FROM AUTHORITIES - The Hermit of Frost Road reports via smoke signal that two state functionaries arrived at his column a sennight ago with quite different messages. One, the Second Deputy Under-Assistant to the Permanent Committee on Temporary Matters Related to Environmental Awareness & Good Stewardship, presented said Hermit with a certificate of appreciation for the environmentally friendly way in which he constructed the column atop which he has been residing for the last several weeks.

The other functionary, representing the People's Temporary Commissariat on Permanent Matters Related to Environmental Crimes & Misdemeanors, tried to serve the Hermit with a writ of habeas porpoise, haling him into court on charges of building a column without a license, causing an erection greater than five feet and lasting longer than 24 hours, lowering property values by raising his own, willfully flouting good taste, and harboring marine wildlife at an altitude exceeding 900 feet.

As the Hermit watched with bemusement, the competing functionaries accosted each other first with hard words and thence with colorful and mildly abusive language, finally reaching a point where they commenced fisticuffing each other. This disturbance went on for some time ere it was broken up by the Hermit emptying his chamber pot on the heads of the brawlers. As the howling functionaries sped off in opposite directions, the Hermit activated the electric fence that surrounds his many acres as an inducement to other trespassers to stay away.