Judge, 1915-12-11 · page 18 of 28
Judge — December 11, 1915 — page 18: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two elements: a satirical cartoon at the top and humorous local news items below. **The Cartoon:** A grocer offers "fresh mistletoe" to a female customer. She responds that mistletoe causes "frivolous and unhygienic" habits—a reference to the Christmas tradition of kissing under mistletoe. The satire mocks Victorian-era prudishness about even innocent romantic gestures. **"Lazytown Local News":** This is mock-rural gossip from a fictional backwater town. The humor targets small-town absurdity: a man's rat infestation, bizarre medical advice (sleeping with feet out the window), stolen maps blamed on "foreign spies," and particularly Columbus Allsop's comically futile effort to track a mink by copying its pawprint and then exhaustively examining every mink in the area. The final item ridicules a poet for simply recycling last spring's poem with seasonal word-swaps ("dawn of autumn" instead of spring). The satire mocks rural ignorance, small-town paranoia, and literary pretension.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Grocer—We have some nice fresh mistletoe, ma’am. GEVERAL stray rats have taken up at the home of Sim Flinders. He thinks if any more come he will be compelled to build another room to his house. 2 Washington Hocks, after being bothered with spells when he could not breathe, has undergone an inspection by the Horse Doc- tor, who advised him to hereafter sleep with his feet out the window. a Miss Fruzie Allsop expects to have her new dress completed and ready for public opinion by next Sunday. 2 Fit Smith was out this week with his axe cutting down all the ambushes around the Hog Ford moonshine still house. 2 A map of the United States has been stolen from the Wild Onion school house. The Depity Constable is working on the case and believes that some foreign spy has been in our midst. /)) Ny iy Y Gp LAZYTOWN LOCAL NEWS By GEORGE BINGHAM A mule driven by Clab Hancock got scared at Miss Flutie Belcher Tucsday morning and ranaway. Clab received several slight inju- ries and had the handle broken off of his jug. 2 Luke Mathewsla has come to think that the world is gradually shrinking up, as it is not half as big as it was when he was a boy. : # Columbus Allsop, had he had the advan- tages of an early training, might have developed into a sleuth equal to the town marshal at Tickville. As it is, still he is possessed of great ability in that line, dis- playing as he does considerable shrewdness when the occasion demands. Friday morn- ing he observed the track of a mink in his back yard near the chicken roost, and, get- ting his pencil and paper, he copied it off Miss Elderberry—Young man, mistletoe causes a frivolous and unhygienic habit. and started out through the Gimlet creek bottoms in search of the owner. After hunting for many hours and examining a multitude of minks large and small, he was at last rewarded with success, having found the animal the track fitted, and returned home with him. The Tickville Tidings of last week con- tained a very striking poem from the pencil of Miss Hostetter Hocks. The poem is lengthy and is entitled “The Dawn of Autumn.” This is the same poem Miss Hocks wrote on the advent of spring, last May, and has only had to make some changes here and there. In reconstructing it, she put a faded, down-and-out look on all the flowers, took all the sap and vigor out of the corn fields, and set a lot of crickets to singing the funeral of the dying weeds. Then, in the ninth verse she moved the sun over to the south several miles, made the sun rise later, and substituted mosquitoes for butterflies.