By Owner and Esteemed Editor-in-Perpetuity John R. Block

DEAR READERS OF THIS FORMERLY DISGRACEFUL PUBLICATION AND THOSE WHO RESIDE IN PITTSBURG,

Foremost, damn that superfluous ‘h’! Each instance of this accursed consonant is a mortal sin of print, its long-winded hubris bleeding pennies from the coffers of a hard-working business-man like the unrefined knife strokes of a stammering cut-purse with whom you types are no doubt intimately familiar. Henceforth, the land within the limits of your shanty town — Twain’s title of “hell with the lid off” charitably presumes hell’s proprietors, personal friends of mine and fine (devil-)men to the last, shan’t object to such defamation — shall be recognized by this publication, when with all recourse exhausted it unfortunately must, without this insufferable lingual extremity and the celebration of excess and poor business it embodies.

Now, indeed this age faces its greatest threat from the horde of ogres whom we allege to be human like the rest of us since that fool Kaiser Wilhelm II abandoned the sound counsel of Otto von Bismarck. My heavily overcompensated laborers, who may at times masquerade with alarming temerity under the guise of “journalists,” have sowed disquiet with their audacious supposition that our beloved arbiters of justice — police or, forgive the indecency, ‘cops,’ as the common ruffians call them — engage in practices in contradiction to that dreadful apparatus of appeasement the layman calls the constitution. (May my bones turn to dust and my blood soak the Earth should I ever furnish that forgery of law a capital!) We of superior intellect are to believe these purported, incredibly minor, and well-justified infractions by the mere presence of documentation on one of those temperamental recording contraptions! My well-placed sources tell me they are nothing but some bastardized mechanisms of a Hungarian separatist group and their purpose of deceit will be revealed within a fort-night.

Thus the responsibility falls once again upon the republic’s shrinking elite to suppress this hare-brained expression of confusion among the lowborn, doubtless lashing out in what little time they have between breeding like slovenly rabbits and drowning themselves in casks of that pitiful swig they name ale, for three of which — and a garish automotive travesty called an IROC — I bought this pathetic outfit. To that end, I’ve acquired this otherwise dubious publication to dedicate more coverage to the outstanding achievements of our boys in blue, who always stand ready to dispense wisdom on the strength of the law and the sanctity of private property not with wasteful verbiage, unlike my entitled servants and their corrupt union draining outrageous wages from an honest entrepreneur, but rather with the swift strike of a billy club covered in barbed wire. I welcome the cosmopolitans, socialites, bearers of wealth, and I suppose whatever of this feeble-minded lot of scoundrels feigns to be literate to the finest paper this side of the Mason Dixie for enshrining our union-busters and the proverbial studded fist of the affluent.

Welcome to the Club and Shield.