#14 Missing News

“Again?” Pit exclaimed, “you can’t be serious Bob!”

“I wish it was otherwise Pit,” said Bob as he shook his head with a sigh peeking from behind the windows of his soul wondering if it should come out on ceremony.

“That’s strange,” Pit noted, “According to statistics, I would have expected you to sigh by now. Are you holding back a sigh?”

“No,” sighed Bob, proving his point.

“Impressive,” said Pit, “Now, what shall we do with this predicament?”

Bob frowned. He did not know what to do. He had walked out from his house in the morning to collect the newspaper as usual only to find that the newspaper had no news on it. It was not just Bob’s paper that had no news on it, everyone in town receive blank pieces of paper. Something was very wrong.

“This smells pretty fishy to me,” said Pit.

“I suspect it is the salmon in your hands,” said Bob.

“Brilliant!” shouted Pit, pointing the salmon right at Bob’s nose.

As quick as a snail on caffeine, Pit breaks the window with the salmon and dashes out the kitchen door.

“What are you doing Pit?” shouted Bob.

Almost out of ear-shot, Pit shouts back, “Meet me in the front garden!”

Bob turns around and dashes to the front door. Bam! The door flings wide open just as Bob caught hold of the handle. Slamming his face and sending him flying into the air.

“Bob, bob!! Hurry up!” screams Pit as he dashes through the front door.

Bob, now having landed on the sofa only manages to give a limp nod before passing out.

“Goodness mayonnaise me, Bob! Now is not the time to nap!” said Pit.

“Sir,” said a small little voice from just outside the front door, “I believe we have something to discuss?”

“Yes, we do,” replied Pit sternly. With that, Pit gave an earful to what appeared to be well groomed ants in tuxedos about the legalities of removing news from newspapers.

“We understand Sir Pit,” said the ants, “We are horribly sorry about this incident. We had tried to source better material for building our ant hill. It’s sort of a Caesar’s Palace and pile of dirt kinda architectural endeavor. Anyway, we couldn’t find anything to hold up the dirt roof. We tried using sticks as the columns but it was too weak, candles but they were too wick, and even dolphins but they were too sloshy. That’s when we saw the newspaper columns and used them. Its inherent phonetic qualities and mixture of compound words gave it paralleled strength, line after line…”

“Alright, alright. That’s quite enough!” interrupted Pit. Who then turned to the still dazed Bob and said, “Told you there was something fishy about this!”

“Dolphins aren’t fish, they’re mammals,” stated Bob, still in a daze, perhaps even a haze, who knows?

Anyway, the ants carefully and painstakingly removed the news columns supporting the roof and glued them back to the newspapers. With the help of Pit, the ants managed to build their ant hill out of just dirt.

“So now it’s more of a pile of dirt and Caesar’s Palace kinda architecture,” said the ants in tuxedos.

“Your description sounds the same as before,” said Pit.

“No! It is not the same!” retorted the distinguished ants, “the sequence of words are different! They mean absolutely different things!

“My apollo geese,” said Pit.

The ants having just finished their ant hill were too overjoyed to take offense at such a small slip in contextual interpretation of spoken words. They decided instead, to hold a ball to celebrate the completion of their new home. So, Pit lent them his basket ball, and the ants had a ball of a time holding the ball all through the night.