Back in November, I told you that the Shalampax school board implemented a No Child Left Behind program to combat the problem of parents leaving their children in school after hours, including overnight and, in some cases, over the weekend. The key element in the program is a fee that the school board now charges any parents who leave their children in the school when it’s closed.
I’m happy to report that the No Child Left Behind program has been a tremendous success. Before the school board implemented the program, some parents never thought to leave their children in school to keep them out of their parents’ hair. Now almost all parents do so frequently.
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A group of self-described “concerned citizens” (who knew we had any in Shalampax?) are expressing outrage over our process of using random selection rather than democratic election to choose our parliamentarians.
I don’t know how seriously to take this group because they haven’t yet given themselves a name. As you know, no group is worth a damn until they have a proper name, preferably one with a catchy acronym, but so be it.
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A major survey was recently commissioned to study the level of apathy in Shalampax. According to the couple of people I could be bothered to ask, no one knows or, more accurately, no one cares who commissioned the survey.
The problem with most surveys is that, because only a small random sampling of the population is interviewed, the studies are normally accurate only to a few percent above or below the reported results. However, depending on the sample size, this is typically true only 19 times out of 20. The results may be wildly inaccurate for the other one time out of 20.
The designers of the apathy survey have eliminated this problem. Because the population of Shalampax is only 4,242, it was decided that it would be feasible to interview the entire population, rather than just a random sample. This would totally eliminate the sampling error.
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I’ve got nothing. I was scheduled to write one of my spirituality columns for today’s issue of Shalampax Speaks, but, as is the custom for most Shalampaxians, I procrastinated.
By the time I realized how close the deadline was it was too late to drink enough spirits to put me in the frame of mind necessary to churn out a full column’s worth of spirituality-related crap.
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Last night, Stapleinforehead held another in his painful series of free poetry recitals. He was able to attract an exceptionally large audience (large by Shalampaxian standards; there were nine people there) by offering attendees a free, sumptuous meal, including an excellent selection of wines. Promising that he had worked hard to write a set of poems that would be less vomit-inducing than last time also helped to boost attendance.
The food and wine were every bit as good as Stapleinforehead had promised, but he made a serious tactical error in his program. He served the meal before reciting his poems. As soon as they finished dessert, the entire audience, myself included, rushed out of the room before Stapleinforehead could inflict his poems on us.
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Exercising the executive reserve powers that he has while the Parliament of Shalampax is shut down for National Democracy Month, Prime Minister Manexposinghimself has declared today, January 20, to be Anson Jones Day in Shalampax.
According to Wikipedia, the unfailingly reliable font of truth on the Internet, Anson Jones, who was born on January 20, 1798, was a doctor, businessman, congressman, and the last president of the Republic of Texas. He was sometimes called the “Architect of Annexation.”
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