(Roughly) Daily

From Rebecca Saltzman…

As America’s seventh-ranked patriotic bunting company, we’re proud to fulfill all of your Fourth of July decorating needs this year. Also, due to a factory mix-up, our bunting this year is made of live snakes.

The American people rely on us for red, white, and blue fabric to hang on their porches. However, it has recently come to our attention that many customers have instead received a writhing mass of serpents. Are they at least harmless? No, they’re quite deadly. But we hope you will be reassured to know that the snakes can play “Yankee Doodle” on their rattles, which is a step up from our plastic bunting option.

How could this mistake happen? Our bunting factory operates under lax, or one might say non-existent, quality control standards. We also built our factory on top of a known snake nesting habitat. Our entire factory is infested with snakes.

To determine whether you’ve received bunting or snakes, we have put together the following helpful guidance…

Read on: “We Apologize That Instead of July Fourth Bunting, We Accidentally Shipped You a Box Full of Snakes,” from @beccasaltz in @mcsweeneys.

* Friedrich Nietzsche

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As we parse patriotism, recall that on this date in 1862 (88 years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on this same date), Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a young Oxford mathematics don, took the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church College– Alice Liddell and her sisters– on a boating picnic on the River Thames in Oxford.  To amuse the children he told them the story of a little girl, bored by a riverbank, whose adventure begins when she tumbles down a rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world called “Wonderland.”  The story so captivated the 10-year-old Alice that she begged him to write it down. The result was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865 under the pen name “Lewis Carroll,” with illustrations by John Tenniel.

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