Stuffing the Passer - Worker's Paradise

Our long national nightmare is over. After 25 days of brutal deadlock, the Local Fuzzy and Fuzz-Like Entertainer and Entertaintrixes Union have resolved their dispute with the evil capitalist swine at the House Rock Built and are back to work.

This all reminds me of the famed Haymarket Riot, an auspicious event in labor history that happened on my birthday way back in 1886. You might not know it today, but back then, puppets faced grueling hours, limited Scotch breaks, and persistent occupational safety hazards (this was in the time before Franklin Roosevelt created the PHCMO -- Puppeteer Hand Cleanliness Monitoring Organization -- a hare-brained make-work program that, unexpectedly, singlehandedly ended the Great Depression. Good on ya, FDR).

At any rate, a few rabble-rousing sock puppets and marionettes turned a small wildcat walk-out at a Chicago carnival geek show into an enormous general strike that shut down puppetry in all of the nation's top commercial centers, a development that threatened the very livelihood of Ron D. Rockefeller, the loss-notable younger brother of John Rockefeller who had made a comparably small yet nonetheless handsome fortune off of his national puppet monopoly. As the crowd become unruly and the outmanned Pinkertons fled for their lives, the nation's puppet robber-barons turned to their last resort and called in a young and largely unknown behemoth of a lawyer from Ohio named William Howard Taft, whose well-executed flying belly-flop crushed several dozen brave puppets to death on that dark, dark day.

Many of those sentences were factual.

Okay, puppets.

Now I've got to hide my good scotch.