The DC Diatribe is the oldest and most esteemed newspaper in the greater Washington area. Dellingham Ditchwatter, Assistant to the Chief Editor and author of the Ditch report, is a news hound – and the Shori Banazai is a good place to listen in because this is where the makers and shakers go, and where the most important political stories are discussed and debated.
The current rage in the news involves the hyperactive nature of the greaser mice. However, It has become increasingly difficult to keep the human populace titillated as the sex and violence aspects of Mousean activities are repetitious and somewhat boring. (Mousean orgies overwhelm those of the Congress and most of the DC swamp bureaucrats. Mousean warfare, although massive in scale, simply ends up with lots of dead mice. The DC sanitation workers who constantly shovel up masses of smelly and nauseating dead mice have complained about this.)
The Ditch report clearly needed something new.
And then lightning struck. Yes, it actually struck the Shori Banazai setting fire to the famous pizza ovens. The sushi exploded, setting hundreds of hungry greaser mice ablaze. In their panic, the now “well lite” Mouseans rushed onto the streets of DC and into adjoining boutiques, dry goods stores, and nearby government buildings. The resulting wider conflagration destroyed two hundred and twenty-seven blocks of prime real estate.
The vaunted DC fire department, joined by hundreds of others from Virginia and Maryland, eventually “put out” the fire. Unfortunately, individual “flaming” greaser mice popped up to start more conflagrations in quite strange places around the City and outside the Beltway. (The “DC Roast” as it is now called reminded some National Archives historians of the famous Chicago fire rumored to have been started by one of Mrs. O’Leary’s cows, either Daisy, Madeline, or Gwendolyn.)
The good news was that the fire had created another news story angle – the impact of climate change and manmade environmental adversity on the Mouseans and other small creatures. And none other than Delingham’s cousin, Barney Pfief, was the head of the Environmental Prediction Agency. (Notably, the EPA name change had occurred when the word “protection” was perceived to be a micro-aggression and toxically masculine.)
Dellingham and Barney met at the quickly restored Shori Banazai. The purpose of the meeting was quite simple. How does the DC Diatribe make a long running national and international story out of the Mousean lightning strike deaths and area wide destruction? (Obviously, Mouseans were prolific breeders and some smaller nations with limited resources had been overrun, but that was not of particular interest to DC Diatribe readers. But Climate Change —-? Always a Page 1 Headline.)
The discussion between Dellingham and Barney was animated. However, the end result was that whatever story was to be concocted, it had to be laundered through one of the major environmental groups. The famed Japanese Godzilla Environmentalists, who had been instrumental in creating nuclear mutant dinosaur monsters, were chosen.
A secret meeting was arranged with Ambassador Sakitomi.
At first, the Ambassador was disinterested and even somewhat offended. Japan was free of the Mousean “mutant mini-monsters”, and he feared that media exposure would lead some crazed environmentalists to plant Mouseans in a Japanese city. After much bloviating, the meeting ended without a resolution. (In a top secret memo to his government, the Ambassador outlined the situation and his concerns about a growing problem on a global scale. The bottom line: Tokyo may have been “destroyed” by Godzilla, but, by God, it wouldn’t be destroyed by mice. )
