Squirrelfest© 2005

(From the Blind Observer)
PARKERSBURG, WV– Controversy has struck Squirrelfest© 2005. The normally sleepy event, held every year here during squirrel season, has grown far beyond the Squirrel Gravy Cook-Off that comprised the original 1952 Squirrelfest©, and now includes carnival rides, gospel music, and the popular Shoot-Your-Hats-Off.

But suspicions have been cast on the time-honored Squirrel Gravy Cook-Off as a possible source of a breakout of Mad Squirrel Disease in humans locally, including possibly in longtime Squirrelfest© President Hobart Shrub; and last year’s Shoot-Your-Hats-Off still has people talking.

Mad Squirrel Disease
LaVerta Reynolds is expected to win the Squirrel Gravy Cook-Off, as she has every year since 1952. She’s a favorite with the judges, Brantlow Meeker and Rutherford Vance.

Squirrelfest© participants, snacking on barbequed squirrel, broiled squirrel, squirrel stew, baked squirrel, and fried squirrel with squirrel gravy, dismissed the idea that LaVerta’s gravy could be the source of the recent occurrence of Mad Squirrel Disease in local humans. The disease, which produces holes in the brain, normally strikes only one person in a million, say neurologists, but Dr. John Wiemeraner says in a report that in the last four years he has seen 11 cases in his practice here, all in people who reported eating squirrel brains at some time.

Symptoms include loss of muscle control and dementia. It may take years, even decades, neurologists say, for symptoms to appear.

“It is perhaps best to avoid squirrel brains and probably the brains of any other animal,” said Dr. Rayburn Barker, who with Wiemeraner reported the neurological findings to the Mid-Ohio Valley Medical Journal.

But squirrel brains are a lip-smacking memory for Squirrelfest© visitor Annabel Gates. They were the choicest morsels of the game her father once hunted. “In our family, we saw it as a prized piece of meat, and if he shared it with you, you were pretty happy. Not that he was stingy,” she said, “but there’s just not much of a squirrel brain.”

Hardy Lyvers, whose wife simmers squirrels, head and all, with sautéed onions and peppers and serves them over rice, said “two guys’ opinions” in a medical journal won’t make him change his ways.

Howard Garland’s prize-winning Squirrelfest© recipe for fresh road-killed squirrel especially concerns Dr. Barker. A crazed squirrel, he said, may be more likely to dash into traffic and get killed.

Shoot-Your-Hats-Off
Some Squirrelfest© observers speculated that Mad Squirrel Disease might have been a factor in the incident that marred last year’s Shoot-Your-Hats-Off, in which contestants try to shoot each other’s hats off.

Fewer people are expected to be injured this year than usual in Shoot-Your-Hats-Off, due to summer target-practice sessions and a hoped-for decrease in heavy drinking, but the three contestants who were unfortunately left lying in a drunken stupor after being shot in last year’s event have clearly weighed heavily on President Shrub.

Many Squirrelfest© participants were alarmed when they learned that Shrub, apparently believing that Squirrelfest© had become possessed by evil forces, ordered last year’s three Shoot-Your-Hats-Off victims left untreated in the creek bed where they lay. But accusations that he acted strangely have not put Shrub on the defensive. He has said, ‘I will personally fully investigate my actions and I will make every effort to get to the bottom of what I did that day.”

He ruled out a medical examination, calls for which have increased after Shrub shot his mailman for bringing notice of the newly assigned County 911 number. Shrub asserted that the new house-numbering is “the Mark of the Beast,” and that the “mailman” was obviously Satan. He dismissed suggestions of Mad Squirrel Disease as “crazy talk.”

Shrub said in an interview that he believed 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry may have been behind last year’s mysterious occurrence. He said Kerry’s Democrats had wanted to sabotage Squirrelfest© and, he said, “take away our God-given right to bear arms.” But, he said, President George Bush had supported Squirrelfest,© sending over boxes of Social Security Treasury bonds from the Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, saying that they were “worthless IOUs” which could be used for target practice.