Bailey & Riley read the Newspaper

We conquered the crossword in approximately 4.5 minutes (clearly we were not reading the New York Times). My favorite clues were a 7-letter word for "cleaned between teeth" and a 3-letter word for "unhappy." Hmmm...

Then we did the Jumble. When Riley unscrambled the word "tyrant" and I made a sassy response of "well aren't you so smart," we decided that, as an aspiring journalist and soon-to-be English teacher, i.e. a little obsessed with linguistics, we probably should not do word puzzles together. While otherwise relatively docile, the puzzles cause us to become a little more competitive than team-oriented.

After we declared the No Word Puzzles Treaty of 2010, it was only natural that we move on to the comics. Riley read one in particular that annoyed him and scratched out the entire strip. We then proceeded to say farewell to all of the less than worthy comics in our local newspaper. "Bye Cathy." "Bye Garfield," we said as we scribbled with gusto. Zippy received extra X's and dark ink scratches, for it is extra bad. We especially enjoyed putting to rest Marmaduke, Brenda Starr, and Mark Trail. Riley got pretty excited about ending Family Circus, and I let out some long pent up angst towards Marmaduke, yelling, "Oh, what's gonna happen today, Marmaduke? Let me guess, are you gonna sit on the couch again, covering the whole thing with your huge, dumb body?"

This whole activity was quite stress relieving. Perhaps my current bout of acne will disappear soon as a result.

Halfway through our little editing project, I said, "Mom and Dad are probably going to get mad because they haven't read these yet," and then scratched out Stone Soup and its disgruntled divorcees. There were only eight surviving strips, among them Get Fuzzy and Bizarro. There were no survivors on the page to the right of the centerfold.

Dad came down in the midst of our scratching and said, "Hey! What are you doing?! I haven't read those yet!"

"I told you we'd get in trouble," I mumbled to Riley.

We immediately represented our case, holding up the paper for him to see that we were doing him a favor, and he quickly simmered because we salvaged Zits and Baby Blues. He then remained to observe as I calculated the percentage of good comics in relation to all those that are published, and presented the Funnies with a 25%. A failing grade.