The Record of What Actually Happened
Three black belts in one hundred and sixty-nine days, each conferred by the man who had received the last one. The belts assert nineteen years of training apiece. The academy has existed for six. Applauding in the third photograph, in the academy's own branded shirts, are a former Vice President this newspaper reported on in August and a former President it has never reported on at all.
The sentence was spoken at 11:40 on a Tuesday night, in a kitchen in Winchester, by a forty-year-old commercial-lines underwriter, to his wife, who was loading a dishwasher. He had reinstalled the game four hours earlier and had last played it in 2004. He then wrote to this newspaper and asked to be audited, believing it would settle the matter in his favour.
The claim was made at 3:14 p.m. on Tuesday, 2 September, in the dismissal zone at Willow Run Elementary, by a nine-year-old, to an audience of nine-year-olds, and it was not original. What makes it worth five weeks is that it appears to be true — and that the man it is about would very much prefer we stopped.
A high school wrestling champion and Brazilian jiu-jitsu prodigy has found himself at the center of a botched 7-Eleven heist investigation — despite the inconvenient fact that he is, by every official measurement, simply too short to have done it.
A strip-mall academy in Winchester tied a blue belt on the reptilian forty-sixth vice president on 14 August, and the sanctioning body has had one question open since 2011: whether a man who went twenty months without a detectable pulse may be entered against men with hearts.
Steve Harrington thought he and his dog Baxter had a real shot at the local pickleball title. He was wrong.
