BAYOU LAFONTAINE, Louisiana -- A Bayou LaFontaine man was taken into police custody Thursday afternoon after he shot his neighbor’s above-ground pool, causing a tide of brackish water and algae to flood the Lee Highway Piggly-Wiggly. Property damage was substantial after the flood carried away all three Little Debbie Cakes displays, one box each of All-Natural!® hangover remedy and male enhancement supplements, and a large jar of pickled meat. Piggly-Wiggly franchisee and runner-up for the prestigious North Louisiana Regional PW Owner of The Year, 1994-96, Vernon “Eggs” Thibault, put the losses at “pert near twenny, twenny-two doll, mebbe twenny-three. We shall not recover from this abomination. I aim to kill ol’ Loosh when he gets out. That sonofabitch.”

Earlier in the day, Lucius Poke, of the 300 block of Almighty Jeb Stuart Avenue, turned on his computer to check his email and discovered approximately 4,000 listserv messages about salt and removing oneself from the list. Poke, according to his wife, Judy, “signed up for that thing yes’day spite a my tellin’ him Widda Rummage signed up for it back April last year and said they’s all high-fancy types all upset about someone name a Karnaziz an she couldn’t quit it fast enough. But ol’ Loosh, he don’t listen much well, you know. He got hit in his head a few times coming up is all I can reckon. He can think about it some more down in county lockup.”

Having ignored warnings to set up an email filter to direct the list content to a special mailbox for later perusal, Poke was overwhelmed by the onslaught of messages. According to one police source who asked not to be identified, “It was poetic, in a way. I think the flood of email found its analog in the subsequent flood at the PW -- a corollary, so to speak, and I think, an indictment of these unfiltered times.”

Reached for comment, co-owner of the listserv, Dave “The Pirate” Combs, reported that he once changed the subject line of his daily email containing birthday wishes and instructions to unsubscribe from “ULTRA Birthdays and List Administrivia” to “If One More of You Damn Fools Sends a Messsage to the Entire List Asking How to Unsubscribe Instead of Reading This Daily Reminder, You can Spank My Ass And Call Me Betty.” Combs admitted that the message prompted a heated, sometimes violent discussion on whether it gave an unfair competitive advantage to a man if he posted as a woman. Women on the list were outraged at the suggestion men posted anything worthwhile as a rule, but raised the issue of a spanking being an obvious example of physical or mechanical aid in violation of the rules governing pacers. USATF agreed with the women, and ruled against Combs, forbidding him to wear headphones or post to his own list for six months. Combs’ pacer could not be reached to confirm his insistence that it was “just an expression.”

After a series of messages to the list asking to unsubscribe went unanswered, Lucius Poke directed three shotgun blasts at point-blank range towards his computer. The first blew a hole in the computer; the second, the wall behind it; the third, delivered a fatal blow to Raymond J. Braddock’s backyard pool adjacent the Poke property.

Biologists from the Bayou LaFontaine Community College rushed to the scene when it was reported that a new life form had evolved in the miasma of Braddock’s pool water, only to discover it was a Little Debbie® Strawberry Shortcake Roll® covered in gaseous slime, giving it the appearance of animation. “They shoulda been here while back. Something crawled itseff up outta that pool ‘bout a fortnight ago. Et ol’ Jesse, my hound. Ran off. Wasn’t no Little Debbie cake, I tell you what.”

Being placed in the backseat of the patrol car, Poke was quoted as saying, “That triple-aught shot does pack a punch, don’t it? You don’t see any of them messages on my ‘puter now, do ye?”