You competition not ‘horsing around’ with ‘Foal’s Paradise’ pic

To the Editor:

My lands. I’ve never been so offended and insulted in my 96 years on God’s green earth. Imagine my chagrin when a week ago today, I sat down to my morning raspberry Jello and rice pudding, removed my false teeth, and unfolded my daily Athens Messenger before me. At first I smiled to see the photo of a sweet, infant horse in the foreground. And I smiled even wider to see the humorous pun in the headline – “Foal’s Paradise.”

Ha,  ha. It seems like those tricksters at the Messenger know how to pull a pun out of nearly any headline situation. You communist  hippies at The Athens NEWS could sure  learn a thing or two from them! Ha, ha.

But,  alas, I’ll never read that daily paper again, because after I donned my  bifocals and took a closer look at the photo, I noticed, the horror!, that in  the background two horses were engaging in — oh, my dear, I have a hard time  even saying this – they were having sexual congress. And right in a field in  front of any poor, unsuspecting soul driving past.

When  I saw what those filthy horses were doing, I dropped a spoonful of rice pudding  into my raspberry Jello, and almost fell out of my chair. It’s getting so you  can’t even turn on the television any more without seeing a nasty little  cartoon character telling another cartoon character to go, um, engage in sexual  congress with himself. One would think a person could watch a program called  “Family Guy” without being exposed to something like that. Similarly, one would  hope that a family newspaper would be more careful than to show two of God’s  creatures, in all their immodest nakedness, doing “the eight-legged mambo”  right out in the open, for all the world to see. It had such a shocking,  tumultuous effect on me that I was still sitting in front of the box fan a good  two hours later… and set to high speed!!

I’m  writing this letter to the hippie Athens  NEWS — which I might add, is none too family-oriented itself! – because I  am so offended by that other paper parading open sexual activities right on its  cover. Good grief, what’s next!! I shudder to think.

Terri A. Smith
Make Believe Road
Wearing Thin, Ohio