Chicago Shady Dealer

Good Thing Nearly Allowed to Happen

By Daniel Moattar
May 23, 2013

WASHINGTON, CHICAGO, NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, JOHANNESBURG, TOKYO, NEW DELHI, CAIRO, SHANGHAI, BUENOS AIRES, SAO PAULO, JERUSALEM, BEIRUT – A consistent pattern of global economic, social, and political trends dating to the Upper Paleolithic period was nearly brought to a screeching halt today when a good thing almost happened to Josh Frantz, 9, of Camden, New Jersey.

Frantz, an area third-grader attending H.B. Wilson Elementary, was displaced from his former home of Philadelphia in 2008 following a foreclosure brought about by predatory lending practices and precipitated by that year’s sub-prime mortgage crisis. Frantz’s father, James, 36, a former United States Marine, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of a misdirected unmanned drone strike in central Afghanistan. Unable to maintain consistent employment, the elder Frantz has returned to live with his parents in Camden, where a full two-fifths of the population draws an annual income below the poverty line.

Preliminary investigations suggest that the good thing, as yet undetermined in nature, began to sort of consider taking place at approximately 9:55 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time. While specific reports are unclear, leading theories suggest the event involved several sunbeams, a red balloon, or the passage of a neighborhood ice-cream truck.

At 9:59, a closed-circuit surveillance camera captured Frantz at the edge of the sidewalk, staring upwards and apparently mouthing the words, “No, come back.” Shortly afterwards, a Google Street View camera van is seen to pass by, splashing the boy with a combination of mud and storm-drain overflow.The recording cuts off as Frantz is accosted by two black-suited men wearing earpieces.

“We were really white-knuckling it for a minute there,” said Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corporation.”It’s not easy keeping this shitshow in line with people’s sick expectations. It’s events like this that endanger perfectly good news cycles and threaten to put a lot of hard-working pundits out of a job. It’s gonna be a day or two before that kid thinks about picking up another heads-up penny, I can tell you that.”No other good things have nearly happened since the event, though rumors persist that Donald Trump might have lost all of his hair in a jet ski incident.