Safety Fork, the

A massive infestation of school-age children appeared in Eden Prairie last night, popping into existence on sidewalks and streetcorners. By the time I was on my way to work, a vast armada of yellow busses had already been deployed to vacuum up the kids and their bags of brand-new pencils and cartoon-theme binders and four-function calculators.

The City of Eden Prairie (so far as I can deduce) spends its entire treasury on three things: police cars, school busses, and roads. Perpetrators and pupils are consumed daily by patrol cars and school busses, respectively, although in numbers the latter far eclipse the former. All are carted off to city-owned facilities into which entry by the general public is prohibited. Some time later, laborers appear and begin to construct roads. Conservation of mass and the sheer scale on which these activities occur dictate that somewhere, an unappetizing process—like the fusion of those by which are made the proverbial laws and sausages—must be converting the collected persons directly into paving materials, No. 2 pencils and all.