OBX Report

Yesterday Governor Chris Christie, the Republican Governor of New Joisey, found himself again in the middle of heated controversy after a local tour plane operated snapped a picture of him and his family enjoying the deserted beaches on Ocracoke Island. In July, the Christie family was photographed on a beach in New Joisey after the beach had been closed due to state budgetary reasons.

Ocracoke has been closed to the public for the past week due to a massive power outage caused by a cut power line that has affected all areas south of Oregon Inlet. A mandatory evacuation was issued and Governor Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency.  All non-residents and non-essential personnel have been ordered off the island.

Christie’s new spokesperson, Anthony Scaramucci, said that Governor Christie is certainly an “essential personnel” and thus exempt from the ban. He further said the Christie family is constantly under attack by the fake media and that they need to find isolated places to get away from the 24 hour fake news cycle and so the public should cut him a break.

Since the photo was made public The OBX Report has learned that Governor Christie is not only on the board of PCL Construction, the company responsible for severing the power lines to the island, but he is also a major shareholder in the company. Mr. Scaramucci has denied that Governor Christie ordered up an “accident” so he could enjoy a little “me time” on Ocracoke.   “It’s ridiculous,” said Scaramucci. “Like when they accused him of shutting down that bridge. Totally baseless. Fake. Fake. Fake.”

Bob “Stubby” Petite was looking forward to seeing the ocean for the first time. A resident of Bantam, Rhode Island, Petite said he has been all over the country and has seen everything from Mount Rushmore to the Grand Canyon but in his 48 years he’d never been to the beach.

“Just figured I’d get to it one day,” he laughs. “That day came a lot later than I thought.”

His wife, Pebbles, (named after the famous Flintstone character) planned a surprise vacation to the Outer Banks this summer, renting one of the few remaining oceanside four bedroom cottages in Kill Devil Hills. Crossing the Wright Memorial Bridge, Petite said he was completely underwhelmed by what he thought was the ocean. He recalled being “overjoyed” to learn that the bridge merely spanned the Pamlico Sound and that the Atlantic was considerably larger.

After arriving at their rental home, Petite good-naturedly allowed himself to be blindfolded and led by the hand by his young daughter, Bitsy, (named after the famous waterproof spider) to the ocean.

“I could hear the crashing waves and the call of distant sea birds,” Petite said. “My family led me right to the surf and the cold water splashed across my Birkenstocks. My imagination was running wild with what I was about to see.”

The blindfold was removed by his son, Flea (named after the famous Red Hot Chilipepper’s bassist), and after Petite’s eyes adjusted to the glaring noonday sun he was completely let down.  The only thing huge about the ocean was the disappointment he experienced upon taking it all in at a glance.

“I’d almost call it tiny,” he said. “I think I could have thrown a shuttlecock to the horizon. I have no idea why people come here. Maybe somebody makes a good Margarita.”

Nags Head Police Department has issued an all points bulletin for a man who injured 11 beach-goers last Saturday near Bonnet Street beach access. Witnesses say the man drove his gold plated electric golf cart onto the beach and using a sand wedge began hitting a golf ball toward a yellow caution flag that had been posted to warn swimmers of rip currents in the area.

“He was yelling at people that he was ‘playing through’ and then just started swinging away,” said Carl Spackler of Nebraska. “He had a terrible slice and the ball would sail on him and inevitably hit somebody.”

Ty Webb, visiting from New York, was one of the victims struck by an errant golf ball. Mr. Webb believes he was hit by the unidentified golfer’s fourth shot. He was struck in the temple and rendered temporarily dazed.

“He didn’t say sorry or nothing,” said Mr. Webb as he was being tended to by Dare County EMT’s. “He just yelled ‘oh, I’ll take a Mulligan’ then he’d drop another ball and whang away.”

Deputy Police Chief Kevin Stadler said police are looking for an orange male in his early to mid 70’s, approximately 6’2”, 275 lbs and possibly wearing a badly dyed ferret or mongoose on his head underneath a red baseball cap. He may have been in the company of a half dozen men dressed like Agent Smith from the Matrix.

“We believe the man was playing at the nearby Nags Head Golf Links and became confused,” said Deputy Chief Stadler. “We have reports that he was complaining the sand traps were ‘yuuuge’ and that the water hazard was ‘too bigly.’”

Nags Head Lifeguard Danny Noonan is credited with saving the life of a child who was in the ocean when struck in the head and nearly drown. An avid golfer himself, Noonan said it was a “damn good thing” the golfer was only using a sand wedge because if he’d been hitting a driver or even a three iron he’d have probably “killed people outright.”

He has smote them with nor’easters and category V hurricanes. He has sent plagues of mosquitoes large enough to carry off a 3rd grader, sent endangered birds to close their beaches and nesting turtles to close the ones the birds didn’t handle. He has used His Power to choke their vital waterways with sand and recently cut power to the entire village.

But apparently He is not done testing the tribe of Hatteras. Not by a long shot.

“Oh, I’ve got a few more things up my sleeve,” God told the OBX Report in an exclusive interview. “I hope they can handle it.”

God’s testing of the people of Hatteras harkens back to the time he put Job  through a series of trials to measure his faith. The Celestial Oneness acknowledged He was conducting a similar experiment with the people of Hatteras, but was not as certain that they will be able to hang with Him as unwaveringly as the man from the Land of Uz.

“I mean I’ve really been throwing it to them lately,” God said. “Job got some boils and lost a few cattle and honestly he probably knew it was Me doing it all along to test him. The Hatteras people? They blame it all on the Audubon Society and the CCA.”

God said that the rewards for keeping faith with him would be “pretty sweet” but would not provide any spoilers other than to say it would be a “a lot more awesome than Shelly Island.”

Nags Head – Steven Stallings from Chestertown Maryland is totally okay after his calculated dismount of his son’s skimboard. Steven used to make his own skimboards when he was young, and thought he would show the kids that he still has it. He did indeed.

We asked a nearby spectator, Jan Janowski, what she thought of his display.  “I didn’t know sand could be so loud when something hit it,” she said shaking her head apparently in awe.

Mr. Stallings refused any help and waved off the attention as he “just chilled for a moment” on the beach after his one and a half second ride. After about five minutes of “chilling” the lifeguard checked on him only to find out he was “100 percent okay.”

“I was concerned for the man,” said the lifeguard on the scene, “I have never seen anyone hit the sand with both their back and face at the same time. I offered to get him a back brace, but he managed to roll to his stomach and lurch over to his beach chair.”

When asked for an encore performance by his son, Steven replied, “No one time is all you get. If I kept showing you,  you would steal my moves. You are going to have to wait to next year.”

“If you can walk next year,” his wife added.

 

They live along the tide line, right where the waves wash over the shore, scuttling briefly through the receding waters before burying themselves back in the sand. Long believed to be completely harmless, for years children have played with them, fishermen use them as bait and cats chase them as they dart through the surf.

Call them “sand-fleas,” “mole-crabs,” or their proper scientific name “emerita taipoida” these little clowns of the tides have been a part of beachgoers’ fun for years, but last Wednesday that all changed with the first recorded attack by a sand flea on a human being.

Scientists now believe the mole-crabs are, in fact, an evolved pre-larval stage of the insidious xenomorph, the spindly creatures responsible for the destruction of the USCSS Nostromo and the Hadleys Hope colony. They call the new animals “eggs with legs” and warn people lying on the sand close to the ocean will “more than likely” be attacked by the mole crab. The crab attacks by latching onto the victim’s face and forcing its proboscis down their throat. After depositing a larval version of the xenomorph in the victim’s stomach the mole crab falls off and is consumed by seagulls. The victim then has 48-72 hours to finish enjoying their vacation and complete their bucket list before the juvenile xenomorph bursts through their chest.

Dr. Ash with the Center for Disease Control leads the team studying the problem.  He speculated that the mole crabs had not attacked humans before now in order to “lull us into a sense of complacency.” Currently there is no known way to remove the mole-crabs once attached, however a combination of baking soda and Diet Coke has shown some promise.

Since Wednesday’s incident there have been 63 reported attacks along Dare County’s beaches. Visitors have been moving their beach gear further and further back from the tide line in response to this new menace.

“I mean, we paid good money to vacation here,” said Joan Lambert from Washington, D.C. “We came here to enjoy the beach and by golly that’s what we’re going to do.”

Kitty Hawk – EMS was activated this past Wednesday to an area restaurant in response to a child suffering a panic attack due to soda withdraw. The child, 8, had been on vacation, for the first time to the Outer Banks, from Ohio. Thanks to a quick injection of Fructocan the child’s life was saved.

“Thank god we had those Fructocan injectables on hand. I thought I was going to have to perform an onsite Pepsiotomy,” said EMS Paramedic, Sandra White, “If it had been another ten minutes he would have been a goner. According to the parents it had been eight entire minutes since his soda was refilled. It’s seeing stuff like this on the job that make it hard to sleep at night.”

The server responsible for neglecting the child’s soda was immediately taken into custody for negligence, and is being held in lieu of a $100,000 bond.

The wait staff manager, Becki Saunders, had a few thoughts on the matter, “I get it, we have all been there, sometimes the kids just don’t stop drinking the soda. You fill it up, and they drink it down again. You are busy, they are running you, part of you starts to think you are doing them a favor if you don’t fill it up. You have to shake those thoughts out of your head and do your job. What if doctors or the police or the president just stopped doing their job. That is how society falls apart. It’s sad to see a good server break like this.”

This is the third time this Summer the EMS has had to respond to soda related incident at a restaurant. Calls have been made by politicians and local leaders to better educated our service industry to how important proper hydration is for children of parents who let them drink soda.

The child’s parents didn’t want to comment, but they have set up a GoFundMe to help cover the costs of their son’s recovery.

In 11th grade Sarah Daniels won the PNC Science Fair at Manteo High School with a solar powered oyster shucker. In 12th grade, she finished first in the North Carolina Young Geniuses competition with her invention of a self-anchoring beach umbrella that doubled as a metal detector. Her yearbook was filled with well wishes from students and teachers, all predicting big things for the bright young lady from Avon. They weren’t wrong, but even the most optimistic might be forgiven for not realizing how right they were.

This past spring Daniels, now in her third year at the College of the Albemarle, launched “Apparel for Your Apple” a one-woman app development studio for iPhone (She also develops for Android devices but is “not thrilled” with the platform.)  She’s struck gold with her first commercial release, “Silencio Totalis,” which blocks spoiler posts across a wide array of social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and AskJeeves. The app utilizes individualized plugins to block spoilers for shows users don’t want any details about. Currently the “Game of Thrones” anti-spoiler software leads all plugins with over $58 million in sales. (Plugin prices vary:  .99 for less popular shows like “24:Legacy” and 5.99 for more popular programs like GOT). Daniels is so confident in her product that she offers a full money-back guarantee if any spoiler-information gets through her app’s filter.

If Silencio Totalis sounds like a Harry Potter spell, it’s for a good reason

“I remember when the Half-Blood Prince came out,” Daniels told the OBX Report. “Before I saw it somebody on MySpace babbled about how Dumbledore died. I was so bummed. Totally messed up the movie for me. I wanted to develop an app that would help people not have that same negative experience.”

With her new found wealth, Daniels says she can finally afford what passes for “affordable housing” here in Dare County. She plans to move out of her parents’ home and into one of the new Run Hill SAGA apartments this Fall.

Cape Point, Hatteras – For years Hatteras residents have prided themselves on being the actual Outer Banks due to their geographical position. Sometimes they even call themselves the real Outer Banks, or refer to the other islands as the Inner Banks. Unfortunately now that Shelly Island has popped up off the point, the’re basically the same as Manteo or Colington.

The North Carolina Geographical society has already declared it the official Outer Bank, and the management of Cape Hatteras National Seashore is updating all their maps.

People down there are not taking it well.

“Leave it to the park service to take one more thing away from us,” said Charrell Harrell, “I can’t wait to hear about the birds that nest on this island.”

“I heard they were building a Wings on it already,” joked Jim Austin.

“Nah didn’t you hear? It’s in international waters, so they gonna open a casino,” his brother Tony replied.

“This ain’t no joke yall,” was the response from their other brother Austin, “People come down here to drive on the Outer Banks beaches. No one wants to tell the family about fishing on the Inner Banks. We aught to blow that stupid island up like we did that Nazi submarine that came ashore in ’42.”

“Don’t worry brother, no one is gonna go out to Shelly Island to fish on account of it already being overrun with coyotes,” Jim chimed back in.

Local Government to start shutting down anything with OBX in the name

Since it is technically false advertising to call a business on the inner islands OBX, the local governments have begun to contact locals using the acronym in their name.

“Nobody wants to shut down OBX businesses, but the law is the law. After we take care of the businesses.” said an unhelpful bureaucrat who wouldn’t give their name.

After businesses being updated, next comes license plates. It is projected to cost the state millions of dollars in materials and man-hours to replaced all those OBX plates. Any car decals in the shape of the Outer Banks must add a new sticker to represent the island.

At the same time anyone with OBX in their username or email that does not live on Shelly Island will be forced to change their name.

This will be especially painful for those with Outer Banks tattoos as they must come in for the small island to be added to their tattoo.

Residents and visitors to the Outer Banks have heard tales about infamous Blackbeard, but very few know of his less successful protege, Brownbeard. Brownbeard, though fierce and skilled at pirating,  had a short career as a buccaneer, never acquiring the crew or reputation of his mentor.  Scholars and historians have argued on the reasons for this, but the majority of them cite his eccentric mannerisms.

Brownbeard wanted to follow in Blackbeard’s footsteps, but he also wanted to put his own unique spin on it. He still wore the same clothing, and grew a beard, but the changes came in the hair and beard accessories. Blackbeard was known to wear burning fuses to terrify his victims with his demon-like appearance. Brownbeard went for a similar, but more visceral approach. Here is famous nautical historian, Andrew Wallace, describing it:

Brownbeard, having learned the power of scaring your prey into surrendering from Blackbeard, spent hours in preparation of his visage. His main concern was to take a ship without having to engage in close combat which would put him and his crew in mortal danger. Blackbeard used flaming fuses in his hair to invoke a sort of fear of the Devil to pacify his opponents, and Brownbeard used a slightly altered tactic. He also added fuel into his hair to set it alight, but instead of using expensive fuses, he used natural and plentiful human excrement. He would massage into his hair and beard, and then set it aflame. Other ships could smell it from leagues away. Not only was his ship never boarded, the English Navy would pretend like they hadn’t seen it.

This tactic of covering his hair in feces was unheard of at the time. No other pirate before or since has attempted it. Survivors of Brownbeard’s attacks were known to complain they could still smell his burning pooplocks for years after.

Brownbeard’s reign of terror on the high seas was a short lived one. After one Summer of plundering, his own crew mutinied and killed him. Instead of keeping the ship and treasure, none of them wanted to touch anything. They scuttled the ship in the sound and put to rest the legend of Brownbeard forever.

The location of the ship was not actually lost. People just didn’t want to touch his poopy treasure or risk being haunted by his ghost. Researchers now are fairly certain the remaining feces will have washed off, but are donning hazardous environment suits for the excavation just in case.

In similar news, Dusty Hills, a local dirtbag cook, has decided to go as Brownbeard for Halloween this year. He already started growing out what looks like the rudiments of a beard, but could just be caked on dirt and grease.