Well, here we are again, on a day that, by some stretch of the imagination, could potentially be mistake for Friday.  And since nobody real sent me any questions this week, I’m going to be quoting from my Global Revolutionary Ferret book (it is indeed almost the epitome of foolishness to even bother to point out that Global Revolutionary Ferret would be just about the best name for a band ever, since you, gentle reader, no doubt already figured out the above fact).  This being said, let’s get our Q & A on!

Q: How did President Monroe’s statements reflect a new sense of American confidence in foreign affairs? ~ Gorganar the Desecrator, First Lady of Luxembourg

A: Well, Madame Desecrator, James Monroe (frequently known amongst his homies as “Toad Nostrils McGee”) is known for his great fondness and affinity for doctrines of all kinds.  Indeed, ‘twas he who first proposed the doctrine which we still refer to as the Five Second Rule, as well as the time-honored doctrine of He Who Smelt It having been, in most cases, the same person as He Who Dealt It.  Most often credited to him however, is the eponymous Monroe Doctrine, which wasn’t really all that planned out or anything, so much as it was drunkenly shouted from a balcony during one of George Washington’s totally bitchin’ Founding Fathers Only Spring Break Bashes.  The substance of it, as best we can figure nowadays, is that if any European nations decided to try and steal our New World Flava, then he would personally go and leave a flaming bag of dog poop on France’s front porch.  This was put to the test about two weeks later during the XYZ Affair, when France tried to steal the last three letters of the alphabet.  As promised, Emperor Louie Napoleon XIV woke up the next day to find a dead possum in his bed and the aforementioned fiery poo bag on his doorstep.  Ever since then, our two nations have enjoyed a system of mutually assured taunting, with us occasionally saving them from the Nazis, Otto von Bismarck, Girl Scouts, Haunted Dryer Lint, and any angry bees than get into the car while France is driving to some boutique or another.

Q: Marx and Engels say there have always been class antagonisms.  Why do they believe that the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is different from previous class antagonisms? ~ Che Guevara, Underneath that Hamburger Stand That’s Shaped Like A Bulldog

A: Well, Senor Chia Pet, I never really met the bourgeoisie and the proletariat classes, probably because I went to school in Chesterfield rather than Cuba, with you and Ricky Ricardo.  But boy do I ever know about those class antagonisms.  Like back when I was in third grade, our science class (which was totally retarded, by the way) was next door to the music class, and it was one of those big rooms with just one of those You Damn Kids Stop Messing With The Curtain curtains down the middle.  Man, they were always antagonizing our class.  Not that it made any difference since all our teacher ever did was mispronounce the names of sea creatures and give me Oops Slips (the Oops Slip, for those of you so blessed as to enjoy sheltered upbringings, is a little slip given out to those who either forget to do their homework, or eschew it with grim purpose, as a sign of rebellion against their running-dog capitalist oppressors).  Man, I totally hated that class.

Q: What, in Kaspar’s view, made the victory and Blenheim a great one? ~ Doctor Claw, M.D, Northwest Territory

A: Well, Doctor Claw, the first thing we have to remember here is that, being a friendly ghost and whatnot, Kaspar’s views regarding the victory and Blenheim are somewhat liable to be a bit out of the mainstream of general scholarship.  I mean, being dead and all, one imagines that battle holds no terrors that his interminable existence of wandering and solitude have not already taught him.  Secondly, let’s take a look at this so-called “Battle of Blenheim.”  Now, the very word, Blenheim, being interpreted means “Home of the Blintzes,” and blintzes, as we all know, are a harsh mistress indeed (The Harsh Mistress of Blintzes, needless to say, would be a fantabulous name for a band).  As it so happened, the Magyars and the Invisigoths were both jealous to own this fabled realm of blintzes, and as a result, a positive Blintzkrieg ensued, in which many heroes were made, and of which many songs were written, most of them silly.

Q: If I were to turn on the National Geographic channel Sunday night, November 20^th, at 8:00, would I see a special on Jamestown in which you, Ben, get shot in the leg? ~ Louis “Squirrel Nut Zippers” Farrakhan.

A: Why yes, yes you would.

            Well, here we are once more, at a day kinda, sorta, similar to Fridaycommence!, when I answer all your questions and maybe even a few that you didn’t even ask.  So, let the edification

Q: Ben,
How come, whenever you start looking for something, you have to pee all of the sudden. I mean, you lose your keys, so you start looking, and then, BAM, I gotta go tinkle. You could have just taken a leak 5mins before, but you start searching for something, and it's all gotta come out again. You can try to hold it, thinking that it will only take you a few seconds to locate them keys, but you will never find them until after you pee, and guaranteed, you go and comeback, you will find those keys in a heart beat. So, what gives? ~ Phillipa, Detroit

P.S. Why is it called taking a leak, when you’re really leaving one?

A: Well, Phillipa, that’s a very excellent question, and the answer like the answers to so very many other fine questions related to leaks and the takage thereof, comes to us from none other than the Devil himself, Lucifer (or as the goth kids call him, Lucy).  You see, way going all the way back in the day, the Devil has hated nothing more than when the people of Earth can easily find their car keys.  I mean, where are you going to go once you’ve got those keys?  Church?  Bowling?  To save the city from Alfalfa and the Council of Doom? (Alfalfa & The Council of Doom, by the way, would make a most splendiferous name for a band)  Wherever it is you’re going, the only thing Satan knows is that he can’t take the risk that it’s somewhere that’s going to make people happy.  Now, way back in Biblical times, he used to try and get away with doing a lot more, like the time that Job was looking for his car keys and Satan made a volcano full of fiery pterodactyls come up in his living room.  But God was all like, “Dag, Satan, you’re a tool, I’m not letting you get away with that kind of stuff anymore.”  So now all he can do is make you have to go take a leak, and hope that while you’re in the bathroom you’ll forget all about driving somewhere and saving the city from evil.

P.S. The reason for this goes way back to when the English had first colonized Virginia.  Back then, they brought with them all manner of weird English vegetables; amongst them being the venerable leek.  Now, it just so happened that the laws back then were pretty harsh, and the penalty for answering nature’s call within the city walls was death by monkey stoning.  On the other hand, the penalty for stealing a leek was the comparatively benign punishment of being made to run through the nearest Indian village singing the I’m a Little Teapot Song.  Therefore, when the authorities caught a man taking a whiz in town, the best excuse was to claim that you had, in fact, merely just stolen a leek.  This worked surprisingly often, and soon the phrase entered into the American lexicon of slang.  Over the years, people forget what a leek was in the first place, and the spelling was changed to reflect what was widely believed to be the meaning of the work leek.

Q: What is the more efficient projectile - a monkey with an aerodynamic titanium helmet and Russian spacesuit propelled by the Ben Special LJ1000 crossbow or a flaming flying squirrel with a helmet made of ferrets and weasels propelled by the Rasputin Model A3E4000 catapult?  In a followup question: What are the maximum speeds reached by these two projectiles? ~ Jim Cooke, The Bulgarslayer

A: Well, Senor Jim, the question you ask has plagued mankind since ever it first occurred to him that a helmet could, in fact, be constructed out of various members of the stoat family (genus: stoatus maximus).  As with all things though, the scientific method oft yields up the most bountiful bounty of answers, so let’s break it down and put our logic hats on (and by logic hats, I mean beer helmets).

First, monkeys are generally acknowledged to be among the more aerodynamic of primates, and adding a suitable helmet (i.e. the one from the Rocketeer) and a Russian space suit would only tend to greatly extend his flight time.  Though, being as how it’s a Russian space suit here, he’d have to wait in line for six hours to get it, and by then he’d be drunk off of cheap vodka and Gorbachev Ecto Cooler.  Even taking all these factors into account, I suspect that one could easily, once armed with such a crossbow, put said monkey at least ten inches through a bail of hay at up to 120 yards; which, as all ballistic expertise dudes know, quite strong enough to kill a man (but ph balanced, to kill a woman).

A flaming flying squirrel, on the other hand, would most definitely travel farther, taking into account its vast membranous wings, vicious talons, and being on firetude.  Adding to these advantages the fact that a catapult (a Rasputin A3E4000 no less) would probably let a  flaming flying squirrel, even one encumbered by a weasel/ferret helmet to travel at least a mile before wafting gently again to Earth, where the weasels would doubtlessly gnaw to death any hapless soul beneath them.

Well, I’m off to refill my “logic hat”.  I’d like to apologize for this one taking so long, but the site’s been having some technical difficulties and I’ve only now been able to update

            Well, here we are once more, on that most blessed day of the week, Friday.  And, as all ye who tuned in this same time last week, Friday is now Q & A Day, when I, Ben, Answer questions from y’all my way awesome readers.  Indeed, in the past week, I have been nigh deluged with questions, assuming of course that two questions constitute a deluge.  Therefore, after furnishing with answers those brave souls who braved the capricious fancies of email to seek my wisdom, I shall return once more to the abundance of wisdom provided by All Them Dudes from The JMU History Department.  So, without further ado, let’s do this thang.

            Q: Long time reader, first time writer. I was wondering, what are yawns contagious? ~ Matt, Krypton

            A: Well, Matt of Krypton, the answer to your question, like the answers to most questions which plague the dreams of mankind, requires going back to cavemen (or as they are called nowadays, Cave Person Americans, or, Neanderhonkies).  To answer your particular question, we’re going to go all the way back to the Pleistocene Epoch, when New Jersey was still a verdant jungle uncorrupted by orcs and stuff.  Now cavemen, as everybody knows, are generally not famed for their great linguistic accomplishments, and as a result, it ought not come as a surprise that their pop music was less than awesome.  And it just so happened that the most famousest of cavemen pop stars, Brittany Spears, was also a narcoleptic.  This being the case, in the middle of a concert, it was not at all uncommon for her to just yawn, up and fall asleep right there on stage.  All the cavekids thought that this was way cool, and the fact that it annoyed their parents just made it better.  Unfortunately, this was back in the day, when if enough cavemen did something, it became written on the DNA of the human race, forever binding their descendents to do whatever it was all the cavemen thought was so cool.  So yeah, when one person yawns today, and then everyone else does too, it’s kind of like your ancient caveman DNA is trying to make you do the wave.

            Q: If a yak was to travel 250,000 miles (the distance from Earth to Moon) – how long would it take?  And what kind of propulsion system would it use? ~ Jim Cooke, Chancellor of Desolation

            A: Well, Jim Cooke, Chancellor of Desolation, I’m going to answer your question backwards.  Not literally backwards though, because then it would be all garbledy, and you’d have to hold your computer up to a mirror to read it; rather, I’m going to do the second part first and vice versa.  A yak, it happens to be the case, can easily be fitted with a primitive solar sail, and thus, by harnessing the tides of photons streaming from the Sun, be propelled away from the center of the solar system, and way out yonder.  The problem is, the Moon oft is wont to be closer to the Sun than is the Earth, which would leave our hypothetical yak drifting eternally in the inky vastness of space.  Therefore, all you’d have to do is turn the sail around, soak the yak in phosphorus, and set it ablaze.  The yak, new acting like it’s own miniature Sun, would essentially propel itself to the Moon, a voyage which would, if I’m a’reckoning correctly, take approximately 72,000 years (by way of comparison, if you took all the weasels in the world and set them end to end, starting in San Francisco and going towards Zimbabwe, you’d never make it, because they’d keep running around unless you took a staple gun to them, and then your yak still wouldn’t have made it to the Moon).

Now, back to history:

            Q: How do you relate this reading with Emperor Qianlong’s letter to King George III of England?  ~ Her Majesty, Chester A. Arthur

            A: Well, Your Highness, it all goes back to when the two of them were both in You’re Gonna Rule A Country Someday Day Care, and young King George (being as he was, the one hundred and eleventh king by that name, England having gotten into something of a rut in terms of creativity) was assigned to have Emperor Qianlong as a pen pal.  The thing is, and let me be blunt here, they were both like, five years old at the time, and everything they wrote was pretty much retarded.  Like King George III asked Emperor Qianlong if he ever tried feeding a goldfish Jello, and Emperor Qianlong wrote back asking if King George III had eye lasers.

            Of course, eventually, they both grew up and while Emperor Qianlong just grew out his fingernails really long and fought Flash Gordon, King George III in time became an enormous tool who oppressed the heck out of the colonies until George Washington had to fax him a bucket of whoop-ass by suggesting that his frilly clothes, goofy-looking wig, and inordinate fondness for handbags were not, perhaps indicative of some measure of fruitiness on his part.  Sources close to the King report that upon receiving this bit of news, King George III burst into tears, ran up to his room, and ate nothing but marshmallow peeps and strawberry daiquiris for the next fortnight.  Upon emerging, he changed his name to Biff Thumpchest, bought a Hummer, and started listening to country music, fooling absolutely nobody.

            Well, that’s it for this week, be sure to send me your questions again this week; my email is at ben@teacupmammoths.com, the comments box is just down at the bottom of the page, and if you live in Richmond you can just drive by my house and shout random queries at me.

            Friday rules; it’s just about everyone’s favorite day of the week, and you’ll all be completely enthused to know that it just got demonstrably better!  How, you may ask?  Well, inspired by a number of other blogs and/or breakfast cereals (okay, mostly just Count Chocula and his whiny emo kid musings), I’ve decided that from here on out Friday is gonna be Q & A day.  So, all y’all have to do is send me questions about anything, politics, science, life in general, Dick Cheney, religion, beef, monkeys, Nintendo games, history, hating Ashton Kutcher, whatever.  Leave comments, email me ( ben@teacupmammoths.com ) , tie your question to a carrier pigeon and throw it into a black hole in another dimension and hope that the laws of quantum electrodynamics are kind to you, anything works, as long as it gets to me by Friday.  So yeah, start doing that.

            Now, I was gonna make this very Friday, today, the first Q & A Friday here at teacupmammoths.com, but since you only learned that I was looking for questions like, five seconds ago, and none of y’all seem to be the right combination of telepathic, time traveling, and motivated, clearly something must be done if this blog is not to wind up way too short.  So, after considering and rejecting using a giant font and padding the margins to make it seem longer, I’ve decided to just go to my trusty copy of “The Global Experience: Readings in World History Since 1550,” (written by four random professors at JMU who created it by combining their power rings) and pull out a few of the discussion questions.  It is also imperative, therefore, that you send me real questions, because it’s really not that long of a book and I’ll have to start doing reruns in a month or so.  This all being said, let’s begin!

            Q: What were some of the reasons for the self-imposed isolation of Japan under Tokugawa rule? ~ Boris Yeltsin, New Mexico

            A: Well Boris, there were a lot of reasons for it.  For one thing, Tokugawa was a totally hard name to spell, and after about two weeks of all the other Asian emperors calling him stuff like, Togawumba, Tinyjawa, and Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang, Tokugawa just got sick of it all and decided to self-impose himself some isolation.  This had the advantage for Japan of keeping out all the cheap import ninjas that had recently been dragging their economy down, to say nothing of the 78% reduction in monster attacks during Tokugawa’s reign.

            Q: What sort of dissent was Lord Baltimore willing to tolerate?  What limits did he put in religious dissent? ~ Cobra Commander, Age 7

            A:  Well Cobra Commander, Lord Baltimore was a pretty chill guy, as such he had no problems whatsoever with nuns going about with Mohawks or politicians pretending to Ganesh, god of four-armed elephants.  He was even pretty cool with Martin Luther and John Calvin starting up a totally bitchin’ garage band (Death Monkey Reformation), as long as they didn’t start cranking it all up at like, four in the morning on Saturdays.  And he thought that baboons wearing miters were pretty goshdarn cute.  However, anything involving goats was pretty much right out, as were all religions that involved talking backwards and defenestrating ferrets (the Defenestrating Ferrets, by the way, would make a most excellent name for a band).  Also, if you had a mullet and Lord Baltimore saw you, he’d just up and beat you like a red-headed stepchild.

            Q: Is Adam Smith’s approach to international trade workable in an international economy in which not all the trading countries practice laissez-faire economic policies? ~ John Bigbooty, President of Uruguay

            A: Well El Presidente Bigbooty, I wouldn’t go around trying to steal Adams Smith’s flava like that.  I mean seriously, didn’t you ever play Civilization, when you built his thing, your economy totally took off and you could start cranking out space ships and Hoover Dams like some kind of thing that cranks out some other kind of thing really, really fast?  And what are you throwing all them fancy-shmancy French words in there any way?  C’mon now President Bigbooty, you’re just trying to look cool, but it’s not working.  I’ll bet you’re just all angry because Adam Smith wouldn’t put you on his friends list on myspace.  Well guess what?  Now I won’t either.  So there.

            Q: Edmund Burke once described Rousseu as “an insane Socrates.”  Why would Burke say this about Rousseu? ~ The Right Reverend Methuselah Cheeseworthy Hammer

            A: Well Padre Hammer, first let me point out that Edmund Burke never got along with Rousseu anyways, because freshman year, when they were roommates, Rousseu was always brewing merlot in the bathtub and changing Edmund Burke’s screensaver to something involving trout whenever he was off at class.  Secondly, he was right; Rousseu was exactly like an insane Socrates.  Like, he always used to sit around in a toga philosophizing, but instead saying deep stuff, he’d just compose intricate baroque armpit symphonies about ham.  And once, Bill and Ted came back in time to snag him for a history report, but he smeared himself all over with Crisco and they couldn’t catch him.  And like all philosophers and other rock stars, he only had one name, like Bono, or Madonna, or Confucius (whose album that he did last year with Hillary Duff totally sucked, by the way).  Finally, he was forced to drink hemlock by the Athenian government in 399 B.C, only Rousseu was wearing a clown suit all the while.

            So there you go, the historic first Q & A Friday ever here at teacupmammoths.com.  Be sure to make the next one easier for me by sending in real questions so I won’t have to mooch more of them from the Industrial Revolution.