You know that song, by Kid Rock and Cheryl Crow, where they’re singing about how neither of them keeps out the other one’s picture any more and by the way now they both do a lot drugs?  That’s a good song, but it doesn’t work because it sounds like they’re both in the same room singing at each other, which defeats the entire purpose of a “where the hell are you?” duet like that.  Really, if they’d been serious about making it a good song about missing each other and all that, they’d have to both be animated musical Polish immigrant mice singing about evading cats as well as their mutual longing for cheese and each other.

            Occasionally, life around my house gets a tad boring, and I try to spice things up by reenacting scenes from Disney’s acclaimed hit motion picture, The Lion King.  Like, once, I was walking through the kitchen and I saw my cat sitting there, so I just held her aloft over my head and pretended that I was that blue-butted baboon priest on a savannah somewhere.  And then once I punched a lion off a cliff and down into a chasm of death below.  Now they don’t let me back in Oz anymore.

            I was at Best Buy the other day, and they were selling robot vacuum cleaners (not like, to vacuum your robot, but rather robots who were also vacuum cleaners).  But they were called, in the loathsome fashion of the times in which we live in, the iRobot.  That’s a horrible name for something, unless it’s actually going to go haywire, kill Zefram Cochrane, and then get in an epic battle with cyborg battle damage Will Smith.  Also, isn’t a robot vacuum cleaner a bad idea anyway?  I mean, I’m always accidentally running over stuff with the vacuum, with this, you’d turn it on and ten minutes later be all like, “Hey, where’s the dog!?”  That wouldn’t be cool.

            Whenever I’m doing school tours at work, kids always ask me stuff like, “Are you an Indian Princess?” or, “Were there Pilgrims here?” or, “Are you related to Frodo?”  But last week some kid asked me, “Were there trolls here?” and he was serious.  It was kind of scary; nobody ever guessed the truth about the historical trolls before him (The Historical Trolls, however, would make a most excellent name for a band).

            I passed an insurance billboard the other day; it said, “Where VA goes for TLC”  So I got all angry, Virginia’s not that stupid, we can find The Learning Channel just fine without you, State Farm Insurance Company, thank you very much.

            Ever notice how on the controls to the air conditioner in your car, instead of writing “Low” and “High”, they have to make it all extra short and just put “Lo” and “Hi”?  Aren’t they already short enough already, without additional abbrevification?  I could understand if the controls said, “Make it Colder in Here, but Only a Little Bit” and “Dude, You’re not an Eskimo, Turn it Down a Notch” but high and low are really pretty short words already, and beshortening them only makes it confusing, because if you’re in a Biblical frame of mind, it looks like you’re A/C wants you to behold something, or possibly greet it with informality.

            I saw today that they’re coming out with the Xbox 360.  That’s cool, but what happened to the 358 Xboxes I never heard about?  (Also, I just wanted to point out the devious evilosity of Microsoft here, because my spellchecker recognizes “Xbox” as a real word, but not Playstation and Camecube.  Oh Bill Gates, your day will come.).

            Speaking of stuff on your dashboard, you know how the symbol for most things is like, a simplified stick figure guy doing whatever action is being conveyed?  Like how the seatbelt light is a guy wearing a seatbelt and the symbol for the onboard snow machine is a snowflake?  Even though it makes sense, I was still surprised to see that the symbol on the “Don’t Hit a Baby in the Face with an Airbag!” light is, in fact, a baby getting hit in the face with an airbag.  I like that kind of honesty; Toyota, I applaud you.

            I was at the hardware store this week, and they were playing the “Every Single Song from the 80s” radio station.  It was too much though, like 80s overload, and I was all expecting that at any moment Ayatollah Khomeini and Michael J. Fox would just bust through the door and start dancing around or something.  I waited a while though, but they didn’t come in.  Gorbachev came in for a minute and kind of did a little Commie jig or something, but it just wasn’t the same.

            Also, at the aforementioned hardware store, they were selling 10-packs of hazardous chemical gloves.  If you have a job where you need that many hazardous chemical gloves, maybe you’d better just find a new line of work.  Or better yet, just forget the gloves and hope you mutate into something cool.

            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.

            Okay, let me start off by admitting that I am indeed very much a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan.  I mean, really, it almost makes me disappointed to live here in Richmond, where the closest thing we have to vampires are those creepy goth kids.  To my knowledge, there’s not even a hellmouth under the city, and I’ve just about given up hope that our mayor is ever going to turn into a giant demon snake and try to eat my old high school (I mean c’mon, he hangs out with Bill Cosby, and that’s about as non-I-want-to-be-a-giant-high-school-devouring-demon-snake as you can get).  So yeah, Richmond: Zero Living Dead Activity; for which I should probably be thankful, but it does leave me with all these extra crossbows that I only get to use against hay bales at the archery range (granted, they’re evil hay bales, but even so, they just kind of sit there and don’t turn into dust or anything when you bust a bolt in its shiesty dome).

            The thing is though, getting back to Buffy Summers, did you ever wonder about some of the rest of her family?  By which of course I mean, he never-mentioned-on-the-show uncle, Mark Summers, host of the ever-popular show Double Dare and really the modern father of vampire fighting at Nickelodeon.  What’s that, you don’t believe me?  Well then, I ask only that you think back to The World of David the Gnome.  Remember how bad that show sucked?  Everyone said that it was because it was made in Norway, but c’mon, that’s where Vikings are from, not gnomes.  The real reason why it was so bad was because everyone on that show was a vampire.  Seriously, David, his wife, Buckwheat Bertha, the fox, the kindly old woodcutter, every one of them was a vampire.  By night they’d stalk around the studio, eating people and generally wreaking havoc.  Clearly, the world of children’s television programming needed a new kind of hero not answerable to the FCC, and that’s when fate, which is not without a sense of humor, tapped Mark Summers to be that hero.

            You see, it was about halfway through the first season of Double Dare, and while the show’s unexpected success had brought him unimaginable fame, wealth, and the attention of any number of beautiful women, Mark Summers still felt as if something important was missing.  ‘Twas on that fateful night that he was wandering through one of the many cemeteries of MarkSummersville that he was accosted by a ravening band of vampires.  Thinking quickly and remembering the large Styrofoam nose full of green slime that he had brought home from work with him, Mark Summers beat the fiends into submission before finishing them off with some quick work from his wooden leg (oh yes, Mark Summers has a wooden leg, he lost his real one in a transporter accident in the Mutara Nebula).  He returned home that night, sobered, yet filled with a new purpose: to kill a bunch of vampires.

            And so it went, by day running the biggest game show on TV since that one where you threw a pie at Hitler and he fell into a tank of electric eels that they took of the air after the eel lobby complained (The Eel Lobby, by the way, would be a most excellent name for a band).  But by night, Mark Summers took the ultimate physical challenge, as he crept through the shadows, ceaselessly ridding the world of the undead.  He might have continued indefinitely in this, had not the fateful day came when, to his unmitigated horror, one of the families on Double Dare turned out to all be vampires.

            Using their unholy strength, speed, and knowledge of elementary school environmental science, this band of bloodthirsty killers quickly sent the Donaldson family home with nothing but their shame, a home edition of the game, and a year’s supply of British Knights tennis shoes, and though Mark Summers had only minutes to concoct a plan to destroy them, when it came time to run the obstacle course, he had seized upon a plan as bold as it was silly.  Over the last commercial break he quickly changed around the challenges awaiting the vampiric team, so that when it came time to see what awaited them, they were shocked to see that a cunningly laid trap awaited them.

            Indeed, only a master vampire slayer could have conceived of such a plan.  They would have to climb up a ladder made of crosses, slide down a slide past His Holiness John Paul II, into a swimming pool full of ping pong balls and holy water, run through a tunnel of pointy wooden stakes, jump through a big flamey hoop of fiery fire, and finally grab the flag from a hook in front of a moderately well lit window.  I know what you’re thinking, ‘why didn’t they just quit then?’, but you forget, among all the legions of the damned, vampires are the least able to turn down a chance to win everlasting glory on daytime television, so on they went, all meeting their undeaths along the way, and bring Mark Summers his greatest victory yet against the forces of darkness.  Unfortunately, the producers were less than impressed, and told him that his days as a children’s game show host were over unless he gave up his never-ending battle against vampires.

            Mark Summers, of course, chose to accept the ignominy of getting fired from the show that he himself had created, in order to pursue his epic war against evil.  Going underground, he kept to the shadows, avoiding publicity while carrying out his mission.  It was by his hand that the Count from Sesame Street was punched off of a flaming blimp (really, the guy they have on now is just a zombie Fatty Arbuckle in a cape with some purple makeup on), and it was he who slew Count Choculas 3 through 17 (the first two were killed by a jealous Frankenberry, and Number 18 has to travel under heavy guard, sleeping in a different coffin every night).

            So there you have it, the tale of one of our generation’s greatest of heroes, Mark Summers.  Even now he dwells among us, now beneath the very streets in the labyrinthine sewer systems of our cities, now in a big fiberglass tree full of those elves who bake cookies shaped like more elves (he once saved them all from Count Shockula, that vampire over at Sears who sells pneumatic struts, and they’ve been grateful ever since), always ready to hurl a metaphorical bucket of tapioca pudding at the forces of evil, in order to win the BMX dirtbike of justice and peace.

            Disclaimer: The following blog is in no way whatsoever to be construed as a pitiable cry for help.  If, however, you go ahead and take it that way anyhow and feel moved by compassion to help, then I’m sure as monkeys gonna be the last person on Earth to stop you.  That is all.

            To begin at the beginning (rather than the end, which always leaves people wondering what you’re on about), I’ve never been particularly good when it comes to meeting girls.  And by girls, I mean girls to date.  I’m all sorts of dapper and rakish with the ladies in whom I’m not particularly interested of who I know have no great interest in me, but put me in the same room as a girl I rather have a crush on, and a feeling altogether curious steals over me all a sudden.  I’m not entirely sure what best to call it, so I’m just gonna go with Socially Crippling Mortal Terror and go with that.  As one might well expect, this does little to enhance my wit, dancing skills, or ability to use complete words in conversation (much less complete sentences).  Which is all a long way of saying that I have a better chance of being kidnapped by militant hamsters than ever successfully picking up a girl at a bar, club, or other such social place thingie (I’m serious, that thing with the hamsters has happened, like, three times since the start of Summer alone).

            Which brings me, at long last, to my real point here (other than establishing a great deal of Ben-centered pathos), that I thought I’d give computer dating a try.  I mean think about it; the internet is a giant place full of weirdoes without real lives who spend their days slaying orcs and writing blogs.  Clearly, it seemed to me, this was a sure place to meet women of great class, charm, and personality.  As such, I went ahead and just skipped all the dating sites whose banners included the phrase “Free Live Skanks”, and went with the seemingly dignified Eharmony.  Except there’s one horrible problem with Eharmony; it seems to be the unofficial site for single women who are creeping up on 30 and desperate to get married but never will because they’re too busy with their careers/mental illnesses to really have a relationship with anyone.  That’s a bit of a generalization, but only in the same way as saying that, generally, water is wet and beef makes a poor choice of roofing materials.  So, after going through a months-long saga of dating and not dating this one girl who was very nice except for the fact that every couple of weeks we’d go to Starbucks and she’d dump me.  It was almost like clockwork, she’d suggest Starbucks, I’d plan for dumpage with my Viente Mocha Latte, and so the cycle continued for quite a while until it just got silly and we went our separate ways.

            So, I thought I’d try Yahoo for a while, only it turns out to be the official dating service of crazy girls who have some kind of weird aversion to actually meeting anyone online.  For instance, last week, I got a message from a girl who was all like, “Hey, you sound pretty cool, let’s talk!”  So I wrote something like, “Sure thing, here’s my email and my AIM name!”  And then, I get a message back from her that’s all, “I’m sorry, but I’m taking a break from dating for a while.”  It was the weirdest thing ever, until it happened again this week with a different girl. 

            Now, by this point, I’m just totally confused.  I mean, it’s not like between the first message they sent me and the second one they learned anything new to scare them off.  Unless like, both of them had their entire family slain by mythic Danish warriors and the fact that my AIM name is King Hrothgar struck them as incredibly offensive in some way.  I’m rather beginning to suspect that like, my son is destined to defeat some evil robot cyborg army in the future and so the evil robot cyborgs are traveling back in time to mess with my head via online dating services (don’t laugh, it happened to Grover Cleveland too).  I’m not even going to get into the time that I went out with a girl from Yahoo, beat her at bowling, and she never talked to me again (it was worth it though, I got a 156 for the first time in my life).

            So anyways, having all but lost confidence in the internet as a way to meet women, I’ve decided to try a more direct approach, blatantly and shamelessly selling myself over my own little slice of cyberspace.  Which is to say, in brief, that if any of my readers happen to female, single, somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 years of age, crazy, but in a good way, not an evil robot cyborg from the future, and not an actual under-a-bridge-dwelling troll, this is your chance to date a minor celebrity (really, you’re getting in on the ground floor here, as negotiations for a teacupmammoths.com motion picture are already well under way with New Line Cinema; Elijah Wood is going to be playing Dick Cheney, by the way).

            So, should you happen to be interested in a guy who owns a minivan with a fifth of a million miles on it, builds his own medieval artillery and chainmail, has an unplaceable yet exotic accent, a fondness for old books and hand tools, has a Level 49 Paladin, and of course, is in charge of a thriving media empire, drop me a line via any of the three pillars of teacupmammoths communication (email, AIM, and the ever-popular comments section), and you may well be the first girl I date who doesn’t turn out to be some kind of psycho.

            And of course, lest you doubt that I’m the charming and handsome rogue I make myself out to be, here’s incontrovertible photographic evidence (I’m the one on the right):

We now return to our regularly scheduled program of NOT being one of those angsty emo kid blogs.  Tune in tomorrow when I make a series of humorous comparisons between Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sesame Street, Double Dare, and breakfast cereals before finishing off with a witty, yet important life lesson.

            There’s a Big Lots near my house, but on the sign, they’ve got an exclamation point right in the middle, so it’s like they’re saying BIG!...lots.  I don’t get it; are they ashamed of their lots, or are they just really trying to play up the bigitude of them in order to stand out against all the competition they’ve been getting from other sorts of lots, like Vacant Lots!, and I Used to Live In Gomorrah and Now My Wife is a Pillar of Salt Lots!  Maybe they just oughtta have used punctuation check when they were typing their sign.

            There’s a candy bar called the “Take 5”.  This has got to be the best name ever, but they’re just not taking it far enough.  They should make one called something like “Buy a Whole Case of These” or “Just Live off These for the Rest of Your Natural Life,” or maybe “One of These has a Live Panda Inside.”  Or, if you wanted to steal some serious flava from the Axe guys (like, the deodorant Axe, not like, Vikings or Dwarves or whatnot), you could just call it “Buy a Bunch of These and Hot Women Will Find You Attractive.”  So c’mon Take 5, you just need to try a little harder.

            You know how in The Fugitive, Harrison Ford was always chasing after the guy who killed his wife, and all he knew was that he had one arm?  Well, what if the guy really just had tucked his arm up into his sleeve or something?  He could just forget about anyone tracking him down to exact merciless justice upon him.  The lesson here then, is that if you’re ever going to kill Harrison Ford’s wife, just make sure you feign some obvious handicap so he’ll be chasing the wrong guy.  I myself would wear say, a chicken on my head and some of those Bigfoot slippers.  That way Harrison Ford would always be looking for some kind of Chicken-Headed Petite Sasquatch Man, and I’d be in the clear.

            I was out driving the other day, and I was on this road with a whole bunch of churches on it (actually in Richmond, that’s like, every single road in town), and all of them had all these signs with Biblical verses and inspirationally pithy epigrams on them, like “Eternity, Smoking or Non?” and “In Case of Rapture, this Church will be Unmanned.”  But then I passed one where the sign said “Yummy, Brunswick Stew!” and I just didn’t get where they were trying to go with that.  Maybe it’s just because I’m not a Baptist, I dunno.

            You know how in the last episode of Star Trek, Captain Picard kept having all these first episode flashbacks where he’d be hanging out in the future planting grapes and all of a sudden these troll people and mutants would start all shouting at him out of nowhere?  Of course you do, and I always wanted that to happen to me too.  Well today I was in the hardware store parking lot, and I heard all this shouting and stuff, and the first thing I did was start looking around for troll people, because troll people generally mean that Q is about to put you on trial for the evils of humanity.  But it was really freaking me out, cause I kept hearing it but I couldn’t see any troll people.  Then I finally saw that there was a school bus nearby, and all the troll kids had just gotten out for the day, but I’m still gonna stay out of the Devron system for a couple of weeks anyway, lest I cause so weird temporal paradox or come down with a case of the Space Crazies.

            Speaking of Star Trek, I always hoped that one time, the Enterprise would get hit by a photon torpedo, and Captain Picard would be all calling down to Engineering to see how bad the damage was, and after LeVar Burton told him how the dilithium matrix was all wiggidy wack and everything, he’d say, “But don’t take my word for it, da duh da.”  That would just bring everything full circle for me, and the universe would at last make sense.

            Did anyone else find it weird that two paragraphs up, when I heard shouting, the first thing I thought of was Star Trek?  I did, and I’m sorry.

            I used to worry that wearing a wrinkly shirt reflected badly upon me, but then I figured out that shirts are actually a lot like brains, in that the wrinklier yours is, the smarter it means you probably are.  Because, you know, you’re spending all your time pondering stuff, instead of ironing.

            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.

            Among the many awesome powers and system utilities that come with being a blogmeister, is that of the daily referrer log.  Every day, you see, my site keeps track of all the other sites that people have come to it, via links, from over the last day.  So, for instance, if someone Googles weaselboogers, and then clicks on my site when it turns up on the list, I’ll be able to see that this happened.  This means, in practical terms, that even far above the surface of the Earth in my Zeppelin of Doom, I’m still able to see how many people are apparently looking for teacupmammoths, and how many were looking for something else (usually Dick Cheney, Wonder Woman, or monkeys) and just happened to be sucked into the roiling vortex of randomness that is this very blog.  As if this wasn’t already fun enough, I’m able to track how many people are having my site translated into Spanish (at least two, on a regular basis; which is kind of frightening, when you think about how stuff usually makes even less sense when you let Babelfish translate it for you).  What I’m getting at here is that a lot of people have searched for some pretty weird stuff online, and ended up here, but nothing could have prepared me for one that turned up on my list the day.

            I knew that something was afoot immediately, based on the fact that the page they were coming from was, as best I was able to tell, the Chinese version of Google.  This was interesting enough, since I figured that teacupmammoths would probably be one of those subversively capitalist sites that the Chinese government has banned.  I guess not though, so I’ll have to be more ardently anti-communist in the future (be sure to tune in next week when I take a look at recent allegations that Gorbachev eats puppies).  The thing that really weirded me out though, was what they were searching for, “Foxy Boxing Martian Style.”  Really.  At first, I was worried that this was some kind of horribly freaky underground indie Chinese thing, but since according to the search, I’m the internet’s number one site regarding it, I can only assume that whatever it is, it’s at least wholesome enough to write a blog about without worrying about generating tons of e-hatemail from Foxy Boxing Enthusiasts and Martian Enthusiasts like I did that time I wrote about Worf trying out for the J.V. girls’ field hockey team.

            Which brings us back to the real mystery here:  What on Earth is Foxy Boxing Martian Style?  I mean, the Foxy Boxing part is simple enough, it’s that sport (according the veritable font of wisdom Homer Simpson) where chicks whale on each other (also known as tennis).  The Martian Style part is a bit more difficult to fathom, so I’m just gonna break it down logically, and hope I end up with something ridiculous.  So then, let’s first assume that Martian here refers to the planet Mars, rather than Mars, Pennsylvania, where all they have is that green guy who got struck by lightening and a chocolate factory (unless of course, we decide that this is some new sport where women beat each other up at a chocolate factory, which would just be weird, and potentially hot).

            Now, on Mars the planet, they really only have three things, junk that we’ve sent up there to take pictures, that big stone face that looks like Senator (and plus-size evening gown model) Ted Kennedy, and J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter.  Clearly, this can’t be about all those little solar-powered land rovers up there, because there’d be absolutely no challenge in watching some woman beat the tar out of one of those.  Maybe if we’d sent more of those battlebots up there, armed with like, chainsaws, and flame throwers, and maybe some kind of an angry badger on a bungee cord or something, this might be worth thinking about, but alas, NASA just sent up these little go karts with cameras and astronaut ice cream.  And it’s probably not the case that the giant stone Ted Kennedy face is concerned here either, since it appears that whatever ancient civilization built this monument to the Senator vanished countless aeons ago, or at least back in the 80s.

            Which leaves us, of course, with the Martian Manhunter, who at first glance, might not seem like a likely candidate for boxy boxing stardom.  But think again, cause he’s already freaky looking (which is a definite help when you’re a boxer; just look at King Hippo and Piston Honda), he already has his own battle-ready superhero underwear (and really, I think most of us can agree that if only we all had a few more pairs of that, we’d all being out getting beat up for fun and profit on a daily basis already), and, since he’s a shape shifter, he could probably pass himself off as a girl long enough to get registered for a match in the ring.  Also, much like most boxers, he’s weak against fire.  No, really, I mean, George Foreman is weak against fire, that’s why he made those grills so not-fiery and stuff.  Add to this the fact that he never really liked humanity all that much because we smell funny and wear hats, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see why he’d want to go all Ike and Tina on some girl in an epic battle of beatitude.  And ladies, if you were thinking of making a little extra money on the side, don’t, because the next girl you fight could actually be a seven foot tall Martian with all sorts of issues.

            The Big Yellow, WaHo, La Casa de Waffle, Beezlebub, the Devil has many names – wait, most of those are actually names for Waffle House, which is kind of like the devil though, in that, um, they have hot things there, and, uh, people there can be weird, and ooh, the people who work there might have goat legs, but you can’t tell because they’re always behind that counter.  So yeah, Waffle House, it’s not really like the devil much at all, which is probably a good thing, because I hang out there a lot.  Now some of you, I fear, may not have ever experienced the absolutely insane awesomeness of Waffle House.  Maybe you live in one of those accursed parts of the country where all there are are Ihops, maybe you were raised by wolverines (or possibly tangerines, or some other foresty -ines thing), maybe you’ve heard that Waffle House was just really sketchy.  But you know, the people who say that are only doing it to score you off because Waffle House is so awesome they don’t want to have to share it with you, waffle neophyte that you are.  In any case, I thought I’d use my unparalleled influence over the internet to work for the good of humanity, for once, so tonight I’m gonna try to give y’all a virtual tour of La Casa de Waffle.  So buckle your seatbelts, and put on your +2 Helmet of Surly Waitress Evasion, cause he we go.

            Now, the first thing you have to know about Waffle House is that it’s kind of like a cemetery is for goth kids; it’s there all day long, but you’ll miss all the grooviness if you go during the day.  Also, it can be kind of spooky, and you might have to fight off vampires.  So should you happen to plan your maiden voyage to Waffle House as a consequence of reading this blog, make sure you go on a night when you have absolutely nothing important to do the next day.  The reason behind this is simple, at night, you only get the real hardcore Waffleheads there.  Like, if Waffle House was Star Wars, the people who go there at three in the morning would all be dressed as Princess Leia, though in truth, some of them are anyway.

            What does one order at Waffle House?  Well, if you didn’t get waffles, that would just be weird.  I mean, would you go to Linens n’ Things, and not buy any N’ Things?  Would you go to Mongolia and not buy a Yak?  I think not.  So when you go to Waffle House, get a Waffle.  And you can order one with strawberries or beef jerky on it or whatever, but whatever you do, don’t go all Meg Ryan on them and start trying to get some funky customized waffle, and be all asking whether or not it contains hydrogenated soybean oil.  This is Waffle House, and they’ll shun you so hard you’ll fly through the window and wake up in Amish Country.  Also, if you’re one of the many people who hate to waste time sleeping but are afraid to buy powerful illegal stimulants off of Ebay, order a cup of the coffee there.  Just don’t listen to it while you’re waiting for it to cool off, because it’s probably made out of demons and stuff.  You might also want to think about ordering a Texas Cheesesteak Sandwich, because they write “Texas” in the most provocatively awesome font ever.  I wish I could post it here, but it would make your monitor explode, so I’ll just describe it briefly and hope that you’re wearing something that’s resistant to flying shards of glass.  Imagine that some crazed Texan sciency guy (yes, it was probably George Bush) somehow managed to combine that font that they burn into cows, and like, the marquee of the Grand Old Opry.  Seriously, it just leaps off the menumat and smacks you metaphorically in the face.  You could be lactose intolerant, vegetarian, sandwich-hater from whatever state is the polar opposite of Texas (Vermont) and you’d still be unable to resist its evilly seductive deliciousity.

            Waffle House also comes equipped with a truly epic jukebox.  You see, due to budgetary reasons, or possibly just an overly literal interpretation of the It’s a Gift to Be Simple song, it only has one page of songs to choose from.  And since Waffle House is like some kind of giant metaphor for some other kind of thing, they’ve tried to diversify their music repertoire and ended up with about three songs from any given genre.  The only exceptions of course being songs about Waffle House (of which there are way too many), songs by CCR (which inexplicably seems to be it’s own genre, thereby earning a good three or four spots on the list, and Lindsey Lohan (who, even more inexplicably is apparently now an entire school of music, since she gets like, a whole column of jukebox choices).  So make sure you bring along a bag fulla quarters, so you can sit there for two hours listening to nothing but Fortunate Son and Lindsay Lohan Battles the Pink Robots.

            So there you go, all the reasons you’ve been waiting for to take a random road trip with one or more of your homies this very night down to the only place in town that exposes Ihop for the godless commie plot to destroy America that is truly is.  And if your monitor exploded back there in the Texas Cheesesteak Sandwich paragraph, I’d say I’m sorry, but since your monitor just blew up, you couldn’t read it anyway.

            You know how in The Lion King, when Simba finally reuturns home after years of eating bugs and hanging out with Timone and Pumba (clearly the R2-D2 and C3PO of the jungle, if you know what I mean), and his evil Uncle Dave has messed everything up?  How exactly did that happen anyway?  I mean, the savannah looks like some kind of a postindustrial wasteland of doom.  How did lions do that?  Did they stop eating gazelles and start opening up poorly managed petroleum refineries?  Did a radioactive meteorite crash there?  Seriously, despite the authority that comes with being King of the Beasts, when it comes to environmental regulation, your two choices are pretty much whether or not to eat all the other animals, and whether or not to keep that retarded baboon priest on staff; not whether or not to try to develop a self-sufficient petrochemical business while turning the wilderness into New Jersey.  On the other hand, if lions actually do have some way of completely messing up the environment when they feel like it, maybe we’d better go ahead and eat them all now, before they turn on us and usher in a global famine or something.

            As everybody knows, Two Face is just one of many thematically-unified Batman villains, because he carries a double-headed quarter.  But what if he accidentally got ahold of one of those new Kansas quarters?  If he wanted to keep his gimmick, he’d have to have a normal face on one side, and a buffalo on the other, which means he’d have to fall into a big vat of buffalo wings or something (because the surest way of getting freaky powers is to fall into a vat of something, just ask the Joker, Plastic Man, Clayface, or Henry Kissinger).

            You know how when scientifically referring to degrees of getting it on, we commonly use baseball as a guide (first base, second base, shortstop, guy in the stands selling hot dogs, whatever)?  What about people in those benighted countries without baseball?  Do people there just never talk about this sort of thing?  Or do they use more familiar sports?  I mean, how do you draw comparisons to say, polo (unless of course you really like horses)?  Maybe this is why populations in Europe are declining; they don’t have any good sports to compare stuff like this to.

            Why did they choose to name that magazine Ebony, anyways?  I mean, there are a lot of other sort of dark-colored woods that you could have chosen.  And then Hallmark has that line of greeting cards called Mahogany, but think of all the untapped wood potential (The Untapped Wood Potential, by the way, would make an awesome name for a band).  I for one would read a magazine called Wenge, or possibly Bocote.  And what about white people, don’t we get any xylonamous magazines and greeting cards?  I’d be willing to take out a subscription to, say, Tasmanian Eucalyptus Burl weekly, or send someone a card from a company called Tennessee Cheddar.

            I never shop at Abercrombie & Fitch.  This is party because I spend all my money on van and potato gun components, but also because all the pictures they have on the walls are of naked people.  It just seems weird, like being at a car dealership with a big picture of a guy riding a bike, or going to a video game store and having a picture of a guy on a date with a girl.  But there they are, all over the store, “Sigh, I’m so sexy I wish I were dead.  Pants make me sad, that’s why I don’t wear any,” they seem to say.  What kind of message does that send about having faith in the product you’re selling, if even your spokesmodels would rather be seen naked all over the Regency Square Mall and Battledome rather than wear your clothes.  Personally, I think this is related to the fact that Abercrombie & Fitch (which does at least give me a chance to use that little & key on my computer) used to sell cool stuff, like elephant guns.  One day though, back in the 80s, they realized that elephants can’t even own guns in this country anymore, and they decided to get into selling preppy garb.  Sadly, they were still kind of in elephant mode, and since pachyderms usually go about undressed, all their ad pictures are really big, with naked people cast in an elephantastic sort of gray. 

            Whenever I see the logo from “Friends”, I always wonder what all those periods are between all the letters.  Was “Friends” just not quite as long a word as they were hoping for, prompting the producers to fill it out a bit with unnecessary punctuation?  Would calling the show “A Bunch of People Who Sleep With Each Other and Don’t Have Real Jobs” been too long?  Or maybe “Friends” is actually an acronym of some sort, like the real name of the show was something like, “Franklin Roosevelt is Eating Ninety Dead Squirrels,” or “Fool! Retreat if Einstein Needs Doorknobs Soon!”

            Among the few invariably certain things in this ever-changing world of ours is the fact that Chewbacca totally rules.  I mean, who doesn’t like Chewbacca?  Probably only people like Hitler and Ashton Kutcher.  It is therefore nothing short of an event of unquestionable intergalactic significance that Chewbacca has at last decided to become a U.S. citizen.  I myself am somewhat lackluster in my keeping up with international affairs, but I didn’t even know that we had diplomatic ties with his home planet (the name of which escapes me at the moment, but I do know it starts with a K and has about 42 Ys in it).  Sure, in all the news articles about it, they say that Chewbacca is coming over here from England, but the way I see it, there are really only two possibilities concerning that problem.

            First, it might be the case that by England, they actually mean England, Chewbacca-World, like it’s a town there or something, and they just completely randomly ended up with that name by a total quirk of fate.  So in Wookiee, England probably means something like, “Land of the Venomous Mud Squirrels” (over here, of course, it simply means “Land of Engs,” whatever those are).  So, one can assume that he’s also coming here just to escape from a hometown with a silly name, much as people from Blueball, Pennsylvania, Medieval England, Iowa, and I’m A Big Fat Retard, Vermont have done since they were first founded by various fools and Amish people.

            The other possibility is that “Being from England” is actually just a codeword for being a space alien.  I’m sure there are way too many planets to keep track of out there, and even with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith on the case, people would freak out if they knew that Patrick Stewart is from Zebulon 9 in the Zookdar Nebula (to say nothing of the generally acknowledged fact that Alec Guinness really was from Tatooine after all, and rather than dying, he’s merely gone back home for a bit of a vacation).  In fact, how do we even know that England is even a real place.  I’ve never been there, and though I know folks who say they’ve been, they might be lying.  Or maybe it’s all really just a bunch of holograms out in a big underground bio-dome somewhere out in Nevada and everyone that we think is from England is actually a space alien like Chewbacca, C.S. Lewis, and Monty Python.  Which goes a long way, mind you, to proving that there are plenty of friendly aliens out there who aren’t addicted to Reese’s Pieces and Speak ‘n Spell, but still, I’m rather disappointed to know that this whole England thing has been such a farce.

            The other big question of course, is how Chewbacca got to be a U.S. citizen in the first place.  All that I was able to find out is that he’s marrying a woman from Texas (and, being as he is well over 200 years old, I’m sure his mom is all sorts of relieved to know he’s finally settling down).  Now, I tried to come up with an exhaustive list of all the single women in Texas that I know of, and the only ones I could think of were the Bush twins.  I personally never learned to tell the two of them apart, but assuming that Chewbacca’s not a Mormon or anything, we can safely say that he’s only marrying the one of them.

            The last thing I want to be doing is jumping to conclusions here, but it seems to me that since George Bush’s dad was President, and George Bush is President now, he’d probably really like it if his son could be President too someday.  Alas, having only daughters, the only way ol’ George’s dream is gonna come true is if he decides to settle for a son-in-law; which, of course, Chewbacca will now be.  Sure, you might think that since Chewie isn’t a native of this fine nation of ours, he can’t be elected President.  And that’s where Arnold Shwarzenegger comes in.

            For you see, it won’t be long before the American people, believing that they’re paving the way for the Terminator to reach the Presidency, actually play into the diabolically ingenious plans of the Republican Party by voting to amend the Constitution to allow Austrians and Wookiees to run for President.  Honestly, I’m not sure why exactly they’re going to such lengths to everyone’s favorite walking carpet elected, but I for one, and eager to see what kind of Supreme Court Justices he’ll nominate, as well as which diplomats he plans to beat to death with their own arms.

            If there’s a single comic in the daily papers that regularly and accurately depicts life in Canada, I would have to say that that comic is most certainly “Hagar the Horrible.”  If I had to choose a second one though, I’d probably have to go with “For Better of for Worse.”  Really, just about everything I know about Canada, I learned from reading this strip and from my friends on the streets (yeah, I grew up in a weird neighborhood, we’d all gather around behind the school and speculate wildly on the nature of Canada, which was a good thing, because when they brought in the school nurse to explain it to us it was so completely not as awesome).  So anyways, as usual, I was reading it this morning when I came upon this:

            Now, up until the last panel, this one makes a decent amount of sense (unlike Funky Winkerbean, which is more like taking a daily odyssey into some otherworldly realm of eternal torment and suffering), but then I stopped to look at the guys eyes and just totally freaked out (really, I did, right there at the breakfast table; I snarfed in my Hot Pocket and everything).  Why, you may ask?  Because, those are not the eyes of a man suffering from sleep deprivation, those are the eyes of a man who has been tainted with some ancient and nameless evil, and since it’s nameless, I’m gonna just call it Chuck.  For you see, I spent all of five years in college, studying the ways of history, potato guns, bad winemaking, and armoring, and along the way, I saw plenty of tired people and plenty of people possessed of Chuck, the ancient and (recently) nameless evil, and lemme tell you, the two look nothing alike.

            Which means, of course, that we find ourselves in a bit of a quandary here, for clearly For Better for Worse Guy has been doing than merely pulling a few all-nighters.  At first I suspected that, like so many other Canadians, he had been dabbling in the dark arts of necromancy and maple syrup refining, but then he would almost certainly have on some kind of a robe made out of Teddy Grahams boxes or knitted from the souls of the damned (which are more alike than you may be likely to suspect), but nope, he’s wearing a cardigan, which is like the official upper body garment of Canada.  They’re like apple pie to Canadians, except they usually don’t eat them.  Usually.  Also, he’d probably have tentacles growing out of his ears and there’d be demon monkeys flying around the apartment and stuff; which there aren’t.  Indeed, it seemed as if I would be left without a hope of unraveling the case of For Better For Worse Guy’s evil Chuck eyes, but then I remembered something else I had read concerning the most unlikeliest of connections.

            There was an article in the paper today, you see, which dealt with the growing business of mining the oils sands of Alberta, which, if I recall correctly, is probably in Canada (at the very least, I’m nearly almost positive it’s not in Paraguay).  And this is of course, all sorts of controversial since this mining is destroying huge tracts of Canada’s pristine god-forsaken frozen wastelands.  Critics counter that the only other option is to get oil by grinding up baby seals, which of course brings in all sorts of extremist factions that would rather get oil by grinding up other animals such as manatees, squirrels, and Ben Affleck, but that is neither here nor there.

            For you see, while many may argue about the environmental impact of oil sand mining, few care to address the real hazard here; that of hideous and nameless evils named Chuck that have been slumbering dreamlessly since ere the Earth had cooled, awaiting the day when man in all his hubris might awaken them to devour the Earth as a fat guy devours a case of Twinkies.  Why don’t these things happen here in the America?  Simple, because the planet is a lot narrower way up at the North and South poles, so all the evil is a lot closer to the surface.  Down here in more temperate climes, you have to dig way deeper to unleash unholy hell furies upon the human race, though from time to time, some old lady planting a flower bed will hit a rich vein of evil and get transformed into some kind of gibbering harpy beast or talk show host.

            So clearly, the Power of Chuck has been released out in Alberta and, wafting o’er the countryside like the evil from a succulent and delicious waffle, has infested Sleep Impaired For Better For Worse Guy, who, unfortunately, is now probably in the wretched thrall of the underworld.  One can only hope, from an objective point of view, that this will bring about much funnier comic strips in the coming weeks, as he goes all crazy like Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, or Winfield Scott Hancock in Gettysburg.  Either way, only time will tell.

            Ever since the first nerd caveman took up his +7 Club of Cave Mastery, fashioned a crude pair of Vulcan ears from a wooly mammoth, and started quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail to all his nerd caveman friends, there have been questions which have ever dwelt in the hallowed halls of geekdom.  Is Mr. Spock Jewish?  Why can’t an Orc Shaman train in duel wielding?  What exactly is in Hobbit Weed anyways?  But greatest of all these timeless unanswerables is that most quanderous quandary of all:  Who is better, Captain Kirk or Captain Picard?  Now certainly greater minds than I have grappled with this mystery; Saint Augustine, for instance, was a staunch supporter of the CaptainKirkSchool, while rival East Coast Theologian John Calvin was a diehard member of the Picard Faction.  Who then are we to believe, when such giants as these stand so irrevocably divided?  Well, me.  Why?  Because I’m gonna take this whole thing apart logically and after weighing all the options carefully just go with which one gives me a shoutout on his Myspace page.  Well, then, without further ado, buckle on your ridgiest forehead and let’s get started; and age before beauty being the standard rule for these things, we’re a gonna start with Captain Kirk.

            Beginning with points in his favor, Captain Kirk, much like Bill Clinton, boldly got it on with all sorts of alien life forms, often without even checking whether or not they were, technically speaking, female.  Picard, on the other hand, mostly just stuck to having a major 5^th grade crush on Dr. Beverly Crusher, who, while she was kind of hot in a space mom sort of a way, was also Wesley’s mother, for which she, and by association, Captain Picard, loses all potential coolness points in terms of romance.

            In terms of punching things in the face, Captain Kirk is also the clear winner, for while every once in a while Picard would go out and manfully beat the space crap out of someone, I always felt like an episode hadn’t really gotten started right if Kirk hadn’t beaten something up by halfway through the opening credits.  So yeah, when Picard punched someone in the face with a saddle or shot them with a crossbow, you knew that he was doing it because he really cared, but the fact is, in terms of sheer ass-beatitude, Kirk wins by a mile.

            Concerning the manner of Klingons they hung out with, Kirk is the decisive winner as well.  I know, I know, Worf is pretty cool, especially because he holds the intergalactic record for telling the most people that they will die without honor before breakfast on a single day (1,387), but think about Kirk’s Klingons for a second.  They had shiny pants.  Shiny, shiny, shiny pants.  Seriously, I’m all psyched about the 23^rd century just because of the anticipated breakthroughs in pants technology.  Also, since Kirk was instrumental in helping Spock to establish the now axiomatic Evil Twin Goatee Rule, he gets bonus points in this one.

            Also, when it comes to l337 I.T. skillz, Kirk pretty much has it in the bag, for his awesome ability to make evil space computers blow up.  Granted, for him this was pretty much a weekly challenge, so he got aplenty of practice, but if I recall rightly, some of these evil space computers had been enslaving entire planets for centuries, and all Kirk had to do to make smoke come out of their ears was throw out a poser like this, “You claim to be programmed to help these people, but in fact you totally suck.”  Or, “Everything I tell you is a lie; I’m lying to you right now.”  True, every computer that Kirk ever met talked like Stephen Hawking on ‘shrooms, but still, being able to destroy evil computers just by saying stuff that doesn’t make any sense, that’s pretty sweet.

            On the subject of gracefully dealing with hair loss, Picard is far and away the better of the two.  I mean, think about how many fraudulent/fake-looking baldness cures we already have in the 21^st century; by the time Picard starts getting a little thin on top there’s probably millions of different useless ways for middle-aged honky captains to feel like they’re doing something about male pattern baldness.  So Picard gets all sorts of cool points for just not giving a damn.  Kirk on the other hand, appears to have been wearing a cheap space toupee made from a dead tribble since at least 1967, and while his continued power over the ladies of the Alpha Quadrant in spite of this handicap is impressive, he still has a mop on his head.

            In terms of who they are in real life, I’m afraid that Picard wins pretty much completely.  I mean, sure Kirk was flying on a plane once back in the 60s (tickets purchased on Priceline, no doubt), and there was a Big Freaky Eskimo Sasquatch Leper  on the wing (or, for those of you preferring the politically correct term, a Big Freaky Inuit Sasquatch Leper) and he had the guts to break a window and shoot at it, which would, under normal circumstances, mean a point in his favor, but just think about what he’s up against here.  I mean, Captain Picard is also the leader of the X-Men.  That means that not only does he get to fight Q and hang out with the guy who does Reading Rainbow, but he’s also the world’s most powerful psychic (more powerful even than Dion Warwick), he hangs out with Wolverine, and his nemesis is Gandalf the Gray.  C’mon now, you just can’t beat credentials like that.

            Finally we get to accents and nationalities, where Picard wins pretty much hands down.  Sure, he’s supposed to be French, but what evidence is there that he lives like it?  He’s always drinking tea, he has a totally British accent, he occasionally beats people up, and he doesn’t wear a beret.  I think there’s only one conclusion we can draw here: that by the 24^th century, mankind has discovered a cure for being French.  Kirk on the other hand, is from Canada, or possibly Iowa.  It doesn’t matter though, because his accent is the most completely weird thing ever in the history of the human race.  Really, it’s like when he was three years old he just memorized all the magnetic poetry pieces on his mom’s refrigerator, and for the rest of his life, whenever people look at him like he’s supposed to say something, he just starts stringing them together randomly with all these dramatically useless Keanu pauses thrown in.

            So yeah, in the end, for finding a cure for Frenchitude, and for being able to hold a serious conversation with a Ferengi without giggling himself silly, Picard wins.  Sorry Kirk, you’re just too weird.

            Please direct all Shatner-inspired hate mail to this address: ben@teacupmammoths.com

            I love eating at Panera’s, as I have made abundantly clear in this very space previously, in no small part because of all the potential wackiness that can happen when they have to call your name.  I went there with my dad the other week though, and the first thing that the girl at the counter said was, “Whoa! You guys look exactly alike!”  Which is kinda true, cause we do, but then I got to thinking, maybe it’s not that I look a lot like my dad after all, maybe she’s just crazy and that’s what Panera Girl says to everyone.  If that’s true, I would imagine she gets punched a lot.  I mean, being told I look just like my dad is one thing, but what if I had chosen instead to share an over-roasted beef hamwich with say, an orangutan, or President Gerald Ford?  Then I might not have taken it so well.  Also, it would be completely hilarious if when you ordered your sandwich there, you said your name was Spartacus, then, when they called you, a bunch of other guys who had also used the same name came up and they were like, “Which of you is Spartacus?”  And then everyone would be all like, “I am Spartacus!” “No, I am Spartacus!”  “Nay, pity ye these fools, for I am Spartacus!”  You’d probably never get your sandwich, but it would be fun.

            I was in Harrisonburg last week, and since I went to JMU (‘Jo Momma University) it was all nostalgic and stuff, except since I was there, they’ve changed all this stuff, and the town is all different.  Like, they used to just have a regular dentist office in town, but now they’ve built a new bigger one.  The thing is, on the sign there’s this big picture of a Swirling Vortex of Doom witch doctor hand with a big eye in the middle.  Now, if this was a sign for the hand, eye, and Swirling Vortex of Doom specialist, that would all be cool, but unless he’s a voodoo dentist or something, I suspect that the sign-making guy just gave him one he had lying around the shop.  Also, now there’s an entire Heavenly Ham emporium in the mall.  Back when I was a student there, all we had was a Ham of the Damned store, but now it’s gone too, victim to the merciless progression of Harrisonburg trying to get all classy.

            Why is it that people in public restroom always have to go and write dirty limericks and stuff on the walls?  I mean, if you’ve already decided to carry a magic marker with you at all times, I’m clearly not going to talk you out of using it, but why not try to change it up a little bit and be different.  Like instead of writing a clever haiku implying that whoever reads it is gay, try putting up an Emily Dickenson poem.  Or instead of just recording that you were there, why not throw out a few lines from Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Great Expectations?  Trust me, you’ll weird out so many more people that way.

            You know how they’re always putting out those little books of funny and/or dumb things that the President said?  I’ll bet those are a relatively new phenomenon.  Like, imagine being in medieval Mongolia and hanging out the Barnes & Noble yurt, you’d have to have a book of like, humorous Genghis Khanisms, and there’d be a big picture of him on the front holding a chicken of falling out of a helicopter or something, and it’d be full of verbal slip-ups, where he had been doing an on air spelling bee or something with his horde, and had accidentally spelt yak with an extra E at the end.  That would have been funny.

            Last night I was in Waffle House enjoying a delicious nocturnal foodstuff, and there was this guy there whistling a merry little tune.  But after a minute, I realized that it was in fact the theme song from Wrath of Khan.  And so I was all freakin out, cause he was this trucker hanging out at Waffle House, whistling the Wrath of Khan song.  I wanted to say something, but I knew that if I was wrong, I would surely bring shame upon my family for ten generations, so I didn’t say anything.  I was gonna do some really subtle thing that would let any other Khanheads around know I picked up on it, like go trap myself in an asteroid and kill Leonard Nimoy, but by the time I’d figured out my plan of action, he’d already left.  I suspect that someone’s just come out with like, a Wrath of Khan remix, like Willy Nelson or someone, so now all the truckers know it; which, when you think about it, is actually far more weird than just the idea that a lone trucker might just happen to be a fan.

            If you’re one of those people who goes to the International House of Pancakes just because it’s all cosmopolitan and international, I’m afraid I’m about to disappoint you horribly.  You see, it turns out that there’s really just like, one up in Canada and that’s it.  So don’t be sitting there thinking that people in Papua New Guinea are, at that exact same moment, eating an international pancake too, unless you “eating an international pancake,” you mean, “sitting in the jungle eating tigers,”  which you probably didn’t mean unless you’re crazy.

            The Internet, it goes almost without saying, is pretty darn awesome, embodying, as it does, the very quintessence of all things cool.  Where else, after all, can order a ham from the comfort of their own home or office?  Through what other medium can one watch footage of a beached whale being thrown miles into the air via the ingenuity of our nation’s highway department?  Where else can you go, should you desire to know who would win in a hypothetical battle between Casper Weinberger and Alf?  Indeed, it should come then as no surprise that the Internet was invented right here in America, Land of New Stuff We Made Up.  Though originally envisioned by Alexander Graham Bell, (who actually invented the telephone primarily so that his other invention, the 56k modem would have something to run off of) the 19^th century Internet really turned out to be mostly just good for buying wagon tongues online and posting Chester A. Arthur/X-Men crossover fanfics.  And so the Internet, widely ridiculed as a failure, lay fallow until Al Gore (who originally became stranded on Earth after his soybean-powered time machine conked out over Tennessee) decided to use his awesome powers to make mankind’s most ancient dream of being able to look for naked pictures of Brittany Spears while working at the office come true at last.  In short, the Internet rules.

            Alack, not all is well in Internetland, for now, the most ancient and bitter enemy of all that is good in the world, the United Nations, has decided to try and take over all of cyberspace and use it for their own nefarious ends.  You see, back when he finally perfected the Internet, Al Gore knew that he would not always be there to oversee his creation and that he would have to make special provision that it always be looked after.  So he built a robot to do it, but the robot went haywire, escaped, and proceeded to run for President a few years back.  In desperation, Al Gore gathered up all the monkeys he could find, and herded them into a vast, secret underground bunker far beneath WashingtonD.C.  There they toil ceaselessly, each with his own little monkey powerbook, doling out domain names, flinging poop at one another, and making sure that the people of the world can always Mapquest their way to the nearest Wally World and endless vaults of completely worthless information such as the fact that pumpernickel is German for “fart of Satan.”  Now, secreted away deep within their Fortress of Doom, the U.N. has decided that they want to run the show.

            Now, at first glance, this might seem like a decent enough idea.  After all, one tends to think of the U.N. as kind of being like Captain Planet and the Planeteers, or the Superfriends back in the 70s when they were diverse, yet completely ineffective.  However, the truth becomes all too horribly clear when you think for a moment about the fact that most of the people at the U.N. actually come from other countries.  I mean, when you think about all the most evil men from throughout history, the vast majority of them were, in fact, from other countries too, the same countries that now want to be in charge of the Internet.  To whom exactly am I referring?  Let’s take a closer look at just some of the people and nations who would now have a say in whether or not you’re allowed to set up a website with nothing but pictures of squirrels being sucked through various kitchen appliances:

            Napoleon Bonaparte, whose necromantically animated army of skeleton warriors and Frenchmen swept across continental Europe and kind of Russia, shutting down Internet cafes across much of the civilized world as well as making a necklace out of the iPods of his slain enemies.  Also generally credited with inventing the pop-up ad, Napoleon was from France, a nation which just so happens to be part of the U.N.

            Rasputin, the mad Russian monk, who, in the early 20^th century gained great influence over the court and local area networks of Czar Nicolas through the clever use of those little ads where they say that if you punch the monkey or set Gary Coleman on fire you can win a Playstation 3 (yes, he knew that someday there was going to be a Playstaion 3; that’s just how awesome his dark powers were).  Russia, where Rasputin was from also happens (all too conveniently) to be a part of the U.N.

            Adolf Hitler, who in addition to being a total psycho, is thought by many to have invented adware and, on at least one occasion, hacked President Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt’s Livejournal.  And you know how there’s nothing in Wyoming anymore?  It used to be an earthly paradise, but Hitler turned his giant orbital boringness ray on it and things there haven’t been the same since.  Hitler of course, was from Germany, which, last time I checked, even had it’s own monogrammed parking spot at the U.N.

            Zimbabwe, which really isn’t that evil or anything, but seriously, do they even have the Internet there?  I mean, what if they think it’s some kind of water buffalo or something and pass all these completely inappropriate laws based on such a faulty assumption (Article 7, Subparagraph 18: No Internets shall be allowed to graze in the town square during the festival of the Fall harvest.  Also, when marrying the daughter of a village elder, a young man must present to him a gift of three ISPs and a bushel of gigabytes.).

            What then is to be done?  Well, while most of the battle must be left to our nation’s leaders (Chewbacca, Dick Cheney, and Sarah Michelle Gellar), we can each to our part by traveling to other countries and loudly complaining about what a pain it is to have to look after an Internet all the time.  Or, if you’re not the traveling sort, send letters to foreign countries like Honduras and Vermont, bemoaning how the Internet is always sneaking into your house at night and eating all your goats.  Also, plant a VictoryGarden, because that always works.  There you have it, all we can do now is hope that our leaders do not fail us, and that should the U.N. get their international panties in a bunch about this, we can always just put the Internet in an old shoe box with some holes poked in the lid and stuff it under America’s bed, then just whistle the official No Really I’m Not Doing Anything Suspicious tune and deny that there ever was an Internet in the first place and tell them to send in U.N. inspectors if they don’t believe us.

            Well, here we are again, just three years away from the next Presidential election, and already people are wondering who’s going to get nominated and who, in the fullness of time after Florida’s quadrennial Wacky Voting Misadventure, is going to be running the country for the next four to eight years.  Some of course speculate that Dick Cheney is going to make a go of it, but I happen to have it on good authority that he’s been meaning to spend some quality time at his secret volcano fortress under the sea singing, dancing, capering about, and raising an army of robo-baboons.  Others suspect that John Kerry might try to win it again, but since recent biological studies have found that he is, in fact, an Ent, this seems unlikely as well.  Who then shall lead our great country?  Clearly we need someone possessing great leadership skills, moral clarity, and an uncommon degree of badassitude.  Taking all these things into account, I think there’s really only one possible answer, Mr. T, for any number of reasons which I’m going to expound upon at greater length right now.

            First, he’s compassionate, because he pities the fool.  Now if there’s one thing our country has plenty of these days, its fools, and President Mr. T could mobilize the government as never before to pity all of them more effectively.

            Next, he knows the importance of conserving important nonrenewable fossil fuels and taking less petroleum-intensive forms of transportation, which is of course why he ain’t getting on no plane.  Of course, this might lead some to wonder about what we’re going to do with Air Force One for the next four years, but between renting it out for Harrison Ford movies and bar mitzvahs, I think we should be able to make a pretty tidy profit on it.

            Also, Mr. T cares about kids.  Whether it be drinking milk for good nutrition, staying in school, or growing a Mohawk, Mr. T is the very epitome of all sorts of good qualities that parents all across this great land of ours want to see their kids take to heart, thusly enabling them to make good life choices and beat up Sylvester Stallone.  Yes parents all over can rest assured that their kids would have strong bones, good study skills, and funky hair styles if Mr. T were running things.

            Some people, it has recently been the case, have criticized the President for acting unilaterally.  Not Mr. T though, cause he totally knows how to work with a team.  Like, say his cabinet and Hans Blix were captured by terrorists.  Hans Blix would say something whiny in a foreign language or something, and then Mr. T would just completely ignore his euro-ramblings and build an assault vehicle out of a lawnmower, a roast beef sandwich, and a sack of doorknobs (with the help of Reginald Barclay, the most nervousest starship engineer in the Alpha Quadrant, of course), thereby whomping the terrorists and proving that when your teamwork is good enough, you don’t even have to listen to other people.

            And speaking of terrorists, President Mr. T would be sure to wage a culturally sensitive, yet mercilessly badass war against all those who would blow up our junk.  Just imagine, Osama bin Laden going one on one with Mr. T.  From the second the bell rang until about two seconds later when Mr. T turned him into chunky salsa, it would be like one big metaphor of awesomeness over evil.

            And lest you be concerned that Mr. T might somehow lack the fundamental understanding of economics so necessary to keeping our nation on an even keel, I ask you to look no further than his obvious and blatant support for returning to the gold standard.  Not only would this ensure a low inflation rate for years to come, but it would also certainly make him the most blinged out President since Jimmy “Funkmaster Shizzlemah” Carter.

            And finally, just bear in mind that Mr.T would be the first President since Rutherford B. Hayes to be available in Chia form, for those patriotic yet weird Americans who want a shaggy green little terra cotta idol of their Commander-in-Chief watching over their kitchen sink, just as America watches over the kitchen sink of the world.

            There are some things in this world that people are just better for not having too much of.  You know, like things that tend to corrupt us, or create terrible monsters or terrible reality shows.  Indeed, one can almost imagine the gods themselves sitting down at the dawn of time and making a list of it all, “Hmmm, nuclear weapons, afro picks, molybdenum, pickle relish, plutonium, beef, heroin, we’d better keep a close rein on all that stuff.  Right then, on to inventing weasels and whisky sours!”  Sadly, there are a few things that somehow either were overlooked, or were invented by minds more ingeniously twisted than the Ancients could ever have imagined, and every now and then some hideous new evil breaks forth by becoming too readily available for public consumption.  One such evil, of course, is garden gnomes.

            Now before I even begin, I know that many of you must be out there shaking your heads dismissively whilst thinking to yourselves, “Surely, mass garden gnome consumption shall forever be a vice of only the very wealthy, being expensive as they so often are!”  Would that you were right, but alas, I fear modern technology has once more unleashed upon an unwary world an evil the likes of which has not been seen since that great pog debacle a while back (The Great Pog Debacle, by the way, would be a most excellent name for a band).  For you see, just last week, whilst I was out shopping for crossbow parts, I saw garden gnomes on sale for three for $10 at the hardware store (don’t even bother asking which one, I’m certainly not going to tell you and then be held responsible for imperiling your immortal soul with ageless and unspeakable evils).  Think about it, that’s like, $3 a gnome, so even if you’re just earning minimum wage, you could still be bringing in upwards of 80 gnomes a week.  And when you start getting into your higher income brackets, it only gets more frightening.  What’s that you say?  You don’t see how buying thousands of gnomes could ruin your life and/or bring about the very Apocalypse itself?  Well then, join me, won’t you, as we embark on a magical little tour of just a few of the veritable plethora of evils that gnomes can visit upon the human race.

            First, you could buy like, a thousand of them, and then use a combination of black magic and common household cleaners to turn them into a legion of the damned.  You’d start out by sacrificing them all to one of your basic hell-beasts, like Azaroth the Defiler, of Zothriel the Butt-Ugly, or even the rarely attempted Timmy, the Unimpressively Named.  Then, once they’re all dead, you turn right around and strike some sort of demonic pact, to bring them all back in some hideous semblance of life to cater to your every evil whim, like some kind of horrible army of zombie death gnomes or something (also, The Zombie Death Gnomes would be just about the best gnome-related band name ever).

            Alternately, you could get a few hundred of them and then raise them on nothing but raw hamburger, thereby instilling in them an insatiable thirst for blood.  Then, all you’d have to do is sell them back to little old ladies and wait for the inevitable as the ravening gnomes slaughtered untold legions of the elderly.  And don’t go thinking that after you figured out what was going on you could just rehabilitate the gnomes to be peaceable again.  Nope, once a gnome’s tasted human blood, there’s nothing you can do but set him on fire and whack him with an aluminum baseball bat that’s been blessed by the pope, and should you happen to get one of those store-brand knock-off sanctified baseball bats, it won’t work right, and you’ll just end up with a whole bunch of bloodthirsty and also on fire killer gnomes running around the house clawing at the furniture and opening up little gateways to the underworld, which is kinda cute for the first ten minutes, but then you want to take a nap or fix a waffle and it just gets annoying.

            Of course, while a single gnome can be cute; many people make the mistake of buying one from an old Asian man and then ignoring his sage advice and feeding it after midnight or getting it wet.  The next thing you know, you’ve an entire herd of green, scaly, foul-tempered additional gnomes running around, tearing things up, making sequels and whatnot, until you can destroy them all with sunlight or preferably high explosives.  Don’t try to win them over with love, that only works in Care Bear movies and the U.N, unless by “win them over” you mean “kill them”, and by “with love” you mean “with one of those proton packs from Ghostbusters.”  Also, if you absolutely must have a gnome (because like, you’re handicapped and need to use one as a back scratcher or bottle opener) make sure you take it to the gnome vet to be neutered, because most of the stray gnomes out there just end up in the pot at various Chinese restaurants anyway.

            So there you have it, a brief run down of just a few of the horrors of which a man armed with thousands of gnomes it capable (and that’s not even getting into the ecological terrors they can create, as seen in World of Warcraft).  So, for the good of humanity, I would hope that each and every one of you out there would take some time this week to go buy and few gnomes, and then throw them off the nearest cliff into the sea, thereby destroying them, and ridding the world of their evil.  One can only hope, of course, that any that survive would quickly perish in the depths of the sea, rather than mutating and falling under the sway of Aquaman, who would probably just manage to taint the very oceans with their pointy-hatted eviliciousness.

            I think that the moment when I first began to suspect that I was in for an unusual trip came when I passed the ficus plant trying to hitch a ride along 288.  Really.  And there upon lies the story.  It was the evening of this Saturday last, I had just gotten off work after yet another fun- and chicken-filled day at Henricus, and was off on my merry way to jolly old Madison Virginia, home of absolutely nothing, but temporary location of numerous of my old college homies. 

            I’m not entirely sure whether the aforementioned ficus plant standing by the side of 288 with a suitcase was in fact the cause of the weirdness which was to ensue, or whether it was merely a harbinger of it.  All I know is that there was so totally no way on Earth I was gonna stop and pick it up, despite the fact that I had packed my usual supply of armaments that I take with me when I go on a road trip.  Crossbow, chainmaille, Potato Gun of Doom™, fun-size travel claymore, all these essential pieces of road tripping equipment were safely stowed away in the hold of my Minivan of Fury, yet still, I felt vaguely unsafe, and unwilling to trust in the angelic nature of ficus plants.

            After getting out of town though, things seemed to settle back into some semblance of normality for a while.  Until I got to Lousia.  There, it turned out to be the case that I needed to buy gas, potatoes, and Cheez-its.  With this in mind, I stopped by the local Food Lion, and stepped into a weird universe of terror that had nothing to do with their poor selection of firing yams.  What happened?  Read on, and be amazed:

            You see, as I walked into Food Lion, some guy almost ran into me.  Not like he wasn’t paying attention or something either, he was looking right ahead, where I happened to be standing in all my Benly awesomeness, but for whatever reason, he durn near bowled me over.  I moved on however, and thought no more of the situation, for about ten seconds.  What I encountered in the Food Lion at first struck me as odd, then unsettling, then completely freakish, then right back to just odd again. For you see, it was like absolutely nobody there could see me.  Seriously, like people kept almost running into me with their carts, forcing me to jump out of the way like I was in the weird Special Grocery Store edition of Frogger.  Those few who couldn’t quite ignore me completely acknowledged me with only a look of passing disgust and revulsion before going off along their ways, and leaving me very weirded out and thoroughly relieved to be out of that accursed Food Lion of Louisa.  So what exactly happened?  Here’s a few theories I’ve come up with after literally minutes of paranormal, quantum electrodynamic research:

            First, I think it highly possible that the ficus plant was actually generating some kind of weird subspace distortion field, that slightly phased me out of sync with our dimension, like that Reading Rainbow episode where LeVar Burton got hit by the warp reactor and he had to wander around with ship until Worf emitted some kind of radiation that brought him back into phase.  That’s why nobody saw me in the Food Lion, I was all ghostly and phantasmal, which would have been kind of cool if I’d known what was going on and tried to use my stealth powers for something awesome, like hurling a watermelon and Osama bin Laden, assuming he shops at the Louisa Food Lion.  I don’t even want to think about why a ficus plant would do all this in the first place, it was probably just mad because I wouldn’t give it a lift to wherever it is that ficus plants want to go to (probably hell, or worse, New Jersey).

            Or maybe, I wasn’t the one who was out of sync with reality.  Perhaps the entire town of Lousia was trapped in a recursion loop within the very space-time continuum itself.  And like, for the past 300 years, they all just keep repeating all the same stuff, unable to break free.  And like, since I was new and different, I was all crimping their trapped-in-a-neverending-purgatory-of-Food-Lion style, so they were miffed.  Or maybe it was because I took their last box of Garlic-flavored Cheez-its.  Either way, someone was messing with the fabric of reality, which is never cool, unless you’re doing it so you can ride around on a Quetzalcoatl or buy some Ecto Cooler or vote for William Howard Taft.

            In truth though, I think that what was actually happening was this:  You see, a bajillion years ago, when Lousia was build by the Ancients, it was an earthly paradise, a perfect society, where everything was totally sweet and it rained waffles and everybody had their own helper monkey whether they needed one or not.  It was all ruled by the High Archon Billy, Potentate of All Louisa.  But lo, Billy knew that he would not live forever, and so he built a totally awesome robot version of himself to rule the city after he died, or returned to his home planet of Thanagar, or went back to college or whatever.  And everything was cool for a bout two weeks, and then somebody spilled a Diet Coke on this robot, and it went all crazy and decided that the only way to enslave all the good people of Louisa, and make them into some kind of werewolf zombies, or zombie werewolves, and even though they all recognized me as an outsider, they couldn’t really do anything aside from stymie my efforts to buy snack crackers and leer at me.  Also, zombie werewolf zombies are weak against crossbows and potatoes.

            Anyway, eventually I made it out to Madison, which is so far out in the middle of nowhere that a nearby highway sign points the way to Richmond and also to Syria, which shouldn’t even be on the same continent, but that’s probably still just the ficus plant distorting reality.

            It seems like these days you can’t just find a barber shop to go get a haircut at.  Nowadays they’re all called beauty shops, and they’re way the hell expensive.  I mean, if I was planning on being on the cover of Vogue, or Popular Mechanics, then maybe I’d need to be beautiful, but as it is, all I’m really looking for in a coiffure is something that won’t make me look like an unfrozen caveman historical interpreter.  That’s why someone needs to start Less Ugly shop, where you pay half as much and all they do is try and make you look presentable enough to go out in public.

            If I was in the Klan, I’d giggle like a Japanese schoolgirl every time I stopped at Sheetz.

            You know how in 1984 (the novel, not the actual year) the Ministry of Beating the Crap Out of You would stalk people and learn everything about them so that when they were interrogating you, they’d already know like, the one thing in all the world that would terrify you the most?  If I lived in that world, I’d always be acting afraid of ridiculous stuff, and acting like all the stuff that really freaked me out wasn’t a problem.  That way, when they finally arrested me for running a subversive blog of liberty, they’d have gotten all of their What Terrifies Ben information wrong, so instead of setting me on fire while playing Marky Mark records or something, they’d hang me by my toes over a giant vat of sour cream with ennui-ridden gerbils paddling around in it in tiny little canoes whilst humming the theme from the Muppet Show backwards. Then the government would probably collapse, and that would pretty sweet.

            At the Wawa nearest to my house, there’s this one paper towel dispenser in the bathroom that’s like, seven feet off the ground.  And it’s not like it’s right over the sink or something and the mirror’s in the way, it’s just way up there on the wall.  As I see it, there are two possible reasons to put it up there:  either it was put up there for use by a basketball team (which Richmond doesn’t really have), or Bigfoot has finally gotten a job installing bathroom fixtures and is inconsiderately putting them at heights suitable only for himself.

            The other day I stopped a McDonalds to get a cheeseburger, and when I was on my way back out to my van, I noticed that there was some chewing gum stuck to my tire.  But before my brain could formulate a rational thoughts like, “Oh look, chewing gum.  I like ham,” it just randomly came out of nowhere with, “Oh crap, there’s gum on my tire!  I bet that’s gonna completely mess up my gas mileage unless I get it off of there!”  I knew before I had even finished thinking it, that that was the dumbest thing that ever I had thunk, but it was too late, my brain was mostly on other stuff at the time, and I only had enough system resources free to be silently abashed.

            If I was a paranoid schizophrenic, and preferred to spend my days having intense and rancorous arguments with all the invisible trolls hovering around me, the first thing I’d do is go out and get one of those hands-free cell phone headsets and wear it all the time; then people on the street would just think I was a business executive with poor fashion sense.

            If you ever become a totally lame, bush-league supervillain, know your limits.  Like, if you’re a ferret wrangler, and one day a radioactive ferret bites you and you get ferret powers, don’t decide to become evil and then go out and pick a fight with Superman or something.  Seriously, rob a few banks, give Aquaman a wedgie, whatever, but don’t think that just because you’ve got ferretvision that you’re gonna take down a guy who can eat lava, cause it’s not gonna happen.  Unless you were bitten by a kryptonite ferret, then you might have a chance (Kryptonite Ferret, by the way, would be an awesome for a band).

            Family Circus always confuses me, because like, one of the kids in it will say something in a little word balloon, and then the other will answer it in the caption underneath.  Like Jeffy will be saying something like, “Grandma says that the metric system is for Commies!”  And then down underneath, Billy replies, “Not now, you fool, the hour of Festival is nigh upon us!”  Which is cool and all, but I grew up on the Far Side, (not literally, like my neighbors were talking cows or something), so to me, it seems like the caption ought to be a witty or insightful observation on the situation described by the above speech bubble.  So for me Family Circus would be so much better if say, Dolly was saying, “PJ, I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly, but you have elected the way of pain!”  And then at the bottom it would say something like, “Unfortunately for Dolly, PJ was merely a toddler with ahead shaped like a football and an inconvenient affinity for orcs.”