Being as how I had a day’s layover here in Beijing before catching my train up to Mongolia, Meg and Bryan were kind enough to devote much of their day to showing me around town and generally making sure I didn’t get myself arrested/sold into slavery/drafted into a boy band.  Anyway, we decided to take a bit of a whirlwind tour of the city, taking in the various and sundry sights to be seen.  Though both of them maintain that putting me up is no trouble at all and they rarely get to entertain friends from back West, I suspect that they also don’t want the most unenviable task of explaining to my sister how I was shanghaied/abducted by pirates/enlisted in the French Foreign Legion (which would be a bit of a trick, since I’m fairly certain that France hasn’t technically had a legion of any sort, foreign or otherwise since at least 1940).  At any rate, I am most grateful to them (my hosts that is, not the French Foreign Legion; they never did a thing for me even after I went all the way to France just to fix their stupid Gamecube).

 

            After a most refreshing thirteen hour night’s sleep (which sounds like a bit much, but after running the numbers, I believe it was actually about the first time I’d really slept in the better part of a fortnight) we set out for Peking University, where we mingled with the students, saw much of the campus, and I engaged once more in an epic, yet ultimately unsuccessful battle to eat with chopsticks without looking like Stephen Hawking trying to do brain surgery with an angry marmot on a stick.  Indeed, I have come to suspect that the nigh-universal fitness of the Chinese people has less to do with an active lifestyle than it does with the fact that eating too much with chopsticks is about as practical as excavating the Suez Canal with a spork.

 

            Next, it as off to catch a bus, which often takes a bit of doing, since more often than not, the one you want is already insanely crowded, leaving you no choice but to through your lot in with a pack of fellow roving bus wranglers and then sort of tackle a passing bus as if it were some kind of diesel-operated caribou that had strayed away from its herd.  While on the bus, my grim and alien appearance served to get me a little bit of extra personal space, allowing me to observe the ticket lady randomly yelling out the window at various people, cars, and urban donkeys.

 

            At length, we arrived at the Old Imperial Palace, which is actually newer than the New Imperial Palace, though since that loveable old scamp the Emperor liked messing with people, the names got mixed up somewhere along the line (he also liked concubines, eunuchs, and those little golf cart trams that carry people around, though not necessarily in that order).  Though normally a place of many artificial lakes, when we got to the palace, it was more of a place of many dried up, frozen over craters, which pretty much killed my notion of renting a little Imperial Paddleboat and feeding breadcrumbs to the assorted Imperial Ducks (The Imperial Duck, by the way, would be a fine name for the Emperor’s garage band, had he not been overthrown some 90 years prior to my visit).  Next, we got to walk around the Imperial Palace Ruins, which were all that remained of a Western-style portion of the palace that as destroyed during one of the Opium Wars by an allied army of the British and French in 1860.  I know this last bit for a fact because every single one of about 20 different signs there reminded me, word for word, of this unpleasant bit of history (And here are the ruins of the Emperor’s Royal Outhouse, which was destroyed by the allied British and French army in 1860).  I wondered if I ought not try to make amends while I was there (Sorry about all the opium guys, and the sacking and pillaging and whatnot, my bad.  Look, if any of y’all ever want to come over to Richmond and lay waste to a Hardee’s or something, we can call the whole thing even and go out afterwards for slurpees).  But I didn’t want to cause a scene or anything (for once) so I just let it slide this time.  I really hope that the allied British and French army of 1860 never go back there for a tour though, because I’m sure they’ll feel perfectly aful once they see how bummed the Chinese still are about the whole unsavory affair.  Also, all these signs were up forbidding us from either climbing or depicting, which was a bit of a disappointment to me since I really had to fight the urge to just sit down right there and do a nice little freehand charcoal sketch of the Imperial Concubinatorium.  On the way back, we were most unjustly denied access to one of those little golf cart things, which tempted me sorely, as a representative of the allied British and French army, to sell them a bunch of opium and then knock down a few buildings.

 

            After this, we hit up a little coffee shop where they had posters of such great American movie stars as Gregory Peck, Che Guevera, and Richard Nixon, and where they played Kenny G Does Mulan nonstop for half an our straight before the record finally broke and they threw on some traditional Chinese Mariachi Christmas music.  Next it was off to an ATM where, much like Sheetz, the government doesn’t charge you a service fee just to show that communism can be user-friendly after all once in a while.  All the money here has Chairman Mao on it, and I am most pleased to report that, like George Washington, you can fold his head into a mushroom as well.

 

            After that, it was off to a very nice Korean restaurant where everything was written in even more new and wonderful languages that I couldn’t understand, but where they do an excellent job of making beef stew and having one of those tables that’s also a burning pit of fire.

Well, here I am at last in Beijing, the City That Never Plays Music That Makes Any Sense Whatsoever.  I landed yesterday and after going through customs and immigration (including a sign with the refreshingly un-PC label “foreigners” on it), I found myself at that part of the airport where you meet up with people.  So there were all these folks holding signs and shouting and carrying on, and it really felt rather like being a rock star, except that none of them were really looking for me anyway, and even if they were, the only vaguely rock staresque qualities I possess are godly phat kazoo skillz, and a knack for trashing hotel rooms and dating crazy women.  Here at last I met up with Meg and Bryan, two of my sister’s friends in town who were ever so kind enough as to put me up (and put up with me) whilst I’m here in the sunny and socialist People’s Republic.

 

            Beijing is, in many ways, a thoroughly modern city; there’s lots of taxi cabs and high rises and neon signs with demonic hell pigs n them that would make South of the Border proud.  Really, it’s almost like Northern Virginia, but with slightly more statues of Chairman Mao.

 

            I was warned before heading out to dinner with my hosts that many people here would stare at me, which struck me as a terribly considerate thing for them to do since it reminds me a great deal of home where everyone also tends to stare at me, the only difference being that in Beijing I’m not wearing a hat made out of duct tape.

 

            In what seems like a delicious bit of irony, I have discovered that every single showerhead here in Asia is at least seven feet off the ground, and that instead of coming in cartons or bottles, juice routinely comes in these freakishly ginormous juice boxes which would require, all other things being equal, a second grader the size of a special bus to do them proper justice.

 

            Many people here seem to drive proper American cars like we’re used to back in the states, like Hondas, Volkswagens and so forth, as well as a few weird-looking Chinese cars, like Buicks.  Traffic laws are completely optional here, and it is generally the case that anything flat enough to drive a car on counts as a road.  The drivers here a most friendly, and regularly hail each other by honking repeatedly and looking insanely angry.  Never in all my travels have I encountered a place so very ripe for the introduction of the Dixie horn.

 

            The labels on just about everything here are written solely in Chinese (though a few are in Spanish too) and since everything is packaged entirely differently here, it requires a good deal of faith to assume that none of the five flavors in your Cheerios is, in fact, cat.

 

            The architecture here is all most interesting from a Western point of view.  Many things here could easily pass for modern American buildings, though often whoever built them will just go ahead and throw on one of those old-timey pagoda roof things just so you don’t forget that you’re not in Richmond anymore.

 

            Of the few things over here written in English, only a few make any sense whatsoever.  The apartment water heater, for instance, proudly bears the legend “King of Thumb” and never having been one to pick a fight with a water heater, I’m just going to take its word for it.  Also, the other night we ate at a restaurant advertising “heartworming service” which I earnestly hope is a typo.

 

            This being China and all that, I had rather hoped that I might be witness to more awesome spontaneous kung-fu battles then I could keep track of.  Unfortunately, all the local street fighters and battle emporiums seem to know when I’m around and keep a low profile, because the closest thing I’ve seen so far is a couple of construction guys exchanging spirited wedgies at a bus stop (though The Spirited Wedgies would most certainly be a fine name for a band).  At any rate, I have decided to move on to my secondary Chinese quest, finding an elderly man in a dusty shop somewhere to sell me a mogwai or five.

            From the moment that I got off of the plane here, I could tell that I was no longer in the land of my forefathers.  I towered over most of the natives, who scurried about me on unknown and unspeakable errands, whispering in their alien tongues and pushing past me with fearful abandon.  Some gazed at me with looks of commingled wonder and fear, aghast that an outsider such as myself should tread upon their native soil.  As I trod down the concourse, I passed all manner of shops, where ill-favored vendors hawked curious wares both mundane and exotic.  It as, in every sense, a place utterly unlike Virginia, home to a race whose culture I could never hope to understand.  Verily, Newark was all that I had been told.

 

            It was indeed a place infinitely more exotic and strange than I had ever imagined, with sidewalks that move of their own soulless volition (and which I seem to be constitutionally incapable of getting onto without falling over like a one-legged sumo wrestler on a trampoline).  At length, I found my way to the President’s Club, and since he wasn’t using it at the moment, I picked it up and delivered a vigorous beatdown to a number of the local baby seals.  Just kidding of course; there aren’t any baby seals in Newark.  Anymore.  Since the President’s Club was a bit on the crowded side though, I soon left to wander the corridors for a while longer, taking in the local flavor (which, if I had to assign to it an actual flavor, would probably really be closest to frankenberry).

 

            Finally, I found my way to yet another President’s Club, which, by virtue of being on the second floor, had culled from the masses those too portly or vulnerable to nosebleeds to make the ascent.  It was much nicer there, leading me to suspect that the first one was actually the Vice President’s Club or some such thing, in which I case I would exhort the venerable and badass Mr. Cheney to hold his company to somewhat higher standards.  While here, I had a most excellent view of what I am almost positive was New York City, though of course, it’s been a great deal less distinctive these last few years since they shot King Kong off of the Empire State Building.

 

            Also in the President’s Club, I discovered a thing unlike any other of which I have ever even conceived of – a black urinal.  Seriously, you know how black computers and basketball players are just ineffably and invariably cooler that your usual beige ones?  Well it turns out that the rule holds true for urinals too.  It was seriously like some kind of weird 2001: A Space Odyssey urinal; if I was a monkey man I would have invented fire right there in front of it.

 

            So, after walking past about 173 portable defibrillators and a McDonalds with the giant severed torso of Ronald McDonald on it doing that whole Last Supper Big Arms Thing, I finally made it to the right gateway with time to spare.  Now, having learned from movies that any time you’re in an airport and there’s a TV there, whatever they’re talking about on the news is pretty much guaranteed to directly affect the course of your life.  Operating under the reasonable assumption that this is true, I expect to shortly be nominated for the Supreme Court, take part in a Lakers game, and save up to 15% on car insurance by witching to Geico.

 

            My plane (not that it’s really my plane, mind you, you can’t really own a plane like that, they’re like the wind) was already waiting there for me, with the added touch that they painted little swirly things on the jet turbines so that if you watched them long enough, you probably get hypnotized or start understanding the Metric system or some other horrible thing.  Also, the plane has windshield wipers, which strikes me as a wise precaution, since I imagine that if you were ever to hit a junebug at 500 mph, it could get a tad messy.

 

            Finally, while I was waiting there, the PA system would occasionally announce something very important-sounding in Chinese, at which point all of the Chinese folks waiting for the plane would get up and move around very purposefully, leaving me more confused then that time I tried to have that debate concerning the relative merits of Intelligent Design with a drunken mariachi band.

            They always say that flying is the safest way to travel, but of course, on Star Trek, they always say that about the transporter and it seems like every other you hop on the dang thing you end up either getting caught in some kind of subspace rift where everyone has a goatee, or at the very least, you make it down to Rigel VIII with your pants on inside out.  At any rate, I as hoping that at the very worst, I’d be stuck with the inverted pants option (The Inverted Pants Option being of course, a most excellent name for a band) as I boarded a small plane bound for the gleaming metropolis that is Newark, New Jersey, shining doorknob of the East Coast that it is.

 

            Never having flown outside of Chesterfield County before, I did of course make an effort to familiarize myself with all the possible in-flight contingencies that might occur, such as loss of cabin pressure, Shatner on the wing, being attacked by Harrison Ford, and the ever-present danger of running out of peach schnapps.  In a most reassuring nod to our nation’s proud aviation heritage, I was pleased indeed to discover that our plane came fully equipped with stewardesses who, alas, all looked unaccountably angsty.  Perhaps the innumerable wonders and blandishments of aeon-storied Newark in time turn sour to those best acquainted with them.

 

            At length, a video came on in which a man who looked a great deal like a very jocular yam told us all of that stuff about life vests, emergency exits, and what to do if we ran out of peach schnapps (curl up into a little ball and wait for death to overtake you).  Also, in what was for me the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, they told us what to do with our seatbacks (put them in a fully upright position, of all things).  They also told us that there were life jackets underneath our seats, but I kind of felt down there and found nothing but one more facet of the wretched and abominable web of lies that is the American airline industry.  A little while after they brought drinks around, a stewardess came by with a plastic bag which I rightly took to be some manner of communal barf bag.  Not wanting to appear rude on my first flight, I did my level best to Ralph into it, but my all too sound digestion failed to oblige me in this affair.  Looking ever so disappointed with me, the stewardess withdrew to the front cabin.  After this point, a strange cardigan-bound fellow whom I can only describe as some sort of a bizarre man-stewardess began at intervals to peek out at me from the cabin like some kind of a high altitude whack-a-mole, casting me an occasional look of mixed pity and concern.

 

            About this time, and shortly after passing through a cloud that looked like a bunny rabbit (though the resemblance turned out to be wholly superficial) the plane, with a great thud, hit something.  Now, while I’m no veteran of the airways, I am very well-versed in the auditory cues of roadkill, and I thought for a moment that we had surely just struck a rare and delicious sky possum (though, of course, most of them have long since flown South for the winter).

 

            Without further incident we landed, in that famed and legendary realm of mystery, Newark, and though initially folks were a bit slow to disembark, some helpful soul cut loose with a Force 10 Pantsbuster, greatly hastening out egress.

Hi everyone, first let me apologize for not updating the last few days. my server's been down and I've only just been able to log on again.  Also, as of tomorrow, I'm going to be flying to Mongolia for two weeks to hang out with my sister and partake of the awesomeness of the Orient.  Mongolia being as it is a great leader in wireless technology, I expect to be able to update the blog on a regular basis once I'm there, so keep checking in as I'll try to post as regularly as possible.  Meanwhile, party on!

         

 

         It seems like everywhere you look these days, people have those camera phones (this is especially disturbing if you’re looking in either the bathroom or the Amazon rain forest).  And with camera phones, have come descending upon us like so many gibbering sky trout, those people everywhere who always seem to be taking pictures of stuff with them.  All of which is by way of getting to my real query here, “why on Earth does anyone need a phone that’s also a camera?”  Seriously, never have I been talking to someone on the phone and all of a sudden been all like, “Oh, crap, you have to see this thing that I’m seeing at this very moment!  I’m at the mall! And there’s this thing! And you have to see it now!”  And yet, to observe many Richmonders, that’s exactly what a lot of people seem to be doing.  Now I like cameras as much as the next guy, but I also like carburetors, and I think they’d be a silly thing to put in a phone too.  Really, what camera phones tell us is that we, as a people, have forgotten how to combine two things that have nothing to do with each other in a way that isn’t retarded.  This being the case, I would be remiss in my civic duty to the world were I to do otherwise than try to see what kind of improvements can me made to this situation.

 

            For instance, how about a phone that was also a toaster?  For while I’ve never been out talking on the phone to someone and suddenly succumbed to the urge to send them a picture of the Kinko’s at which I happen to be standing, I frequently will be talking to someone and all of a sudden want some fresh toast.  I can never have any though, because while I routinely go gadding about with large quantities of sliced bread in my pockets, I never have a way of toasting it.  And of course, this is just me; think about how many other people out there are going toastless because of poor phone design.

 

            And of course, there’s always the spatula phone, because a lot of the time when I’m talking to someone, I find I’m in a situation where I need to flip a piece of bacon and/or a pancake over to avoid the tragedy of uneven flapjack cookage.  With a spatula phone though, neither I nor any other unfortunate soul would ever again need live in fear of such disaster.  But a spatula is never just a spatula, you know.  You could also use it as a pie server, roadkill remover, spackle applicator, or garden trowel.  Yea, the blandishments of the might spatula phone are many, and indeed if there is one good argument against them, it is only that too many weak-willed people would begin to spend all their waking hours finding things that needs to be spatulated while they talked to their friends.

 

            Which brings us, of course, to the punch you in the face phone, because the truth is, there are a lot of people out in the world with cell phones who need to be punched in the face.  Now, I’ve always done my best to make sure that no deserving cell phone abuser goes unpunched in the face, but I’m just one man, and what with the global domination and whatnot, I can’t be out punching faces all day anyhow.  The punch you in the face phone, however, would save all of us a great deal of trouble by punching people in the face who were engaging in any of your more common mortal phone sins, such as: being way the hell too loud, divulging personal information that I truly neither wanted or needed to know about, just being a tool.  The phone, you see, could automatically sense this, and punch them in the face at appropriate intervals, thus improving the quality of our public life and discourse immeasurably.

 

            And let’s not forget the oft-overlooked chainsaw phone.  Honestly, I can’t say how many times I’ve been talking on the phone and all of a sudden found it necessary to hew down the mightiest oak tree in the forest (And since I work in a forest, there’s a lot of them to hew down, though technically only one can be the mightiest.  Though I guess that after I hew that one down, the one that was the second-mightiest takes over, and then I still have to hew it down too.  And so on and so on.).  Clearly much time and effort would be saved by designed a phone that was also a chainsaw, though you might want to set it up so that you couldn’t use both functions as once, lest the Van Gogh look make a sudden comeback amongst our nation’s lumberjacks and youth.

 

            And for the modern man on the go, how about the U.S.S Ronald Reagan nuclear aircraft carrier phone.  Come on now, we’ve all been in the situation before where we were just talking on the phone and all of a sudden we realized that we needed to project American military supremacy across the globe.  Though even with a chainsaw or spatula phone would have trouble addressing this problem successfully, a phone that was also the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan would easily keep any international terrorists you happened to meet at a safe distance.  Sure it would be a little more cumbersome, having as it would carry some 80 combat aircraft and be capable of top speeds of up to 30 knots.  And of course being powered by two nuclear reactors, you’d be looking at up to 20 years of battery life before you even needed to plug it in for a recharge.

 

            So yeah, take that camera phones, you’re not that cool at all, and when I rule the world with a delightful mixture of ruthlessness and self-effacing charm, you’re going straight out the door along with communism and soyburgers.

            You know how the main day for Christians is Sunday and the one for Jews is Saturday?  Well the one for Muslims is Friday.  Which means that while T.G.I Fridays is always awesome, if you’re a Muslim, it’s actually a religious experience.

 

            People always make it sound like elves all live in these giant trees that they’ve carved into some kind of big ethereal ewok city.  That’s a dirty, dirty lie though, because a lot of elves can’t afford to live in some big fancy West End tree utopia.  Most of them actually live in trailer parks, some of which are up in the trees, but mostly not.

 

            I was at Sears the other day looking a those little plastic feet you can put on furniture to keep it from scuffing up your floor.  Well, it happens to be the case that the Spanish word for “floor protector” is apparently “capuchin.”  Clearly, there must be some entomological connection to the famous, beloved, and delicious capuchin monkey.  Now, it’s been a while since I took Spanish, but I’m pretty sure that if you translate it all out, our Spanish brethren call it “the monkey of floor protection” (I meanwhile, call The Monkey of Floor Protection the best name for a band I’ve heard all week).  My guess is that in your poorer Hispanic countries, they can’t afford all those little plastic furniture feet, so instead they just stick some monkeys at the ends of their table/armoire legs and that keeps them from scratching up the floors.  Of course, as we all know from firsthand experience, when you put a large piece of furniture on a monkey, he’s probably gonna raise a bit of a fuss, and probably start throwing poop everywhere.  Which brings me to my main point, which is, um, that as awesome as monkeys are, be grateful you don’t live in Panama.

 

            Remember how a couple years ago the guy who does Beetle Bailey did that big “Name Our New Character” contest to see what they were gonna call their nerdy IT guy?  Well, in the end they named him Gizmo, which seems like a kind of obvious name hardly worth having a contest over, though that is neither here nor there by this point.  The thing is, has anyone even seen him for the last like, year?  Where’d he go?  I was just getting to enjoy his unique brand of dorky military humor.  Then it hit me, he’s a nerd, he probably went out and caught a late night snack, and since his name is Gizmo, one suspects that he turned all green and slimy, became evil, and starred in am awesome sequel with Robert Picardo.  Let’s just hope they didn’t get him wet or anything.

 

            It seems like everywhere I go these days, they’re selling those totally sweet-looking light sabers that look all extra real and everything.  They sound all real and everything too, but that’s completely unnecessary, because it’s been proven clinically impossible to wave a lightsaber around without making lightsaber sounds yourself.  This is of course a good thing if all you have to work with is a piece of PVC with some orange duct tape on it, but if you’ve gone and spent a jillion dollars on a nice one, the sounds only make it sound like Darth Vader is fighting a horde of bees, which, if I recall correctly, he did not do in any of the Star Wars films.

 

            When the Narnia movie comes out, I’m gonna go to the midnight show and dress up like Lion-O, or possibly Snarf, and then play it all serious and see if anybody notices.  Then after it let’s out and there’s that guy from the news in the parking lot working on his “Look at All The Freaks” story and he interviews me, I’ll act all disappointed that they left Cheetara out of the movie.

 

            Just in case you still had any doubt that Microsoft is run by the Devil, my spellchecker doesn’t believe that Narnia is a real word.

 

            If I were an Indian, I would totally drive a Cherokee, or a Pontiac, or some other car named after me.  As it is, I’m just hoping that next year Chrysler finally comes out with their new Honkeyventure.  Or, barring that, the new Nissan Crackerspedition.

 

            In New Zealand, there are more sheep than people.  I’ll bet its just torture living there, because you have to go around lying to all the sheep every day to make them think that they’re actually outnumbered.  “You hear that, you sheep, there’s 3 billion of us right over that hill there, so don’t try anything funny!”

 

            I always wondered about Fred Flintstone, he spent waaaay to much time with his friend Barney and he wore a dress made out of a tiger.  I’ll bet that’s why Wilma became a heroin addict in the seventh season.

            Here we are again, in the midst of the Christmas season (which now, in accordance with Federal law, begins in late July).  And of course with Christmas comes the inevitable and annual deluge of Christmas songs, some of them good (and therefore not at all funny to write about), and many of them totally lame.  Which brings us, of course, to today’s subject.  After all, while there are a lot of holiday classics that everyone loves even though they don’t make any sense at all, there are a favored few even among those that make you wonder what kind of festive seasonal hallucinogenic substances they guys who wrote them were smoking at the time.  So sit back, pour yourself a glass of egg nog (or one of your other fine nogs, such as corn nog, beef nog, white rhinoceros nog, or Nog from Deep Space 9), and get ready to ponder a few Christmas imponderables.

 

            First, let’s start with everybody’s favorite Christmas ditty that happens to be sung by giant fictional rodents, the Chipmunk Christmas Song.  Now, the song itself makes enough sense when you listen to it (other than Theodore’s unaccountable predilection towards hula hoops), but therein doth not the true mystery lie.  The real question here is what on Earth David Seville was thinking when he came up with the whole chipmunk deal.  I mean, was he just having no luck breaking into the music industry by himself, and one of his friends said, “Hey Dave, why don’t you pretend to be a trio of giant ground squirrels singing about Christmas?  I’m sure you could earn a decent living for the rest of your life off of that!”?  Or was it supposed to be a record about three normal guys singing about Christmas and one guy with a really deep voice, but someone at RCA accidentally labeled it as a 78 instead of a 33.  Or does it all have something to do with David Seville’s friend the witch Doctor?  Either way, the scary thing isn’t so much that the demented imagination of David Seville came up with an idea to have enormous rats wearing body stockings sing Christmas songs as much as the fact that enough people loved it that we still listen to it today.

 

            Next we get to the old Holiday standby, Jingle Bells.  Now, I know that everyone loves this song (particularly Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made that motion picture adaptation a few years back), but I’ve just never gotten the point of a song fraught with such pointless negativity and defeatism.  I mean, so what if Batman smells?  He spends all night out beating up freaks and psychos to keep Gotham safe; are we really in a position to judge him for being a little on the rank side of things?  And Robin, could he really have laid an egg?  It seems clear to me that whoever wrote this song failed to do even the most basic research concerning Batman and his ward.  Seriously folks, birds and reptiles lay eggs, while Robin is a mammal, which means he has hair, is warm-blooded and bears live young (unless of course he’s a spiny anteater or a duck-billed platypus, which, aside from the occasional blurry and unsubstantiated photograph, I have no reason to believe).  Even if the author of the song already knew this, I have trouble taking anyone seriously who would so cavalierly disregard obvious rules of biology simply to make for more ready lyrical construction.  And then of course, we get to the questionable incident in which the Batmobile lost a wheel.  I don’t think I’m alone here when I say that there’s really no argument that the Batmobile has in fact, in numerous occasions, lost one or more wheels.  However, in light of the dangerous nature of Batman’s occupation, one can hardly blame him if his car takes a little damage now and then in the course of helping him to save the innocent.  And finally, so what if the Joker did actually get away?  Would you rather that Batman allowed some innocent city-dweller to perish just so that he could go catch the Joker?  I mean, isn’t Gotham City’s criminal justice and mental health system so hopelessly ill-run that even if Batman did forsake all to bring him in, the Joker would most likely just be back on the streets again in a matter of mere days.

 

            And finally, the somewhat more recent Christmas classic, Ice, Ice Baby, by Sir Vanilla Ice, Vice Reagent of Dorksville (not his actual title).  Honestly, I’ve never even gotten why everybody thinks this is such a great Christmas song anyhow.  Really, other than the repeated references to ice, babies, solving problems, and allowing the DJ to revolve it, this song has very little to do with any traditional celebration of Christmas that I’m familiar with.  I suppose that from a symbolic and metaphorical standpoint, one could theoretically make the case that Vanilla Ice is somehow representative of the often-mentioned “White Christmas” but that seems a slender hook indeed on which the hang the mighty hat of justice in this case (The Mighty Hat of Justice, let me hasten to add, would make a great name for a band, though not necessarily a Christmas one).  I really just have no idea whatsoever why my family insists on playing it pretty much continuously from Thanksgiving onwards this time of year.

            First off, Happy Thanksgiving to all ye my faithful readers, I hope that each and every one of you is this day in the company of good family, faithful friends, and a turkey the size of a Mini Cooper. 

 

            Thanksgiving, it happens to be the case, is one of those few days in the year when the newspapers pretty much just devote the whole issue to the order of the day, with tributes to great men of ages past, heroes of the present, and shapers of the world yet to come.  And it’s all very inspiring and patriotic and really makes for a nice change.  Except, for Dear Abby, who, almost invariably (except for this year, when she decided to confound my machinations horribly) writes a terribly depressing little litany of things that we, ungrateful churls that we are, ought to be more grateful for.  It’s always full of stuff like this: “Feeling a little under the weather today?  Be grateful because people in many parts of the world dying hideous and unspeakable deaths at the hands of the lizard men of the Congo.” Or, “Not doing quite as well as you might like this holiday season?  Well, be thankful you’re not one of the ten million people in America alone who has to eke out a living by recycling the bubble gum they pick out of other people’s shoes.”  In short, its all very depressing, and as an antidote to such misery mongering, I present to y’all my personal list of things that we, as Americans, can in fact be grateful for:

 

            Monkeys, because you know, people in a lot of European countries don’t have the sort of free market economy that we have here, which allows major corporations and enterprising individuals to bring over large quantities of all sorts of primates from the tiniest marmoset to the blue-buttedest baboon for the enjoyment of the public.

 

            Places that are open 24 hours a day, because you know, it’s not everywhere that a man can decide he needs a waffle, a roto-tiller, a Shmuffin, and some powerful over the counter medications at three o’clock in the morning and find them all easily available within ten miles of his house.

 

            Not being in Canada, because while it’s a very nice place with some terribly nice people there, you always have to pay more for magazines there.

 

            Marginally Legal P2P File Sharing Programs which allow anyone in the nation who suddenly feels the need to download a copy of Bionic Commando to do so in mere minutes.  And how about when you just need to get that one song off of that Mariah Carey album where if you play it backwards she tells you to worship Satan?  If it wasn’t for the shadowy world of Internet piracy you’d probably have to go to Sam Goody or something, and they’re not open at three in the morning, are they?

 

            Capitalism, under which all manner of businesses catering to all sorts of weird and outlandish needs can just spring up out of nowhere as long as there’re enough people crazy enough to buy whatever it is they’re selling.  Do you think that the federal government would ever set up a factory to build medieval crossbow parts?  I doubt it.  Also, government-made cars always suck and all look alike, so there’s another nice thing about capitalism (unless you’re already driving a Daewoo, in which case even the suckiest of federally-mandated crapmobiles would be a massive step up in quality).

 

            Dick Cheney, because even though I’m always making fun of him and giving him a hard time about that whole Lord of the Sith thing from way back in the day, he still always sends me a nice card at Christmas with a Chuck E. Cheese gift certificate inside.  And some of those socks with non-slip stuff on the sole so I don’t fall over when I’m walking on linoleum.

 

            Batman, because he keeps our cities safe.  Seriously, they don’t have Batman in say, North Korea, and look how bad things are there right now.  Like, the Joker is always stealing stuff there and hitting people with an unnecessarily thematic clown mallet, and the other day the Penguin stole one of their atomic bombs to power his giant duck mobile.  Honestly, I don’t know how some people even get by without as many superheroes as we have over here.  I mean, we’ve even got superheroes who specialize in fighting stuff like bad oral hygiene and overdue library books, but in Argentina, they don’t even have Aquaman.

 

            New Jersey, because it means that no matter what state you live in, you’ll always have at least one state that you know you’re better than.

 

            So there you go, just a few things that make me ever grateful to be living here in the good old U.S. of A.  Anyway, have a groovy Thanksgiving, and, in the immortal words of Patrick Henry, “Give me the mashed potatoes of give me death!”

            Well here it is again, Thanksgiving Eve, when we, like our forefathers, carve ham-o-lanterns to set in the window and go from door to door collecting drumsticks from old people who live in our neighborhood.  Okay, not really, but this time of year is all about imagining how perfect things could be, so I’m sticking with my ham-o-lantern fantasy.  What really happens on Thanksgiving is that bloggers, columnists, and some of your more eloquent tubers get all serious and try to write moving articles about the value of family togetherness and saving the whales and wearing hats with buckles on them (or possibly articles about how The Eloquent Tubers would make a totally awesome name for a band).  And that’s all okay, but that would be a total buzz kill, so instead I’m gonna go for the historical appreciation route and relate unto y’all the story of the first Thanksgiving, which, by the way, happened here in Virginia some like, ten years before Massachusetts even rose out of the primordial deep and became infested with Pilgrims.  So pull on your learnin’ trousers kids, its time for A Very Teacupmammoths Thanksgiving.

 

            It all started way back in the day, in 1619, when a bunch of English dudes (Who, unlike the Pilgrims to the North, came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum.  However, when they got here, they were dismayed to discover that Virginia had no natural bubble gum mines, forcing them to adopt a program of systematic ass-kicking which has remained the Virginia way ever since) decided to build a plantation on the banks of the scenic and kayak-infested James River.  You see, for quite some time, these first Virginians had been farming tobacco to send back to England, the plan being that not only would England regularly pay them for it, but it would also get all the English all emphasymatic, so that years later in the American Revolution, we’d just be able so run up a gentle slope to escape from them if things weren’t going well.  This plan worked out so well that after a number of years, the Virginians decided that maybe there might be a better way of growing tobacco than just running around in the woods hoping to find a vast field of it that had just sprung out of nowhere.  As a result, George Washington, Head On A Stick Guy, Bob Dole, Thomas Jefferson Airplane, and Abraham Lincoln all got together and decided to build a plantation.

 

            These days this would be no great challenge, but since the first home improvement emporium in North America wouldn’t be built until 1644 (Manny’s Log Cabin O’ Savings), they had to cut down all their own trees using nothing but fire and their own mighty incisors.  Also, the Pharaoh of England, Yule Brenner VIII, wasn’t letting them have any straw for their bricks right then either, so construction was rather arduous.  To make a long story short, the situation was grim until a friendly Indian princess, Pocasquantojaweea, who had run away from home because her parents gave her a stupid name, taught them how to make houses out of raccoons, which the Indians called, Maize.  So Berkeley Plantation was finished, and they decided to have a major league party to celebrate that they didn’t have to all just sleep in the back of Bob Dole’s Winnebago any more.

 

            At first, they planned on having a proper English feast, composed of nasty-looking English foods with odd names, but since the Pharaoh also wasn’t shipping and spotted dick or bangers and mash over at the time, these brave explorers had to kind of improvise.  George Washington, for instance, had just built the world’s first potato gun, and soon discovered that the spent ammunition from his creation was edible, thus was the mashed potato born.  Abe “The Emancipator” Lincoln was busy practicing his choke slam technique on the local Spanish spies, and just so happened to choke slam one Juan Valdez right into a fortuitously located barrel of cranberries, thus was cranberry sauce invented.  Head On A Stick Guy, meanwhile, was just kind of hanging out when their next door neighbor, Ben Franklin, came over from the craft store he was building to show off a kite he had made to fly turkeys around, his choice for the new national bird.  As luck would have it, a random bolt of lightening struck the kite, cooking the turkey, which Head On A Stick Guy quickly besnaggled and took back to the kitchen.  And Bob Dole brought the Pepsi.  Finally, when they were all sitting around the table and waiting for supper, they discovered that nobody wanted to be the one to go bring the food in.  Thomas Jefferson in particular was busy drawing up plans for a preppy university he hoped to build some day, and decided to put an end to the matter by inventing slavery.

 

            After supper Abraham Lincoln made a proclamation of awesomeness, declaring that every year after that, the President would go and set aside a day at the beginning of shopping season to do all the stuff that they just did.  Following his example, every President since has proclaimed the same thing every year, except one time Martin van Buren overslept and forget to.  The next year, the people of America decided to make sure he was awake by making a lot of giant balloons shaped like cartoon character and threw a big parade in front of his house.

 

            Well, now you know the true story of the first Thanksgiving, so when you sit down at the table tomorrow to enjoy some family togetherness and/or deep fried Twinkie sandwiches, you’ll know how much your forefathers had to go through to fix dinner.  And then go worry about saving the whales.

            I received a birthday Chia Pet the other day from homie and occasional co-conspirator Matt (actually it was more of a Chia Shaggy, about which I shall be writing an extensive report later on).  Anyway, there’s all sorts of Chia things and people available these days, including such pop culture icons as Mr. T to Bob Dole.  But what about all the opportunities for historical edification here?  Like, everyone I know could probably do with a Chia Ludwig von Beethoven, or a Chia Che Guevara.  Or how about a Chia William Shakespeare?  That would rule.  The only thing is, before you plant the stuff on them, they’re just a big terra cotta head; and to make the stuff stick to them better, they’re kind of corrugated.  Which isn’t a big deal really, except that before you plant them, it just looks like your Chia celebrity of choice has cornrows or something.  And trust me, Bob Dole with cornrows is not a thing you want to see.

 

            You know Data from Star Trek?  I mean, not personally or anything, (though that would be cool) but you know of him?  Did you ever wonder why Dr. Soong made him that funny uber-honky shade of pale?  I mean, he’s the most advanced android ever, capable of all sorts of impressive mathematical feats and ridiculously high Tetris scores, he has a cat, and his best friend runs Reading Rainbow, so he must be pretty sharp.  And yet, somehow, despite the fact that this is four hundred years in the future, the best the guy who built him could do in terms of a tan was to make him look like his parents were the Cheshire Cat and Michael Jackson.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he was built in a cave, I dunno.

 

            I hate those debit card gas pumps they have everywhere now because they’re so hypocritical.  Like, I go to buy a tank of gas, and the machine tells me to remove my card quickly, so I always really pull it out as fast as I can.  And then the machine takes like, five minutes to process it all and finally let me buy some gas.  C’mon Computerized Wawa Gas Pump, if you’re gonna expect me to go and hurry on your account, then the least you can do is reply in kind.  Besides, you’re already a gas pump, it’s not like you have anything better to do than approve my debit card.  Are you composing a symphony in there?  Or possibly an epic Homeric Haiku?

 

            You know how in MarkTrail, at least one panel of every day’s strip has some ginormous animal or another in it?  I used to think that this was just the guy who draws it showing off his awesome mastery of panda rendering, just in case the Pixar headhunters were out looking for someone to help with Finding Nemo 2: Crap, He Got Lost Again.  But after seeing MarkTrail turn two consecutive villains into giant animals, I think its clear that none of the animals in MarkTrail are really animals; they’re all evil people who’ve been transmogrified.  Which means that far from being a wondrous realm of nature conservation, the Hundred Acre Woods, or wherever Mark Trail lives, is actually like some kind of demented hell for diamond thieves, Lex Luthor wannabes, and Crazy Murdering Psycho Women who’ve all been transformed into hideous mutant cute woodland creatures.  Which in turn makes MarkTrail into the very Hades of the forest, a dark lord of the underworld, sitting high upon a log cabin made from the skulls of the wicked with Cherry, his grim queen Persephone by his side, and his almost-but-not-really-at-all three-headed dog Andy keeping the souls of the damned forever in his icy thrall.

            I was at the hardware store the other day, and I saw this big crate sitting on the floor, and on it, there was a big picture of a lion, and the words “Big Cat Mixer.”  So I was all excited, because I thought that someone had finally developed a kitchen appliance that would allow me to better mix my big cats, creating wacky and stylish new hybrids and mutants.  Especially because all the ones I’ve tried to make myself haven’t turned out so well.  Like, once I tried making a liger with an old egg beater and a steak knife and it didn’t end up well at all.  So anyway, I was thoroughly enthused about this, until I realized that is was really just a cement mixer with a horribly misleading brand name.  Just to be sure though, I threw a puma in there, but nothing happened.

 

            Isn’t it lucky that Adolf Hitler had an uncommon name?  Because you know that after that whole Holocaust thing, no one was ever going to want to be named Hitler again.  Like, what if his name had been Betty Johnson?  Everyone who was already named that would have had to either change their name or live in infamy, which would suck, even though you don’t have to get a new driver’s license.  And it always works out that way.  Like after September 11^th, did anyone wake up and go, “Aw man, now I have to change my name from Osama to something not evil.”  Ditto for Chairman Mao, Godzilla, and/or Brittany Spears.  But you know there’s just got to be this one poor old guy out in Utah somewhere whose parents named him Chairman Mao Osama Hitler and he’s just had to go through life changing names all the way.

            As all ye who count yourself among that most honored of groups, teacupmammoths.com readers, surely already know, this site is a regular font of wisdom, magic, Dick Cheney jokes, monkey allusions, made-up words, and killer robots.  However, there are also innumerable neophytes among your hallowed ranks, those new to the mystical ways of the blog, still callow and unfamiliar all the insanely random junk I throw out here on a regular basis.  What the, is to be done?  Well, it just so happens that amongst the elders of my tribe, there is a thing, an ancient, venerable, and throughly old skool way of passing along the wisdom of countless generations down to those who need to learn a bunch of stuff in a hurry.  My people call it a FAQ, whch is of course an acronym for Firebreathing Armadillo Quintessence (but since that makes so sense whatsoever, our elders went and acronymifyied it back n the day).  So go and fetch your learnin’ trousers, as we embark upon a magical learnventure of knowledge, as we explore a few of the questions that are frequently asked.

 

Q: Who is this Dick Cheney fellow?  Did you make him up?  If so, what up with that?

A: Well, while most of your more ancient tribes know at least tengentially of the Legend of Dick Cheney, his memory is kept uncommonly well by my village (as well as by the Thyrakian Death Honkies of the Zoopdar Nebula, but they’re all tools and we’ll speak no more of their accursed and aeon-blasted race).  According to the yeti masters of Nepal, it was Dick Cheney who forged the Sun and the Moon from the engine block of a ‘52 De Soto.  To the Amazons, he is known as “El Cheney Grande,” and is believed to travel across the sky each night, in a refrigerator shipping crate full of celestial weasels (The Celestial Weasels, by the way, would be a most excellent name for a band).  The people of New Jersey believe that he was te first to discover how to turn deer into corn, which the Indians call “maize”.  To learn the canonical teacupmammoths version, simply click here.

 

Q: And what about all those band names?  How’d you get started bandying them all about like some drunken street urchin flinging cats at the bishop?

A: The theory that random stuff that people say can, and ought to be, taken completely out of context and used to name bands is a practice that originated with Dave Barry, who happens to sort of be my muse (except for the fact that he’s a dude, he’s not Greek, he doesn’t usually seem to wear a sun dress, and I’ve never seen him wielding an extinct musical instrument).  For purposes of shrine-building however, my de facto muse is, and shall ever be, one of more of the Andrews Sisters.

 

Q: What about monkeys?  And Hitler?

A: If it come down to a fight to the death between monkeys and Hitler, monkey would totally punch him off of a flaming zeppelin.

 

Q: So, what is a teacup mammoth anyway?

A: The teacup mammoth is a hypothetical household pet for the man on the go in the 21^st century.  Originally conceived of back when I was still on myspace.com, it was the coolest domain name I could think of that wasn’t already taken.  Also, the logo is really damn cute.

 

Q: What about those Tshirts you were selling?  Are they real, or merely mythical, like the Chilean Duck of Paradise and the State of Wyoming?

A: Oh, they’re all too real, and still very much for sale at the funkadelic price of just $9 ($379 Canadian).  Also, keep an eye out soon for window stickers, big foam hands, a major motion picture, and our very own teacupmammoths.com U.N. corruption scandal.  But wait, there’s more!  In the next fiscal year, I hope to acquire Daewoo International, after which point the number of affordably- priced, sweatshop-manufactured in North Korea products ought to really take off.

 

Q: When you were in college, did you once turn your closet into a winery, much to the delight of all the hippies living in the dorm?

A: Indeed I did.

 

Q: When’s the Expansion Pack coming out?  Any word on the new playable races?

A: Our current target release date is 1^st quarter of ‘06 (dates maybe be subject to change in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico); the new races will be the Blood Mammoths and the Ditzy Cheerleader Orcs.

 

            Well, there you have it, everything you ever wanted to know about everything else.  If you absolutely must use this knowledge for evil, just don’t mention my name to your mom when she’s grounding you.  Party on, and good night.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A: Why yes, yes you would.

In this fast-paced modern globally integrated economic order by which the world runs nowadays, a lot of your more traditional leaders and managers feel somewhat out of their depth. Indeed, is there is one question that simply everyone asks me, it’s probably, "Ben, how on Earth do you do that thing with your feet?" But since that has triflingly little to do with management, I’m gonna skip on down a ways on my Big List of Questions That People Are Always Asking Me, to number 637, "How can I, as the CEO/Dark Overlord/80s Pop Icon of my aspiring evil empire, make certain that I’m running things in the most efficient, merciless, and awesome way possible, while still remaining dedicated to workplace diversity and offering a good healthcare package?" Well, Condoleeza, I’m glad you asked. It just so happens to be the case that in situations such as this, there is no better way to start off than by examining the style of someone who is an acknowledged giant in their field, and then draw the right lessons and apply them to your own small business and/or evil daycare facility. This however, ouldn’t be terribly funny at all, so instead we’re going to go with lessons in management from the very driver of the metaphorical short bus of evil (The Metaphorical Short Bus of Evil, by the way, being a totally awesome name for a band), Cobra Commander himself.

Let’s start out by looking at one of the most important parts of being a good manager, delegation. You see, few things contribute more to your ability to accomplish the most with your time than being able to choose motivaed self-starters to carry out your diabolical machinations. By way of introduction then, let’s have a brief review of the Cobra management team: First, you have Desto, a guy with a metal head, who may or may not be black (much like Bill Cosby’s evil brother, Cosbo). Destro’s a good guy and all, but the fact is, he’s plainly way cooler than Cobra Commander, which tends to make him something of an unsettling influence that we should all be careful to avoid. Next you have the Baroness, who in addition to being totally hot and wearing a awful lot of leather, has a totally sweet Iron Curtain accent and Harry Potter glasses. I cannot stress the importance of making sure that you have at least one such totally hot evil babe on your advisory board. Then of course we get to Doctor Mindbender, who had at least three monocles, and no shirt whatsoever. An important lesson to learn here, is that with the exception of barbarians, cavemen, and Dick Cheney, all your employees should be well shirted at all times. Finally, you have Zartan, who can turn blue and look like some kind of an unholy mix between a smurf, a biker, and a thundercat.

Well, now that you step back and survey your elite leadership team of freaks and mutants, you have to ask yourself, "How would Cobra Commander make them do stuff?" The answer, of course, is to shriek at them in the most ridiculous voice possible on any and all occasions. Evil Scheme of the Day not pan out? Pitch a fit. Coffee maker broken again? Go ahead, go bananas. Someone forget to order more of those little do it yourself cashews from Price Club? Have a total and complete seizure right there in the board room, in front of your big map of the world, Serpentor, the janitor, everyone. It’ll make you seem dangerous and unpredictable, but also reassure your employees that you’re in touch with your emotions and aren’t afraid to be honest.

And how about the actual plans of your corporation? Let’s say, for example, that you’ve decided to become a major player in the ever-lucrative global broccoli industry. A traditional CEO might well formulate a plan involving the acquisition of farms and agricultural contracts, coupled with an aggressive wholesale advertising campaign and competitive pricing. The problem is, this has all been done before, and you’re certainly not going to engage the more talented members of your team by going with such a bland and uninteresting mission. Instead, do it the Cobra Commander way, and formulate a wacky and nigh inconceivably complicated scheme to cull the DNA of mankind’s most learned broccoliologists while simultaneously traveling back in time to when the very first broccoli crawled out of the warm Precambrian Sea that covered 90% of the globe as late as 1973. Then, using all your stolen DNA and some of those cool little flying bubble jet hover thingies, launch a massive assault on the Statue of Liberty in an attempt to turn that venerable monument to the two weeks when we actually got along with France into the world’s largest Chia Pet. Also, make sure you sing that nifty Cobra theme song a lot.

And of course, I should be remiss in my duties here, were I to overlook the importance of brevity and concision in formulating your company mission statement. Far too many folks these days blather on for countless pages about "synergizing quality," "facilitating paradigms," "wearing hats made out of live marsupials" and the like to inspire their employees (or as we like to call them, Protein Resources") with anything but ennui. Consider then, the Cobra mission statement, "Cobra: An Evil Terrorist Organization, Determined to Rule the World." Just look at that, isn’t it marvelous in its simplicity? Everybody who walks into the Terrordrome lobby knows that your company means business. And it works for just about anyone! For instance, "Tyrone’s Used Auto Parts: An Evil Terrorist Organization Determined to Rule the World" or perhaps "Osama’s House of Goat Lovin’: An Evil Terrorist Organization Determined to Rule the World." See how it just trips off the tongue?

And finally, no matter what, make sure you wear a big shiny metal face thing; that way if you sneeze and/or get transformed into a giant snake, the world (and your stockholders) need never know the horror of your secret shame.

            In this very space, throughout the various and sundry months that I have kept this blog, I’ve written the life stories of all manner of friends, allies, and world leaders past and present.  It just so happens, in case you wist it not, that today happens to be my birthday, and keeping in the festive spirit of the season, I thought I might take this opportunity to tell my own story, the tale of my life, the Legend of Ben, thus far, if you will.  From whence did I come; whither do I go?  Am I still single?  What about monkeys?  Have ye patience, my comrades, all these questions and more shall be answered here today, as I relate to you, the Autobiblography of Ben.

 

            I was born to the Family Strohm on this very day, 1979.  It is a family known primarily for producing librarians, monkey wranglers, American folk heroes, and other such pillars of our society (sometimes all three at once; an example being my totally awesome grandmother who would never let me say this except for the fact that she never goes online).  After surviving two brief but glorious months of the Carter Administration, I found my way into the magical world that is yet known amongst my people as “The 80s.”  Long did I bask beneath the enlightening glow of a most uncommon mix of killer robots, hammer pants, and Ronald Reagan.  These things, combined with one good wallop of electricity when I was but a very toddler, formed within my very soul the metaphorical weasel of nascent greatness (The Metaphorical Weasel of Nascent Greatness being, after all, a most excellent name for a band).  The turning point of all this occurred when, at the tender age of eight, I left the herds of stegopossums ever tended by my forefathers and went on a wacky pilgrimage road trip to the ancient home of my tribe, the bituminous empire of Pennsylvania.  ‘Twas there that I first saw Bill & Ted’s Excellent adventure, and I knew at that very moment that never again would I want for purpose in my life, so clear did it all appear to me.  And so I returned to Virginia, to bide my time, think about dinosaurs, get sent to the gifted class on the extra long bus, only to return via the retarded class on the short bus (which is, in its entirety, a story for another day altogether), and generally do all the sorts of humble and unassuming things that make it all the more impressive when some years later you go on to conquer the very cosmos itself.  And so I waited on, until about 8^th grade or so, when things just got all wiggety and/or crazy.

 

            For you see, fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic sword (oh yes, I did have one of those all along) and said, “By the Power of Greyskull!” Or maybe it was a magical fedora, and the words might have been more along the lines of, “Hey Genghis, want a Twinkie?”  Either way, all sorts of crazy sparks flew out of everything, I got a great tan, and my cat started talking like Worf.  This auspicious event, as you may have well gathered, pretty much marked my ascension from socially-debilitating dorkiness, to loveable and kind of cute dorkiness, as well as being a harbinger of my awesome powers to be.

 

            Enrolling in time, so many titans of my generation have, at Meadowbrook High School and Poorly Disguised Super Hero Academy, I earned numerous honors in Not Doing Any Homework, Squeaking By, Not Getting Any Dates Whatsoever, Having a Bunch of Teachers Who Helped Me Out Anyway, Hurling Lightning Bolts, Smiting The Unrighteous, Latin, Drama, Getting Away with Wearing A Hat After They Banned Such Nonsense, and finally beating out two actual cheerleaders to become President of the student government senior year (though during my administration my cabinet was wracked by dissention and scandal, those who remember it now recall me as a wise and benevolent warlord).

 

            After this, I went off to college to study Physics, that I might build an infernal device capable of bringing to governments of Earth to their knees, but I sucked at math, and decided to go with more of the undergrad history route to global domination.  I endured the Crucible of A Dozen Psycho Roommates, fell in with a good group of lovable scamps and charming rogues, waged mighty battles against my adversaries by moonlight in single combat, and finally graduated at what was almost certainly last in my class (but hey, so did General Pickett, and look how awesome he turned out).

 

            Since then, I have done all sorts of awesome things worthy of record in completely separate blogs, and presently bide my time once again, working to build my evil cyberempire from the ground up, both here in the timeless and eternal æther of the internet and here at my diabolical Fortress of Doom (otherwise known as Richmond, the wackiest capital of the Confederacy on Earth).  I presently am involved in any number (one hundred and thirty seven) of fiendish plots to conquer the world, including building a giant catapult, setting things on fire, transforming the ancestral minivan of my forbears into an unstoppable juggernaut, and finding a girl do date who isn’t totally loopy (really, except for the last one, I’m doing pretty well on all fronts mentioned).

 

            So there you have it, the Saga of Ben, such as it is.  For further updates, please stay tuned to this site, the Emergency Broadcasting Corporation, and any large, dark, metallic, humming retro battleship sort of things that happen to mysteriously appear over downtown.  Until then, be excellent to each other, and party on.

            I found out the other day that Walgreen’s is now open 24 hours a day.  And that’s cool and all, because now I can buy drugs at three in the morning, legally.  But did you ever notice how all the places that are open 24 hours start with “Wa”?  Like Wal-Mart, or Waffle House, or even Wawa, and now Walgreen’s?  And of course, let’s not forget Waldorf von Walla Walla’s Wanigan World.  I suspect that this all has to do with some silly law from the 1790’s where you had to name your store something with “Wa” if you wanted to be open late, and then they just never took it off the books.  Either that, or trolls.

 

            I passed vending machine today, and they were selling Deer Park Spring Water.  That’s nice, but the sign said “Since 1873.”  Now, I don’t know about you, but I have trouble believing that back in 1873 there was much of a market for water that cost a dollar a bottle.  Can you imagine some cowperson coming in from a day on the open range, fighting Indians, wrestling rustlers, rooting, tooting, and whatnot, and being like, “Great monkey toads Helga! Get me a bottle of refreshing Deer Park Spring Water!”  Me neither.

 

            I was driving along the other day, and I passed a sign from the National Pork Council (no, not Congress, the other one).  I however, did not see all the fine print at first, for I was approaching from a mighty distance afar.  So all I saw was, “Spaghetti, or MANGO PORK FAJITAS?!”  Now it happens to be the case that there are some foods (not to mention people, nations, and some of your lesser deities) which, in spite of all sorts of great qualities, are simply cursed with silly names.  I mean, you can’t just go and throw the words “MANGO PORK FAJITAS” right up there in foot-high letters and expect people to take you seriously.  It’d be like getting a billboard that said “Samuel J. Tilden, or RUTHERFORD B. HAYES?!” or “United Arab Emirates, or DJIBOUTI?!”

 

            You know how the official I hate breast cancer awareness color is pink?  That’s all well and good for the ladies, but what about us guys that hate breast cancer too?  I mean, for guys, pink either means, “I’m a big ol’ fruit” or, “I think I’m a gangsta” or possibly, “I’m a big ol’ fruity gangsta”  So come on, The American Cancer Society, could you at least meet us halfway on this and go with mauve, or possibly crimson?  I’m just saying, you’re making it really tough for us to take a stand on this without taking a serious coolness hit.

 

            You know how on license plates all the letters are slightly raised above the rest of the plate?  Why is that, is it so blind people can run after criminal automobiles and get the number too?  “That guy just ran a red light!  Go get him Helen Keller!”  Also, I saw a car from Wyoming the other day, and they had this big, embossed, cowboy on the license plate.  But it was like, just right in there amongst the alphanumeric characters, like it was part of the number.  I mean, in Wyoming, is “Guy Riding a Horse” another letter of the alphabet?  When you have to write down your license plate number, do people there have to say, “R, 6, 7, Guy on a Horse, B, Guy on a Horse, Q”?  I really hope so, because if it’s true, that would mean it’s the first interesting thing to come out of Wyoming.  Ever.

 

            I was at Panera’s the other day, and they had a big ad promoting their deliverable box lunches.  “Order them for board meetings, family get togethers, company picnics, or pow wows” it said.  I can only imagine how many Indians are totally happy that now they can forget about cooking for their pow wows and just go hit up some Panera’s.  “Thunder Weasel, it almost time for lunch.  You go getum big heap box lunches from Panera’s.  You take heap wampum, bring back change.”  Sorry, Panera’s, while your outreach efforts are a big improvement over your old ad campaigns “Panera’s: Sandwiches for the Master Race!” I don’t think Indians are big into catering like that.  Maybe you should try again once you’ve got more buffalo-derived foodstuffs on the menu.

 

            You know Veggie Tales, that show where CGI vegetables teach kids important Biblical lessons about stuff?  First, let me say that this makes no sense at all.  I mean, do you really want to raise your kids to be more comfortable learning from a bell pepper than a human?  Cause then when he gets a bad report card, you’re going to have to dress up like the Flaming Carrot and sing a song just to make him get the message about good study habits.  Anyway, I saw that now they’re doing a Veggie Tales Lord of the Rings.  If making avocadoes reenact Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t blasphemy, then surely this is.  Besides, you can only put off teaching your kids about orcs for so long anyhow.  Would you rather have them learn young and get over it, or make it all the way to high school thinking that orcs are mostly like rutabagas with tusks before learning the truth?  C’mon Veggie Tales, take your Tuba of Shame and go back to the hellish abyss that spawned you.

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

            So, as most of you probably already know, the movie Zathura is either coming out soon, or has already infested a theatre (ha, I used the pretentious spelling of that word again!  Mwahahaha!) near you (for those of you who didn’t know, I’m sorry if I ganked your bliss like that).  It’s okay if you’ve never heard of Zathura, it’s also known by its other name Space Jumanji (which, as you may recall, stoked the fires of controversy way back in 1995 for containing the word “Jew” meaning “Jew” and “Manji” meaning “Robin Williams has lost his freaking mind this time.  No. Really.  He has.”).  In fact, the working title for Zathura was, in fact, Space Jumanji, except that after the harsh and inexorable vastness of space made all their giraffes explode, the people making it decided to draft Captain Video and throw it all together at the last possible moment and hope that nobody noticed.

 

            Also, let me point out that both Zathura and Jumanji are nothing more than a clever move by powerful board game lobbyists to try to fool kids into thinking that board games are fun, “Why not put down that Playstion and try playing Jumanji, Little Billy; your house can get eaten by lions and/or asteroids, or maybe asterlions, or like, lions that are riding on asteroids?”  The fact is though, that except for games like Scrabble, Monopoly, and Beat The Hobo, most board games are just way better when you can get rid of all the cards, dice, creative thinking, etc, and throw them on an Xbox.  On top of all that, let me remind you of just one more thing, Mr. Milton Bradley Hasbro Shill Man Person, no kid’s mom is going to buy him a game that causes her house to be destroyed by Robin Willaims, meteors, and giraffes (exploded or otherwise).  My mom never even let me play Full-Contact Battleship indoors, so you know she wouldn’t be keen on this whole “let’s alter the very pith of reality itself to teach a bunch of disaffected suburban yuppie spawn the value of imagination” thing.

 

            But I digress from my real point here, which is that if you were in such a situation that you had to think of a game to make a movie out of like this, and your two best ideas are “Dude, There’s a Tiger in Your Dining Room!” and “Holy Crap, Buzz Lightyear Stole Our House!”, then it probably means that you’re retarded and you should have called in a team of those typewriter monkeys that are always figuring out the answers to stuff.  Let’s take a look then, at a few other games that might have been better choices for this whole “making a movie out of a game” genre.

 

            Operation:  Just think about it, Toby and Vlad are two bored ten year olds, who come across an old copy of this beloved game.  Suddenly, whilst trying to remove the spleen, Robin Williams crashes through the wall, riding a giant femur and spouting all sorts of gibberish.  But wait, what happens when a horde of white blood cells (voiced by Chris Rock) swarm the house, threatening universal destruction?  Can Vlad successfully remove the 3^rd Anterior Scapula?  Will Toby be devoured by a ravenous Hippocampus?  Who names their kid Toby anymore anyway?  Watch, and find out! (By the way, why did they call the game Operation, anyway?  It’s not like you’re doing heart bypasses or knee replacements or anything; you’re just taking this poor guy apart.  Really, it ought to be called Horrible Nazi Medical Science Experiment; that would be a lot more accurate.)

 

            Monopoly:  It all seemed like a quiet afternoon at home with Gorpdar the Skullrender and his brother, Fred.  Until that is, they decided to try playing a game of Monopoly.  All of a sudden, Gorpdar gets a racecar, while Fred inexplicably turns into a shoe and/or an iron.  Things really get wild when Robin Williams crashes into the room, riding a giant Uncle Moneybags and spewing obscure references to Mork & Mindy.  Will Gorpdar manage to save their house from being bulldozed to build a hotel?  How will Fred deal with the “Get eaten by a lion” Community Chest card he draws?  Who on Earth decided that anyone other than freaks would want to be a shoe, anyway?  Find out at a theatre near you this holiday season!

 

            Enormous Floor-Covering Unneccessarily Involved Total Nerd World War II Submarine Combat Simulator Game:  It all seemed like a normal day for complete-and-total-never-had-a-girlfriend-in-their-lives dorks Zebulon and Myron.  At least it was until they decided to play a game of that totally game with a totally long name I don’t feel like typing again.  After spending a fortnight setting up all the boards, generating crew rosters, assigning special combat bonuses and establishing terrain parameters, Zebulon and Myron are amazed when Robin Williams arrives on the scene in a U-Boat!  After computing three pages of meaningless dork numbers from five different rule books and rolling somewhere in the neighborhood of 173 different dice named after polyhedrons, they discover that Robin Williams has in fact scored a critical hit on their dorm room!  Will Zebulon roll the 18 he needs to overcome Robin Williams’ elite stealth bonus?  Will Myron correctly assign damage to the proper hull sections of his carrier group?  Will this Robin Williams thing magically become funny if I repeat it enough times?  No! Because it already took like, six hours just to get through the first round of combat and if the movie let them actually finish, it would be longer than the extended musical director’s cut version of Birth of a Nation (Now with hilarious bloopers outtakes!)

 

            Doom:  Okay, so this one’s already been done, but it sucked pretty thoroughly, so we’re going to see what we can do to make it better.  It was just a regular day for brothers and WWF legends The Rock and That Panda on the WWF Logo.  Until, that is, they decided to fire up the ol’ 486 and play a round of Doom.  Suddenly Robin Williams crashes through the wall, mercifully being eaten mere seconds later by a passing Cyberdemon.  Suddenly it all falls to The Rock to use his awesome lumberjacking abilities with a chainsaw to hew his way through the endless undead legions of Hell, because panda’s aren’t good for anything and the WWF one just goes off to look for some bamboo or a Chinese guy to eat or something.  Will The Rock be able to find a BFG 9000 in time to fight the exploding zombie giraffes?  Wouldn’t The Exploding Zombie Giraffes be a totally sweet name for a band?  Why on Earth did the WWF ever put a dumb panda of their logo in the first place?  You’ll never find out, unless they remake a good version of this movie instead of the sucky version that they actually made instead!

 

            Okay, as we’ve been over before here, Mark Trail is a man of truly awesome and godly powers, able not only to bring down planes full of terrorists with petrified wood, but also gifted with the powers of Captain Planet or something, and able to turn the wicked into beavers at a whim.  Which is all by way of saying that I wouldn’t waste your time by writing about him again were it not for the fact that good ol’ Mark Trail has yet again done something completely ridiculous, by which I mean totally awesome. 

 

            Okay, here’s the setup, Mark Trail is good friends with an old guy who, in addition to looking like Elderly Orangutan Mark, happens to be the CEO of some company or another (in this case, we’re just going to assume its Atari and be done with it).  The second in command at Atari is played by Jonah Jameson’s uncommonly good-natured brother, Smacky Jameson.  Smacky’s wife, who we’re just going to call Skunk-Haired Devil Woman, really, really, really wants her husband to take over the company so that she can at last live in the suburbs and go to a country club (no, really, this is her entire motivation for the ensuing evil which ensues).  Now, Elderly Orangutan Mark invites Smacky and Skunk-Haired Devil Woman out on a fishing trip with him and actual Mark, and during this time, Smacky’s wife reveals her evil plot to murder Orangutan Mark so that her husband can take over the company and she can get a house in the suburbs.  It all sounds simple enough, right?  Well, it gets even weirder, as we shall see.

 

            You see, rather than planning some ingenious scheme to off Orangutan Mark, Devil Woman just keeps trying to henpeck her husband into killing him for her.  Seriously, they’ll all be walking along, and Orangutan Mark will say something like, “Oh, my shoelace has come untied!” and then in the next panel, Devil Woman will be yelling at Smacky, “You’re a fool a coward, you should have killed him then!”  Or maybe they’ll all be out in the woods and Orangutan Mark will go, “Dag, I sure could go for a delicious three taco parfait about now!” and Devil Woman will be shouting, “Smacky, you fool, kill him!  Kill him now!”  The scary thing is, that for about two weeks, this was pretty much the formula for Mark Trail.  Orangutan Mark is mildly inconvenienced; Devil Woman yells at Smacky, who fails to kill him; Devil Woman expresses her disappointment in strong and uncomplimentary words.  Just so you’ll know I’m not making all this up, here’s a little sample:

 

 

 

 

 

 

           Now, let’s stop for a minute here and think about how Mark Trail’s concept of reality differs from our own.  Here’s a woman who’s blatantly and totally insisting that her husband murder another man, and he’s just treating it like she wants to spend too much on a handbag.  The only thing I can think of is that since they’ve been married, she’s tried to get him to kill someone like, every other week, and so he’s just stopped noticing.  Even so, can anyone, even someone as cool as Smacky Jameson put up with such abuse forever?

 

 

 

            Damn, Smacky, just because you needed to put your foot down doesn’t mean you had to rip her head off like that.

 

            Eventually, frustrated with her husband’s lack of evil, Skunk-Haired Devil Woman takes it upon herself to drown Orangutan Mark.  When that doesn’t work, she transforms herself into a rabid raccoon and bites him after traveling back in time (okay, this isn’t shown literally, but it is implied pretty much right on through), finally smashing the radio so that Orangutan Mark will go all frothy and die in the wilderness.  Then she goes and bitches at him so loudly that a passing family of bears is embarrassed for her lack of manners.

 

 

            Mark, Ailing Orangutan Mark, and Smacky all then head out to find help, leaing Devil Woman to hold her own against a giant porcupine that looms out of the shadows and tries to eat her black and twisted soul (as giant porcupi are wont to do).

 

 

 

            Eventually, the three men get Orangutan Mark back to safety and come pick up Devil Woman, who tires to backhand her husband, but is foiled by his Keanu-like ability to dodge the anger of crazy women. 

 

           Finally, Orangutan Mark makes Smacky the head of Atari after all, and Smacky divorces his wife so he can buy one of those make out robots, like the one Will Smith had to fight last year.  Which still seems a little easy.  I mean, this woman tried to murder a dude, like, fifty times, and in the end all she gets is not married to the CEO of Atari?  That’s getting off way too easy.  Is there no justice in the world?

 

            But wait!  In the last strip of the story, we see Mark Trail Original Recipe back in at home with his wife Skanky Donna Reed, as he leans suggestively against a roto-tiller engine block.  Then, we get the final horrifying conclusion:  “Meanwhile, in the Swamp.”  Now, it might seem to the uninitiated that this is actually just a really sucky segue, but to all us Markheads, it actually establishes the chilling coda to the entire story; that Mark Trail has, in yet another act of divine vengeance, transformed Skunk-Haired Devil Woman into a giant woodpecker.

 

 

            So there you have it, yet another silly yet sobering morality play from that Shaman of the funny pages, Mark “I’ll turn you into wildlife” Trail.

      I was at the Price Club this week, and they were selling these videos called Baby Einstein, but you don’t want your kid to be like baby Einstein, because he didn’t start talking until he was like, five years old and all his teachers thought he was retarded.  Which of course mean that either the people making these videos already knew this and chose to lie to you and your children, or they thought that Einstein was some kind of a wonderbaby, in which case they clearly don’t know their history and you don’t want them to be teaching your baby stuff.  Unless, of course, it was actually some kind of a horrible prequel to Young Einstein, in which case you probably should just run screaming away from the store altogether, because if there’s one thing that’ll make your kid dumb, it’s too many prequels.

 

            I was out driving and I saw this billboard, but it was partially obscured by a gas station that had apparently grown there overnight.  So on the left side of the board, it said “Tired of This...” and showed a woman recoiling in horror from something on the other side of the billboard.  But because there was a gas station there, I had no idea what it was I ought to be tired of.  Was it international Communism?  Weasels?  Poorly laid bathtub grout?  I had no idea.  Unless of course, it was actually just asking if I was tired of billboards being obscured by stuff in front of them.  That would be absolutely genius on so many levels.

 

            I read an article in the paper about a girl who had her prosthetic leg stolen.  First, you’d have to be pretty crazy to steal a leg, but secondly, when exactly could you take it?  I mean, if the guy broke into her house during the day, she’d have been out wearing it.  And I’m sure that at night she probably kept it right near her bed.  So what happened?  Did she just forget to put in on one morning as she left for school, and then not remember until second period calculus?  “Dag, I seem to be falling over with unwonted frequency today,” she may have thought, “Aw monkeys, I left my leg on the nightstand again.  Narf!” 

 

            You know Family Circus?  Where every day there’s another charming little domestic vignette about Billy not being able to find his way home without wandering around in the desert for 40 years, or possibly PJ getting lectured by Dolly for setting up a meth lab in his crib (“Who’s been selling ecstasy to all the other toddlers?” “Not Me!”).  I’ll bet that the guy who does that has to go through so much to come up with ideas for it.  Like, I’m sure all his kids are like, fifty years old now, but every week they still have to come home and reenact stupid childhood moments so their dad can continue to provide us with saccharine, wholesome family entertainment.  “Billy, now I want you to climb over that tractor, through the drainpipe, and around that tree!” “But Dad, I’m a CEO of a major corporation!” “Shut up, boy, your old man needs to buy his medicine!”  Also, what kind of a name is Family Circus anyway?  There’s no circus whatsoever involved.  Maybe if Billy had to fight a lion, a lion that was on fire and driving a monster truck, then it would be a circus, but only then.

 

            I was eating a box of Tic Tacs the other days, and I saw that their website is at tictacusa.com, which I could understand if there was some other company that already took www.tictac.com first, forcing Tic Tacs to go with a second string address.  But I checked, and there’s not even a tictac.com in the first place.  This is kind of like if CNN made their website www.ilovelearningaboutthenewsatcnn.com.  Yeah, it works, but why not take the much shorter option that everybody is already going to assume is your address (and I do, by the way, realize the potential hypocrisy involved in championing short, easily typed URLs).  But then I thought, hey, maybe they just have a different website for each nation in which Tic Tacs are available.  But alas, it is not so.  www.tictaccanada.com, www.tictaczimbabwe.com, and www.tictacdjibouti.com all lead to nothing but heartbreak and lameness.  So yeah, why can’t you be more like altoids and the Klan, and just go with the obvious name instead of getting all creative on your customers.

 

            In a side note, why would you go to the website for Tic Tacs anyway?  Did you just have your first one ever and want to know how they work?  Are you looking to get a job at the Tictacary?  Seriously, even though this is the 21^st century and all that, maybe not everybody needs a website.  Leave some bandwidth for the rest of us.

            It is a well-known and generally accepted fact that the Confederacy invented the first successful military submarine (successful anyways in that it sank a ship in combat, it then proceeded to sink itself with all hands aboard).  Comparatively less known is the legend that Confederate rocket scientists in 1865 built a primitive yet ingenious two stage rocket and fired it at Washington DC, from Richmond (this historic event has, over the years, mutated into the annual Dogwood Dell 4^th of July fireworks show and traffic jamboree).  And of course, the Confederates were the first to successfully build an ironclad battleship, which was totally awesome and beat up a whole bunch of stuff.  So, in short, it has long been acknowledged that the good old C.S.A. came up with some pretty snazzy stuff back then, much of which ended up playing a major part in the gentle art of blowing stuff up even to this very day.  What is less known however, is that Confederate ingenuity was not in the least restricted to missiles, submarines, and battleships, but rather spanned a mind-boggling array of other secret projects as well.  Indeed, this fact was completely unknown until last week I found Jefferson Davis’ Secret Grimoire of Dixie Doom down amongst my grandmother’s cookbooks.  Join me now, as we go on a fantastical journey through the history of Southern invention, as we look at just a few of the awesome things developed during the famous War for the Suppression of Yankee Arrogance (as we are wont to call it, hereabouts).

 

            General Stonewall Jackson, for instance, took a great interest in the potential military applications of flight during the early years of the war, and working with the Scots-Irish regiments which made up much of his command, he had, by 1862, made incredible progress in the fields of powered flight and electromagnetic field manipulation.  Indeed, by 1863, his first prototype was nearing completion, though in an ironic twist of fate, it was not finished until the eve of Jackson’s fatal wounding at Yellow Tavern.  Tests of the experimental invisible jet plane by his troops proved it to be an astounding success, but with Stonewall Jackson dead, there was no commanding officer to fund further development of this radical new weapon.  Heartbroken, his troops could think of nothing more fitting than entrusting the plane to Jackson’s infant daughter, Stonewallina Jackson.  Years passed, and one day Stonewallina learnt of her inheritance.  Knowing that she must use this invisible jet to do good, but also aware that her father’s name would forever be shrouded in controversy, Stonewallina changed her name to Wonder Woman and took her fight against evil to the skies, as she continues to do to this very day.

 

            Next we come to General J.E.B. Stuart, who experimented in the early days of the war, with inventing ways to grow a big, fluffy, pirate beard.  After meeting with great initial success however, all the other generals told him that it was silly plan and a pirate beard wouldn’t really help stop the Yankees anyway.  It was then that Stuart struck upon the real idea that would earn him a place in the annals of history: robot monkeys.  Using only the most brilliant steam engineers, mechanists, and monkeyologists in the South, Stuart worked tirelessly in his funky underground laboratory.  Though he dealt with many early setbacks (including the time one of his robo-monkeys got loose and carried Varina Davis to the roof of the Capitol), he eventually developed a steam-powered robo-monkey capable of pelting union troops with synthetic monkey poop from over 60 yards away with deadly accuracy.  Alas, much like Jackson, Stuart met an early and unfortunate end, leaving his project to languish in the catacombs of Richmond until years later, when a young Dick Cheney stumbled upon his abandoned lab and robo-monkey prototypes, which he has made the fullest use of throughout his career as an intergalactic warlord and Twister player.

 

            Then of course, we have General George Pickett, who had graduated last in his class at West Point due to his many late nights studying theoretical temporal dynamics.  He realized that, outgunned and outmanned as the Confederacy was, the only place to go for reinforcements was back in time itself.  Using a mixture of Funky Aztec Voodoo Mojo Magic and old cotton gin parts, Pickett had soon cobbled together an improbable, but fully operational, time machine, capable of taking him to any point in the past that he wished.  Soon he had raided all the ages of human civilization, gathering an unstoppable force of Vikings, Roman Centurions, Mongol Warriors, Some Really Angry Cavemen, and Keanu Reeves.  He brought this awesome army Northward with him, as the Confederates fought the Battle of Gettysburg, and by the third day, his force was mustered and poised to strike.  Alas, at the last moment, an unfortunate hiccup in the space-time continuum returned his mighty horde to their rightful places in history, leaving Pickett to go down in defeat.

 

            Finally, we get to General Robert E. Lee, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and inventor of mankind’s first atomic bomb.  For you see, whilst one day idly wondering whether anyone would ever name a car after him, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, knocked loose from it’s proper place in the cosmos by General Pickett’s careless temporal shenanigans, smacked him square in the head, opening up totally bitchin’ new vistas of scientific achievement.  After consulting with his crack team of alchemists, General Lee soon realized that by combining his Philosopher’s Stone with enough old shoes, he could create more than enough weapons-grade plutonium to build a bomb that could change the course of the war in an instant.  Alas, the South was even then in the very midst of a shoe shortage of Biblical proportions, prompting him to lead his armies Northward to Gettysburg, where the Union Army kept a Big ol’ Heap o’ Shoes.  Though the battle went badly for Lee, he had the rest of the war to gather substitute ingredients, and by the end of 1864, he had created his nuclear weapon of doom.  Before he could use it, however, the war ended, and it became clear to Lee that to use the bomb now would only serve to bring more needless suffering upon his beloved state of Virginia.  So, unbeknownst to anyone else, he sequestered his untested bomb beneath RichmondCity Hall, where it was to remain forever.  Unfortunately, in later years the bomb started leaking al sorts of toxic evil, and rendering the city council above chronically retarded.

 

            So there you have it, just a few of the many brilliant and diabolically clever devices conceived of by the keen Southern minds of various and sundry generals of the Confederacy.  Remember to never under any circumstances whatsoever try to build any of them at home, unless they turn out really cool and I’m allowed to come over and watch.

            Well, here we are again, at what I’m going to call Q & A Friday, even though from a technical point of view, it’s probably already Tuesday in Australia.

 

Q: Who was the better leader – Queen Elizabeth or Papa Smurf? ~ Jim Cooke, Squirrel Lord of Nebulon V.

 

A: Well, Jim, that’s a very good question, and since it’s the only one that anyone sent me this week, I’m going to cover it in the minutest detail.  First, for all you historical purists out there, I realize that comparing Good Queen Bess to Papa Smurf is rather like comparing ninjas to orangutans; while they’re both awesome, only one ever fought Charleton Heston.  Nonetheless, letting it never be said that Ben Strohm ran away from a silly task, we’re going to recklessly barge ahead anyway and hope that we learn something before millions perish needlessly in my mad quest for such forbidden knowledge.

 

            First, let’s take a look at the finer qualities of both these great monarchs, starting with Papa Smurf.  Now Papa Smurf, as most of you already know, is in many ways (aside from the obvious similarities of visage) like a tiny, blue Robert E. Lee.  No, really, just look at his beard and his slouch hat and all that, he’s clearly a relation of ol Marse Robert, in some way or another.  Also, it kind of explains why Robert E. Lee never carried a grand General’s tent during the war, preferring as he did to just sleep in a house made out of a mushroom.  Papa Smurf also did a pretty good job of keeping his subjects safe from danger, considering that most of them were completely retarded and incapable of doing anything other that living down to their respective gimmicks (in retrospect, for instance, he probably should have just had Sell Out Your Friends to Gargamel Smurf put to death in the first place, rather that trying to chance him to something harmless like Hair Stylish Smurf, or Vanilla Smurf).

 

            Queen Elizabeth, one of England’s most popular monarchs ever, was the daughter of the only English King to date to have a song done about him by Herman’s Hermits, and probably had to beat more crazy sisters in order to hold on to the throne than anyone else in history would wasn’t fighting their way through a convent full of psycho death nuns.  She also wore about fifty pounds of white makeup because someone threw acid on her when she was testifying against Lex Luthor, and she was able to hurl lightning bolts from her fingertips like the Emperor in Star Wars.

 

            Now, to get down to the real historical cock fight that this question fairly begs for, which one was in fact better?  Well, Papa Smurf never decisively defeated the Spanish Armadillo at the Battle of Trafagar, nor did he ever reestablish the Protestant Church in England.  Queen Elizabeth on the other hand, rode around the magical forest on a winged horse (as best we historians can recollect, anyways), nor did she have to put up with Brainy Smurf all the time.  Other than those two minor differences, the respective reigns of the two great leaders would be almost indistinguishable in their great accomplishments.  Almost.  Which brings us to the final deciding question by which all great leaders, fairly or not, must eventually be judged: Did they or did they not allow an evil wizard with a name that sounds like a mouthwash to eat most of their subjects?  While Papa Smurf had many close calls with Gargamel on this count, it nonetheless remains true that he always managed to rescue his little blue homies in the nick of time.  Queen Elizabeth, unfortunately, cannot make the same boast, since in 1579 Listeror the Necromancer devoured the greater part of Northumberland and a few of the more succulent citizens of Lancashire.  By this test, therefore, Papa Smurf is clearly the victor, and to him we must grant the title, “Better Leader between Queen Elizabeth and Papa Smurf.”

            It is generally known that there are few lengths to which people will not go in the interest of procuring new fripperies and doo-dahs to impress other people.  Foremost among these frivolities, of course, is the stretch limo.  I mean, what good is taking a regular fancy car and just making it really long?  Unless you’re putting a bowling alley or particle accelerator in there (in which case I say, Bully for You!), its just kind of silly and people will think your compensating for something (like being really bad at finding your car in the parking lot at Wally World).  Therefore, it ought to come as no surprise that there has recently been a rise in the number of novelty limos; because sometimes a way the hell long car just isn’t conspicuous enough.  Indeed, it turns out that at least one Richmond company has made one that’s all full of fish tanks and LCD screen so that while you’re driving along, it’ll feel like you’re under water.

 

            How many ways is this completely retarded?  I mean, I don’t know if fish get sea sick, but if they do, you’re gonna be spending many a weary hour cleaning up halibut barf from your car.  And what about people who are really afraid of drowning (as opposed, I suppose, to all those people who are absolutely psyched about drowning), riding in that limo would be like riding in King Neptune’s Hellmobile of Death (or, for the less mythically-oriented, Namor’s Aquabuggy).  In fact when you get right down to it, my problem with the fish limo is that in order for it to exist, somebody at a limo design meeting had to say something like this, “Hey, you know how the two things that everybody loves are driving in a really long car and being under the sea?  What if we could make a limo that let people experience both simultaneously!” And then at least half the other guys in the room had to say, “Good idea, Lothar, let’s get right on that one!”  Seriously, the only time your car should be full of fish is when you’re a delivery boy for Captain Chong’s Chinese Market, never when you’re some preppie going to prom, or some kind of a Grey Poupon dude.

 

            But since the metaphorical underwater limo genie is already out of the bottle, let’s try to make the best of things by coming up with a way to make it suck less (an epic challenge, to be sure, but one which someone has to do).  Now, clearly no matter what you’re going to do here, the limo part is really not completely central to the problem; if you were to go and put a bunch of fish in a Mini Cooper, it would still be just as, if not actually more, stupid than the original fish limo.  And it’s not like you can just keep the limo and fill it up with something else, because a limo full of koalas or Gila monsters would still be pretty silly too.  So how can you make the best of having a really long novelty car that also happens to be theoretically under water?  I think I speak for all of us as well as the honorable spirits of our ancestors when I say that the answer may be summed up in one hyphenated made-up word: Limo-Submarines.

 

            But wait, before you scoff, hear me out on this one!  You see, limos are already way long, and so are submarines, likewise, they’re already all decorated with the whole Jacques Cousteau motif, so you don’t have to get rid of all your vehicular trout (The Vehicular Trout, by the way, would make a most awesome name for a band).  All you’d really have to do is make sure that the driver dressed up like a Nazi submarine commander, you threw a bunch of those red cage lights in there, and you got one of those submarine sounding things that go “ding!” at regular intervals.  Then you’d just have to take your limo on the hit TV show, “U-Boat My Ride” and have them pimp it out on the outside with some sweet-looking 3^rd Reich ground effects, spinner hubcaps (you know the Nazis were working on them towards the end of the war), and maybe one of those stick-on Teutonic Dashboard Hula Valkyries.  And then you could get some of those shocks that you can control, so when you had to dive, you could make it ride all close to the ground like Mexican submarines do.  It would be so totally sweet, you could just drive around town, pretending to torpedo other cars and stuff, disrupting Allied shipping, looking for the Lost Ark of the Covenant and whatnot (Did it ever strike anyone else as weird that, even though the Nazis hated Jews, they went searching for ancient holy Jewish artifacts?). 

 

            But look out, because you never know when you’re going to run into a another limo made up to look like an American destroyer, or maybe even some guy driving a Hummer disguised as an entire carrier group (though carrier groups get better gas mileage, I hear).  And they’d start dropping depth charges on you, and you’d take a hit and all your fishtanks would start leaking and you’d have to close off your engine room even though Ensign Fritz was still in there, and then you’d chuck a torpedo at them, or possibly just a barrel full of sauerkraut, and yeah, it would all be totally awesome.

 

            So, okay Richmond Fish Limo guys, let that be a lesson to you, never build something lame, when you can build something awesome instead.  So if you’ve already got a My Little Pony Limo in the works, you’d better just scrap that sucker now, cause even I can’t save something that uncool.

            Some things in life are just so obviously messed up that people tend to forget about how messed up they are.  Like the metric system; it’s clearly a vile and vomitous instrument of the devil, but because it’s all around us, we forget about its insidiously evil influence.  And what about the Olsen twins?  Did you know that they’re not only not identical twins, but one of them is actually a dude (no, really, they did a special episode of Full House about it and everything).  It’s like Hitler once said, “If you’re a freaky enough freak all the freakin’ time, eventually people just stop caring, and I should know, because I’m Hitler.  Heil Frettchen meiner Hosen!”  Which brings me to my real point here: Ronald McDonald and his friends are the freakiest thing ever.  Like, people back in ancient Rome, even after they all started getting really skanky and watching Tivo all the time, still would have been freaked out by Ronald McDonald.  And then they would have fed him to a lion, but that’s beside the point.  What’s that you say?  You don’t see how Ronald and company are such a blight upon the universe?  Well then, let’s embark upon a magical adventure of being totally weirded out.

 

            For example, take Grimace.  What the heck is he?  He’s big, he’s purple, and despite his name, he usually looks pretty jolly.  Also, he used to have four arms, but now two of them have mysteriously disappeared.  What can explain his inappropriate joviality?  The answer, of course, is that he is in fact, some kind of a hideous gumdrop/verminous hell demon hybrid, spawned from the very pits of Tartarus to wreak unholy havoc upon mankind.  As for his extra arms, clearly he sacrificed them to his dark gods so that all the children of the world might be magically blinded to his overwhelming evil.  Why go to all the trouble of this?  Because clearly Grimace is nothing more than the reincarnation of Ashtaroth, demon of sloth and portliness, bent on raising up his dark realm once more upon the Earth.

 

            And what about Hamburglar?  Sure, they try to just pass him off as a wacky guy who’s always saying “robble, robble” and trying to steal hamburgers, but aren’t they conveniently forgetting the hideous truth that Mayor McCheese is in fact himself, a big sentient hamburger?  Hamburglar isn’t just looking for a free quarter pounder, he eats people!  Though this opens up all sorts of deeper questions about just what Ronald is trying to tell us by having this cannibal psycho on speed dial, but just think for a moment about how Mayor McCheese must feel every time they all get together to film a commercial.  There he is, trying to play nice with everyone, while all the while, Hamburglar sits there eyeing him that way. You know, that way that people on deserted islands do when they get really hungry and look at the other guy on the island and he looks like a chicken sandwich, only Hamburglar doesn’t even have to imagine to bring his sick dreams to horrible fruition.  Seriously, someone has to tell the world about this, and if Charleton Heston is too busy fighting apes and Egyptians, that leaves it up to me.

 

            And what about Birdy?  Oh sure, she’s just a big bird (but not the Big Bird) who hangs out with Ronald and his little circus of death, but stop for a moment and think about chicken McNuggets.  I don’t care what anyone says, or how good those things taste, they’re not chicken, and neither is Birdy.  A startling fact which, just a single leap of inductive reasoning later, suggests the inescapable truth that McNuggets are made out of Birdy’s people.  They probably all used to live in some great utopian floating city high above the clouds, passing their days pursuing the arts and pondering the meaning of the universe.  At least they did until Birdy sold them out to Ronald McDonald, who enslaved and butchered them all, saving Birdy alone to live out her life with the knowledge that she alone is responsible for the annihilation of her people.

 

            Finally, we have Ronald himself.  Let’s start with the obvious questions: how’d he get all white like that?  And how’s his hair get that toxic shade of red going on?  All you really have to do to figure this one out is think about who he looks like, The Joker.  And if Ronald McDonald looks like the Joker, then it must be the case that it’s only because he too was punched into a vat of chemicals by Batman.  Now I’m not going to pretend to know why Batman would punch Ronald McDonald into a vat of chemicals, hideously twisting both his loathsome visage and his demented mind, but seeing as how Batman’s pretty much never wrong, I think it’s safe to assume that he only did it because Ronald was trying to eat s puppy or run Alfred through a wood chipper or something.

 

            So there you have it, the shocking truth behind a creepy guy that no one really liked before anyway and his band of mutants.  I dunno about y’all, but I’m sticking with Arby’s from here on out (Why not Hardee’s, you may ask?  That, my friends is a question for another day).

            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.