It has been quite some while since I traveled any real distance by train, and if at any point before then I’ve ever traveled to Outer Mongolia in one, it certainly has not been in any life which I remember.  I arose early this morning and caught a subway to the train station where I bid farewell to my hosts and embarked upon what promises to be the most interesting leg of my journey thus far.

 

            The train itself it set out in cabins, each equipped with four bunks, and this being the only way other than flying or renting a camel to get betwixt Mongolia and Beijing, I have three companions with whom I am to share this voyage across the wastes.  None of them speak a word of English, and in light of the profound Harry Potter similarities, I have decided to dub them Ron, Hermione, and Neville.

 

            Ron and Hermione are, by all appearances, a young married couple, or possibly a brother and sister.  Either way, they’re not making out or anything, so it isn’t really sketchy or anything.  They travel about as lightly as I myself do, and are entirely agreeable company in every way.  Neville, however, is seemingly off to college in Mongolia and has brought his entire house with him in the form of no fewer than 17 pieces of luggage, including a new computer, two large trunks, and a number of boxes, several of which might easily contain a yak.  Happily, he has also brought along a fairly liberal supply of Chinese moon pies, with which he is most generous, thus proving himself to be a good fellow too, by all rights. It appears that he might also not speak the same language as Ron and Hermione, though it may just be that Ron is a bit peeved about Neville stowing one of his yaks in Ron’s bunk.  Ron also carries a cell phone, the ring of which is exactly the same as of a friend back home of mine.  It is a very curious feeling, to find oneself on a train half a world away from home, in a sea of strange people, not one of whom speaks my language (Ebonics).  All in all, it reminds me some of my time working at Family Dollar last year, except safer and with better food.

 

            We presently have arrived in the mountains, a high and craggy line yet recently thrust up from within the very molten core of the Earth, raising themselves defiantly towards the heavens in a way altogether different from the kindly and ancient Blue Ridge way back in Old Virginny.  Each lies terraced up to the very Zenith, as the local farmers are loath to begrudge the land even an inch of fallow ground.  We are far removed from the bustling streets of Beijing here, where low brick houses huddle together on the hillsides and amongst the scraggly pines.  The immortal words of Alfred Lord Tennyson spring immediately to mind; ‘twas he wisely wrote one dark and deathly winter the immortal words, “Dag, yo, I’m glad I don’t live up there.  Naw, seriously dawg, I’ll bet there isn’t a Best Buy around here for like, a jillion miles or something.”

 

            We have just made our way past The Great Wall (or possibly one of the many Pretty Good Walls, or possibly even one of the occasional Not Too Shabby At All Walls).  This of course means that we are now vulnerable to the local Mongol hordes who ply this forbidding waste.  I can only hope that my store of Twinkies and obvious love of furry hats may win them over, should we fall under attack.  Also, I think we just passed some kind of kung fu dojomajig up on a really big rock.  I bet they’re always having all sorts or legendary soulless ghost ninja battles there, and maybe even a gift shop too.

 

            We now (some hours later) are passing through an expanse of what I believe is scientifically called “A Hell of a Lot of Nothing”  The riverbeds run dry and funky-looking Dr. Seuss trees claw their way skywards in a Mordor of perfect desolation upon the Earth that almost makes New Jersey look verdant and green by comparison.  The persistent smell of coal in the air reminds me of the power plant back home as well as the inescapable fact that this is a terribly unfunny travelogue thus far which I shall have to counterbalance later on in which I make like of intergenerational tensions in Eternia.

 

            A discovery which I find immensely heartening has just occurred, as I have found that the Mongolian word for toilet looks very similar to our own; a discovery which promises to make the rest of this journey a far more comfortable one that it otherwise might have been.  Further more, the bathrooms here have proper toilets in them instead of the funky in-ground ones they seem to prefer back in China, which strike me as damningly indicative of the uncouth excesses of communism.  Also, they have toilet paper here, which is a pleasant surprise.

 

            Though the other gentlemen in our room are presently sleeping (Neville having spent about the last twenty hours in a state of unconsciousness), Hermione is up and, in a delightful turn of events, reading the latest Harry Potter book.  I meanwhile have busied myself with watching the scenery and listening to the collected works of Jim Croce, including “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown,” Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” and the little-known “Oh Crap, Look Our for Dave, He’ll Punch You In the Face.  No, Just Kidding, Some Other Guys Kills Him in a Humorous Manner at the End of the Song.”  My vital supply of jelly beans is holding well, and as long as the lady selling Chocolate Frogs comes by before too very long, I expect I’ll probably survive all the way to my destination.

 

Second Day:

 

            I awake after an uncommonly sound night’s sleep to find myself in the midst of what can only be either the Gobi Desert or Wyoming.  Now, it happens to be the case that, strictly speaking, the Gobi is also my first real desert, but all the same, it’s just as special as I had always hoped it would be.  Dunes roll around on the plain around us in a way altogether reminiscent of the ones on the Outer Banks.  Off in the distance, a range of craggy peaks reach toward the horizon with an aspect wholly different from any which I have ever seen before.  I hope there’s a Balrog or something under them, because that would be totally sweet.

 

            Just in case remained that this was a real, bona fide desert, we just passed a real, honest, totally not fake cow skull, just like all the stories say there ought to be in this sort of place.  Also, I have just witnessed my first wild camel ever.  It’s one of those two hump ones, which my sister tells me make for a much superior ride in terms of comfort, security, and low-ridingness.  Mere words cannot convey how totally awesome this is.

 

            Well, he at last appear to be drawing near to Ulan Bator, my destination, so I shall end this entry here, resuming after I’ve gotten a chance to settle in for a bit.

            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