Of all the barbarians who have ever conquered the world, Genghis Khan is without a doubt, the most excellent.  Why, you ask?  Well, clearly his expert utilization of furry hats played a major role, as well as his love of gadding about the steppes of Mongolia on his Vespa.  I would of course be remiss in my geekly duties as well, were I to omit the fact that he played a significant role in what is probably the defining cinematic event of the 20^th Century, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”  In short, until recently, I thought I had a pretty good appreciation of Genghis Khan.  But nay, verily was a very fool to have believed so, for there has recently been published a new book of Genghis Khan-related awesomeness.  It’s kind of long though, and it doesn’t have any pictures, so for the benefit of all you out there who might not already have a great yen to learn all about the man who is generally credited as making yak-riding cool (some few on the fringe of such studies would instead grant that most august of honors to Chester A. Arthur) I present the following brief (and pop culture reference-infested) biblogrophy of Genghis “Is That My Waffle?” Khan:

 

            Like so many other beloved Charles Dickens characters, Genghis Khan had a rough childhood.  When he was little (or possibly not yet born) his parents were attacked by robbers and totally conquered.  Never one to cry in his Spaghetti-O’s however, young Genghis chose to take the Batman route, and to become awesomely rich and someday star in one of only two good movies Keanu Reeves has ever made.  After this, he found himself alone with his mom, Jemima Khan, and his three brothers, Smacky, Greldar, and Carl Khan.  So, he got a job in a soot factory, and had many wacky and musical adventures with his new friends Huck Finn, and the Artful Dodger.  At length, he finally got his family a place in a small starter tribe, where, after correctly pointing out that the chief was, in fact, merely a walrus with uncommonly good delegation skills, he was forced to go around all day wearing one of those big wooden thingies that you put on an ox (no, not a credenza, that other big wooden thingie you put on an ox).  In time though, a kindly family of dirt miners realized that young Genghis wasn’t really an ox after all, and therefore making him wear one of those things was just plain silly.  So, one night, they cut him loose, give him a bag full of peanut butter sandwiches, and sent him on his way.

 

            Eventually, after he had many wacky misadventures with his nerdy younger brother (here played by Harold Ramis) he, much like Sam Walton, created a sizeable empire from nothing by conquering all the tribes on Mongolia.  Now despite what you may of heard about him (from those anti-Genghis Khan partisan attack dogs on all the mainstream networks), Genghis Khan was really a delightful chap to be conquered by.  You see, he had a very simple plan whenever he took over a new city, province, or fashion park.  He’d just say, “Okay y’all (he did say y’all), you’re part of my empire now, if you’re all cool, I’ll let you go on doing pretty much whatever you were doing already; if you go and act like a bunch of big ol’ tools though, I’m gonna come back and turn your city into a forsaken wasteland.”  Then according to how the city acted, he’d live up to his promise.  So, by the time he was sixty, Genghis Khan ruled all of Mongolia, had al the Twinkies his little barbarian warlord heart desired, and just kinda wanted to enjoy his retirement.  But such was not to be.

 

            You see, next door to Mongolia, lived the Middle East, where, at the time, they still had some cool stuff, this being before either oil or terrorists were invented.  “Mayhap they have awesomeness that I can trade from them,” thought Genghis Khan with a good-humored twinkle in his eye, “I shall send them a trading party and see if they want to be my friends.”  And so he did.  Alas, while his merchant party of awesomeness was traveling through a Middle Eastern town, that town’s mayor, Optimus Toolbox, thought it’s be funny to kill them all and take their stuff.  Genghis Khan was not pleased, but hey, he was old, and rich, and didn’t want any trouble, so he sent some ambassadors to try and straighten things out.  Unwisely, the incorrigible Mayor Toolbox messed them all up too.

 

            You ever have some kinda thing going on, where like, someone was doing something really annoying, and you were just trying to turn a yam into an artillery piece or make a topiary shaped like Martin Van Buren, but they just wouldn’t quit being annoying, no matter how nicely you asked, so eventually you just freaked out and took over the world?  That’s pretty much what happened here. “C’mon, you guys,” said Genghis Khan at the very apogee of exasperation, “I really just wanted to have my empire and trade with y’all, but you had to be a bunch of buttweasels and mess it all up.”  And with that, Genghis Khan started taking over the entire world.  In fact, he will probably go down in history as the only global dominator of note to have conquered the world mostly because his neighbors were just that annoying.

 

            As it happened, he ended up conquering all of the Middle East (They still hold it against him there today.  Saddam “More Cheetos Please” Hussein, for instance, personally blames Genghis Khan for our recent butt-kickage of himself).  Everywhere he went, he introduced all the awesome things that he’d found in other countries.  In Europe alone, he was responsible for the introduction of the math, pants, and being really angry at the Middle East.

 

            These days, Genghis Khan remains the one native superhero of Mongolia (unless you count Andre the Giant or Aquaman) as well as being their version of George Washington.  In conclusion, Genghis Khan is not only awesome, but worthy of emulation in all things either conquesty or sartorial.  So when ever you find yourself in a quandary (or even an enigma) ask yourself, “WWGD?”

            In trying times such as these, what the world needs now is something that really brings people together, something that unifies folks in spite of their differences, and something I can write a blog about without having to do any research, studying, or preparation of any sort whatsoever.  What, you ask, could do all these things?  The answer of course is, Global Domination.  Yes, ever since Grover Cleveland first climbed out of the primeval muck that spawned him, man has wanted to take over the world.  Taking over the world however, is a lot like regrouting the floor in your shower, it all seems straight-forward enough, until you actually try it.  Next thing you know, you’re sitting there with all this grout and flamboyantly thematic henchmen (The Flamboyantly Thematic Henchmen, by the way, would be a totally sweet name for a band, but not one I’d want to be involved in) and spackling knives without a clue as to how you got there (don’t be ashamed, we’ve all been there before).  With that in mind, I’d like to take this opportunity to help you on your way to becoming a dark overlord with a few quick pointers often missed by even the most assiduous of noobs.

 

            First, you need a cool name.  The nations of the world shall never quake in terror at the mention of the name Herman Finklemeyer, which, I am foolishly assuming, is what most of you are, in fact, named.  Brevity is your friend here.  So take something impressive and fearsome like “Doom” or “Evil” or “Timmy” or something exotic like “Fu Manchu” or “Smackypants”.  Then, if you so desire, slap on a cool title like “Dr.” or “Empress” or “Funk Master Shizzle-mah”.  By simply combining words from these two groups, you too can come up with awesomely evil names such as “Empress Smackypants” (You can’t have that one though, I just called dibs.  You can still be Funk Master Shizzle-mah Timmy though, if you want).

 

            Now that you’ve got a name, you need a place from which to hurl your evil, like flaming rolls of toilet paper at the passing cars that are the puny nations of the world.  Volcanoes are always good, though you’ll spend a fortune on air conditioning, and if you need to launch a weather control satellite or just send a monkey into orbit, it’s tough to find a location better-suited to the job.  A tropical island is also one of the all-time favorites, owing to the plethora of beaches and villainous skanks that abound upon them.  If you’ve got the capital to pull it off though, you might want to consider a base on the moon (real estate is mighty cheap there right now), especially if you’re plans involve menacing Earth with a giant space laser (and these days, who isn’t?).  But for the aspiring mastermind on a budget, you just can’t beat a fortress twenty miles below the surface of the Earth, accessible only through the service entrance at Stuckey’s.

 

            Also, you should probably pick up a few quirks and eccentricities, if only help you stand out from all the other wannabes out there, as well as helping to explain you’re frequent and merciless bouts of capriciousness towards those who fail to serve you well.  Maybe you’d like to develop an irrational fear of dirt, like Howard Hughes?  Or possibly an addiction to some bizarre and exotic drug that grows only in the steamy jungles of your homeland?  Perhaps a propensity towards fits of boundless rage followed by a listless fuguelike state would be more your cup of tea?  And failing all those, you can always just talk in rhyme, like Roadblock from G.I. Joe (I don’t hafta see clear, to fracture your rear!).

 

            Next, you’ll be needing a few henchmen to lead your armies of mindless goons, as well as to keep any pesky heroes out of your hair (though if you lost it all in a disfiguring lab accident that you happen the blame on the father of your nemesis, that’d be cool too).  A short guy who throws something is a perennial favorite amongst many of your higher class overlords, as well as someone with a turban, and one of those villain bombs.  It’s tough to go wrong with a heat-packin’ gangsta from the city streets with some phat kung fu skills, or you could always just get a really enormous guy who never talks because he’s probably retarded or something.  Some hot girl with epic foxy boxing abilities and a thing for evil overlords is always a plus, but if you’re interested in site security, you might just want to invest in a big guy with metal teeth, like Dick Cheney.

 

            The last real thing you’ll need is a good characteristic villain catchphrase.  Something like, “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” or “Fools, I’ll destroy them all!” are good if you want to emphasize you evilosity.  If you’d rather try something more “outside the box” though, you might want to try one of the following phrases, “Soon the weasels of power will be mine, Beast Man!” or “Look out, he’s gonna beef!” or even “You hate pants, don’t you!?”  These phrases, while not quite so scary in the traditional sense, will help you to foster an aura of apprehension around yourself, as everyone you meet quickly conclude that you are, in fact, a flippin’ loony (c’mon, you know you are).

 

            After that, all that’s left is getting a good nemesis, and that’s something I’ve already covered (quite bad-assedly, I might add).  So there you have it, everything you need to start taking over the world with the best of them.  Soon your global domination dreams will come true, and you too will be ordering Big-Head Muckety-Muck of the U.N. Kofi Annan (disclaimer: not his real official title) around as if he were your own personal Wesley Crusher.

            For many of us, out of sight is out of mind, and those things which do not daily impress upon us their nearness are oft quickly consigned to the great heap o’ crap we don’t remember any more.  And when it comes hammerpants. Martin Van Buren, and sitcoms involving the late Tony Danza, this is perhaps a merciful thing.  Some things however, it is not seemly to forget so quickly, for they go silent not because they slumber, but merely because they seethe and scheme beneath our very feet, like Gary Coleman, or International Communism.  Almost as bad as the former though, and certainly worse than the latter, is the menace which yet lurks beneath the streets of our fair city.  Yes, Richmond, which has been called Emerald City of the James (by me anyways) is, I fear blithely ignoring a terrible evil which draws ever nearer than most of us suspect.  But first, a little history:

 

            It was late last year (on election night, actually) that the first of a terrible series of subterranean explosions rocked Northern Richmond.  Houses shook, knickknacks fell from china cabinets, old people fell, and could not get up.  Chaos ensued, as the powers that be (now the powers that was) sought to find an explanation for the continuing episodic reverberations (The Episodic Reverberations, might I add, would make a totally sweet name for a band).  Some blamed it on the ghost of J.E.B. Stuart, who walks Hollywood Cemetery and orders the occasional pizza, others blamed the City Council for neglecting the pieties of our ancestors and incurring the wrath of the elder gods (General Robert E. Lee and Frankenberry), yet others simply blamed it on the hordes of  white people who infest the suburbs of Richmond.  In the end though, the police arrested a couple of kids who had been putting dry ice in soda bottles and casting them upon the sidewalk (it being an undisputed fact that a soda bottle of dry ice call certainly cause a massive explosion shaking things for miles around) and declared the matter closed.

 

            Or so they thought.  For some weeks later, the rumblings again resumed at intervals, once more puzzling the best minds of Richmond.  I however, delved into my innumerable tomes of eldritch lore, and discovered that this phenomenon was not altogether unprecedented.  Indeed, in the town of Moodus, Vermont, similar rumblings had plagued the countryside since long before the arrival of the Pilgrims and their silly, unnecessarily bebuckled hats.  It was not until the 1800’s that a man of science who claimed to be from England came and unearthed in the hills nearby, amidst the most thunderous quaking ever to there transpire, an enormous red pearl of fire, which was the source of power to the devils who dwelt beneath the Moodus mountains (This really all happened, actually).  With his prize in hand, this mysterious stranger set sail for England, but his ship was sunk by a rogue storm en route, and save for the occasional seismic peep, Moodus has be silent ever since.

 

            With this knowledge in hand, as well as my storied mastery of the lore of the endless catacombs of Richmond (as well as the forgotten and myriad mines of Midlothian), I have deduced that in fact, the recent Richmond rumblings are the fault of none other than Spanky, Lord of the Mole People (don’t laugh at his name, he’s sensitive).  Long has Lord Spanky made his abode beneath the city, causing little trouble to us surface dwellers ever since the time back in the 80’s when, by their powers combined, Dick Cheney and Doug Wilder overthrew his last great scheme (none know all the details, but I have it from a reliable source that it involved Tony Danza and the global cheese supply (Tony Danza and the Global Cheese Supply would be a totally sweet name for a band, you know)).  Since then, Lord Spanky has limited is evil to making a lot of potholes in the Boulevard, and financing a controlling share of the Stony Point Fashion Park, but on election night, when his two most ancient nemesis were elected once more, his wrath waxed strong, and he sought to wreak destruction again upon all those who love the light of day.  Now though, he bides his time, amassing a giganimous army of mole people, robots, trolls, and, uh, The Jeffersons, awaiting his time to strike at the good yet unsuspecting people of Richmond.  Doug Wilder and Dick Cheney are both far too busy at the moment to combat this threat though, so the task falls to us!

 

            Here are a few ways that you can turn the tide against the armies of Spanky, Lord of the Mole People:  First, stomp around a lot, get some big ol’ pumpkin boots too, it’ll only make it work better.  Also, get a big pointy metal thing, and randomly jab it into the ground wherever you go (if you actually get one of them, you’ll hear a gurgling scream or anguish and rage).  Every time you pass a storm drain, stop and yell down it, “Curse you Spanky!  Victory shall be mine!”  Finally, get a Doug Wilder mask and one of those little helmets with alight on it, then hang out in the sewers a lot.  Yeah, people might look at you funny while you’re doing it, but hey, they do the same to Batman, and you’re no less important than him when it comes to saving Richmond.

            Of all the natural drives with which mankind is naturally imbued, there is one perhaps both stronger and more enduring than all the rest.  Indeed, it is a rare man indeed, who does not, at some point in his young life, realize that what he lacks is a counterpart, someone who’s existence completes his own, someone he can build his life around, while still remaining true to himself, someone he can do things with, and share all of life’s adventures.  Unfortunately, these days what with feverous madness of daily living, there seems to be so very little time to find such a person, and as a result, all too many us seem to chronically find ourselves lacking a nemesis.

 

            Yes, a nemesis, whatever side of the grand scheme of things you happen to fall on, we all, deep down in our heart of hearts, know that what we need is an arch-foe, a sworn adversary, one who’s very continued existence is an affront to all we hold dear.  Like Superman and Lex Luthor, Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, or Dick Cheney and Cookie Monster, none of us are ever truly happy until we have someone we have sworn to destroy, whatever the cost may be (I used to have a nemesis back in college, but after a few years, we just kind of lost touch and drifted apart).  With these difficulties in mind, along with the paramount importance of finding a nemesis that suits your personal needs and personality, I would like to announce the launch of the official Teacupmammoths.com Nemesis Online Matching System.

 

            Yes, your days or sitting at home alone on Saturday night because there was nobody who you could punch off of a flaming blimp or throw over a waterfall are over.  No more will you will have to face the continual disappointment when you schemes either nefarious or heroic, go off without a hitch because nobody cares enough to throw a monkey into your plans.  No longer will you have to spend your valuable time just hanging out in bars, buying strangers drinks in the vain hope that one of them might be plotting against you.  No, I have seen a dire need for a service such as this, and that’s why I have taken upon myself to make sure that no one in the Richmond Metro Area go nemesisless.  Here’s how you can get in on the action:

 

            Just send me an email with a little basic information about yourself, and what you’re looking for in a nemesis.  I’ll correlate your personal information and profile with my vast database of other eligible nemesi, and start sending you people who you might want to battle to your mutual destruction!  It’s that easy!  Just answer these simple questions, and email them to me here at ben@teacupmammoths.com

 

Which of the following describes you best?

A: My calling in life is to make the world a better place by using my awesome powers to battle the forces of darkness wherever they may lurk, while saving puppies and building orphanages for clinically ugly children.

B: Diabolically evil, I seek to usher in a new and terrible age of darkness at every turn.  All those who dare to oppose me shall be cast into the weasel pit of eternal suffering! Mwahahahaha!

C: For countless aeons, I have wandered this world, ever standing astride the gulf betwixt good and evil.  Your puny human morality means nothing to me, I seek only to maintain the balance of power in the universe.

D: An utter loony, I’m not so much concerned with either good or evil, but merely throwing pies at all those who vex me, like Jimmy Carter.

 

Your approximate level of mightiness is:

A: Mere mortal, driven by my own reasons to seek to make the world more as I believe it ought to be.

B: Meta-human, imbued with awesome powers by some experiment gone-awry or cosmic accident, I have abilities far beyond those of most men, and am more than a match for average SWAT Team or terrorist cell.

C: Demi-godlike, I walk as a titan amongst the human gerbils who surround me.  Nations rise or crumble at my word, I am destiny incarnate.

D: William Howard Taft

 

What nature of relationship are you currently looking for?

A: Recurrent foe, someone who, while not asking for a whole lot of commitment, is still up for foiling my schemes now and then, with the occasional epic battle for the fate of a suburb.

B: Sworn Enemy, though my life is by no means defined by someone else, it is nonetheless the case that whenever I see they’re back in town, I feel the need to smite them to ruin and gloat over the ashes of their broken dreams.

C: True Nemesis, I’m looking for someone to really go steady with, where even if they aren’t working to bring about my downfall at the moment, I’m already planning ahead for the inevitable battle that will likely spell doom for us both.

D: Bane of my existence, for countless generations before had dragged itself to brutish sentience, I have been awaiting the one whom the gods themselves have decreed I must destroy utterly!

E: Dave Coulier and Alanis Morisette

 

What kind of date would you take your new nemesis on?

A: A pitched battle on top of a flaming Nazi blimp involving an experimental pack.

B: An epic and continuing war to see who will have control of the city.

C: A race to uncover and master the powers of an ancient artifact of awesome powers.

D: An apocalyptic duel between immortals, vying to see who shall control the future of the very human race!

E: Slapping each other around in the parking lot outside of Donut Connection.

 

So there you have it, that nemesis you’ve always dreamed of having is but an email away, so get started now, and meet your new nemesis today!

 

            There are in this ancient world of ours (Earth) certain great evils which were first spawned way back in the day, when Dick Cheney still had hair, and when Canada was still a paradise, before the malignant evil of Quebec turned it all into an accursed morass of eternal night.  Some evils however, are older even than that; older than fat people wearing spandex, older than the Metric system, older than even Ted Kennedy.  What, you ask could be so ancient and twisted?  The answer of course is, Michael Jackson.  Yes, ever since he cut off the heads of the rest of the Jackson Five in order to steal their powers for himself, Michael Jackson has grown with ever-increasing rapidity to be the living incarnation of evil.  While once upon a time, he actually looked like a normal black man, after his evil began to run amok Mace Windu had to go and reflect his own negative vibes back onto him, thus revealing Michael Jackson’s true hideous space alien-cave fish form for all the world to see.  But much like Emperor Palpatine or Rosie O’Donnell, those who were already within his thrall were unshaken in their devotion to his diabolical schemes.

 

            After briefly marrying Elvis’s daughter in order to at last get his revenge on the King, he also bought up all the rights to the Beatles’ music, in order to mooch off their greatness.  He had been planning to infuse himself with the Elephant Man’s DNA, thereby making himself even freakier looking than even modern plastic surgery could make him, but happily, cooler heads prevailed, and the world was saved from almost certain grossed-outedness.  So, having not had a hit record in over seven trillion years, and having spent all his money on nose jobs, ferris wheels, and monkeys (not that there’s anything wrong with spending all your money on monkeys, mind you, as long as they’re evil) he decided to become a complete sicko, a move which, in retrospect, appears to have only helped his career.  Now, except for the occasional use of the words “ass” and “weaselboogers” I try to keep this site pretty family-friendly, and since we all know what Michael Jackson is into, I’ll let it suffice to say that Michael Jackson’s song “I’m Bad” has an entirely deeper and disturbing meaning to certain people who are, in fact, Macauly Culkin.

 

            But now, after what was probably about the fourth trial of the century so far this century, Michael Jackson is back on the streets, wearing pajama pants and talking in a tiny little voice with reckless abandon.  How then can you protect yourself and those you love from the greatest abomination created by the music industry since Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch?  Let’s look at a few of the ways that our experts here at teacupmammoths.com have come up with.

 

            First, use common sense.  Like if you’re walking down the street, and one of those dust-buster-shaped child molester vans pulls up, and a really pale guy offers you a ferris wheel or a monkey if you come with him, Just Say No.  Then fake a seizure, so he’ll think you’re crazy and leave you alone (hey, it worked in the Bible).

 

            Look out for white guys in sunglasses.  You see, most white guys in sunglasses are either Michael Jackson, an evil computer-generated FBI agent from the Matrix, or one of the Blues Brothers.  Therefore, upon seeing a white guy with sunglasses, run up and unleash your awesome kung fu skillz upon him.  Really, the odds are two to three in your favor that it’ll be either Michael Jackson or an evil computer-generated FBI agent from the Matrix, in which case, you’ve made the right decision.  Don’t worry about accidentally getting a Blues Brother though, they’re tough, and they’ll probably teach you some hot guitar licks for taking the initiative to start a sweet kung-fu battle right there in Arby’s anyway.

 

            If Michael Jackson invites you over to his house, say you’ll go, but later, and then send a robot gorilla with a bomb in it that’s just wearing your clothes.  Michael Jackson will never know the difference (unless, of course, you’re one of those unlucky people who doesn’t look like a gorilla).  Then, when he tries to touch the robot gorilla, it’ll just beat the white right off of him, and then explode in a gigantic fireball visible for miles (so if you do try this plan, keep an eye out for the mushroom cloud).

 

            Finally, you can just call Batman.  You see, Michael Jackson is really not that much different from the Joker, and as such is the case, Batman is more than capable of taking him down.  Even if Michael Jackson has a giant clown mallet, or a funhouse of doom, Batman’s seen it all before, and can beat him like the proverbial red-headed stepchild that he isn’t.

 

            So, in conclusion, don’t let the fact that Michael Jackson again walks the streets keep you from going out and doing all the things in life that you enjoy.  Rather, think of it as an opportunity to cause some mayhem, and maybe even see the Batmobile (or go to the Science Museum in Richmond, cause they have one there too).

            There are few among us, I think, who have not at some point in their life, wanted to do something totally cool and popular, but have no idea how to do it.  Hitler, for instance, wanted to be an art major, but his mastery of crosshatching was laughable at best, and so he went and started the Nazi party, as well as Hardee’s.  Napoleon just wanted to play ball for the Lakers, but owing to his tinyness, they didn’t let him join up and he ended up conquering Europe.  I myself once wanted to learn how to play Dungeons and Dragons, but Kleebdar the Dungeon Master just laughed at me, so I had to club him senseless with my +7 Truncheon of Nerd Vanquishing.  By such examples, I think we can all see that not knowing how to do cool stuff can lead to all sorts of genocide, conquest, and sucky fast food restaurants.  In the interest of averting further human suffering then, I have decided to go you, my readers, a bit of a leg up on doing something that just about everyone seems to want to get in on these days, Japanese Cartoons, or as our friends in the land of the rising sun call them, Anime.  Let’s take a quick look then, at some of the elements that help to contribute to a successful Anime movie, show, comic book, or shamelessly over-marketed trading card game.

 

            First, it has to take place in Neo-Tokyo.  For whatever reason, good ol’ Tokyo original recipe is never around anymore in Anime.  Maybe it was destroyed in World War III, maybe Rodan ate it (the giant pterodactyl, not the famous sculptor), maybe it just fell down behind the sofa and by the time Japan found it again, they’d already gone and bought a new one; in any case, Neo-Tokyo it is.  It usually looks a lot like regular Tokyo (like I’ve ever been there to know what I’m talking about) but with a lot of neon signs, and people addicted to weird sci-fi anime drugs that turn you into a monster, and a lot more cyber-hookers then there are these days.

 

            Next, giant robots.  Seriously, in Anime, giant robots are like cell phones, everyone has one, and all they ever do is fight with them.  Nobody ever says “See you tonight Hon, I’m taking the kids to school in my giant robot!” They just run around the city, knocking over hotdog carts, fighting either A: other giant robots, or B: giant freak-beasts from some other planet or dimension bent on destroying Neo-Tokyo, which, much like Original Tokyo is built on top of some kind of weird cosmic giant monster bug light that just brings them in like boring people to a quilting convention.  Also, most of the time, the main giant robot has this one totally awesome super attack where it like, combines with other robots, or creates a sword made out of antimatter, or unleashes a maelstrom of atomic awesomeness, that invariably completely destroys the other giant robot.  The only thing is, it takes like, five minutes for it to power up and look all cool while it’s doing this, but it’s okay, cause the other robot/monster is always either too polite to interrupt, or is just so completely tripped out at the very sight of it that its unable to rouse itself adequately to go on fighting.

 

            Then, we have the invariable progression from lighthearted, happy plotlines, to unbearably dark, depressing, Ashton Kutcheresque plotlines.  It doesn’t matter what the show is about, saving the very world from hideous space monsters hell-bent on the annihilation of mankind, or maybe just about the wacky exploits of a bunch of middle school kids, one of whom is a robot, and another one of whom has a pet bunny that turns into a starship, the show starts out all light and happy with humorous romantic tension and wacky situational comedy, and by the end of the second season, the entire world has become a fiery pit of doom and everyone’s family is dead and for about the last five or six episodes, everyone is just hanging on as things get worse and worse and death draws inevitably nearer, and then everything just gets really weird and bizarre, like a Tom Green movie.

 

            Creepy androgynous arch-villains.  Now, usually your anime sub-villains are normal enough, but there’s always the one totally evil mastermind villain, who is usually a guy who looks like he might be a girl, and all he wants to do is destroy everything.  Not take over Neo-Tokyo, not get revenge on those who wronged him, but just wipe out all of existence for weird and ill-explained reasons all his own.  Then, when he’s finally within striking distance of annihilating the world, the hero finally confronts him and he always does something completely surprising but also utterly nonsensical, because Anime writers have only the vaguest of notions about what constitutes a good plot twist and what just confuses people.  Like a normal arch-villain plot twist would be like this: “Luke, I am your father!” While an Anime plot twist is more like this: “Aha, in truth, I am not the evil ninja emperor, but rather some weird combination of a benevolent nature spirit and a self-aware computer program who was in fact created from your very DNA and a pile of burritos ten thousand years before you were even born come at last to wreak fiery vengeance upon the great and immortal yak-spirit who sired you!”  And after that, things get weird, and you have all this impassioned shouting and people start to just up and melt, or catch on fire, or both, and then there’s like, a huge floating eye up in the air, and then they have some weird, out of context Christian imagery, like Jesus in a Waffle House, and it all just gets too bizarre to even think about and then the world explodes and you hear a little girl recite a haiku about springtime and your just sitting there going, “Huh?”

 

            Finally, you must have Pikachu.

 

            So there you have it, a handy and easy to follow guide to making your own hit anime series, so you won’t screw it up and end up becoming an inhuman dictator or something.  All you have to do now is throw in a ridiculously big sword, and a few scenes in a bath house with a panda, and you’re in business.

            Most of us, I believe, prefer to go through life feeling secure in the knowledge that we are, for the most part, safe.  Of course, life can never be completely without danger, the mafia might put a hit on you, or you might choke to death on a rutabaga, or maybe a giant quetzalcoatl will pick you up and take you back to South America for some sinister yet boring purpose.  Most of us, however, never suspect the hideous violent death that may await us in our very own kitchen, where there often lurks a grisly and inhuman nemesis of all humanity, awaiting only its chance to strike and punch you in the face like Ike Turner.  I am of course talking about bacon.  What’s that you say, you already knew that bacon is bad for you?  Slow down there Mr. Speedy McFastington, it’s not what you think at all.  No, the truth is far darker and greasier than you could possibly imagine.

 

            Far from being bad for your heart, as conventional wisdom holds, bacon is actually one of the best foods for your circulatory health, owing to the way it slicks up your insides and makes it more difficult for stuff to get stuck in there (kinda like that motor oil with little bits of Teflon in it).  The negative and unfounded rumors to the contrary, were in fact started during the World War I (or as it was called back then, The War of Jenkins’ Ear) when the German inventor of bacon, Count Otto Von Bacon himself, defeated the president of the American Medical Association, Rex Morgan M.D. in a heated 77 hour game of Dungeons and Dragons, thereby bringing shame and dishonor to the House of Morgan for ten generations.  By way of revenge, Morgan dedicated the rest of his life to starring in a boring comic strip about inadequate medical insurance, and also to ruining the previously pristine good name which bacon had enjoyed up to that point.  This, however, is all beside the point.

 

            Bacon, in truth, is in reality far more horrible than even the wildest accusations of the AMA.  You see, in recent years, bacon has ceased, to a great degree, to be a stand alone food, and has been ever more frequently bound to otherwise prosaic foods to create such things as the bacon-cheeseburger, the salad with some bacon on it, and of course, bacon-heroin.  Thusly stripped of its place of honor amongst pork products, bacon has at last gone rogue, and started punching people in the face.

 

            Scoff if you will, but just this past week, Twitch, a friend and coconspirator of mine fell victim to such and attack when, as he unsuspectingly sat down to eat a plate of delicious bacon, it rose up all a sudden, a seething, undulant, gibbering mass or bacon  with eyes like smoldering embers from the very pits or Tartarus and punched him in the face knocking out one of his fillings and necessitating an emergency trip to the dentist this week.  Lest you fear that this cowardly attack went unanswered, Twitch’s wrath was kindled against this militant bacon (Twitch and the Militant Bacon, I might add, would make a totally sweet name for a band), and with berserker-like fury he devoured it, lest other bacon feel at liberty to get uppity without consequence.

 

            Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that this web of lies and intrigue goes far enough as it is, but you would be wrong to so believe, for the proverbial rabbit hole goes far deeper than that.  It is the case, you see, that bacon is in fact in cahoots (cahoots, I tell you!) with the American Dental Association, lead of course by the devious criminal mastermind Doogie Houser M.D, who, like Saruman and the mountain men, or Dick Cheney and undead chimpanzee army, has been whipping the international bacon community into a bloodthirsty frenzy to further his own vomitous schemes (you have of course, probably guessed where this is all going by now).  You see, the more bacon punches innocent aspiring warlords in the face, the more business it creates for the American Dental Association which, owing to the fact that it shares its acronym with the far better known Americans with Disabilities Act, will seek to eventually besmirch the name of the ADA forever, resulting in a public outcry the likes of which has not been heard since it was revealed that Big Bird is, in fact, a Communist.  This will of course throw our very nation into chaos, imperiling all that it awesome.  So my friends, I exhort you to take up arms against bacon!  Eat a lot of it, but punch it first so it can’t get you so bad, and if you see Doogie Houser, punch him too, he’s got it coming.

            Mongolia.  Its name is synonymous with yaks, global conquest, and totally sweet hats.  It is also, serendipitously enough, where my sister is spending most of this summer whilst she furthers her jedi-like mastery of journalism.  Now, were I the cautious sort, always taking care to painstakingly document my sources and get all my journalist ducks in a row, I might find it difficult to write an entire blog about a country with a very different culture from our own (except concerning table manners and the awesomeness of Genghis Khan, not to mention the mutual appreciation for Dick Cheney) to which, I have never, in fact, even been.  Fortunately though, I’m more like Newsweek, and I’ll just make any old thing up if I think it’ll be funny.  Therefore, based upon eyewitness accounts and firsthand experience from my sister in the Orient, I give you this brief description on all the ways to get around in Mongolia (lest when you yourself travel there, you find yourself like Aquaman, who, not knowing that Mongolia is a landlocked nation, was unable to secure any fish to ride around on and had to take a unicycle everywhere):

 

            First and most important, we have the noble yak.  Nearer and dearer to my heart than most other Mongolian beasts of transport (owing, in no small part, to its close kinship with the wooly mammoth), the yak is, foremost, totally friggin’ awesome.  How, you ask?  First, they don’t have ‘em here in Virginia (an acute shortage of yaks is really the only thing that keeps us from being the all-around most awesome place on Earth), and since anything you have to import from far away is magically and automatically better, yaks are epically keen.  The very work “yak” lends itself to verbification marvelously (“Sorry, your Holiness, I fear I have yakked in thy sock drawer”).  Try doing that with “horse” or “Hubert Humphrey”, or some other form of transportation, it’s just not the same.  Finally, they’re edible, so if your yak breaks down out on a steppe somewhere, miles from the nearest Coldstone Creamery (of which there are many in Mongolia) you can just eat it while you wait for AAA to get there and give you a ride.

 

            Next we have Mongolian Battle Ponies.  It is both bone-chillingly fearsome, and cuter sack full of baby koalas (or ought that be koali?), rather like a kitten with a flamethrower.  They’re really good at climbing mountains (at least the one my sister rode on didn’t fall off a cliff…much), and like yaks, they make a delicious side dish to any Mongol meal.  Also, unlike our big sport utility ponies over here, Mongolian ones are compact and environmentally friendly, running as they do solely of bio-diesel, and being made entirely from recycled soybeans.

 

            Then we come to the camel.  While most of us here in the states are probably used to riding those uncomfortable, precarious one hump camels, in Mongolia, they have the kind with a bonus hump.  This, of course, gives them twice the range, for those long road trips and beer runs across the Gobi Desert.  Also with the whole two hump setup, you get a much lower ride, with far superior high-speed cornering.  Really, the only reason not to go with the camel option is if you’re trying to quit smoking, in which case spending all day riding around on a ubiquitous reminder of cigarettes mightn’t be the best of ideas.

 

            Getting away from the animal kingdom for a while, Mongolians also have the perennially awesome Crazy Bus.  If you’re not familiar with this particular fixture of transit in developing nations and school systems, the Crazy Bus is a big ol’ bus with a dubious repair record, about twice as many passengers as it has seats, and a clientele that sees nothing wrong with bringing goats as carry-on luggage (to be fair though, the goat is not without reason often called “The Palm Pilot of the East”).  Also, owing to their chronic shortage of guys in orange vests, Mongolia really doesn’t have particularly good highway coverage, meaning that if your bus is going from say, Ulan Bator to Genghisburg, the bus driver just follows the nearest old timey big pointing hand sign and takes off over across the wasteland towards wherever it is you’re going.  Thisd sounds kind of dangerous at first, but if you just make sure to bring a leather jacket and a kid with a boomerang, you can pretend that you’re Mad Max (though really, you should probably pretend you’re Mad Max more often even if you’re not going to Mongolia).

 

            Finally, they’ve got sand worms.  Now I know you’ve probably heard that sand worms are just made up, even though Patrick Stewart rode one in Dune, but in the magical kingdom of Mongolia, anything is possible.  They mostly live in the desert (duh) and taking them into the city is generally frowned upon owing to the damage they do to the sidewalks, but assuming you’re planning on putting a lot of highway miles on one, they’re really a pretty good way of getting around.  Also, they always make a totally awesome entrance, like, if you’re going to a block party, and you take a sand worm, you don’t just pull up to the curb and park the thing.  No, you dramatically and awesomtastically burst out from beneath the very earth itself, causing all sorts of destruction and probably eating any yippy little dogs or fat kids who were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time (though if you already filled up on Pork Cracklins™, you might want to just let your sand worm eat them instead).  According to my sister, she hasn’t ridden one of these yet, but I’m hoping that when she finally does, she’ll bring me a picture or a coffee mug with a humorous message referring to like, sand worms, and maybe, uh, bad traffic or something.  Meanwhile though, here’s a computer-generated artist's conception of what one of them looks like (the sand worm, not the coffee mug):

 

            We have all seen incredible things in our lives, things that boggle the mind, things that defy reason itself, things that are, in fact, so absolutely friggin’ sweet that they simply go beyond all explanation, like the time I saw Gorbachev driving a bus in DC.  This is better though, because it’s about Mark Trail.  Now Mark Trail, if you recall, is this guy in the comics who, in addition to being a good-natured park ranger and all around wilderness guy, is also an absolute superhero.  He has, on previous occasions, brought down a plane full of terrorists by throwing a petrified tree at them, single handedly punched out a veritable plethora of possum thieves by hanging out outside their camp and making chicken sounds and then, when they came out to see what could possibly be making chicken noises, punching them all in the face.  One time, he even caught up to a speedboat by rowing down the river on a log.  So yeah, Mark Trail’s credentials are already well in order.

 

            Today though, he did something so unspeakably cool, that I don’t even know where to begin with describing it.  I mean, it’s really impressive, but also kinda scary, like if I was one of Mark Trail’s friends, I’d start getting worried about what might happen f he ever got mad at me.  It’s so cool in fact, that I’m not gonna get into it until the very end of the blog, because if I showed you now, everything else in your life would become that much less awesome by comparison (go ahead and scroll down if you must, you’ll only get more wrath when Mark finds out, and when you realize the awesometude of his godlike powers, you’ll wish you hadn’t).

 

            Anyways, to briefly recapitulate the recent story arc, a plane carrying Hillary Duff (who, of course, looks just like Mark’s girlfriend/mail order skank from Slobovia) and her tiny yippy little annoying pillow dog crashed in the mountains, near the Hundred Acre Woods of Mark (authorities now believe that the plane was struck by a piece of flying petrified wood).  Hillary Duff remains trapped in the plane but is eventually rescued and survives, unfortunately.  Her dog however, is thrown free from the flaming wreckage before it can devour its wounded owner, and if hurled some fifty miles from the actual crash site.  It’s stalked by some wolves for a while, but eventually they just give up due to a plague of ennui that’s been sweeping through the forest like Andre the Giant through a basketball court full of pygmies (it’s not just an idle simile, Mr. The Giant actually did this all the time).  Also, there was a blizzard.  Finally the dog find the one tiny run-down shack in the entire wilderness where, dwells a kindly old troll-geezer, who just looks like a balding version of Mark Trail from far off, but who grows increasingly hideous the closer you get to him.  To make a long story short, it turns out that the dog (who is eventually eaten by Mark’s much larger and less annoying dog) was wearing a diamond collar worth a bajillion dollars, and so the insurance company sends Ten Years Older With Grey Hair Mark to find the collar.  Now, TYOWGH Mark unbelievably obnoxious to regular Mark.  Like, Mark might say “I think I’ll go and cook us both a delicious succulent ham.” And TYOWGH Mark would say, “That sounds just like something you would do, you bumbling, retarded sack of wolverine buttocks!”  But Mark Trail is cool, he just takes it.

 

            So anyway, eventually Mark comes up with an ingenious tin foil-related plan to find the collar, but he foolishly let’s Evil Mark actually look for it.  So, it is at last revealed that Evil Mark actually was planning to steal the collar for himself, but Real Mark catches him and tells the insurance company on him.  Now, this might not seem like much of a penalty to pay, since he was, after all, thinking of stealing umpteen squintillion dollars in diamonds. 

 

Remember that show “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”  You know how there’d be like, an evil wizard, or some kid who meddled in the affairs of higher powers, and at the end someone would be like, “Oh, don’t worry about little Osama, I don’t think he’ll be troubling us any time soon,” and then they’d show you like, a statue, or possibly a painting, and it’s eyes would be moving and you’d be all like “Crap dude! They turned him into a statue, or possibly a painting!”  Well look at what Mark Trail did today:

 

 

Yes.  Mark Trail turned Evil Insurance Claims Agent Mark into a beaver.  Mark Trail is the freakin’ Harry Potter of park rangers.  Granted, being turned into a beaver might not sound as bad as being turned into something like a painting, or Ted Kennedy, but think again, ‘cause this is a cursed beaver!  Yeah, just look at the expression on his face; this is a beaver doomed to wander the Earth for all the countless and unholy aeons until the diamonds in that collar turn back into coal.  I’ll bet he has to like, gnaw down a petrified tree every day, and then it grows back overnight, like he’s in some weird ancient Greek beaver Hell (Ancient Greek Beaver Hell, by the way, would be a totally sweet name for a band, by the way).  So remember, whether you love him or hate him, respect Mark Trail, he can turn you into an overgrown aquarat with a big floppity tail and an eternity of suffering.

            Last time on teacupmammoths.com, I made fun of Superman, Batman, and Martian Manhunter.  And now, the thrilling conclusion…

 

            Wonder Woman was from the island of the Amazons, who, ever since the days of the Ancient Greeks, have lived there guarding various and assorted aeon-forgotten relics of eldritch power, and playing some severely hot games of beach volleyball.  Wonder Woman, however, got tired of this life, and went out into the real world to fight crime.  She took with her the ancient armor made for her mother by the gods themselves, which, in keeping with the style of the ancient Greeks, was red, white, and blue, with star-spangled briefs (just like Dick Cheney’s).  She wielded, as all the Greeks once had, a golden lasso (I’ll bet you thought those were invented here in America) which was supposed to make anyone who she threw it around tell the truth.  In fact, merely being tied up by an Amazon princess wearing star-spangled undies is really enough to make most guys tell the truth (it always works on me anyways).

 

            Green Lantern was really John Stewart, but one day after he had just finished doing the Daily Show, a little blue oompa loompa smurf guy gave him a gnarly green ring.  This ring had the granted him a number of abilities, one being that it made him black, and the other being that it allowed him to make green stuff.  He was lucky that way though, because for a long time (particularly in the 70’s) if you were a black superhero, your primary superhero trait was being black.  Like, if Superman were black, he would have been called Superblackman, and Batman would have been called, Al Sharpton, and since Green Lantern already has a color in his name, it would have just been silly.  Anyways, despite the fact that his ring could really make anything he could imagine as long as it was green, he should have been pretty awesome, but alas, he had a sucky imagination, so all he ever seemed to imagine were green energy bolts and force fields.  Maybe if he was feeling really creative he might make a big green mallet or some green hammerpants, or maybe a jolly green Dick Cheney, but usually, he wasn’t that cool.

 

            Hawkgirl was from the planet Thanagar, which would have been a cool planet, except for the fact that it eventually was revealed that every single one of her people save for her was a total buttweasel, after flew to Earth and tried to poop on peoples’ cars and eat mankind’s entire supply of sunflower seeds.  Her powers were having a totally sweet mystical mace that her people got from Cthulhu, and having magic wings that allowed her to fly whether or not she was actually using them.  Seriously, sometimes she’d actually remember that she was supposed to flap them to take off, but more often, she’d just assume that wing automatically made you fly and start hovering around like Superman.  Personally, I always wondered how she got her top on over them anyways, I mean, it’s not like was wearing one of those skanky ones that ties in the back, it looked more like some kind of an armored wife-beater.

 

            Finally, we get to the Flash.  His superpower was running really fast.  That was pretty much it, unless he got creative, which he rarely remembered to do.  When he did remember though, he could do all sorts of crazy stuff, and then just explain it away by saying he did it by going really fast.  Like, if he really had to, he could go back in time, or punch through a battleship, or build a hovercraft entirely out of legumes.  And if anyone asked, he’d just say he did it by running really fast.  I now suspect that he was really just messing with people most of the time.  His one weakness was junebugs.  I mean, if you’re running at like, half the speed of light and you hit a junebug, it’s just gonna be messy.  Also, he was weak against corduroy.  One time Lex Luthor snuck a pair of corduroy pants onboard the Watchtower and Flash put them on, and all that the other heroes heard was “zip zip zip zip zipzipzipzip PHOOOM!!!”  And then they found Flash lying in the hallway with third degree thigh burns.  It was then that pants were forever banned from the Justice League.

 

            So yeah, if there’s one thing I think we can all learn from the Justice League, it’s that superheroes mysteriously never wear pants.  I mean, I’m certainly not a superhero (wink) but it seems to me that pants can still be a valuable part of your crimefighting arsenal.  It’s not like they were just too lazy to put any pants on, since half of them actually went to the trouble of putting on an additional pair of underpants over their tights (which really seems like it might chafe after a while).  So, just in case any of you out there ever become superheroes (or villains) make sure you don’t wear any pants, otherwise, you’re totally gonna get laughed at.

            If you’re like me (and I wouldn’t wish that on any of you, mind you), you probably spend a lot of time superheroes.  And if you’re like me, you also probably spend a lot of time watching cartoons, building crossbows, and trying to work the phrase “blue-butted baboons” into as much of your writing as humanly possible.  So it’s probably just as well you’re not like me after all, but this still ties in with the whole cartoon-watching thing.  Which brings me, via the most awkward of segues, to the Justice League.  Whether you’re a die-hard fan, or not even cognizant of their existence, they’re up there in the Watchtower making sure the world is safe, so maybe it’s time we all took a closer look at them.  Also, since there’s more people in the Justice League now than there are Pokemon (Martian Manhunter, I choose you!), I’m just gonna do the original seven today, and in the process, try to raise a few though-provoking and ridiculous questions about them.

 

            First, there’s Superman.  He’s kind of the leader of the team, and comes with all your standard super hero features.  Flying, bulletproofness, eye-lasers, costume made out of an invulnerable baby blanket, super strength, and living in a world of people so dumb that they can’t tell he’s really Clark Kent.  Did you ever wonder what he did with his normal clothes when he changed into Superman?  I still do (I never bought that whole thing about him having a secret pocket in his cape).  At the moment, my best guess is that he just eats them, and then barfs them up later and tries to iron them with his heat-vision.  Either that, or he spends a fortune at the Big and Tall and just leaves his old ones in the phone booth.  Also, how did he ever make it through grade school without being discovered?  I mean, you’d think people would have suspected something when he went to get his vaccinations and it turned out he was invulnerable.  Man, people in Smallville must just be supremely uncurious (“Huh, looks like that Kent boy picked up another tractor today, ah well, none boys will be boys.”). 

 

            Batman comes next, and is unique in the sense that he has no super powers at all.  Except for the fact that he can do absolutely anything at all, as long as it happens off-screen.  Like, Batman might be tied up with titanium ropes in the hold of a rocket that’s hurtling towards the Sun, but as the villain of the week (Nelson Mandella) enters the control room for his death ray (he does have one, you know), there’s Batman!  How does he escapes?  Nobody knows.  Personally, I think he actually just has all sorts of awesome super powers, like super turkey-basting, or being able to detonate squirrels with the power of his mind, but he’s just too modest to use them in front of the other League members.  Also, he can have any piece of technology or equipment in the world, as long as you can tack the word bat onto its name.  Yes, from his Batarangs, to his trusty batamaran (really, I just wanted an excuse to work the word “Batamaran” in here somewhere), if you can always depend on Batman to have some piece of equipment that, other than the fact that it’s named after him, has absolutely nothing to do with bats (Why are they called Batarangs anyway?  They don’t come back.  They just stick in something and then usually explode shoot out electricity or beef or something).

 

            Then we come to Martian Manhunter, but since that doesn’t sound nearly as cuddly as a hero’s name ought to, everybody calls him John Jones, only spelled funny to emphasize his Martianity.  Like most aliens, he came here by crossing the Rio Grande, but when the landscaping business he was working for got shut down by the government, he decided to go into the hero business.  He’s telepathic, which lets him read people’s minds, and really supervillians he’s talking to by saying everything they were going to say a split second before them (this makes Lex Luthor so angry).  Also, he can phase through stuff, so he’s always floating eerily through the Watchtower, freaking out everyone, or catching Batman and Wonder Woman making out in the back of his Batvan.  His one weakness is fire, but only if someone actually say, hits him with a fireball or throws him into a volcano.  Which, I guess is kind of a weakness if you’re otherwise invincible, but really its kind of like saying that most people are weak against bullets and hand grenades.

 

            Okay, there’s still four more people to go, and this is already running on long enough, so assuming I don’t either get called away by Doug Wilder to save Richmond from the evil clutches of a blue-butted baboon, or just decide to write about a Hitler sitcom, I’ll finish this one up tomorrow.

            We can all, I believe, use a good discussion on the true nature of Adam Smith’s groundbreaking work, The Wealth of Nations.  This work of literature and economic theory, wildly popular and influential in it’s day, laid the cornerstone for the modern economic model of capitalism, making possible the high standard of living that all of us who don’t live in Canada enjoy on a daily basis.  Indeed, a solid understanding and sound appreciation of the importance of Smith’s work is probably one of the things most sorely needed by the American public today.  However, that would be really boring to read about, so instead I’m going to make fun of He-Man characters.  Today, I’m gonna tackle the good guys.

 

            First, there was Orko (Full Disclosure: when I was about seven years old, I dressed up as Orko for Halloween.  I was, most scientists now agree, as cute as a button).  Orko, like so many of us, was from a parallel dimension, where, one supposes, his awesome talents in the field of messing stuff up were a thing highly revered by the rest of his tribe.  In Eternia however, he was clearly the most useless of the good guys.  One supposes, in fact, that it was really just some sort of affirmative action/Eternians with Disabilities Act that even made them keep him around, assuming of course, that it wasn’t just that King Randor had a crush on him (Orko, however, was really far too infatuated with Cringer to ever notice this, and so the King’s love remained unrequited).

 

            Man-at-Arms, in addition to being one of the many fruitily-named characters, was the faithful family retainer of the royal family.  He wore green tights, had a superhuman ability to notice the blindingly obvious things in life (“Look, Skeletor is trying to get into Castle Greyskull!!”) and wore a brilliantly designed breastplate with a big feeding-trough thing on the front of it.  One assumes that he designed it himself so that not only would short people be unable to punch him in the face unless they stood on a chair first, but also so that he could eat a gallon of oatmeal while driving to work in the morning, without having to use his hands, one of which could turn into a gun.  He loved the Village People, and paid homage to his favorite one, the construction worker, by wearing a helmet.

 

            Teela was Man-at-Arms daughter.  She was actually adopted, as most of us kids guessed early on owing to the fact that Man-at-Arms wasn’t much of a fan of the ladies, and the fact that she was one of the only people on the show who could actually fight.  She was probably the most frustrated persaon in Eternia, due to her limited dating opportunities.  Besides herself and her father, you see, the only people in Eternia who looked the least bit normal were Prince Adam, and the King and Queen.  Everybody else had something like a head made out of an aluminum elephant, or one giant hand, or a monster face, or they were Dick Cheney.  Prince Adam, one would assume, would be all over Teela then, owing to the fact that she also happened to be the only hot girl in Eternia who didn’t turn into bird now and then.  Alas, his ever-present pink vest, melodic alto voice, and the fact that he was a big ol’ sissy boy, all suggested that Teela was going to be waiting a long time.  Also, for reasons unknown to anyone, in action figure form, Teela was wearing a tanktop made out of a giant snake.  This was never explained at all.

 

            Ram Man, another of the homoerotically named protectors of Eternia, wore a suit of Roman Centurion armor he got for the Christmas play at his elementary school, and liked to hang out by the docks picking up sailors.  Okay, not really (as far as we know).  What he did do was knock things down by smacking into them with his head.  I’m sure that all the other good guys tried explaining to him at some point that pretty much everyone had easy access to all sorts of weaponry, and it really wasn’t necessary to use his skull as a sledge hammer, but he didn’t seem to listen.  Or maybe they really just enjoyed messing with him.  “Ram Man, quick, someone needs to put a big hole in that wall right now, and we’re all out of, um magic, and, uh, hammers.”  Ram Man, therefore, was not too terribly bright, and spent most of his time being fascinated by shiny objects, and writing unanswered letters to Elton John.

 

            Finally, we come to He-Man himself (who was actually Prince Adam, I hope I didn’t just spoil it for you).  He looked exactly like Prince Adam, except for the fact that he had a really good tan, his voice always had enough reverb to make him the envy of all the monster truck rally announcers in Eternia (of which there were many), and like so many of us, he had evolved beyond pants.  He was pretty much invincible, but only when he remembered to be.  For instance, if Skeletor dropped a mountain on him, he would always just sit there for a minute, just to add to the drama of it all, and then he’d go and hurl the mountain back at Skeletor.  But if He-Man were just, say, on his way home from Linens n’ Things, and Stinkor (who’s only power, much like my freshman year roommate, was to smell really bad) smacked him in the back of the head with an Eternian fire trout (don’t let the name fool you, it was really just a regular trout with some extra fins and junk tacked on to make them look special), He-Man would fold like a cheap card table.

 

            In conclusion, most people in Eternia were, in fact, freaks, and more than a little bit fruity, and horribly underqualified for their jobs (much like many people in Richmond).  Nonetheless, they usually managed to triumph over the minions of Skeletor (The Minions of Skeletor, by the way, would be a totally sweet name for a band), primarily because they were even more retarded.  So there’s a lesson for you: if you’re not smart enough to make it in the world, maybe you just need to find some dumber people to compete against.   And Elton John, if you’re reading this, send Ram Man a letter sometime; it’s just too pathetic watching him cry himself to sleep in a bucket of Haagen Dazs every night.

            Toads.  They are mankind’s oldest, most reliable and most delicious beast of burden and his earliest hallucinogenic drug.  Yes, ever since we ate all the unicorns, toads have been nearer and dearer to our hearts than any other amphibian, except perhaps for Gerald Ford, or Swamp Thing (and that’s assuming that they aren’t really the same person.  I mean, I’ve never seen them together anywhere, so let’s not rule anything out just yet).  Indeed, the ancestral manse of my family takes it’s very name from that noblest and tastiest of creatures (we’re talking about toads again here, by the way, not Gerald Ford).  As such, it is an altogether new and magical thing that Henricus, where I work, has recently become infested with toads.

 

            God only knows from whence they came, assuming that this isn’t a plague sent down upon us because we demanded that our volunteers make their tally of bricks for the Great Pyramid without straw, but one thing is for certain: there’s about a bajillion tiny toads hopping all over the friggin’ place.  All day long, they prance around, gadding about gaily amongst the tobacco fields, playing little pennywhistles and wearing teensy little frock coats (its so damn cute, I never get any work done anymore).  They recent spate of toad-related accidents however, makes this otherwise joyous occasion somewhat more troubled than it might otherwise be.  For instance, last week, a visitor stepped on a few of them and before we could do anything the toads panicked and tried to jump away, carrying him nearly a half mile before he had the presence of mind to untie his shoes and leap to safety.  Also, some of the less savory toads seem to be hanging out in the restrooms all the time, doubtless smoking tiny little cigarettes and playing with teensy little switchblades.  None of them have any money though, and they keep hopping into the gift shop and just milling around all day, or sneaking in to the admission area (to be fair, a few have bought tickets, but they are, by far, the exception).

 

            As I mentioned though, there’s more of them around than you can shake a weasel at (I tried, believe me).  Indeed, they would cover the sky, and blot out the very Sun itself, as great herds of them winged their way across the site, were it not for the fact that toads are, for the most part, infrequently airborne at best, it being the case that their great leathery membranous wings haven’t grown in yet (I’m just kidding, toads don’t have wings, they actually built little helicopters).  Anyways, as I walk through the site, they all flee from me like I’m Godzilla or something, on my way through their grassy little Tokyo, on my way to battle Mothra, or eat one of their many commuter trains.  The thing is though, I really like toads, and I always wish I’d spent more points on my Toad Mastery attribute, so that I might have a shot at bending them to my will while they’re still young and naïve, in hopes of one day building an unstoppable toad army, that it might sweep across the countryside like a juggernaut, crushing all those who dare to oppose me (of which, there are thankfully few).

 

            Also, due to the legendary lickability of Henricus toads, toadlickers and other toad junkies have descended upon our site in record numbers.  Your normal sized toads, of course, get you high when you lick them, but these little ones are bite-sized, so they tend to go through ‘em like popcorn (bet ya can’t lick just one!).  Alternately, they’re like those little Listerine slips, where you just take one toad and lest it dissolve on your tongue.  To make matters worse, a lot of the local population has been trying to use the toads for fishing bait, prompting some of the more proactive among them (the toads again) to form a toad militia, the actions of which, while protecting the toads, have brought about no small number of casualties amongst the local fishermen.  Some of the toads have even reverted to a feral state (The Feral Toads being a totally sweet name for a band, of course) and as you walk through the site they just sit there, their long serrated fangs glistening with venom, their eyes burning with the livid and untamable fires within as their primal jungle-forged brutality inexorably fights its way to the surface, until they leap upon those who would oppress them in a seething and bloodthirsty rage that would be too terrible to even watch, if it wasn’t so cute.

 

            So, between all the toad junkies getting all hopped up on toads, and the fishermen falling before the wrath of toads, and the toads themselves who even now are busy putting together their little helicopters in preparation of the approaching day when they’ll all take to the skies and head into Richmond to go clubbing, it’s been pretty crazy around here as of late.  Meanwhile though, they’re a cheap source of site security, and a quick pick me up (assuming, of course, you can catch one to lick).

            Colin Powell.  Much like Raymond, everybody loves him (except for Dick Cheney, but more on that later).  Whether as a statesman, breakdancer, chief stockholder in Aunt Jemima International, or just a guy who hangs out along Midlothian Turnpike, punching all the people in PT Cruisers who’s license plates point out that they’re in a PT Cruiser (PT CRZN), Colin Powell is truly one of America’s greatest heroes.  But have you ever stopped to consider another great American to whom he bears an altogether uncanny resemblance?  I am of course talking about Mr. Spock (don’t even try to pretend like you never noticed how much alike they are before).  Seriously though, let’s take a closer look at the ways that Colin Powell is like everybody’s favorite Vulcan (not that T’pol isn’t a pretty cool Vulcan too, though don’t even get me started on Tupac).

 

            First, he’s always level-headed and logical.  For instance, once a horta got loose in the White House, and it was eating all these tunnels in the walls, and waking everybody up in the middle of the night by pretending to play maracas with the desiccated legumes down in the fallout shelter.  Condoleeza Rice wanted to go and blast it with her Type III Phaser Rifle, but Colin Powell just went down to the basement and did a mind meld with it.  In the end, it turned out that the horta was really just angry because it’s weird alien horta state wasn’t getting the representation in government that it deserved.  Thanks to Colin Powell though, we now recognize at last, the first state populated entirely by silicon-based subterranean lifeforms (Florida).

 

            Like Mr. Spock, Colin Powell is half human and half Vulcan, which means that he is forever torn between two worlds and two peoples (this has been a constant bone of contention between him and his parents, Sprazxx and Betty Powell).  Usually this isn’t a problem, but occasionally, like the time the entire Cabinet got “space drunk” (or as we call it on this planet, just regular drunk) and he lost control of his emotions and started running around the White House shirtless, pretending to be Errol Flynn and generally acting goofier than is common, much to the amusement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 

            Then the was that time that Colin Powell was suddenly seized by that every seven years mating urge thing that happens to him, and he had to return to his home planet and fight a battle to the death with Dick Cheney for the amusement of some plastic glow-brains under a big clear dome (500 quatloos on the bald one!)  Eventually, with a little timely help from Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney faked his own death and the honor of the Powell house was preserved, but it was still pretty cool.

 

            And who can forget the time that the Capitol was going to be destroyed by the Romulans, and Colin Powell had to climb through a Jeffries Tube and repair the warp core before it blew up and killed them all.  Even though the radiation in there would have been fatal to a human, Colin Powell still managed to get the warp drive back online in time to whisk the heart of our nation’s legislative branch out of the mutara nebula and back to DC.  Of course, in the end, even Colin Powell couldn’t survive in the warp core, but after he had wisely passed his katra on to Donald Rumsfeld (you should’ve seen the look on his face when he tried to death-grip John Kerry the next day), and after lots of wacky hijinks and shenanigans they finally revived him on the Genesis Planet, and Colin Powell once again was at the proverbial science station of our nation’s government.

 

            Then there was that one time right after that where they all had to go back to the 80’s to get some sweet delicious whales for a White House cookout they were planning.  Only because he’d just come back from the dead, Colin Powell still wasn’t exactly himself, and ended up telling Nancy Reagan that they were not, the Hell, her whales, as well as getting involved in a wacky car chase through Moscow after accidentally mistaking Gorbachev for a small humpback.  In the end though, he managed to make it through and came back to the present with a bunch of succulent, tasty whales, as well as a tanker full of A1 sauce to go with them.  Boy, did PETA ever go crazy when they heard about that one!

 

            And who can forget that time when all those androids from space were trying to invade America, and they wanted to make everyone completely dependant on the Government for everything they needed in life?  Who could resist such a seductive promise of easy, effortless living?  Why, Colin Powell, of course.  He single-handedly out logicked them, by pointing out that Canada is, in fact, totally lame like that already, and we don’t want to end up like that.  In the end, the menace was no more, and the evil androids gave up and went over to Europe, where they’re plan to rob mankind of all dignity and reason for existence is well underway.

 

            So, in brief, know ye that not only is Colin Powell a credit to our great nation, but also to Vulcans everywhere.  And remember: Live long, and prosper.

            There are among us certain great men and women, who despite all that they have done for this great nation of ours (America, in case you haven’t been reading the papers lately), are perennially neglected by the media of our society.  Yes, though everyday they toil tirelessly to improve the lot of the common working man, it is all too rare that any of them receives the plaudits (by plaudits of course, I mean “wheelbarrows full of nachos”) he so richly deserves.  Can I then stand by idly and allow this wholesale neglect of the best among us to continue?  Duh, of course not (good thing too, otherwise this would have been a blog most un-Benlike in its brevity)!  Without further ado then, let me present one of the greatest sons of our land, Snarf.

 

            Now I know what you’re thinking, “But Ben, Snarf wasn’t all that great, he was practically the Walter Mondale of the Thundercats!”  How wrong you are, my friend.  Snarf in fact has a life story far more engrossing than that of many states (I’m looking at you, Oregon) and a list of accomplishments so extensive that I’m only going to pick out the silliest ones to write about today.  But before we can truly appreciate Snarf for all that he has done for us, I think it’s important that we learn a little about the adversity he has had to overcome over the years.

 

            Basil Smackpanda Snarfowski IV was born to a poor family of Frito-miners in the Province of Yaag, which sits beneath the ancient and brooding mountain of Zooglar, the Dark Enchanter, in the Western part of Missouri (where, owing to a state legislature with acutely bad vision, the state flower is, in fact, a duck).  His father, President Martin Van Buren was frequently unemployed, always drunk, and usually abusive.  His mother, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, did her best to hold the family together, suffering quietly through Martin’s periodic bouts of ugmo, while trying to provide as best she could for their seven children, of whom Snarf was the eldest.

 

            When he turned sixteen, young Snarf decided to make it big in show business, changing his name to conceal his Polish heritage, and joined a traveling circus, where he made a name for himself by getting shot out of a cannon while juggling a dozen hungry lions, who were usually on fire.  While this might well have gone on indefinitely, one day the cannon operator accidentally fired him into the audience, where he hit President William Howard Taft in the butt, serendipitously dislodging a hippopotamus that had lodged itself in his windpipe somehow.  His gratitude boundless, the President asked Snarf to join the Secret Service, as well as to help out with the Ed Sullivan Show.  Ed Sullivan, it may now be revealed, was really just a fictional person all along but maintained the illusion of existence by being, in truth, a suit full of chinchillas with an uncommonly good command of the English language.

 

            After this he spent some time traveling abroad, doing his best to improve the world with his newfound money and influence (hew had long since set up his family in a palatial undersea cave in the ancient and forbidden City of R’lyeh.  His efforts were sadly not always successful, especially the time that he spent some months in the steppes of France, trying with missionary zeal to make the natives aware of the existence of soap.  Most of them didn’t take to his strange civilized ways though, (which is just as well, for recent studies have shown soap to be lethal to Frenchmen) and Snarf, his good cheer imperturbable as a sea of anvils, returned to America.

 

            Now back in Missouri, amassed an enormous fortune after he developed a method by which the Federal Government may easily and safely be converted into cheese.  At last though, Hollywood beckoned, and leaving the stately Bong trees of his home behind, he made the trek West to star in Thundercats.  Now, you might think that for a man of Snarf’s experience and dignity, playing the sidekick would be somewhat demeaning, in fact, the very opposite was the case.  For so long had Snarf borne the burden of responsibility that it was quite liberating for him not to be the one in charge.  During this time he made many friends among the cats and crew of Thundercats.  A few years ago he did an album with Mum-Ra, that, while receiving little publicity here, did well indeed in Asia.  He used his sizeable fortune to help Panthro start up a chain of Nun-Chuck and Hairstyling academies all along the East Coast, as had been his longtime dream.  Finally, he earned the everlasting gratitude of all the Thundercats by punching Liono in the face whenever he got too whiny and annoying (which was most of the time, really).

 

            Snarf later went on to star on Star Trek: Voyager, playing the part of Neelix for the duration of the show.  Lately though, he has had difficulty securing parts on screen, owing to his outspoken condemnation of Islamic Fundamentalism, but has made the most of his time, relaxing at his luxurious estate in Missouri with his wife, Cheetara, and his son The Cheat, who is already following in his father’s august cinematic footsteps.  Now and then he still accompanies his close friend and associate Dick Cheney on secret missions to discredit the mullahs of Iran by knocking them out, dressing them up like ladies, putting a pork chop in their mouths and then putting their pictures all over the internet.

 

            So there you go, Snarf, a man for all seasons, champion of the working class, and totally bitchin’ man about town.  I think we can all sleep a little better at night knowing that Liono is not going unpunched, and that somewhere out there, there’s a mullah waking up with an evening gown on and the mysterious taste of ham in his mouth.

            It seems altogether appropriate that, having just completed a magical voyage to a new site, filled with wondrous and fantastic beasts, peril, romance, and yes, even monkeys, that I should do my inaugural article here on another such historical voyage, from long, long ago.  Now, most of my readers here in Virginia (long may she kick ass) probably are already familiar with the subject of today’s blog, but for all of you out there in strange and foreign countries like Vermont, this blog is liable to shatter you most deeply held beliefs and convictions.  The truth however, must be told.

 

            Our story begins in 1620, when the Mayflower and a bunch of pilgrims came over from England and landed in Massachusetts, where they would establish the first permanent English colony in the New World, except for Jamestown, Henricus, and about a jillion little plantations all up and down the James River, which were started in 1607.  Yes, New Englanders, I’m afraid you weren’t the first here at all; not by a long shot.  Call it heresy if you must (I don’t care, here in Virginia, we never burned heretics at the stake) (mmm, steak).

 

            Oh well, at least Massachusetts still was the site of the first Thanksgiving ever.  Oh wait, that happened in Virginia too, when in 1607, the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Death Star (it was made out of wood back then) sailed over from England, under the command of Dick Cheney, with orders to settle in Virginia and do something totally awesome (really, their orders weren’t all that particular, as long as it ended up being awesome or carcinogenic).  In fact, Plymouth can’t even claim being the first English colony from a moral point of view.  After all, Jamestown was chartered with the blessing of King James.  To show their gratitude to their benevolent monarch, the colonists named their town, their mighty (and very damp) river, and the totally sweet old-school Bible they wrote on the way over from England after they realized they couldn’t play road kill bingo on a boat and got really bored.  Massachusetts, meanwhile, was named after Ol’ Massa Chewbacca, the evil Wookie overlord of the Pilgrims, who left his mark of domination upon them by compelling every man among them to wear a hat with a big silly looking, useless buckle on it, and by ordering them to all carry those goofy-looking pilgrim guns, which wouldn’t even be invented for another hundred years.

 

            The Jamestown colonists better embodied the spirit of the nation that their descendants would found anyways.  How, you ask?  Well, the King was always getting angry at the Virginians because they were always running off into the woods, doing whatever they felt like, killing stuff, hooting and hollering, inventing tobacco, and staging early monster truck rallies.  Also, they were all really into growing hemp, like George Washington (“but it’s for making rope out of!” he used to say.  Sure it is George, sure it is).  Meanwhile, up in Massachusetts, they all stayed in nice little easily spied-upon villages, where they never carried on or raised a fuss or anything, except now and then when they’d go and execute a couple of dozen innocent people for making pacts with the devil (the devil wasn’t even in the pact-making business back then, he was doing a brief, but memorable stint as the spokesman for IHOP).

 

            What am I getting at here?  Nothing less than one of the greatest conspiracies of our nation’s history ever.  For generations, kids have been taught a story of our great nation founded on lies, silly hats, and the metric system (Oh yes, they all used the metric system up in Plymouth.  That’s something they don’t go around telling everyone, now isn’t it?).  So my brethren and sistren (I know it’s a made up word, but so are most of the others I use) to throw off the oppressive and metaphorical shackles of a hundred and fifty years of bad history!  It all goes back to the Civil War, you know, before then, Virginia was the generally acknowledged most awesome state ever, but when we lost we had to give the title up to Rhode Island, which isn’t even really an island at all (I checked, it’s a peninsula).  How can you help to defeat the lies?  There are, in fact, a number of ways.  Write a letter to New England telling them you’re onto their little game and you’re not going to buy into anymore.  Next time someone tells you the Mayflower came first, punch them in the face, or if you’re not the violent type, tell someone you can trust, like Dick Cheney (though he’ll just end up punching them in the face too, you know).  The next time you see one of those Mayflower moving vans, hulk out and throw it off a cliff.  If you see someone with a buckle on their hat, challenge them to a fight in the Thunderdome.  These are just a few simple suggestions to help you defeat the evil.

 

            Be sure to tune in tomorrow, for the Legend of Snarf.

Well, here it is, my new site, all shiny and generic and completely confusing to set up how I want it be.  But it's all good, cause I've all my old articles posted already, and shall shortly be putting up a new one for the day, since this is really more of an announcement and doesn't count.  Please feel free to leave comments and stuff, or email me at ben@teacupmammoths.com . Whichever.  With y'all's help, I'm sure that someday we'll all be able to look back and say that this was one of the definitive moments on my path to world domination.

Okay everyone, here's the thing:  Doing this blog has been totally fun, and the reponse from y'all out there in cyberspae has been absolutely more than I ever imagined.  With that in mind, I've started looking at maybe getting a site of my own, rather than just going through my myspace account.  It's a big step though, and not one I'd do simply to gratify my own ego.  Rather, assuming there's enough interest, it seems like the next logical step in my diabolical plan.

So, what say you?  If I went and put up my own site, would you read it?  Do you think anyone else would?  I really do want to hear from y'all about what you think about this.  Yay or Nay, leave me a comment on the issue.  If you haven't got a myspace account, my email is ben_strohm@yahoo.com .  I hope to hear from all of you, and with any luck, this'll be the start of something new and unprecendentedly awesome!

            In all of our lives, there are certain individuals who serve to inspire us to greater achievement.  Now, for many people, greater achievement means doing things like going out and finding a cure for clinical buttugliness, or going to a third world country, like Luxembourg, or Djibouti, to build yurts for the yurtless (no one should be yurtless in this day and age; I’ve been there before, and it’s no way for a civilized man to live), or setting squirrels on fire.  However, in my case, being inspired to greater things means encouraging me (as if I needed much encouragement) to write ridiculous things and hope that people will read them and laugh (or if I’m very lucky, people will read them and take them far too seriously and freak out).  In any case, one of the giants of my literary world is Dave Barry, who, along with Charles Dickens, H.P. Lovecraft, The King James Bible, Dick Cheney, and monkeys, is one of my greatest inspirations when it comes to the art of the written word.

 

            Indeed, since I was but a tiny Benling, with a haircut that attracted bullies to me like baboons to a smoothie machine, Dave Barry and his weekly comedic stylings have opened up to me a new and amazing world of possibilities, filled with exploding cows, exploding toilets, flaming Barbie, and the state of Florida.  ‘Twas from him that I learned the innate humor potential of silly band names (The Innate Humor Potential, by the way, would make a totally sweet band name), and the way that the phrase “weasel boogers” can liven up even the dullest blog, State of the Union Address, or eulogy.  As one might imagine then, I was sadder than a sack of gerbils (gerbils, of course, being infamous for their predisposition towards ennui, when in large groups) to learn that Dave Barry was quitting his regular writing.

 

            As one might well imagine, chaos descended upon the commentary section of the Sunday paper as a water buffalo flung from an office building descends upon the street below, swiftly, completely, and with a lot of goop left over afterwards that takes forever to clean up properly because you forgot to get the pressure washer fixed last week.  As is usually the case when a superhero retires, all the lesser wanna be superheroes in the area all vie for supremacy in the sudden humor vacuum.  Within days Thomas Sowell, Aquaman (lame boy-scout Aquaman, not the cool one who’s on TV now) and President Rutherford B. Hayes all waged endless battle o’er the lower third of the page G1 of the Sunday paper.  The ceaseless violence soon became intolerable, and ordinary civilians started just skipping the commentary section altogether, and going on right to “Ask Marilyn”, lest they be struck by a stray independent clause or even an infarctive gerund, as the battle spilled over into the Home and Garden section.

 

            In the midst of all this devastation, at last a hero hove in view.  Doug Wilder, onetime Governor of Virginia, world-renowned champion of opossum rodeos, and present Mayor of Richmond, seized control of the commentary section, and boldly forged from the reigning anarchy a new order.  Alas, though his skills at governing and doing the “I’m a Little Teapot” dance are more than legendary, his talent for regularly turning out a humor column is somewhat wanting.

 

            His first article, on cleaning up the City Council, ought to have been as easy to make fun of as a pygmy rhinoceros in a pink tutu trying to carve up a bratwurst shaped like Nikita Khrushev with a chainsaw (the rhinoceros with the chainsaw, I mean, not the bratwurst)(that would just be silly).  Sadly, other than a couple of half-hearted references to the time that previous mayor Rudy McCullum tried to set a toiled of fire down at City Hall, the article was really a profound failure to be funny on a number of levels.  Some weeks later, when Richmond was stricken by a series of subterranean explosions and rumblings, he missed a golden opportunity to blame the trouble on the underground kingdom of Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, whom as everyone knows, lives far beneath Richmond, ever plotting to be rid of us surface-dwellers.  But no, other than a liberal dose of weaselboogers, Doug Wilder again missed the chance to be funny, eliciting nary a chortle nor a snarf from the people of this fair city.

 

            One would think that a man so very close to famed comedian and lord of the undead as Bill Cosby would be better equipped to thoroughly mock at least of few of the daily goings on in Richmond, epicenter of wackiness and drug trafficking (really, they’re only the same thing when its like, a clown selling drugs to a midget in huge pants or something) that it is.  Sadly, it seems that this is not to be, leaving us still without a funny guy in the newspaper on a regular basis.  Therefore, let me be the first (except for all the others who already did this) to beseech Dave Barry, or someone else of suitable humor potential to take in hand the Spatula of Funniness, and with it sally forth and reclaim the Throne of Making All Five of the Literate People In Richmond Laugh (there’s really more than five of them, of course, the title’s just based on old census data, these days there’re probably at least a dozen).  So Dave, wherever you are, we need you now, more than ever, before Richmond turns into one of those bland cities which, devoid of flava, idly exist as their populations slowing devolve into troggles (you laugh, but this already happened in Charlotte).  Take back the commentary page.  Weaselboogers.

           Historically-speaking, this has been a big week.  After all, it isn’t every day that we find out who was responsible for Richard Nixon’s fall (it was of course, Dick Cheney).  On the subject of important stuff we did years ago and then decided to keep secret until after we died, but then we got a little older and decided to cash in on it instead then, I’ve decided, for the first time ever (except for all the people I already told about it) to tell about how I was once a hunted man by the JMU police (Motto:  If you’re having fun, we’re not doing out job right).

 

            It all started one night, my Junior year.  Kevin had already been driven from my presence, and I had the room to myself.  As a result, I did what any healthy young man would do, and fixed my self a cup of noodles.  Just as I was getting ready to eat said noodles though, the phone rang.  On the other end was a girl from my church group, calling to ask where on earth I was, as the Vestry dinner was tonight.  The Vestry you see, is like the council of Poobahs for a given Episcopal Church, and I happened to be on ours.  As most things do, this had completely slipped my mind, and a buttered ham slips from the grasp of a hungry orangutan.  I asked if I ought to come over to the church then, but she said that she’d just pick me up if I waited in the parking lot next to Frederickson Hall.  And so, taking my hat and flannel shirt (which were, in those days, the source of all my dark powers), I headed out the door.

 

            As I stood there in the parking lot, it eventually dawned upon me that there are many more interesting things in this world that standing in a parking lot.  It also dawned upon me that right beside me stood a very nice tree.  It was a rather smallish tree, but of sturdy shape, with broad and low lying branches spreading over the lot.  Whether it was the chill of the night air or the ululating spirits of my arboreal marmoset ancestors, I never knew, but I climbed the tree.  Now, as I have said, it was a rather diminutive tree, and as a result, when I got as high off the ground as I trusted it to bear me, I wasn’t really so very far above the earth as I originally expected.  But there I sat, for a couple of minutes, all of three and a half feet off the ground, feeling quite pleased with myself for making such a harrowing ascent and feeling vaguely annoyed that I was still waiting.  Then my arms got tired and I climbed down, waited a few more minutes, and when my ride at last arrived, I hopped in and we were off to Luigi’s Pizzatorium.

 

            I remember but one thing about dinner that night, at it is this: for the entire three hours or so that we were there, they were playing nothing but Rod Stewart songs.  It was as if Luigi had mistakenly spent a large sum of money on the complete Rod Stewart collection, and was trying to get the most mileage he could out of it.  Indeed, to this very day, I can’t listen to Rod Stewart without thinking about pizza, nor can I listen to a pizza without thinking of Rod Stewart.  I think our conversation was really mostly about monkeys and Methodists, but I can’t be sure.  Anyways, when all was over, I went home, fell asleep, and thought no more of the night until two days later.

 

            Two day later, I was sitting in our suite and one of the other guys who lived there was reading the school paper (I believe I was building a giant pair of robotical monkey claws that I had dreamed about the night before).  It was the case that at that time, JMU was in the clutches of a terrible wave of peepings.  All across campus, women were reporting guys looking in their windows, walking in on the girls’ bathrooms, all sorts of things.  The crime log reflected this plague of peepage, and suddenly Joe (for such was his name among our people) laughed aloud.  “Hey Ben,” quoth he, “this guy in the Crime Log sounds just like you!”  I laughed as well, how silly it was, to imagine me in the crime log, oh the very ridiculosity of it all. “Really,” he said, “here it is:  A man was sighted in a tree at 8:00 Tuesday night, in the parking lot outside of White Hall, sitting in a tree.  It is believed that he was trying to gain a view of the second story windows of the neighboring dorm.  The police were called, but the suspect escaped in a dark sedan which picked him up and drove off before they could apprehend him.  He was described by witnesses and being a tall, shaggy man, with a brown cowboy hat and a red flannel shirt over a tie-dye shirt.”  I thought it was all terribly funny at first, but then a chill of terror ran down my back.  “Which parking lot was it again?” I asked. “White Hall, oh wait, it was Frederickson,” Joe saith.  Dun Dun DUN! 

 

            In a moment, I had been transformed from a happy go lucky college student into a happy go lucky fugitive.  I knew at once that I could never go to the police and tell them the truth.  The outrage of the recent epidemic of peeping had reached fever pitch, and with nobody else arrested thus far, I knew that no justice awaited me with the authorities.  I did what any sane man would do, I freaked out.  I got a haircut, decided to stop wearing my hat for a couple of weeks until this all blew over.  I put away my usual wardrobe of red flannel shirts and tie-dye, and started wearing a wife-beater and overalls to disguise my identity.  Two days later my secret became too funny to keep to myself, so I told all my friends about it and made a big copy of the Crime Log and taped it to my door.  Shortly thereafter the peeping stopped, and most of us suspected that it had been built more upon rumors and ugly girls who thought that guys would want to catch them in the shower.  But now, I feel that the truth can at last be told, and lucrative book deals and a spot on Letterman can at last be mine.

           Interdimensional warlords.  All of us know at least a few, whether from professional life, seeing them on the Home Shopping Network, or even just working with them in the glee club.  But most of us, alas, don’t really have them as a part of our daily lives in a personal sense.  This is totally wack, needless to say (though I just did anyway) and I have decided to introduce to y’all, my faithful audience, one of the Richmond area’s most up and coming warlords.  But really, how can any of us truly know a man unless we know from whence he came.  With this in mind, I give you this quick biblography of Twitch, and may it serve you as well as you shall serve him when he at last gains dominion o’er the tri-cities area.

 

            Twitch was born to King Arglebargle of the Realm of Pnut, and seemed at first to have been smiled upon by fate as few other men are, for Pnut is by far the most beauteous and carmel-coated of the Seven Kingdoms of Lorgon.  Alas, while yet a child, he was spirited away one night by the soulless ham ninjas of the Veil of Grok.  Yet even then the power of his destiny was strong upon him, for he beat them into Honey Dijon mustard (for that is what soulless ham ninjas are made from) like so many baby seals with the copy of “Pat the Bunny” which he had wisely kept with him.  Now however, young Twitch found himself alone in the wastelands of Bumwalla with nothing save for his pajamas, a book about a fluffy bunny, and his insatiable drive for conquest.

 

            It was in this environment that he flourished however, and before long all the clans of deciduous Zabaak mollusks fled when he hove into view on the horizon.  Always did he wander the wastes, accompanied by his giant blue ox, Jaqwanda, as he wore a hat made out of a living pig and planted apple trees everywhere (to this very day, the peasants of Bumwalla wear pigs for hats and live only on apples in honor of he who so long protected them).  At last he knew that he was ready to claim his place among the storied heroes of his people, but when he at last returned after years and innumerable adventures to the Kingdom of Pnut, he found that it had been torn down some years earlier to make way for a Bed, Bath and Beyond, and all the people of the kingdom had moved to South Dakota, which was totally far away.

 

            With no home to return to, Twitch traveled across the sea to the fabled academy of Meadowbrook High School.  The legends are not clear on how he traversed the ocean.  Some say that he carved a manatee into a catamaran, others that he glued a thousand hummingbirds to his hat and waited until they all decided to fly in the same direction, yet others say that he made a fiery chariot out of the box his refrigerator came in and harnessed a bunch of flying squirrels to it.  None can say for certain.  While at Meadowbrook, he developed his innate totally phat kung fu skillz under the tutelage of Dick Cheney.  He also joined the show choir, making many friends and allies, and helping out the Incredible Hulk when he was fighting his eating disorder (You no like Hulk! You think Hulk too fat!).  It was at this time that he was first contacted from beyond the grave by the totally sweet-looking blue glowing spirit of John Quincy Adams, who told him to work at the sketchiest movie rental place in all of Richmond, and then to quit after a week and get a job as a DJ (but not DJ from Full House, ‘cause Twitch is a dude).

 

            And so it came to pass, as the spirit had predicted, and for a time, DJing seemed to fill the world-domination shaped hole in his heart quite well.  But then one day, his old mentor, Dick Cheney brought him a melon bouquet in a basket made from a hollowed out armadillo, and told him that being a DJ and ruling the world are, in fact, not automatically the same thing.  Rather they are like simultaneously being Howard Dean, and a yam wrangler; they don’t really coincide unless you work at it.  This at last was the proverbial water buffalo in the sock drawer that Twitch had been awaiting, and now he knew his destiny at last.

 

            This destiny of course, is to take over the world (really, it’s not as if the people running it now are doing such a bang-up job anyway, there’s never any soap in the public restrooms, and deviled ham is damnably expensive these days), starting with Richmond, partly because he’s already here anyway, but mostly because Richmond is, as we all know, the center of the universe.  To this end, he built a super-secret transdimensional starbase, tucked away in a nearby subspace domain.  From here, Twitch continues his DJing, all the while working in subtle subliminal messages to get us to assist him in his mad quest and also to send him those little plastic tubes full of rubber dinosaurs that they sell at the science museum (don’t ask why, its that diabolically brilliant).  In preparation of the glorious day when at last his plans come to terrible and vivid fruition, he follows a daily regimen of yak-baiting, suburban kung fu tournaments against the unspeakable lizard men of Woodlake, and now and then mauling his weight in hobbits (they’re old, mean hobbits who live in underground trailer parks though, so don’t worry about Smeagol).  In closing, I exhort you all to do your part, if not now, then by taking up arms when the revolution of Twitch at last arrives.  Or barring that, to at least give the next unspeakable lizard man of Woodlake you see a good shoe wedgie (they really hate that).

           Matt, a name which strikes terror into the hearts of ne’er-do-well and supervillians alike, is also the name of a man whose origins have ever been shrouded in mystery.  Until now.  Yes, thanks to recent breakthroughs in the exciting and lucrative field of just making stuff up and hoping people will read it anyway, many of the dark and sequestered mysteries surrounding this remarkable man  have at last been unraveled, and his tale of heroism can at last be told.  Which I am about to do.  Right now.  In this next paragraph.

 

            Matt was born in Richmond, Virginia, or possibly in the interminable wastelands of the Knaar Province of the forbidden World of Hthraak.  Either way, his parents were (and still are, lest you worry) intergalactically famous ninja warp theorists.  As a result, young Matt spend many of his formative years flying around in a Devornian Hyper RV, solving zany mysteries and being exposed to various radioactive substances which would someday grant him a mind-boggling array of super powers useful for picking up buildings and anecdotes useful for picking up girls.  Long did he tarry in the aeon-blasted plains of Hrotok, where ageless epochs ago the diaphanous Kralar Beasts filtered down from distant and unseemly stars, but now where only the lugubrious spatula mammoths of Zod scurry to and fro.  Matt punched a lot of them in the face, but lugubrious spatula mammoths are, for the most part, buttheads, so no harm was done, and it served to hone his skills in battle.

 

            After he reached the Age of Ascension, Matt did as all his forefathers had done since the first Greltak was spawned from the primordial seas of Zrug, and went to the nameless abyss of pain known in the tongues of man as Falling Creek Middle School.  There he began at last to press his crimefighting skills into service, after a certain unnamable band director (who we shall simply refer to as Mr. Weaseltrousers) threw a bus at him.  He then met Samuel L. Jackson in a comic book shop and after learning his true destiny from him, vanquished him, as he would so many other servants of evil in years to come.

           

            In that fateful summer of the Year of the No-Legged Hamster, Matt traveled high in the Himalayas to the forgotten and desuetudinous monastery of Monag the Vile (who is really a terribly nice fellow, who merely had the misfortune to inherit one of the least desirable family names to be found in Tibet).  There he learned the ancient art of ham mastery, as well as the methods by which baboons are converted into gumdrops.  His roommate was a Yeti named Carl (though he may have just been a Sherpa with a back-hair problem), and they went on all manner of wacky misadventures, paintballing yaks, and getting into Old Farmer Xolag’s vegetable garden.

 

            Matt was called away from this place of refuge and meditation though, when he learned that his nemesis, Matt Damon, was trying to unravel the very fabric of the universe and act like a big ol’ ‘tard.  Fortunately, all those years of mammoth-punching had not been in vain, and soon the damonic menace was no more.  Matt then went crazy, Broadway Style, and proceeded to take part in an altogether impressive montage in the big city, featuring the Rockettes, a panoply of different urban-looking neon signs, and Rudy Guliani singing the Banana Boat song (it was far to weird to even imagine, so I’d advise you not to try if you value your sanity).

 

            After this, Matt moved on to Meadowbrook High School, which, as I’m sure you all already know, is in fact an elite academy for superheroes (and more than a few skanks) owned by Captain Picard and Henry Kissinger.  While there, he single-handedly slaughtered the nest of Zoltrogs which had been dwelling beneath the cafeteria and yoinking all the breadtangles of pizza every night.

 

            From thence, he spent some years traveling around the untamed wilds of Virginia (or as it is often called, The Nebraska of the East).  There he wrestled with grizzly bears and his own inner turmoil, eventually emerging victorious over both, and making a totally sweet battle coat out of the one (the bear, I mean.  He tried to make a totally sweet battle coat out of his own personal demons, but it just looked really grungy and smelled like old automatic transmission fluid and beans).  Once, he punched a Nazi off of a flaming zeppelin, and another time, Jimmy Carter was about to wreck an orphanage with a giant mechanical spider he built, and Matt selflessly crashed his Sport Utility Vehicle into it, foiling yet another plan by Jimmy Carter to establish anew his ungodly reign of terror over the helpless.

 

            These days, Matt lives in Charlottesville, where he patrols the streets of that fabled burg by night (and sometimes just after brunch), rounding up hooligans, mountebanks, scoundrels, scalawags, and the original cast of Battlestar Galactica.  Though exact details are sketchy at best, one supposes that he has some sort of a funky orbital Watch Tower fortress thingie in geosynchronous orbit high above the surface of the Earth.  Or maybe he just rooms with some other dude to save money on rent, one can rarely say which with certainty.  Among his non-heroic activities, Matt maintains an active and cogitative blog, to which I would publish the link, but I’m sure he’ll leave me a comment after I get this posted and then you can just click on it.  So there.  So before I sign off for the day, thanks Smatt, for making the world a safer, and more awesomer place in which to reside.

     Okay, time for the blog you’ve all been waiting for.  The epic conclusion of the Ben’s Horrible Roommates Tetralogy.  It’s time for the first, and worst roommate I ever had, and the only one who I never defeated.  What you are about to read is the distilled sum of fully seven years of rage, so this is gonna be a long one.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Chuck: 

 

It was the Fall of 1998, cell phones were bigger, computers were slower, and I had yet to discover the panoply of joys which may be indulged in through the art of computer piracy.  It was a simpler time, and I was a simpler man.  A mere stripling of eighteen, I was off to JMU for my first semester of college.  Now, a lot of folks choose to room with a friend from high school for Freshman year, but all the other people from Meadowbrook were at least a coolness lever higher than me, and I somehow had a premonition that I was destined to have a long succession of dysfunctional and borderline psychotic roommate about whom I would one day write a series of wildly popular blogs.  I turned out to be right, by the way.

 

            I lived in a suite that year, with three rooms off of the common room, and five other guys, at least at first.  Across from my room was where Squeaky Mike and his roommate who never talked, so I’ll just call him Klaang the Voiceless.  Nextdoor is where Farhad lived with his roommate, who moved out about a month into the school year.  This particular development made me altogether envious because it in fact took about 3.5 yattoseconds for me to realize that my roommate was an unnatural abomination, a mix of beast and man, with table manners and hygienic practices worse than the worst of either, though I shall go into greater detail later.  The other thing that made me rather jealous of Farhad was the way that he was always having girls over.  For hours at a time, he’d be in there with the door closed, sometimes tow or three of them.  In time though, I realized that they were all in there listening to Elton John all the time and painting each others toenails.  At this point I became decidedly less jealous.  My roommate however, was Chuck, and this is his tale.

 

            Chuck hailed from Luray, Virginia, which if the billboards I’ve seen are true, is in a cave of some sort.  He was the earthly incarnation of sloth and gluttony, frequently even combining the two into a new vice, called gloth.  Let’s look then, at some of his more salient features of evil:

 

            He smelled.  Not like, say, someone who always goes to the gym and then doesn’t do their laundry smells.  Or even how someone who cannot bring himself to throw out any trash smells.  He smelled so bad that if I ever made an RPG, and one of the classes you could choose was the Stankomancer, “Stench of Chuck^®” would be his most powerful attack by far.  Seriously, if you opened the door, an almost palpable wave of noisomeness would push you back into the hallway.  I’m sure that so many people probably tried to break into my room that year, but never made it through the door because upon opening it they became convinced that a very flatulent and unwashed yak had perished in the room some two weeks prior.  You know that scene in Se7en, where there’s that drug dude in the room and there’s about a billion of those little pine tree air fresheners?  It was like that, only I used Glade Plug-ins™.  Really, I had like, an entire power strip full of them just hanging on the wall.  And it still didn’t cover the loathsome fetor of decay which hung o’er the room like a burning pall of butt.  He never did any laundry either, and would lounge around all day on the ever browner sheets of his bed, wearing the same exact sweatpants (regular pants not being manufactured in his size, apparently) looking like some late and decadent Roman emperor.

 

            He was the laziest man ever.  Sometimes, for up to two or three days in a row, I’d never come back to the room and find him out of bed.  Class was a thing completely foreign to him, It seemed, as were most other activities involving exertion of any kind.  There is a passage in the Bible, in the Book of Proverbs or something, where some wise old prophet is describing at length all the sins of the world, and one of them runs thusly “A lazy man will not even move his hand from his shirt to feed himself.”  I never believed that anyone could be that lazy.  I was wrong.  Now, JMU had a pretty good dining plan, and really, pretty much anytime during the day, you could just head on out to any of the 78 different little eateries on campus and get something to eat.  This was too much work for Chuck.  Sometimes he’d wake up in the afternoon and lie in bed for hours, and now and then lament his hunger, “God, I’m so hungry!” he would say, as if he was chained to a rock in the desert somewhere instead of 100 yards away from a place that made tolerably good submarine sandwiches.  And he’d do this, for like, three hours.  It was surreal.  Eventually he’d usually order a pizza and then eat it all in one sitting while making sounds as if someone was trying to dispose of a walrus by putting it through a garbage disposal.

 

            He snored.  Not just like normal people snore.  He was so loud that nearby airports complained about all the noise that he made.  I was so sleep deprived that year it wasn’t even funny.  I’d go out to the library and catch a nap a couple of times a week just to get enough rest to stay awake.

 

            He was a connoisseur.  He was, you see, a film major, which apparently meant he ought to spend sixteen hours a day watching really bad movies.  But he never called them movies, he said “films.”  “Zombie Hacksaw Nightmare Horror 5 is a wonderful film, isn’t it?” he would say, as if we were busy talking about Citizen Kane or something.  Also, when most people see something funny, they laugh.  This is the natural human response to humor, and is one of the best ways to pick out the space aliens who walk among us.  When Chuck saw something funny though, he’d just chuckle airily, and with a worldly tone in his voice say, “Ah, this amuses me.”

 

            Near the end of the year at least, he was around less, probably because I left a message on my computer which implied that the radiation shield in my monitor had failed and prompt evacuation was recommended.  He was, in short, a combination of the worst attributes of Comic Book Guy and Jabba the Hutt.  On the bright side, it made all my other bad roommates after that seem ever so much better by comparison.

(Okay, now nobody freak out or anything, I know I still have one more crazy roommate story to tell, but it turns out I'm gonna be really busy tonight and don't have the time to write it right now.  As such, I'm gonna post a back-up blog I wrote for just such an occasion as this, and tomorrow I'll get the epic tale of Chuck posted)

            Dick Cheney, Klarr Skullsplitter, Mr. Chinchillatrousers, MC Crackabarrel, The Littlest Jawa, Shirley Temple.  Many names, one man.  Yes, Dick Cheney gets around, and gets a lot of play right here on my humble blog.  But who is this man of mystery really?  From whence did he come?  Where did his hair go?  What about monkeys?  These are the questions that haunt us all, but today, thanks to minutes of painstaking research followed by about half an hour of just making stuff up, I have at last found the answers.  Come with me now, gentle reader, as we embark on a magical and educational voyage to at last unravel a mystery which has tugged at the mind of man since out first apelike ancestors back during the 70’s grunted up at the night sky in wonderment: Who is Dick Cheney?

 

            Dick Cheney was born on the planet Geldar, over 20,000 of our Earth Years ago.  His parents, Bob and Bertha Cheney, we sadly devoured by a oliaginous Slaak Beast at his 5^th birthday party, leaving little Dick Cheney alone in a fearsome and coniferous world.  Fortunately, he was taken in and raised by a tribe of arboreal cheese pandas, who taught him the way of the warrior, and how to burp through his nose without burning off all his nosebuds from the inside.  It was during this time that he came upon a mysterious radioactive meteor that had fallen into to forbidden and delicious Jungle of Nerock one night.  It glew with a smoldering intensity and kept at bay the rapacious Gruuna Hounds who dwell in that land, so young Dick Cheney passed the night in it’s warmth, though all his tribesmen were much afraid.  Little did he know, that as he slept, the radiation from the meteor was altering his very DNA, making immortal, and a diabolical genius.

 

            After leading his troops to victory during the Wars of Thraanek, Dick Cheney studied the ways of the Jedi under Master Yoda.  Yoda however sensed much fear in him and sent him on his way.  Dick Cheney then went on a most excellent adventure through history, learning totally sweet stuff about stuff from all the most awesome people in history.  Genghis Khan, Batman, Mr. T, George Washington, and your Mom all taught their ancient ninja battle-axe skillz to Dick Cheney, little knowing the terrible use to which he would one day put them.

 

            At last, Dick Cheney settled in the 70’s, where his totally phat disco crimefighting powers made him the toast of the town.  Unfortunately, this town was Hoboken, New Jersey, and it’s dark and seething influence began to corrupt his once noble heart.  Studying under Evil Emperor John Travolta, Dick Cheney, or Darth Cheney as he soon came to be called, was a scourge of all that is good, and a blight on the pants of America.  After a climactic battle with lots of fire and robots and John Williams music, Richard M. Nixon pushed him into a big river full of magma and blithely walked away, certain that the Dick Cheney menace was no more.  In fact, Dick Cheney’s 70’s helmet hair had absorbed most of the magma, saving his life, but rendering him pretty much totally bald.

 

            Dick Cheney then went on a totally sweet road trip for a while, riding around on his airspeeder, running over ewoks as he zipped along the highways of our great nation, as he puzzled out the recent events of his life and listened to Harry Chapin albums for like, eighteen hours a day.  At last, he realized the error of his ways, and opened Halliburton, which was originally designed to turn toxic waste into puppies.  Sadly something went horribly wrong, and he ended up building a Death Star instead.  In the end though, the She-Ra Christmas Special showed him the true meaning of Christmas and he only Death Starred Canada, making it the God-forsaken wasteland that we all know and love today.

 

            In the 80’s he got an electric robo-baboon heart installed, thus allowing him to finally shoot lightning bolts at all those who incurred his wrath, as well as tour with the Moody Blues for a few years.  He also invented the delicious three-ham omelet, and helped Ronald Reagan get his groove back.  Though it is little talked about today, he was also part of a secret plot to over throw the Soviet Union by stealing the Great Red Spot off of Gorbachev’s head, though sadly, Gorbachev was wearing a hat that day and it didn’t work out, forcing Dick Cheney to instead reveal to the world that Vanilla Ice was actually totally lame, thus performing almost as great a service to mankind.

 

            Dick Cheney now lives in a totally sweet hollowed-out undersea volcano fortress with his wife, Lon Cheney, and their son, Cobra Commander (he wants to be a firetruck when he grows up).  He owns a submarine that turns into a helicopter, and spends most of his time sitting around in a wife-beater eating Cheez Doodles^Ò, punching Osama Bin Laden in the face, and shamelessly trying to get all his friends to read my blog (as all good people do, you know).

 

            So there you go, Dick Cheney, a man for all seasons and all seasonings.  Know him, love him, buy him a beer, he is truly, a very strange man about whom I just wrote a terribly silly biography.  Good night.

           There are, in this world of ours, certain strange and mysterious places, where people are wont to disappear.  The Bermuda Triangle, Canada, Stonehenge, all occasionally devour people as a washing machine occasionally eats socks.  But one place that most people don’t know about is Blue Ridge Hall, where my senior year roommate Mike the 2^nd mysteriously disappeared.  As you may recall, my first roommate of the year, Wanna Be Rapper Mike left for better and angrier things halfway through first semester, and by second semester, they had found me a new roommate, also named Mike (if you find that to be confusing, at least you can take comfort in the fact that you’re not as confused as Mike ended up being).  Mike the 2^nd really bore no resemblence at all to Mike the 1^st, save for the fact that I’m writing about them, and that both of them were recently revealed to have been complicit in the Watergate scandal responsible for the end of the Nixon Administation (Concussion Mike and the Nixon Administration would, by the way, be a totally sweet name for a band). This, is his story.

 

            Mike was from somewhere, probably in Nova, but I’m not sure exactly where, so let’s just say he was from Tibet.  Now, Tibet is a grand place and all, but apparently the Sherpas who raised him never really explained a lot of things about the vast urban jungle of Harrisonburg to him, so he was quickly overwhelmed by all the bright shiny objects to be found so close at hand.  It started off well enough, he didn’t really like rap music, he was totally clear on the fact that he was, in actuality, white, and he seemed at least as socially inept as myself, so there was no real need to worry about walking in on him with a girl.  Alas, as events would soon unfold, it turned out that there was to be precious little chance of walking in and finding him in the room at all.

 

            Before we get into the cautionary tale proper, a quick anecdote: Wanna Be Rapper Mike had, while he still lived in the room, composed a voice mail message reflecting his unique class and unspeakable coolness.  It went a little like this: "Yo yo yo! M to the I to the K to the E isn’t in his crib right now, so leave him a message and he’ll holla back to ya boyyeeee!”  Also, imagine that this message was done in complete seriousness, it was how he talked and everything.  So anyways, when Mike 2: Revenge of Mike moved in, he naturally found this pre-existing message to be absolutely hilarious and decided to keep it.  Unfortunately for me, all his friends found it to be equally funny, and every night, at about the hour his friends would start to all get drunk and bored (4:30 in the afternoon), the phone would start ringing off the hook.  If I answered, all I got was a wastoid telling me to hang up so he could get Mike’s voice mail.  It was funny at first, then annoying, and then after Mike disappeared, it didn’t happen so much.

 

            Right then, on to the vanishing.  Now Mike, it turned out to be the case, spent all his time partying and hanging out at frats.  Either more considerate or merely less determined than my previous roommates though, when he went out late drinking and whoring, he’d simply spend the night at wherever it was be passed out for the night, and not come back until the next day.  At first.  This lifestyle, is seems, agreed so very much with him that he soon stared spending entire weekends away from the room, not dragging back in until Monday afternoon sometimes.  As time wore on, he was clearly sucked into a whirling vortex of wine, women, and song as I saw less and less of him.

 

            Eventually it got to the point where he’d only show up a couple of times a week to change and catch a shower, then head back out again to a life more busy and fraught with wonder than my own.  It was like that episode of Deep Space 9 where that planet kept phasing in and out of our space-time continuum, but every time they phased out, it took longer and longer for them to come back.  In time the mystery became more widespread.  People would occasionally call asking where he was, or the Hall Director would drop by with some papers or something and express some surprise that I hadn’t seen him in a week.

           

            It didn’t really down on me how very odd this all was, until one day at church, I casually remarked that it had been nearly a fortnight since I’d seen Mike, and everyone else was completely freaked out.  It was too late to worry though, and since no unrecognizable bodies had turned up in Newman Lake recently, I assumed he was merely off exploring higher planes of existence, or was simply perpetually plastered.  Some two days later, he returned at last.  “I’ll bet you’ve been wondering where I’ve been for the last month,” he said laconically.  I indicated that yes, I had rather noticed his absence of late.  He then told me that he had been at a party a couple of weeks ago and someone had boisterously pushed his head through a wall.  He had passed out in the frat house for three days or so, when somebody became concerned and took him to the hospital, where they discovered that he’d suffered a concussion and decided to keep him for a couple of weeks.  “I’m mostly better now,” he reassured me, “but I keep forgetting where everything is.  Have you seen my keys?”

 

            Later than afternoon he departed again, and never again did he darken the door of my room, as best I can reckon.  Sometimes I’d return from morning classes and think that I could subtly discern some trace that he had been there, a paper on the desk that looked out of place, or some nigh imperceptible shift in the massive and oddly-shaped heap of increasingly stank laundry on his bed.  Finals week came and went, and yet no sign appeared of him.  Moving out day rolled around, and though I stayed until the last hour, I could not espy him. 

 

Never did I hear of him again; and since the police never asked me any questions concerning his disappearance, I can only conclude that something more than meets the eye had transpired beneath my very nose.  It is, for instance, possible that he transcended his way to a higher plane, where, like some modern Prometheus, he lies forever chained to a cliff in punishment of his late dawdling with us mere mortals.  Or perhaps the Mother Ship came for him at last, carrying him back to his homeworld of Spanckulon 7 to regale the elders of his race with merry and ribald tales of the lives of the Earthmen.  Or maybe he just got wasted, flunked out, and came back the next day to collect all his junk.  Whichever it is, he remains forever a burning enigma to all the human race.  And if you’re out there somewhere reading this, Concussion Mike, I hope you found your keys.

           My first senior year of college did not begin auspiciously.  It was the case, alas, that I had been kidnapped by an army of tiny yet well-organized baboons, and had as such been unable to get my housing registration form turned in on time.  To make matters worse, the campus housing office was not inclined to listen to the magical and fantastic tale of my daring escape from the banana mines of Mobatu Ubangi, Iowa.  At length, however, they relented and told me that they would put me in for a last minute dorm reservation.  The downside was, I ended up in Blue Ridge Hall.

 

            Blue Ridge Hall, much like the Berlin Wall, had been built some years before pretty much overnight.  Though it had been intended to be a temporary fix for a chronic housing shortage, it remains there to this day, squatting with an ill-favored look upon University Road.  It was also approximately fifty three mile from the dorm to all the rest of campus, but happily enough, half a block to Sheetz and the Price Club.  As a result, I did relatively little learning that year, but subsisted on a steady diet of Shmuffins and acquired a number of fifty gallon drums of pickle relish.  It was also in this dorm that I was so very fortunate as to be assigned a room with Wanna Be a Rapper Mike.

 

            Mike, you see, had originally been planning to room with a friend of his, who tragically ended up flunking out, or being arrested, or possibly merely turning out to be imaginary.  At any rate, he was less than delighted to see me.  He was, in fact, less than delighted about most things, as he possessed a rage collection which would make even the Incredible Hulk or Alan Keyes envious.  Also, he thought he was a hardcore gangsta from the inner city.  He was in fact, a white guy, whose somewhat diminutive stature and 24 hour a day diet of rap music had warped him into one of my most memorable mutant roommates.

 

            Mike, you see, loved rap. It was his very reason for living, and as a result he played it every single waking moment and most of his asleep ones as well.  I personally, am not a great fan of rap, but really even if he’d been playing something infinitely more palatable to the ear of a cultured and hoity toity gentleman such as myself, it would have gotten to be epically lame in short order.  In time, retaliation became all too necessary, and I found I needed to dip into my voluminous polka collection for ordinance (polkas, of course, being his one weakness)(well, okay, polkas and all other things in the world that made him angry) (of which there were many).

 

            He also believed himself to be quite the lady’s man, and to be fair, he did seem to have some luck with the sorority girls.  Unfortunately for him, all too frequently when he would be sitting on the floor of the room with his date, whispering sweet nothings in her ear, wooing her as the melodic chords of “In My Projects” gently wafting out the open window, I would walk in, laden with books and Shmuffins, a five gallon kerosene can under one arm and a bag full of brewing supplies under the other.  For some reason, this seemed to dispel the atmosphere of romance he had so carefully wrought, as he usually let me know afterwards.

 

            He wore armbands.  All the time.  Now, I realize that I’m not exactly “hip” or “with it” or even “Not Living In the Late Renaissance Anymore”  but it is my general understanding that armbands are a thing one wears to keep ones hands from getting all sweaty whilst riding a bike.  It seemed however, that if Mike did have a bike, it was either invisible, like Wonder Woman’s jet, or it was nonexistent, like Wonder Woman’s pants.  Perhaps he merely had unnaturally sweaty palms, like he was bitten, in his youth, by a radioactive sweat monster, granting him altogether preternatural powers of perspiration that allowed him to fight crime but at the horrible cost of always making it difficult for him to hold onto the handlebars of his mythical bike, and making it really disgusting to shake hands with him.  Either way, it was silly.

 

            Finally, he was dead set on joining a frat.  As a result, he was perpetually having these guys over who were all complete buttweasels.  “Argh! I’m so angry, Biff and Myron are such buttweasels!” he would often tell me.  At last though, his unprincipled sucking up to the frat gods paid off, and he was, happily, not around so much.

 

            The end came suddenly, and awesomely.  One day, Harrisonburg’s only armband store went out of business.  Or maybe his frat gave him a doofy nickname like “Ragemeister Shizzlemah.”  Or maybe the aliens that were trying to steal his thoughts finally got to him.  Whatever.  Anyways, I returned home from hanging out with some of the roughly 50,000 hippies who lived in the dorm to find him presiding over Ragefest 2001 (which is really just a metaphor I just made up to convey his severe ragefullness; don’t bother looking to see if it’s a real holiday, like Spocktoberfest).  Lest the rest of the world remain ignorant of  his burning hatred for all things living, Mike had wisely decided that the best course of action was to blast rap music as loudly as the tiny little girly speakers on his computer could.  I was in no mood for such things, as I had just finished watching Braveheart and drinking about a quart of really bad, really strong, really awesome dormmade wine with the 50,000 hippies down the hall. War had been declared, and I answered the call to arms.  Deftly I perused my music arsenal, sparing to weapon which might grant me victory.  Frankie Yankovic was called into service, innumerable 80’s cartoon theme songs were drafted.  Indeed, I even plunged into the depths of my Shame Folder, and found some stuff by Brittany Spears and The Partridge Family.  Despite his rage, my adversary could not prevail against me, for the past few months of continual rap exposure had allowed me to build up a great tolerance to it.  Mike, however, was completely unprepared for Harry Belafonte and all too quickly, the day was won.

 

            Mike went off to live in his frat, where I heard later that he was taking anger management courses and remaining on track for a rage-induced heart attack by the age of 35.  He also shaved his head and looked like a giant thumb with armbands on.  I however, celebrated my newfound freedom by learning to make chainmaille, and for the rest of the semester, the room was mine.  What happened in the Spring though, is another story entirely…

           Most of us have probably never lived with a celebrity in college, and other than that time Alf stayed with me for a couple of weeks until the police stopped looking for him, I haven’t either.  I came close though, in so much as I once had a roommate who was, in fact, the reincarnation of infamous child star, Fred Savage (Perhaps you believe that Fred Savage is yet among the living. Perhaps you are a fool.)  For many years, I have regarded this particular episode in my life as a less than pleasant one.  But now, I’m going to make fun of it, and get a blog out of the whole sordid affair as well.  I feel better already.  Come with me then, across the mists of time, back to the magical Spring of 2000, where my story begins.

 

            ‘Twas the beginning the second semester of my Sophomore year at JMU, and once again, I had decided to go with the random freakshow lottery method of roommate selection.  I was not to be disappointed.  For you see, my roommate from the Fall had found life with me to be not nearly enough of a haze of drugs, skanks, and alcohol, and had therefore been so very kind as to join a frat a week into the year.  Upon my return to school after Kwanzaa break, therefore, I found that I had been given a new roommate.  His name was Kevin (really), and he was the very image of Kevin from the Wonder Years, with one horrible difference.

 

            You know that episode of Star Trek where they go to the mirror universe?  And everybody from this universe lives there too, only everyone is evil and skanky and violently insane and Spock had a goatee (this, by the way, was back when a goatee made you look diabolical, rather than making you look like Comic Book Guy)?  It was as if, through some terribly act of interdimensional juxtaposition, Fred Savage from the evil universe had come to live with me.

 

            I think I first began to realize that things weren’t going to go well, when I overheard a phone call that he was having with one of his frat homies (Kevin, you see, wanted to join a frat too, he was merely very bad at it).  Though I could hear but one side of the conversation, it was both extremely disturbing and ridiculous.  Here then, are a few of the lines I yet remember:

 

“All I want to know is why every time I pass out at a party, I wake up covered in peanut butter!”

 

“I told you guys all not to write on me, especially when I’ve got alcohol poisoning!”

 

“And don’t think I don’t know it’s you who got everybody calling me Mr. Frosty!”

 

            Something, it seemed, was delightfully awry.  And so the madness began.  I myself speculate that much like Wonder Years Kevin, he had a persistent internal monologue (I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to learn an important lesson about growing up), which ultimately played a major part in his eventual loopiness.  He would return most nights at about four in the morning, reeking of peanut butter and Incredible Hulk flavored Slurpees.  Upon getting his bearings, he would usually hold a heated and angry dialogue with all the invisible people who, it seemed, lived in his closet (I checked once, quite thoroughly, and there was no one there.  Also, the entrance to Narnia wasn’t even there).  I suspect that they were the lost souls of Winnie and that guy who grew up to be Marilyn Manson, come back to haunt him for having killed them both in his home universe, but I can’t be sure.  What was clear though, was that he and the closet voices frequently disagreed, but they held some strange power over him.  “Our unholy hatred for all things living can only be appeased by you playing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” a hundred times!” they must have said, for with many profane protests, Kevin invariably did just that, usually singing along to better sate their lust for weepy drunk music.  Alas, even his computer must have mocked him, for he would often kick and curse it for not being a Mac.  “Remember when I told you I was a Mac Kevy-Poo? I lied, you fool! Mwahahahaha!” It seemed to say, delighting in the torment it heaped upon his fevered brow.

 

            Near the end, the madness overtook him.  He began to freak out more and more because I was always building swords out in the suite.  And the popcorn bags I left sitting on my desk seemed to deal with him far more harshly than did any of his own possessions, “Haha, Ben left us here on his desk because he knew we would make your life a living Hell while, even while he’s out at class! Bleughrrrrgh!”  they must have roared at him in my absence.  And so it came to pass, that one night as I returned from my nightly ramble around campus, I found a note awaiting me.  “You Win!” it said, and I took it to mean that he had decided to take his leave of me.  The next two weeks passed in a curious silence, as we neither of us had anything to say to the other.  The one break in quietude came one night as I was busy reading up on Dick Cheney online.  Kevin dragged himself from bed and left the room, but upon his return he came over and fixed his baleful eye upon me.  “Can you, without being too self-righteous, tell me what exactly you think you’re doing,” quoth he.  “I’m surfin’ the Web!” was my gleeful reply; and with that, he spake no more.

 

            The rest of the year passed well enough, but the end of my tale comes not until the Fall of the next year.  Now, it is that case that while every issue of the JMU paper contains a crime log, the first issue after Summer Vacation is invariably the most interesting, for it includes all the crimes that transpired over the break (I myself never graced this most august of crime logs, my exploits taking place mostly during the Winter months).  It was there though, that I read of Kevin’s end.

 

“Krazy Wonder Years Kevin, Ben’s old roommate, was arrested by campus police June 23, when he was found hiding behind a convertible in Z lot.  Upon further inspection, it was discovered he had been throwing sand from a nearby construction site into the car.  He was expelled.”

 

            And so it came to pass that Kevin was banished from the sunny land of Virginia, and cast back to the seething black morass of inhumanity that first spawned him, New Jersey.

 

(If this one goes over well, I’ve got at least three other roommates of notable strangeness to relate the sad tales of, if anyone is interested)

   Most of us have coworkers that we dislike.  Some of them snarf in the coffee urn, some corner you in your cubicle and mooch off your life force like annoyingly boorish vampires, others merely spend all afternoon talking loudly on the speakerphone.  I am not so lucky, for I work with some most disagreeable individuals who incessantly loaf around, producing nothing of value, try to gather inside information by eavesdropping on important meetings, take three hour lunch breaks and last but not least, flee from squirrels and poop all over the sidewalk.  Who, you may ask are these dreadful fellow employees of mine?  They are, quite literally, chickens, each with their own unique flavor of evil and lack of useful skills (during a time when we’re on a very tight budget, no less!).  Follow me now, won’t you?  As we learn more about these Annoying Chickens of Henricus!

 

            First, we have Henry, the rooster.  Cock of the walk, he is also the pure an putreficent incarnation of evil in this world.  I can hardly think of where to begin as I ponder the depths of his depravity.  He is both vengeful and cowardly, an almost palpable pall of darkness hangs over him, granting him, it almost seems, a strange cadaverous aura of grandeur.  Forever beating the tar out of his harem like an impotent sheik, he flees at the very sight of a squirrel in the chicken coop and quakes beneath the junipers whenever a hawk draws near.  He randomly runs into blazing fires, and then goes mad when you chase him from the flames.  He draws curiously near when you brandish an axe, but flees like the very gates of Hell itself were flung open behind him if you shake a blanket at him.  Recently, he’s developed a case of termites or some such thing in his legs, and we fear that we’ll just have to cut off his legs and hope that his new ones grow in straight enough for him to gimp around on until we can build him a little Professor X hoverchair.  He is given to sudden fits of running off of the bluff, yet one more suicidal tendency that has yet, alas, to be his undoing.

 

Next, there’s Kate, the smallest of the group, she’s the only one that ever lays any eggs, a virtue she more than compensates for by having the most insufferable case of wanderlust ever to drive a chicken abroad.  Rarely does a day pass that we don’t hear Henry’s plaintive yet loathsome cry as yet again Kate wanders far afield in search of worms or shiny objects.  Sometimes for up to an hour on end, his piercing call will shatter the tranquility of Henricus, until at last he realizes that she’s only just behind that tree over there.  At least then all present get to watch the ensuing smackdown, as Henry flies (figuratively speaking, of course) into a livid and all-consuming rage, like I do whenever I think about how Ben Affleck pollutes the face of the Earth by his very existence.

 

Jackie is the largest and most useless of the hens, frequently getting stuck in the vegetable garden fence.  Her only natural defense is being too fat to be carried away by a bald eagle, and playing dead when threatened.  Unfortunately, she rarely keeps the act up for more than five seconds, so usually I’m not lulled into a false sense of dead chicken perception.  Usually.

 

Finally there’s Farah.  She suffers from a terminal case of Ugmo, an unfortunate condition which makes her look so freaky that decent people recoil from her in horror.  Also, she’s a walking toxic waste hazard (I’ll leave the details to your imagination).

 

So those are the abominable Hell chickens which whom I work (The Abominable Hell Chickens, might I add, would be a totally sweet name for a band).  Stay tuned for further updates about them, especially when Henry finally loses his baby legs.

   There is, deep within the hearts of all good men, a deep and abiding vacuum, an empty space, devoid of something inexpressible, a hole which can be filled only by a show about a bunch of rodents who live in a tree and fight the forces of evil.  Thank heaven then, that in the late 80’s Disney executives were drunk enough one day that someone fooled them into signing into existence “Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers”, a show, which by it’s mere existence markedly improves the quality of life on this planet, while actually watching it has been known to heal the lame, raise the dead, cause undue amounts of mouse attraction.  Let’s take a look at the cast, shall we?

 

            First, there was Chip, who was new to crime fighting, after years of running around naked and harassing Donald Duck (really).  However, in order to pay off his mounting gambling debts and nut addiction, he decided to start fighting crime.  You can tell he’s the leader because he wears a bomber jacket and a fedora.  Seriously, when’s the last time you know someone who wore a bomber jacket and a fedora who wasn’t the leader of their gang?  I didn’t think so.  Also, Chip was perpetually consumed by his desire for the one female member of the team, but for reasons which will soon become pitifully self-evident.

 

            Dale was the raging Yang to Chip’s sober Yin. The combination of his loud Hawaiian shirt, lack of pants, and ill-concealed love of nuts clearly paints him as the most flamboyant one of the group (if you know what I mean).  Also, his red nose clearly betrays his status as the doofus of the group, as well as being a telling sign of both his uncontrolled alcoholism and shameful reindeer ancestry.

 

            Gadget Hackwrench was the only female member of the group.  She was also the only one that wore pants of any kind.  Though both Dale would occasionally make a half-hearted attempt to win her affection, it was clear that his first love was in fact Chip.  Chip therefore, with his dashing good looks and process of elimination, was pretty much destined to end up with her from the outset.  The only thing that kept this from ever kept the two of them from truly having a relationship was the highly controversial interspecies nature of their relationship.  Chip, you see was a chipmunk (Tamias striatus), while Gadget was a long-tailed field mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus).  Notice how they’re not even the same genus?  Hell, they aren’t even in the same family!  For comparison’s sake, imagine your sister getting engaged to a blue-butted pygmy marmoset.  To the rodent community, this would have been even freakier.  Speaking of freakiness, while I was researching this article, I found that Gadget is in fact the subject of a sizeable web-ring and fanfic club.  Now, I didn’t actually read any of the stories posted, but by looking over the titles and speculating wildly, I think I can safely say that the internet is indeed home to far greater perversities than ever I had imagined.

 

Monterey Jack was an Australian Mouse, who had raised Gadget from the time she was a mere squeakling, after her father died when the farmer’s wife cut off his tail with a carving knife.  He was the largest of the group, being the actual size of movie star and human speedbump Danny DeVito.  His sidekick was a fly whose name I can remember at the moment, so I’m just gonna call him Krell Fleshrender, who only hung around with Monterey Jack so that he might one day feast upon his decaying corpse, assuming he didn’t end up being brought back to vivid and terrible semi-life by mad scientists or Canadians.  He was also the big, overzealous, get everyone in trouble, guy, who existed in part to make all the other characters looks smarter, a common fixture in 80’s cartoons and totalitarian governments (“Who left all this perestroika all over the Kremlin?” “Gorbachev!!” insert laughtrack here).

 

Their nemeses were fairly standard for the genre, one was a fat cat named, creatively enough, Fat Cat, while the other was a mad scientist named Dick Cheney.  Usually, they wanted to harm little woodland creatures, causing said woodland creatures to call in the Rescue Rangers, like the A-Team, only furrier.  Our heroes all lived in a fiberglass tree that they took over after they killed off the Keebler elves with rabies and other less mentionable diseases.

 

One noticeable gap in the cross-section of rodent demography in the show was the conspicuous lack of squirrels.  Mysterious, no?  Not at all.  In fact, when you’ve known as many squirrels as I have, you begin to learn why they’re referred to by so many biologists and international rock stars as the white trash of the rodent world.  Nasty creatures, squirrels, step on your face as soon as say hello to you.  Why, these days a man can hardly set foot outside his door without seeing a whole clan of them passed out drunk on home-brew and their own debauchery, practically falling out of the trees above you, with all their tiny little rusted out Ford Pintos up on tiny little cinder blocks in their front yards.  If there was a law, it’d be agin’ ‘em.

 

Sorry about that, it’s just that my hatred for squirrels burns with the all-consuming fire of a thousand fiery suns and last week one of them pooped on me at work.  So yeah, as soon as the conquest of Richmond is complete, all the squirrels are getting evicted.

    Most of us drive to work in the morning.  Except for Amish people, welfare recipients, and Superman, though I’m fairly certain that neither of my readers fall into those categories.  And, like most people, few things strike dread into my little Ben heart like seeing one of those signs that tells you that half the road is closed and so you get into the lane that’s going to be staying open and then watch as all the selfish buttweasels of the road zoom past you in the soon-to-be-closed lane, merging at the last moment at the expense of more generous souls than themselves (Buttweasels of the Road, by the way, would be a totally sweet name for a band).  But one thing you are not likely to see as you drive to work, is Screech and the Road Crew (which would also make a stellar name for a band).  The other day though, that is exactly what I saw.

 

            It was, I believe, a Tuesday (that’s Dia del pantalones de los yacs, for all my readers South of the Border), or possibly some other day.  Anyway, as I drove along down Chippenham Parkway, named for the abundant (and resplendent) ham fields of Chesterfield, I passed a road crew.  In most respects, this was an ordinary enough road crew, a bunch of tough-looking guys, wearing wife beaters and jeans, standing around leaning on their shovels as their foreman gave them their marching orders for the day.  The foreman however, was not just any foreman. He was, in a word, Screech.  Yes, good reader, it was as if Screech himself had returned from the dead, or from South America, where he’s raising and army of Hitler clones, or possibly just hanging out in North Dakota, teaching baboons to do macramé, only to take up the mantle of highway foreman guy.  Now, as you might expect, most of the normal looking construction guys were looking at him kind of funny.  “Surely, Screech, the very world itself is your cashew.  What calls you from the marbled halls of your ivory palace to soil your hands with us mere Plebians?” they seemed to say.  But I think that for all of their wonder, it was not entirely unmingled with a newfound respect, like when Elvis joined the army, or when Darth Vader volunteered at that bake sale.

 

            Now, the question which next occupies my mind is this: What road construction project could possibly be so terribly important that Screech would return, whether from the very grave, or merely from the red-litten aeon-ageless City of Kadatheron, which rises lonely and majestic by the magical gumdrop river of Snarg.  All I can think of is that some higher power wishes to ease my daily commute to work.  Perhaps knowing of the recent plan between Twitch and I to conquer the world (or at least the Richmond Metro Area), the VDOT gods have desired to smooth my way along, by improving the last mile of Chippenham Parkway.  If this is so, I shall put up many temples and Chuck-E-Cheese’s in their honor when at last the triumphal day arrives.  Perhaps though, the forces behind this recent Screechly repaving are less than benevolent, and wish merely to lull me into a false sense of security, that they may speed me to my destruction all the sooner.  Only time will tell.  Even the wisest cannot always know the future, for as Twitch himself, diabolical genius that he is, once said, “Sometimes I just flap my arms, and hope something happens.”  Sobering words, and ones that we all ought take more to heart.