If you were to walk down the street and randomly ask people who their favorite astrophysicist is, most of them would say Stephen Hawking.  Okay, maybe some of them would say it was Albert Einstein, or Alf, or Donald Rumsfeld, but Stephen Hawking is still clearly in the top four.  Anyways, the thing is, if he’s so totally brilliant (and you know he is because he was on Star Trek once) how come he just rolls around all the time in that dinky little souped up wheelchair?  I mean, I’m sure he could probably build a toaster oven that’s smarter than both houses of Congress put together, so how come he’s riding around in Lincoln Continental of the wheelchair world?  The answer, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, is that there’s actually more to this situation than meets the eye.  But what could really be behind this bizarre contradiction between the inherent awesomeness of Stephen Hawking and the comparative lametude of his only modestly pimped out ride?

            After puzzling over this quandary, I think I’ve come to the only conclusion that fits with the facts available, which is of course, that Stephen Hawking, much like Captain Picard, is in fact Professor X, brilliant telepath and leader of a team of mutants who fight evil and other severely uncool things.  I’ll bet the he hates spending all day rolling around in that wheelchair of his doing PBS specials and sneaker endorsements, and as soon as he gets back to his fortress at night, he hops out and either puts on his powered exoskeleton or gets into some kind of awesome looking hoverchair that has like, a mini-fridge, and a DVD player, and some photon torpedoes, and maybe even a Mr. Coffee (except, since he’s in England, it would be Mr. Tea, which is like Mr. Coffee, but with more gold chains and a mohawk).  And then, I bet he has some kind of totally sweet underground tunnel thing that takes him to his secret base at the center of the Earth where, with his council of awesomeness (including such super-powered mutants as Bob Denver, Bob Dole, Wolverine and LeVar Burton) where he works tirelessly behind the scenes in all global affairs working ever for the good of mankind.

            Stephen Hawking is also probably just putting on an act when he talks like he’s just another world-famous physicist.  Like, when he’s down with all his mutant homies in the danger room, he’s always saying stuff like, “I came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of bubble gum,” or “Christmas came early this year, and Santa just brought you a punch in the face,” or maybe even, “Autobots, transform and roll out!” because as cool as he is, Stephen Hawking is not above using someone else’s battle cry if it works really well.  And Stephen Hawking and his four mutants probably each have a different ring of elemental power, (Bob Dole of course, has Heart) and by their powers combined, they could summon some benevolent nature spirit, but since Captain Planet is in rehab right now, the best they can probably hope for is Ralph Nader with a green mullet (the haircut, not the fish, unless it’s not an exclusive choice and he can have both, cause if you think anyone is gonna stand their ground when a green-mulleted fish-swinging Ralph Nader comes after them, you haven’t spent as much time out living on the streets as I have).

            And of course, they’d all travel around in some crazy tank that they got a the Thundercats’ garage sale, after Lion-o got taken away for abusing Snarf and Panthro finally got a full time gig as a jazz performer for those stupid robo-koalas that 3^rd Earth is infested with.  And maybe once in a while, they fight a robeast, just to keep things interesting.

            So yeah, next time someone tells you that Stephen Hawking is just another stuffy old white guy scientist, you make sure you set them straight on the subject.  Also, make sure you point out that he is totally the world champion when it comes to doing the robot dance.

            If there’s one thing that always comes to mind when you mention Little Orphan Annie (aside from showtunes that, when you sing them, will makes all your friends shun you like an Amish man with a cable modem and a zoot suit), it’s the fact that she’s something of an anatomical anomaly, insomuch as she has all white eyes.  Now, this has always seemed kind of creepy to me, but that’s beside the point.  What does matter though, is that this particular affliction of hers is extremely rare, being confined, in fact, to just three different individuals in the course of human history.  They are of course, Little Orphan Annie herself, Raiden the thunder god from Mortal Kombat, and Geordi LaForge, chief engineer of the U.S.S. Enterprise N.C.C. 1701-D (the very fact that I knew all that pretty much brands me as a geek for the rest of my life, but I think I already crossed that particular Rubicon of geekdom when I wrote an entire blog about the secret life of Snarf).  Now, I find it to be frankly incredible that there are only three people and/or thunder gods in the world who suffer from this particular ailment, without there being some kind of a connection.  There are a number of possible explanations for how these three very different people came to be united by a common trait like this, from all of them taking part in an ill-fated experimental contact lens trial to Little Orphan Annie going mad and biting the other two of them in some fevered ragamuffin frenzy (Ragamuffin Frenzy, by the way, would be a totally sweet name for a band).  When all is said and done though, I think that neither of these explanations makes any sense at all, leaving us with but a single option as to the common origin of these fabled and infamous three.

            That of course is this: they’re all siblings who were born to a poor family of Jell-O ranchers on the banks of the Mississippi River in Louisiana.  Every day they’d all gather on the front porch of their plywood gazebo, playing harmonica, eating moonpies, and building a small Thunderdome entirely out of dead squirrels and RC Cola cans.  There in their bastion of domestic bliss, they all grew up together, singing dirt chanties and carving possums into stylish yet modest swimwear.  Indeed, the three of them could have gone on indefinitely like that, dancing with catfish and turning marmots in to marmalade.  Alas, such an idyllic way of life can rarely be expected to endure forever, and this situation was no different.  Bill Cosby Industries bought out the family’s Jell-O farm, and the three children had to go their separate ways and try to make a name for themselves in the world, while sending back all they could spare to their poverty-stricken parents, Mumm-Ra and Imelda Marcos, who were living in a 24 hour pancake emporium with a generous all you can eat deal.

            Little Orphan Annie, who had always wondered why her parents had named her that instead of just “Annie” decided one of the many professional cheese wranglers who were making their way out West at the time, helping to meet the ever-increasing demand for tough and courageous men and women who could drive the vast herds of cheese across the Great Plains from the spawning pits of Nevada to the slicing yards of St. Louis (the patron saint of cheese, particularly Cheeses of Nazareth).  For many seasons Little Orphan Annie (who was getting really tired of trying to explain her most uncalled for name to everyone she met) drove her charge, a snarling horde of Goudas halfway across the nation, and might well have gone on indefinitely, were it not for the Great Cheese Shortage of aught seven, when a terrible blight struck the cheese herds and forced many cheese wranglers to head into the big city in search of other employment.  Unfortunately, there were no jobs to be had for a girl with creepy all white demon eyes and Little Orphan Annie had to start stealing car stereos and selling them on Ebay to get by.  Happily, she eventually met Dick Cheney’s grandfather, Daddy Warbucks, and now rules over a media empire of great snazzitude and awesomosity.

            Geordi LaForge had a much more challenging road ahead of him, for as soon as he left home, he was captured by slavers and forced to take part in an epic miniseries that people still watch today when they feel like they ought to see something important.  This miniseries is of course, Ken Burns’ An American Tragedy: The Disco Era.  After this though, Geordi made his way to public television, where he got a job as the host of Reading Rainbow, while going to night school and taking correspondence courses to become a certified starship engineer.  At last the break he had been waiting for came his way, when his old friend Worf came by for a dramatic reading of “Goodnight Moon” and mentioned in passing that the starship Enterprise needed more weird people on it, and the chief engineer spot was open.  So, donning a big funny looking hair clip to hide the whiteulosity of his eyes, Geordi LaForge was at last living his dream, to be best friends with an android and work on a spaceship run by the leader of the X-Men.

            The youngest of the three, little Raiden, knew all along that if he was going to make anything of himself, he was going to need a good education, so he got a part time job as a human refrigerator magnet, while taking classes at the local community college to earn his two year Be Some Kind of Ancient Japanese Thunder God or Something Degree.  It was the best three dollars he ever spent.  After graduating, Raiden made a name for himself with the publication of his classic book on growing up, “Are you there God, it’s me Raiden?” which told kids absolutely nothing of value, but was made into a Jerry Bruckheimer film some years later anyway.  When he heard about the upcoming video game, Mortal Kombat though, Raiden knew he had to have a part in it, and so, after beating out Matt Damon and Secretary of State Madeline Albright, he got the role, the royalties from which continue to support him to this very day.

            The three of them still keep in touch now and then, and they hold a big family reunion every year back on their ancestral farm, which they got back from Bill Cosby after an epic battle on top of a flaming Nazi dirigible.  For the most part though, they just keep on doing their own thing, although recent rumors suggest that they’ll all be taking part in next year’s big Broadway revival of “Alf!”the musical.

            As most of you astute and regular teacupmammoths.com readers know, Richmond is forever in peril of any number of sub terrene menaces, the foremost of which is, of course, Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, and his Legions of Other, Less Regal Mole People, who, from time to time, make their presence known by shaking up the city and stealing area lawn ornaments (in particular, they have an affinity for garden gnomes and those goofy looking old-lady-with-her-old-lady-drawers-showing things that are usually put up by old ladies whose sense of decency has decayed with the onset of geezerdom).  As such, most of the less jaded and ennui-infested among you will be shocked to learn that Massachusetts, home of Ted Kennedy and possibly maple syrup (who, thanks to recent legislation in that state, can finally marry each other) has recently suffered from an epidemic of exploding manholes in its more urban areas.  Yes, Massachusetts, long famed and venerated for the well-known non-volatility of its manholes, has been struck by the nightmare of every state (except for Wyoming, which as everyone knows, doesn’t exist), a flaming manhole epidemic (The Flaming Manhole Epidemic, by the way, would make a good name for a band, though not one I would ever want to be associated with).

            Now, you’re probably thinking exactly what I thought when I first learnt of this frighteningly hilarious new development, that clearly Spanky and his ilk (he does have ilk of course) had decided to move their operations Northward, in hopes of finding a city somewhere less courageous an silly than Richmond (good luck with that one, Spanky, Lord of the Mole People!).  However, it happens to be the case that Mole People cannot long survive without a steady supply of tobacco and ridiculous city council members, so the true cause of this most worrisome of developments way up North must be something even more sinister than the likes of Spanky.  What could possibly be so diabolically evil as to turn innocent and unsuspecting manholes into flaming doom pits?  Well, since one generally expects better of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Rat King is still settling into his new morning show with Katie Couric, there is but one conclusion left to us: Morlocks.

            I know, I know, morlocks are generally not supposed to show up until civilization has fallen and half the human race has devolved into a race of pretty, yet dimwitted Keebler elves.  And yet, while it remains all too obvious that people have a lot of catching up to do in the pretty department, dimwittedness is sweeping the nation like Beatlemania, assuming that Beatlemania made people into fools.  In any case, this recent spate of manhole detonations attests to the fact that for whatever reason, there are now enough dumb people in the world to feed a colony of morlocks (at least up in Massachusetts, though I’m sure I’m not the only one who suspected something like this was coming sooner or later up yonder).  Even now, they doubtless toil away far beneath the unsuspecting city streets, working away at maintaining all their ancient morlock kitchen appliances that they’ve forgotten how to use for their original purposes.  Though if they have a Zamboni machine down there or something, or maybe an old ferris wheel or an EasyBake Oven, that would actually be kind of cute (“Hurrrgh! Krog make Teddy Grahams! Mmmmm!).

            Really, we probably should have been expecting something like this, and been taking steps to prepare for it.  I mean, if there aren’t any morlocks yet, where did Michael Jackson, Ron Howard’s little brother (Zlontar Howard) and Mickey Rooney come from?  Obviously, they’re all part of a morlock advance force, sent to stupid up the human population and make us tastier to their evil masters down in the ancient and aeon-fabled caverns of Thraar (which as everybody knows, are smack dab right under Boston).  But take heart, for after consulting with all of the finest morlock experts in the world (except, of course, for the ones who are themselves morlocks, since that would be pretty retarded) I have come up with a number of ways that you can keep yourself safe from the Morlock Menace.

            First, if you’re ever walking by a manhole, and it explodes, and a voice from within the roiling flames asks if you’d like some candy, or possibly a new bicycle, just walk away, and go tell the nearest misunderstood Victorian time machine making guy what just happened.  If you can’t find one of them, go steal one of those angsty-looking manikins they have at Kohl’s and throw it down the manhole.  Morlocks are really pretty gullible, so they’ll eat it and spend the rest of the day coughing up cardigans (Coughing Up Cardigans, by the way, would be a totally excellent name for a band).  Also, next time you pass a manhole, even if it shows no sign of detonating in the near future, hop up and down on top of it while taunting the morlocks below.  Morlocks, you see, cannot abide a good stiff taunting, and any that hear you will probably become so angry and out of sorts that they’ll make a serious tactical error, such as setting themselves on fire or eating a boy band.  Finally, get some of those Bigfoot slippers and wear them every time you go out.  That way, any morlocks who happen to be watching you through a storm drain or something will think that you’re a Yeti or something, and since Yetis are called, not without good reason, “The Spam of the Giant Legendary Ape-Man World” the morlocks will probably just leave you alone and wait for someone tastier to go by.  Or, maybe you’d just be better off staying away from Massachusetts entirely until this whole thing blows over.

            Richmond, it is generally believed, is an island of civility and genteel good-manneredness in the ocean of crudity and buttweasels that makes up so much of the world today.  Even so, there are, every now and then, events which shatter this happy illusion of civilization and decency, turning brother against brother and threatening to summon forth the primal apelike nature of man in all it’s terrible glory.  What could possibly bring out this most base and ancient facet of human nature, you may ask?  The answer is that most lusted after thing in all the world, the four-year-old Henrico County surplus iBook.  And now that I’ve piqued your curiosity by appealing to your more salacious instincts, let me go way back a couple of months and start at the beginning.

            It all started about four years ago when Henrico County (named after King James’s eldest son, Prince County) decided that in order to make all it’s high school students more tech-savvy, it would issue iBooks to all of it’s incoming freshman class students.  This would have been an absolutely brilliant idea, except for the fact that when you give a bunch of high school kids, they rarely all rise up and with one voice exclaim, “Yay, now we can all work on improving our graphic design, HTML ad coding skills, all of which will improve our prospects for earning a living in the fast-paced technology-dependent society of today!”  Instead, they do what high school kids usually do if you give them computers, they download stuff of questionable legality and taste (like John Mayer CDs), play Solitaire in class, and try to hack into secure school files.  And those are the good ones.  Among the others, there was at least one kid who, upon hearing that iBooks are bulletproof (and really why wouldn’t they be?) Swung his into a wall like a baseball bat.

            So, here it is, four years later; the iBook program has cost about a bajillion dollars, Henrice County has not, amazingly enough, become the new Mecca of the Information Age (in the sense that every year millions of Cybermuslims make a pilgrimage there and a few hundred people end up getting trampled to death an/or stoned).  So, in an effort to cut their losses, the Henrico Board of Guys Who Decide Stuff decides to just sell all the old iBooks off at $50 apiece on such and such a day, first come, first served.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Me and a few friends were actually planning on staying up all night and then getting there first thing in the morning to buy some of them ourselves.  A few days later however, it became clear that the proverbial Golden Apple of Discord (which, wittily enough, also happened to be a literal Apple, though more of a translucent aqua blue one) had been thrown amongst the various titans of the Richmond Metro Area.

            All a sudden, every single high school parent in Henrico was outraged that the iBooks were being sold on an open market, rather just to the residents and students of Henrico County.  Other city residents countered, saying that since it was a public auction, everyone ought to have a chance for them.  The battle raged across the editorial pages of the Times-Dispatch as if the city was debating whether or not to reinstate the sport of flaming baby-kicking (don’t worry, it’ll be  making a comeback in the Spring of ‘06).  The Henrico Coucil of Muckety-Mucks (I having already forgotten what I called them a paragraph up) pointed out that they were just trying to unload a bunch of old, mostly broken down laptops and make a few thousand bucks for the county at the same time, but the Dachshund of cheap consumer electronics had already been hurled into the waiting jaws of the Hungry Hungry Hippo of Avarice, and nothing could be done until this bitter little morality play ran itself to the gory and horrific end.

            But wait, things got even stranger after that!  Inquiries about the iBooks started pouring in from near and far, and it soon became clear that people were planning on flying in from states as far away as Wyoming, while others were making arrangement to come from other countries such as Canada and California.  Now, remember for a moment that these really are a bunch of four-year-old computers, most of which have seen some pretty hard use, so while $50 might be a real bargain, at $200, they’d be a total ripoff.  Nonetheless, people were willing to spend hundreds of dollars on short-notice plane tickets, just so they could fly to Richmond and stand in line in hopes that they might get an iBook (I might take this opportunity to point out that a person can buy a perfectly serviceable new laptop for something like $500, if one cares to do a little shopping around).  This new development of course, only made the people in Henrico screech all the more screechily as everything went completely freaking insane.  Seriously, you know that scene in Soylent Green where everyone is all rioting and stuff because there aren’t enough little green pop tarts made out of dead people to go around?  It was shaping up to be just like that, but without Charleton Heston.  People were literally getting outraged about these stupid obsolete, beat-up iBooks as if their fundamental rights were being taken away.  You think people get angry about Iraq, or high gas prices or naming sports teams after Indians?  You ain’t seen nothing yet.  In all honesty, if this had gone on a couple more weeks, people would have started forming gangs and beating each other over it.  It really would have been sort of scary, except that it was mostly just retarded.

            So, in the end, the Henrico Council of Wiseguys decided, fine, high school stedents could have first crack at the iBooks, and then the rest would be sold off to county residents.  Problem solved?  Not even close.  You see, it seems that when all these students and their respective moms showed up to buy the iBooks that had caused Richmond the most suffering and hatred since the Civil War, it turns out that most of them expected to be getting the actual specific iBook that they had had in school.  Which, since these things had all been sitting in a warehouse somewhere all summer, was just about the dumbest thing they could possibly have expected other than believing that they had won some kind of awesome victory against the forces of evil.

            So, to sum it all up, people are friggin’ crazy when it comes to getting cheap stuff, so if you ever want to take over the world or throw an entire city into chaos (and really, who amng us doesn’t?) just offer up some cheap, used computers and watch humanity degenerate into a seething throng of troggles, troggles who want iBooks (because of course, troggles are invariably all about Apple products, as opposed to PCs, though now and then you run into a Linux troggle).  In closing, allow me to point out one other thing, that The Linux Troggles would be a totally sweet name for a band.

            I feel sorry for Batman.  Really, think about all the stuff he does; he spends all sorts of time training to have awesome kung fu skillz and be the biggest badass he can be because he doesn’t have any superpowers to start out with and he needs to make up for it.  Both his parents got killed when he was but a wee little batboy, and for most heroes, all it takes is the loss of one loved one to spur you to a life of crimefighting.  Also, he has to go and spend all this money on bat-themed Bat-accessories just so he can compete with all the other superheroes he hangs out with.  I mean, think how angry it must make him to know that while he’s had to spend all his life training to be Batman, someone like the Flash can just ignore his mother’s advice about standing next to a rack of random chemicals during a thunderstorm and end up with a whole slew (that’s nearly a plethora, by the way) or improbably yet useful powers (for instance, the Flash can do a dead on rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee” using only armpit farts).  No such luck for Batman, who has to actually work at remaining awesome.  By way of illustrating the importance of my main point here, please consider this delicious and low-calorie simile:

            Imagine a midget wanted to join the WWF and become a pro-wrestler, so he spent all day working out and traveling to remote Himalayan midget monasteries to study pro-wrestling and finally get good enough to be a pro, despite the presence of his midgetude.  So finally, after years of training and practice, he finally tries to get a spot in the WWF, only to find that he’s not allowed.  This, of course is because thanks to that lawsuit a few years back, the WWF is now the Wildlife Wrestling Federation, and they won’t even let you into the ring unless you’re some kind of panda (and for the purposes of this simile, the midget in question is just a regular old, garden variety midget, rather than a midget panda, cause that would just be too weird).  So, the midget has to go back to the midget wrestling league, while guys like the Rock and the Great Gazoo get to beat up all the pandas (pandae?).  And that’s a lot like Batman.

            You see, no matter how hard Batman tries, he’s never going to be able to say, destroy a comet that’s threatening Earth, or single-handedly destroy a giant killer robot from space.  And yet, since he’s so totally awesome, he’s always thrown in with all the heroes who have real powers, like Superman, Wonder Woman and Dick Cheney.  Really, someone ought to just give him a power ring or let a radioactive something-or-another bite him and give him some real powers (I’d lend him my power ring, but I’m still using it to create a vast herd of green beefaloes, and a guy has to prioritize).  What this all boils down to then is that Batman will always be stuck having to fight supervillians who aren’t so much super and just crazy people who suffered industrial accidents.

            Take the Joker for instance.  He doesn’t have any super powers, he just laughs a lot and has green hair.  In fact, he’s almost less powerful than a normal villain because everything he does has to be clown-themed.  Like he can’t just hit you with a hammer, it has to be a big goofy clown hammer, and he can’t just drive a normal car, it has to be a clown car with like, fifteen other supervillians in it too.  Or how about the Riddler?  He’s really just an unusually clever guy with a knack for puzzles who tries to pull off the most retarded capers ever.  Like he’ll go and kidnap the mayor or steal the Maltese Ham Sandwich or something, and then he’ll call Batman up and tell him exactly how to find and defeat him through a series of simple riddles.  And it’s not like he wants Batman to find him because he know’s he can beat him, cause the Riddler doesn’t have any powers other than a big ol’ question mark-infested suit and a stick to hit stuff with.  And it’s not like this just happened once and then the Riddler got smarter about it.  No, every time he proceeds based on the assumption that his riddles last time just weren’t fiendishly clever enough.  Note to the Riddler: Dude, the riddles are not working.  Just do something Evil next time, it’ll still be more fun than getting beat up by Batman.  This is roughly analogous to Osama Bin Laden telling Arnold Schwarzenegger exactly where to find him by means of a series of cleverly written haikus, and then expecting to choke him with his turban when he finally shows up.

            Just imagine what Batman has to go through every time this happens.  Here he is, all brilliant and tough and capable of solving mysteries of Scoobyesque magnitude, and just because he can’t fly or shoot broccoli out of his ears or something, he has to waste all his talents rounding up psychos that keep getting let out thanks to the revolving door of the Gotham City mental health system.  Just once, I bet he’d love to vanquish a real villain like Lex Luthor or his little brother, Martin; buy nooo, all the good evil geniuses belong to Superman and Microsoft.  I dunno, I guess I’m just saying that if any of you ever happen to decide to become a brilliant and devious criminal mastermind, try starting out in Gotham so Batman can actually fight someone who isn’t all loopy for once.  Trust me, it’ll mean the world to him.

            Here beginneth part two of all the awesome things you can do at the Outer Banks (PHUT):

            I would be completely remiss in my duties as a guy who makes snarky comments about things were I to neglect to mention the T-Shirt Whirl (not to be confused with T-Shirt World, which is the far more wholesome of the two, and as such not nearly as entertaining).  Now, you’re likely already familiar with the concept behind establishments of this sort.  They’ve got a bunch of shirts, and they’ve got a bunch of various pictures, pithy aphorisms, and downright crap that you can get put on them.  This, in itself, is not particularly funny, I admit, but when you take into consideration the fact that T-Shirt Whirl has a wide variety of material to choose from, running the gamut from “Teddy Bear with a Pirate Hat On” to the ever-popular “Flaming Skull with a Rattlesnake In Front of a Confederate Flag Riding a Motorcycle with a Hot Babe” and captions to match, you’ve got some serious mix and match potential.  For instance, how about a picture of the Grim Reaper with the words “I’m too cute to throw back!”  Or conversely, a picture of kitten in a sun bonnet saying “Support Your Local Hookers.”  Or maybe a picture of the previously-mentioned Flaming Skull etc, etc, with the caption, “Grandpa’s Fishing Buddy.”  And of course, the funniest of all, a picture of a teddy bear riding a tractor, over which it says, “Been Farming Long?  Bitch!”  Seriously, every time I get sad thinking about how Arby’s doesn’t serve baby seal croissanwiches, I just imagine a cute t-shirt saying and add “bitch” to it; it makes life so much more ridiculous.  Also, they sell stickers there that say “Surrender the Booty!”  I bought one and put it on my van next to my Model U.N. sticker.  At first I thought it would look weird and clashy, but sadly, it turned out to look horribly appropriate.

            And of course, while you’re at the beach, you might as well get out and see something that you can only see while you’re there: ugly people in thong bathing suits!  No, wait, don’t go look at them, you’re not missing anything, and unless you’re an escaped Nazi war criminal who feels all guilty and wants to suffer, in which case thong away, Colonel Klink, you’ve earned it.  Actually, what I meant to say you should check out are the lighthouses.  The Outer Banks have like, a jillion of these, all of which formed millions of years ago after the magma from extinct volcanoes formed tall, tower-like structures which, in the 18^th century, inspired safety-minded seafarers to turn them all into fish tank gravel and build a bunch of lighthouses.  Now, all the brochures tell you that the lighthouses, like snowflakes, are all wonderful and different, and you really ought to drive a hundred and fifty miles all up and down the island so you can see all of them in all their natural glory.  This is retarded, because they all look pretty much alike, except they’re painted different and have different quaint little postcard histories.  So yeah, unless you’re working out some kind of weird Freudian issues or something, just go see one or two, ya freak.

            And speaking of big stuff that you can only find at the beach, make sure you pay a visit to Jockey’s Ridge, the carnivorous sand dune of death..  I have no idea how it got that name (the Jockey part, not the death), since there’s neither horse racing nor an underpants factory there (nor, of course, a factory where they make horses into underwear, cause that would just be strange and I already regret imagining it).  It is however, a giant sand dune which happens to be slowing consuming a neighboring town.  Really, its already eaten like, a dozen houses, a miniature golf course (not the Bootleg Wookie one though, thank heavens) and a couple of slow-moving children.  Also, I think there might be sand worms there, though to tell the truth, the perpetual hang glider infestation is a lot worse (The Perpetual Hang Glider Infestation would, of course, make a totally sweet name for a band).

            And right next door to the carnivorous sand dune of death, is the Wright Brothers Memorial.  This, needless to say, commemorates the place where, a hundred years ago, Orville and Redenbacher Wright built a plane out of popsicle sticks and bicycle parts.  Everyone else laughed at them, “Ha ha,” they said, but the Wright Brothers wanted more than anything to be on both the Ohio and North Carolina State Quarter, so they went ahead anyway.  Their first plane flew a total of something like five inches, and eventually crashed, killing Orville, and driving his grieving brother to start a popcorn company.  Also, for reasons unknown to mankind, the monument has a chimney, and no doors.  I suspect that a hobbit lives in it, or maybe it’s just full of chocolate.

            Finally, while you’re at the beach, read “Ivanhoe”, by Sir Willard Scott.  I know, reading a medieval geek novel at the beach is as strange as Charleton Heston singing “Mmm Bop”, but fortunately for me, the Nation Council of Recommending Things That Are None of It’s Business (composed of Jimmy Carter, the two surviving members of Hanson, and an Andrews Sister) recently endorsed it as “A Totally Weaselicious Beach Book”.  Don’t even bother wondering why this compelled me to read it; some things are better off remaining a mystery.  Unhappily, the title is a total lie, the titular dude, Ivan, isn’t even remotely a Hoe, and everybody is really angsty for about six hundred pages.  Come to think of it, I don’t even know why I mentioned this; you know what, instead of reading, just sing the Super Mario Brothers Song (with sound effects) along with your sister when your family is driving somewhere.  You’ll probably annoy your mom, but if you can make it through the octopus level without snarfing yourself giddy, you can at least feel like you’ve accomplished something.

            It being generally known that I have recently been to the Outer Banks of North Carolina (or OBX, as the infidels would have it written), some of you might be wondering what manner of things there be to do down there.  And of course, if you still haven’t taken a vacation this summer, being that hurricane season is all up ons, this is probably one of the cheaper times to rent a cottage, lighthouse, or family-size porta-john.  However, since it would verily be the very acme of foolishness to just go venturing off to such an exotic and magical place as North Carolina without some inkling or another of what charming diversions one might expect there to encounter, I have taken the task upon myself to furnish y’all with a brief list of a few of the more wondrous fripperies which may be seen, purchased, and/or eaten in the Outer Banks, which, just to be ornery, I’m going to abbreviate and signify by a completely different and non-yuppified combination of letters, like BUH, POG, or maybe even the rarely attempted four letter island abbreviation, PHUT (not to be confused with the chosen acronym of the Pennsylvania Heritage of Underwear Trolls).  Anyway, let’s see what manner of wackiness may be discovered by the enterprising and beach-going soul.

            First, as you arrive on the island, you will no doubt be struck by the awesome presence of the World’s Most Fanciest Looking Home Depot.  Seriously, there’s some kind of an ordinance on the island, where any store over a certain size has to look like a lighthouse or something, so a couple of years back when the decided to build a Home Depot there, they were bound by the very law itself to make it look absolutely ridiculous.  Like, imagine that you were and old sea captain, and also a supervillian, and you wanted to build some kind of a nautical fortress of doom, while still remaining true to your ocean-going heritage, so you put a couple of lighthouse-looking dealies on it, while leaving most of it to look like the Brandermill version of the Supreme Courthouse.  That’s what this Home Depot looks like.  Every time I walk in, I expect some guy with a hook hand and a helper monkey to zoom up in a hoverchair and go, “Arrrr, welcome to me bonny fortress of doom, narrr!  Today we be having a whale of a sale on coping saws and pastel high gloss interiors!”  It’s never happened yet, but whenever I’m at the beach, I stop in every day anways, just in case.

            Next, make sure you stop by the Bootleg Wookie Golf Miniature Golf Course.  Sure, you could go to Count Baron Von Priceypant’s Golfstravaganza and pay 15$ to ride in a little cart, but for $1.50 a head, you can play all day at BWGMGC.  And trust me, even if it weren’t cheaper, you’d still want to go.  You see, whoever started it up, realized that in order to make it in the cutthroat world of mini beach golf, you need some sort of a gimmick.  He also realized, that if you plan on making your gimmick anything that people are going to recognize, you’ll be paying a heap of money to buy the rights to it.  The solution?  Weird-ass Bizarro Star Wars characters, crafted with loving care from fiberglass and the broken dreams of orphan children.  You can for instance, see Buzz Aldrin locked in mortal combat with a deformed Imperial Chicken Walker whilst one of his legs falls off.  Or you can see Chewbacca’s freaky elephant man brother, the giganimous Zoobacca, standing in a volcano beating a Martian as if it were some kind of intergalactic baby seal.  I think there’s also a dinosaur there, but since copyright on those ran out sometime during the Pleistocene Epoch, the golf course guy didn’t have to get all creative and give it like, three arms and a beef cannon for a tail.

            Should you happen to want to eat while you’re at the beach, make sure you stop by the famous and delectable Windmill Battleship Restaurant, where it’s not just a pretty name, it’s a restaurant made out of a battleship next to a windmill.  Now, when I was there, the restaurant didn’t look particularly seaworthy to me, but as a mere landlubber (and I do lubb me some land, let me tell you) it looked more like a generic waterfront restaurant building, at least from the outside.  Inside however, it clearly is made out of a battleship (the windmill is outside actually, and not available for eating in).  All their tables and chairs and other such sitting apparatuses (apparati?, that sounds more like a Harry Potter word) are all art-deco and cool-looking, and the walls are all covered with pictures of other restaurants/battleships that this one has sunk in glorious combat over the years.  Also, there’s a signed plaque from George Bush designating it as the most officially awesome restaurant to combine windmills battleships and fine cuisine that anyone was crazy enough to build.  Upstairs, there’s the historic Lima bean-shaped bar of doom, where Mr. T, Dwight Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe and Winston Churchill all got drunk on the night before they flew off into outer space on their heroic mission to stop Hitler, while in the process being exposed to cosmic Space Rays^®, thereby becoming the Fantastic Four and saving the world yet again.  Finally, the Windmill Battleship Restaurant parking lot is right next door to the ocean, so whenever there’s a storm, the term overflow parking takes on a wacky and horrible double meaning.

            Well, there are of course a heap more awesome things to see down in PHUT, but since I’m already running a little long, you’ll just have to check back in tomorrow and see what else they are (don’t think I just used up all the sweet ones today though, and I’m just gonna write about sucky things to see, like the Nautical Lint Museum, and the Everything’s $1.73 Store.  Oh heavens no, there’s gonna be some industrial grade awesome coming up.

            It being generally known that I have recently been to the Outer Banks of North Carolina (or OBX, as the infidels would have it written), some of you might be wondering what manner of things there be to do down there.  And of course, if you still haven’t taken a vacation this summer, being that hurricane season is all up ons, this is probably one of the cheaper times to rent a cottage, lighthouse, or family-size porta-john.  However, since it would verily be the very acme of foolishness to just go venturing off to such an exotic and magical place as North Carolina without some inkling or another of what charming diversions one might expect there to encounter, I have taken the task upon myself to furnish y’all with a brief list of a few of the more wondrous fripperies which may be seen, purchased, and/or eaten in the Outer Banks, which, just to be ornery, I’m going to abbreviate and signify by a completely different and non-yuppified combination of letters, like BUH, POG, or maybe even the rarely attempted four letter island abbreviation, PHUT (not to be confused with the chosen acronym of the Pennsylvania Heritage of Underwear Trolls).  Anyway, let’s see what manner of wackiness may be discovered by the enterprising and beach-going soul.

            First, as you arrive on the island, you will no doubt be struck by the awesome presence of the World’s Most Fanciest Looking Home Depot.  Seriously, there’s some kind of an ordinance on the island, where any store over a certain size has to look like a lighthouse or something, so a couple of years back when the decided to build a Home Depot there, they were bound by the very law itself to make it look absolutely ridiculous.  Like, imagine that you were and old sea captain, and also a supervillian, and you wanted to build some kind of a nautical fortress of doom, while still remaining true to your ocean-going heritage, so you put a couple of lighthouse-looking dealies on it, while leaving most of it to look like the Brandermill version of the Supreme Courthouse.  That’s what this Home Depot looks like.  Every time I walk in, I expect some guy with a hook hand and a helper monkey to zoom up in a hoverchair and go, “Arrrr, welcome to me bonny fortress of doom, narrr!  Today we be having a whale of a sale on coping saws and pastel high gloss interiors!”  It’s never happened yet, but whenever I’m at the beach, I stop in every day anways, just in case.

            Next, make sure you stop by the Bootleg Wookie Golf Miniature Golf Course.  Sure, you could go to Count Baron Von Priceypant’s Golfstravaganza and pay 15$ to ride in a little cart, but for $1.50 a head, you can play all day at BWGMGC.  And trust me, even if it weren’t cheaper, you’d still want to go.  You see, whoever started it up, realized that in order to make it in the cutthroat world of mini beach golf, you need some sort of a gimmick.  He also realized, that if you plan on making your gimmick anything that people are going to recognize, you’ll be paying a heap of money to buy the rights to it.  The solution?  Weird-ass Bizarro Star Wars characters, crafted with loving care from fiberglass and the broken dreams of orphan children.  You can for instance, see Buzz Aldrin locked in mortal combat with a deformed Imperial Chicken Walker whilst one of his legs falls off.  Or you can see Chewbacca’s freaky elephant man brother, the giganimous Zoobacca, standing in a volcano beating a Martian as if it were some kind of intergalactic baby seal.  I think there’s also a dinosaur there, but since copyright on those ran out sometime during the Pleistocene Epoch, the golf course guy didn’t have to get all creative and give it like, three arms and a beef cannon for a tail.

            Should you happen to want to eat while you’re at the beach, make sure you stop by the famous and delectable Windmill Battleship Restaurant, where it’s not just a pretty name, it’s a restaurant made out of a battleship next to a windmill.  Now, when I was there, the restaurant didn’t look particularly seaworthy to me, but as a mere landlubber (and I do lubb me some land, let me tell you) it looked more like a generic waterfront restaurant building, at least from the outside.  Inside however, it clearly is made out of a battleship (the windmill is outside actually, and not available for eating in).  All their tables and chairs and other such sitting apparatuses (apparati?, that sounds more like a Harry Potter word) are all art-deco and cool-looking, and the walls are all covered with pictures of other restaurants/battleships that this one has sunk in glorious combat over the years.  Also, there’s a signed plaque from George Bush designating it as the most officially awesome restaurant to combine windmills battleships and fine cuisine that anyone was crazy enough to build.  Upstairs, there’s the historic Lima bean-shaped bar of doom, where Mr. T, Dwight Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe and Winston Churchill all got drunk on the night before they flew off into outer space on their heroic mission to stop Hitler, while in the process being exposed to cosmic Space Rays^®, thereby becoming the Fantastic Four and saving the world yet again.  Finally, the Windmill Battleship Restaurant parking lot is right next door to the ocean, so whenever there’s a storm, the term overflow parking takes on a wacky and horrible double meaning.

            Well, there are of course a heap more awesome things to see down in PHUT, but since I’m already running a little long, you’ll just have to check back in tomorrow and see what else they are (don’t think I just used up all the sweet ones today though, and I’m just gonna write about sucky things to see, like the Nautical Lint Museum, and the Everything’s $1.73 Store.  Oh heavens no, there’s gonna be some industrial grade awesome coming up.

            Ever wonder about stuff that’s related to other stuff?  Like those little organ grinder monkeys and global terrorism, you know there’s some kind of connection there, but you just can’t quite pin it down.  Or how Dick Cheney’s career didn’t really take off until hammerpants had passed from fashionability.  And of course, the greatest question of them all; what’s the connection between Star Wars, The Presbyterian Church, and Communist China.  I know you probably never thought anyone would finally find the answer to this timeless and imponderable question, neither did I, until I discovered something online so horrifyingly self-evident that’s its terrible veracity cannot for a moment be doubted.  You need not doubt the truth of what is to follow, it has been vetted by the greatest independent fact checkers in the business, and it is, without a doubt, completely legit.  What you are about to see came from a copy of Star Wars: Episode Three, Revenge of the Sith found on the mean streets of Beijing, and it puts forever to rest the question which haunts us all.  Now, some of you will be completely shocked and freaked out by what you are about to see, and others of you will probably just snarf in your beverage, so you’ll want to make sure you don’t do it over your keyboard.  With these words of warning, I give you this:                                                                                                               

            Now, being a Presbyterian myself, I had always suspected that Star Wars was really all about me, not only because Yoda bears such an uncanny resemblance to John Calvin (who, after defeating Pope Babyface XIV in a steel cage match, decided to just go and start his own denomination).  It is also no secret that the Chinese government has always been unusually harsh in it’s oppression of Presbyterian groups.  I’d always kind of wondered why this was, but clearly it has a lot to do with the fact that for some time now, the Chinese government has known the truth about the Presbyterian Church: it’s full of Jedi.

            I’d always kind of suspected that this might be true, since our church was always sending missionaries to China, and then when they came back, they’d be all like, “We have dealt a serious blow to the forces of the Evil Galactic Empire this day!  Um, I mean, uh, we built an orphanage in a poor mountain village, yeah, that’s what we did, my bad y’all.”  And then there were all the times that I’d go to see our minister about something, and right when I walked in he’d be practicing his lightsaber forms, and then he’d put it away really quick and tell me these weren’t the droids I was looking for.  And of course, there was the time that Christopher Lee kidnapped the Moderator of the General Assembly, and we had to send a couple of guys to blow up his battleship and chase off General Grievous (who, in case you were wondering, is actually a Unitarian).

            But now, it’s all so clear I can’t imagine how I ever missed it in the first place, and I’m all psyched about going to live on a swamp planet with a gnarly old muppet and learn how to make stuff fly around with the power of my mind.  Unfortunately, I have recently received a new report from the Wookies that the Red Chinese are even now working on construction of a Death Star somewhere in China, which is a totally wack thing for them to be working on (though I might have suspected earlier when the fortune cookie I got last week at General Tsao’s Sacred Wind of the Seven Spirits of Righteous Vengeance Fried Chicken Palace said “We are building a Death Star, come and stop us if you can, Sucka! Sincerely Yours, The People’s Republic of China).

            Clearly, the time has come to leave the shelter of the metaphorical moisture farm this is Virginia, and do that thing where my minivan transforms into an X-Wing so I can fly to China and destroy their Death Star before they can use it against anyone cool and/or anyone who owes me money.  And of course, once I get that done, I might as well have an epic battle with Chairman Mao, the evil emperor of China, high above one of China’s many scenic and deadly fiery magma pits.  Of course, I’ll eventually cut off 75% of his limbs, let him roll down a gentle slope and catch on fire, tell him he was the chosen one, and then just go home and assume that he’s dead and nobody is going to rescue him and rebuild him into a half man, half machine lord of darkness, cause hey, that magma is really hot, and I’m gonna have a long trip ahead of me before I’m back in Richmond where I can get a decent Slurpee.  Cause yeah, even if I’m a Presbyterian Jedi, I still love me some Slurpees.

            My sister, as will be generally known to readers of teacupmammoths.com, recently returned from a trip to Mongolia (Motto: Come for the yaks, stay for the nightlife), in addition to going to Mongolia though, she also spent a little time in China and Russia.  Now, Russia, as I understand things, has kind of turned into one big frozen Communist yard sale since the the Soviet Union lost the Cold War (Though a number of military and economic factors contributed to this loss, the decisive event occurred when Ronald Reagan beat Mikhail Gorbachev at a game of HORSE which was appointed to decide whether Capitalism or Communism was better.  For the historically curious among you, it wasn’t even close, Reagan beat Gorbachev quite handily while earning merely a HOR for himself).  Anyways, it turns out that even now, you’re hardly off the plane when you arrive in Moscow before people are trying to sell you all sorts of Communist leftovers.  AK-47's, red cranial spots, and or course nuclear weapons are all available at low, low prices for the interested tourist.  But at least one other thing was also to be bought there, and that is what my sister decided to bring home for me.  What as it, you ask?  It was, she told me, a Lenin hat.

            Now, I don’t know about you, but I was never the biggest Lenin fan in the world.  I mean, I know he was an absolutely essential part of the Beatles, but I think that once he went solo and became a Communist dictator, most of his songs sucked, and smacked of the malicious influence of Yoko Ono.  Nonetheless, I was severely excited to hear that my sister was bringing me home a Lenin hat.  I mean, Russia is frequently called “The Disney World of Siberia” for a good reason right?  So I was all atwitter with anticipation as to what physical form the awesomeness of this hat was going to take.  I figured that since at Disney World they sell those Goofy hats, that look like you scalped Goofy and turned the top half of his face into a ghoulish yet festive chapeau, complete with dangly ears, a Lenin hat would be much in the same vein, since Lenin is generally considered to be the most Goofyesque Communist Dictator in history (some would hold that this title ought to go to Pol Pot, but I say his penchant for genocide makes him much more of a Donald Duck dictator).  Already I had imagined how very stylish and bitchin’ I would look after donning such a unique piece of headgear as a Lenin hat; his fearsome face glowering at all who opposed my tyrannical reign, his long, floppy ears merrily blowing in the summer breeze or possibly serving as a makeshift chin strap in windy conditions, but alas, it was not to be.

            Mt sister informed me that in fact, the hat, while bearing numerous Lenin-themed pins and buttons, did not, in the strictest sense, conform to the shape of his head.  Instead, it had more the shape of those oval hats that army guys and 1950s burger making dudes generally wear.  So, when my sister handed me the hat as we drove along through the scenic Dismal Swamp, home of all sorts of scenic man-eating alligators and possums, I put it on my head immediately (the hat, not the swamp, which would have been rather messy).  I must say, I looked ever so dapper whilst wearing it, but even so, it brought with it many a peril all its own.  For instance, there was some guy behind us who was all tailgating and stuff, like he wanted to pass us, but even when we slowed down, he never did, I surmise that the driver, taking my hat to be a token of my allegiance, mistook me for some kind of Commie Pinko spy, sent to steal America’s superior swamp technology and take it back to the Motherland.

            In addition, it seems that decades of oppressive rule have left most Russians with tiny heads, and as an unfortunate side effect of this trend, the hat displayed an alarming tendency to fall off if I didn’t just sit there and balance it the right way.  This would have been okay, but every time a song I liked came on the radio and I tried to rock out to it, it would fly off and smack into other things in the car.  From this I concluded that Russians must not rock out on a regular basis, and if they do, they must have special hats made specifically for that purpose; which, if there is any justice in the world, will bear a more striking resemblance to Goofy.

            As you probably remember from my last blog (unless you have like, the shortest memory in the world like some guy in an artsy movie or possibly a cocker spaniel), Hitler has ganked a radiator hose in my van, and as such, I have had to seek out another form of transportation.  Unfortunately, since my sister wasn’t able to sneak a yak through customs on her way back from Mongolia, I’ve had to settle for the next best thing - my grandmother’s car.  “Why is that less cool than a yak?” you may ask.  Well, her car happens to be the oldest Ford Tempo ever.  Like, its so old that Gerald Ford himself made it in the very fires of Mount Doom (because of course, that’s where Gerald Ford lives).  To make matters worse, this car clearly hates me with a burning passion not felt by a car since the part of General Lee in the movie “Gettysburg” was given to Martin Sheen instead of to the General Lee.  On the bright side though, my grandmother doesn’t drive anymore, so her car is free whenever I want it (Fun Ben’s Grandmother fact: when she was growing up in Kansas, her uncle’s phone number was 9).  Still, since it lives right next to my van, it always sees me paying attention to my van; changing it’s oil, putting air in the tires, and occasionally giving it a piece of rawhide to chew on when it does tricks.  So yeah, my grandmother’s car is extremely jealous, and as a result takes it out on me by being all passive aggressive.

            For instance, it always stalls out at traffic lights when you first start out, and the only way to keep the engine running until the light turns green is to throw it in park and gun the engine.  This all works pretty well in isolation, but to the casual observer, it appears that I’m trying to challenge everyone else at the light to a drag race or something.  So I’ll be sitting there, right next to some guy in a rice rocket, revving my engine like crazy, looking all manic and stuff as if I can, by the very power of my mind, force the car to keep running, and then when the light turns green, the guy next to me totally peels out of there, while I’m usually pleasantly surprised if I can attain a speed of over 15 mph.  On the bright side, at least the guy in the ricer gets a little self esteem boost out of the whole tawdry affair.

            Also, as you might well have already inferred, it has a tiny engine.  I mean, when you look under the hood, there’s a lot of junk in there that looks like an engine, but I’m pretty sure that if I could get a good look at it from underneath, I’d find like, a hamster in one of those little hamster purgatory wheels, and a rubber band, four AA batteries (Hamster Purgatory, by the way, would be a band name so awesome that it almost justifies the existence of my grandmother’s car in the first place).  Now, I’m used to driving a car with a tiny engine, but at least in my van, all the sound insulation in the firewall is worn out and it always feels like I’m really going until I look at the speedometer.  Not so in my grandmother’s car, where even when you floor it, it just makes that sound like one of those little toy cars that you pull back a ways and then they crash into stuff, go into reverse for a foot and a half, and then smack into a credenza or something.

            To make matters worse, the engine light keeps coming on to tell me the car is overheating.  At first this really freaked me out, since I prefer the cars I drive to not catch on fire and explode more frequently than can be helped (yeah, I’m just old school that way).  But then we took it the repair shop where the guys has like, +7 to Jalopy Mastery, and he said that all the repair parts to the car have gone extinct and we’d just have to live with it (I suspect that Hitler was probably somehow involved in this debacle as well.  One of these days I’m gonna drive out to the middle of nowhere, put the child-safety locks on, and then stop the car, jump out and close the door really quickly so he’ll be stuck in there in the heat and melt like a bag of delicious invisible Nazi Reese’s Peanut Butter cups) (The Invisible Nazi Peanut Butter Cups, by the way, would be an exceptionally awesome name for a band).  But anyways, I’ll be driving along, and the engine light will be all blazing mightily forth from it’s place on the dashboard, glowing with an unholy fire like the Eye of Sauron or something, just tempting me to drive the thing back to Mount Doom, and see if Gerald can do anything about it, or at least put a piece of duct tape over it so I won’t have to be taunted by it’s seething and nameless evil power.

            Finally, it’s just a goofy looking car, like it was what the future of old lady cars was thought to be back in the early 80s.  Maybe if I had a monster truck conversion done on it or something, then it would look really cool, but I don’t have enough money to do that right now, so I’m just gonna have to settle for driving it around places where everybody is really tiny so I can still enjoy that much sought after monster truck vibe, like the Midget Quarter of Richmond, or maybe even Safetytown, home of the only completely ornamental Ukrop’s in Virginia.

            So, I guess what I’m really trying to say here is, I really don’t like Hitler messing with all cars, and we probably ought to pass some sort of a law against it, instead of just giving him community service every time like we’ve been doing up to now.  Also, if that hamster dies in there, there’s no way I’m gonna be able to find a proper replacement one for it unless I go all the way out to Zordak and Anastasia’s Domestic Auto Rodent Junkyard and Fashion Bargain Warehouse in Goochland.

            So, here I am, back from the scenic and exotic land of the Outer Banks, home of sun, surf, and those damnable yuppie tags that half the people here in Richmond seem to think bestow some manner of coolness upon them.  It was a good trip, and by way of reference to, here’s a little summary of the goings on surrounding my triumphant return from vacation:

            First, as you probably noticed from the paucity of blogs this past week (The Paucity of Blogs, might I add, would make a totally sweet name for a band), I was unable to secure regular access to the internet.  It turned out to the be case, you see, that if a fellow wants to get ahold of a wireless connection down at the beach, he has only two choices:  any number of expensive boutiquey little coffee shops, and an abandoned parking lot shrouded in eternal darkness.  As you might imagine, what with me flourishing in the shadows and all, I chose the abandoned parking lot option.  It’s not that I didn’t try to gussy it up though, by doing what I could to add a certain degree of coffee shop classiness to it, it just didn’t work out that well.  Like, I brought along all these different sized coffee cups, and then I gave them confusing and vaguely Eupopean-sounding names that had nothing to do with how big they actually were, and instead of just taking along regular and decaf, I brought all the funkiest-named coffees I could find in Food Lion (which, in case you were wondering, is staffed completely by Ukranians, or at least North Carolinians who’ve really been practicing at it), and then I’d sit out in the car a think way too much and ask myself, “May I have a Vienti-doube-whipped-iced-Jamocha-cream-latte?”  And then I’d get all frustrated and gruff with me, because I’d said it wrong and ordered some kind of mythical beverage, but in the end I’d explain it all to myself and then I’d charge me five bucks for what tasted like a cup of brewed shoe polish and chewing tobacco while I surfed the web and tried to avoid the stares of emo kids.  But it’s really hard to do all that in an abandoned parking lot, so I just ended up checking my email and going to Wal-Mart, where they don’t have the internet, but they do have all sorts of unholy beach-flavored Starbursts.

            My voyage home today was no less interesting than my trip down, a little better actually, since it wasn’t dark and I didn’t have to play the William Shatner Twilight Zone game to entertain myself while we were driving (you know, the one where you scream, “There’s something on the wing!” and then you roll down the window and try to crawl out of the car while gibbering like a madman about Priceline).  We did, for instance, get stuck behind a big line of trucks all following this one car that was, of course, going way too slowly.  And its not that they weren’t allowed to pass, it was just that all of them had somehow been recruited to join this one little car’s truck harem or something, which isn’t really all that funny; I just wanted to work the phrase “truck harem” into a blog.  Then we were behind this guy who completely overreacted when we passed a cop by the side of the road.  You know how when most people pass a cop car, they think something like this, “Good heavens, there’s a police officer.  Mayhap I shall slow down so as not to unduly arouse his ire!”  This guy apparently was thinking more along the lines of, “Oh sweet flying death monkeys!  It’s a cop!  I’d better slow down to 15 miles an hour or he’ll punch me in the face!  Oh no, he’s gonna punch me in the face anyway, I’d better veer way off the road, so his magical Inspector Gadget arms can’t reach me!”  And that’s exactly what he did.  This guy nearly drove into a swamp full of possessed soybeans so as not to pass too close to a cop car.  It was totally sweet.

            At length, we passed into a curious realm, where all the street signs had a little picture of some kind of weird thing in the corner.  I’m not sure exactly what it was supposed to be, but I think it was some kind of inexplicable doom sloth, that probably reigned over the people of the land, and demanded regular sacrifices of human blood and free dinners and IHOP.  It was weird, and we didn’t stop to investigate further, since I myself have something of an inexplicable doom sloth phobia.  Shortly thereafter, we passed a place called “Poopman’s Produce Stand”.  I do not thing I shall ever pass a produce stand with a less appetizing name, unless it was something like “Fartblossom Vegetables” or “Cornucopia of Stank”, though Cornucopia of Stank would make a pretty cool name for something, like maybe a downscale version of Linens ‘n Things.

            And so, in due time, we made it home, to find that the house had indeed not grown giant chicken legs and walked off on its own (don’t laugh, it happened last year when we went on a road trip to Canadia).  Concerning what I actually did while I was at the beach, fear not, I shall post detailed travelogue of awesomeness in the next couple of days.  Meanwhile, peruse at your leisure a few of the blogs I managed to get written before my laptop melted down like a Soviet power plant running off Windows 95.

            Okay, as you already know, I suspected that I wouldn’t be able to post regularly whilst I was here down at the beach.  Well, it turns out that I was right, and our cottage doesn’t have internet access, yet the fact that I’m able to post this, would suggest that either I have at last attained a Keanu-like mastery of computers or I finally managed to find a place with web service.  Upon that of course, hangs the tale which here follows.  Come with me then, good reader, and hear the tale of how I came to be sitting in a random parking lot in the middle of the night here on some beach or another.

            It all started normally enough, as I set out from home with my sister (the rest of our clan having already headed South to blaze a trail through the wilds of Smithfield).  And since Hitler had messed up my van and my grandmother’s car hates me, we set out in my sister’s Civic of Fury.  As we traveled down the road, we passed all the traditional landmarks on the way out of Richmond; most notably Johnson’s Concrete Lawn Menagerie Emporium, where you can get anything from a big naked Greek deity to Confucius riding that Eddie Murphy dragon from Mulan, to more different kinds of yard gnomes than any decent person could possibly have need of (if you’re ever trying to do all your Christmas/Kwanzaa shopping done in one place though, it’s hard to beat).

            After I got my new totally sweet Lenin hat (that hat was totally sweet, not Lenin; he was a tool), the tale of which shall be related in a blog yet to come, and we passed through the Dismal Swamp (where, if you recall, Scooby Doo once helped Cass Eliot and the Harlem Globetrotters to defeat a Taffy Monster that turned out to really be Richard Milhous Nixon) night fell, and we made out way to the endless wastelands of North Carolina.  There, we saw a thing altogether unprecedented in my experience: the lost souls of a soybean field.

            Honestly, it was dusk, and we were driving through this forsaken expanse of soybeans, and there was this weird, eerie mist slowly rising up from amongst them and hanging like a pall of evil o’er all the land.  At first, I though it was just humidity or something, but it started getting really intense and evil looking and we decided that it was probably some kind of legion of soy-demons.  You know, like where there’s that part in the Bible where Jesus is whomping on that gang of demons that were totally possessing that one dude, and Jesus was like, “Dag, yo, all you cracker demons get out of that dude!”  And the demons were all like, “Dude, that’s not cool, send us into that herd of evil non-kosher soybeans over yonder!”  And then Jesus was like, “Foo’ whatever.”  And then all the demons went into the soybeans and they went all evil and people freaked out and stuff.  I forget which book it is, I think it’s in the Gospel of, um, Dave or something.  Anyway, all these soybeans were bathed in some kind of stench of evil and it was totally creepy driving through it, and you should never trust soybeans, cause they’ll just punch you in the face if they ever get the chance.

            So we finally got down to the beach, and lo and behold, there was no internet in our cottage.  However, I was able to pick up this really weak wireless signal from somewhere in the neighborhood,  so I ended up like, wandering all over the place, holding my sister’s laptop out in front of me like some kind of really geeky Diogenes, but it was all to naught.  Last night, however, my sister and I finally decided we needed to go on an ill-conceived quest in search of web access.  So, we got in the Civic of Fury (which I have tentatively decided to name Josh) and slowly drove off down the road, in search of someone with a wireless network we could mooch off of.  It was really kind of ridiculous; we’d be creeping down the road, and all of a sudden I’d be like “Wait, I think I got one!” And we’d have to throw the car into reverse and pull off of the road while I tried to get it to work right, like we were out trying to hack into a government satellite or something (in fact, I only hack into government satellites when I’m in Richmond, it being generally acknowledged as the Hackable Satellite Capital of Central Virginia for good reason).  Finally, we find a decent unsecured network near this abandoned playground.

            So there we are, hunched over a laptop in Josh the Civic of Fury, in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night, listening to Abby Road and looking incredibly sketchy.  Like, every now and then, someone would walk by and be all like, “Oh crap, I’ll bet they’re hacking into a government satellite, which is a lot easier to do in Richmond!”  It was totally cool.  I felt like a spy.  Like, if a midget with metal teeth or some Korean guy with a battle hat had jumped out of the bushes and tried to attack us, I would have been completely cool and in command of my awesome kung fu skillz, as I freaked out and drove away as fast as I could.  But that didn’t happen, to my knowledge, and so here I am tonight posting this blog, which you happen to be reading right now.  Unless you’re asleep and this is all coming to you in a dream, in which case you’re so totally gonna freak out tomorrow when you check my site and see everything you already dreamed.  But that would be kind of cool, and if it happens, you so totally have to leave me a comment about it, so I’ll know teacupmammoths has become a psychic phenomenon, like spoon bending or mariachi bands.  Meanwhile, be sure to come back tomorrow, when I write in great detail concerning all the local sights and smells to be found here in the Outer Banks of North Carolina (where, if you get an OBX license plate even if you’re not from the actual Outer Banks, children and small furry animals will bite you in the face with the full protection of the law behind them).

Felicitations and greetings fellow blogheads!  I just wanted y'all to know that I'm going to be at the beach with my various and assorted homies for the next week, and I might not have access to the web while I'm there, so if you check in during the week and don't see anything new, freak not out, for I am but delayed in my postage, and will put up a whole week's worth of awesomeness com Sunday night.  What shall these blogs tell of?  All manner of things, from topics of global importance, like the giant sand dune that ate a miniature golf course, and personal tales of triumph and poor tanning, like how every time I go out on the beach, people think I'm Smeagol and throw fish at me.  Meanwhile, do be sure to party on, as always.

Ben

           Perhaps, like most people, you believe that your car is safe from the wiles of evil dictators who’ve been dead for 60 years and suddenly returned to vivid and terrible life endowed with the power to turn nearly invisible.  I used to too, but then this past week I received this picture, from alert teacupmammoths.com reader Scott of the Antarctic (mostly his real name). 

     At first, I was too freaked out to even comprehend what I was seeing, and I had to turn off my monitor and go hide under the bed until I felt like having some Gummy Bears and ventured out once more.  After I was done with the Gummy Bears though, I went back to my computer and resumed being freaked out.  I mean, I drive by myself all the time, it’s not like I have any friends other than the little woodland creatures of the forest (just like St. Francis, assuming than in a few hundred years people start buying little hobbit-sized concrete statues of me to put in their yards).

            I know what you’re thinking, “Foolish Ben, Hitler is clearly not in your van, being as he is too large to fit in the glove compartment or little armrest/starship control panel thingie between the front two seats!”  Perhaps so, were it not evidently the case that somehow Hitler has gained the power to become invisible.  How did this happen anyway?  Did he infiltrate the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and steal it from that invisible guy?  Has he joined up with the Romulans and gotten ahold of a Nazi-sized cloaking device?  Does he just have a suit of clothes dyed to look exactly like the inside of my van?  I don’t know, but the fact remains that this is a distinctly sucky development, and almost as bad as that time I got a squirrel wrapped around my van’s distributor cap.  All I knew, was that it was no longer a mystery why my van’s most annoying to replace radiator hose had suddenly given out (it being a well-known fact that Hitler loathed radiator hoses, and someday hoped to rid his empire from their pernicious influence).

            To make matters worse, if you look at the picture, it’s obvious that far from enjoying his little stealth road trip, Hitler is severely cheesed off.  Just look at him, he’s all frowning and pouty looking, like someone just took his last wiener schnitzel or something.  Why is he being such a sour kraut here?  I have a few ideas.  First, it’s possible that he’s just angry because he’s being forced to ride in a thoroughly unvolkswagenish car which, judging by the look of it, is the same one Biff used to chase Michael J. Fox at the end of “Back to the Future 2”.  Hitler, you see, is a big fan of 80’s movies, and was obviously disappointed not to get a chance to be punched in the face by Lea Thompson.  Or, maybe Hitler inferred from the purple suit that this guy is wearing that he was in the august company of a pimp.  Alas, judging by the look on Hitler’s face, he is in fact merely a rabbi with unusual fashion sense on his way to the kosher market to by some hamless Hamdingers, with nary a ho in sight.  Or, maybe Hitler is just really annoyed because he has to pretend like he isn’t there, lest he tip his hand too soon and have the rabbi realize that Hitler is riding shotgun.  So maybe this guy is just driving down the road, blaring Hillary Duff songs as loud as he can, pegging Hitler with jellybeans of undesirable flavors as he travels merrily along his way.  Or maybe this guy is actually some powerful immortal being of justice, like Green Lantern’s brother, the Purple Lantern, and he’s driving Hitler all the way to Kansas to put him in the supervillian prison there.  But Hitler just had to go and get all whiny when the Purple Lantern or the Phantom or the Question or whoever he is refused to stop at Burger King and let Hitler get one of those little crowns they give out.  So, by way of punishment, he used his power ring to render Hitler mostly invisible until they get where they’re going.

            On a more serious not though, clearly riding with Hitler is a problem we as a society need to address.  I mean, say you’re driving a race car with only one seat in it, is Hitler going to be sitting on your lap?  Even if you can see through him, that’s still a little bit forward of him.  And what if you’re driving a clown car alone, is it gonna be full of invisible clown Hitlers (not that The Invisible Clown Hitlers wouldn’t be a sweet name for a band)?  Does this mean everyone can always take the HOV lane from now on?  If you know that he’s there, can you expect him to pitch in for gas money?  Probably not, he’s the kind of guy who’d get you an AOL disk for your birthday.  If he only rides with you when you’re alone, does that mean that if you pick up your grandmother from pro wrestling camp, Hitler has to get out and walk home?  I’m just saying, there are a lot of questions here, and I think it’s time we started doing something about the problem of Hitler being such an invisible ride mooch and all.  As for myself though, I plan on getting a big Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt cardboard cutout and having him ride along with me, in the hopes that he’ll be scared off by its fearsome demeanor.  Don’t get the Neville Chamberlain one though, it’ll just make Hitler all cocky and then you’ll never chase him out.

            There are probably a lot of difficult things about being a superhero (not that I would know, wink), never being free to tell your friends your true identity, having the woman at the Ukrop’s dry cleaners look at you all funny when you take in your costume to get the funky stench of evil cleaned out (The Funky Stench of Evil, needless to say, would be a totally sweet name for a band), and the fact that unless your car either transforms into a different car, or you can afford a second vehicle and a secret garage, everyone is going to wonder why you always drive around town in the Yakmobile (assuming of course, that you’re a yak-themed superhero).  The greatest challenge of all though, I imagine, is coming to realize that everyone you know is a complete retard.  Take Superman for instance, his costume largely consists of taking off his glasses and slicking his hair back, yet this fools absolutely everybody he knows.  And it’s not just that Clark Kent is such a different guy that no one suspects him of it, nobody even ever comes up to him and says, “Y’know Clark, this is gonna sound crazy, but you kinda look like Superman.”  Nope, even supervillians, some of whom dedicate their entire professional career to discovering Superman’s secret identity ever stop and think, “Hey, there’s that guy that always delivers Superman’s messages to the public, who also happens to bear a striking physical resemblance to Superman while never being seen at the same time as Superman.  I wonder if he could tell me who Superman really is.”  I mean, what does he do when he goes to the beach?  Does he have to wear big ol’ space goggle sunglasses and one of those little old lady swim caps?  Otherwise, he might lose his glasses and get his hair wet and then everyone would realize the truth.

            I mean, just speaking from experience here, you’d think that as you were rescuing one of your closest friends from a meteor, they might make the connection that you were, in fact, not merely a superhero but also the guy they’d been hanging out with since 6^th Grade.  To illustrate this point, here’s a true story.  For a time, while I was in college, I was severely into the dangerous and silly sport of padded weapons fighting.  Every week after pro-wrestling was over, me and a bunch of the guys from my dorm would go out on the basketball court and beat the tar out of each other with swords made out of PVC and foam insulation, held together with duct tape.  Well, as our weapon-building skills and lethality progressed, we started to develop padded armor and other protection gear to help cut down on the number of fatalities we incurred.  Now, it came to pass, that one day I was out on the basketball court with another guy, dressed from head to toe in about fifty pounds of surplus football/hockey/baseball equipment (into which I have installed, to my everlasting satisfaction, a self-contained air conditioning system), exchanging a whomping with another fellow, of similar attire.  All of a sudden, I heard a girl call out, “Ben, how’s it going?”  So I looked around, expecting to see some girl who lived in my dorm and knew my pastimes well enough to recognize me.  Instead, I saw, some 300 feet away, a girl who I hadn’t seen since high school, who I didn’t even know all that well back then, who didn’t even go to JMU but was just visiting a friend of hers for the weekend.  And yet, despite the fact that I was halfway across campus, completely covered in armor, and she wasn’t even looking for me, she recognized me instantly. 

            Which is all really just a roundabout way of saying that there is no way on Earth that Spiderman could save Kierstin Dunst from the Green Goblin and carry her halfway across town, having a merry little conversation all the while, and not have her immediately recognize him as Toby Macguire, the other guy she’s madly in love with.  Look at it this way; if I were to dress up like a teacup mammoth, and thwart the vile schemes of Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, right in front of Channel 6 News, nobody would be fooled.  Like, the new anchor (Biff Thumpchest, Richmond’s voice of reason) would say “Who is that masked man?” and simultaneously, all across town, thousands upon thousands of people would exclaim, “Holy crap! That’s Ben!” before calling in to the station and revealing my ever so briefly secret identity to the world. 

            So yeah, comic book secrecy is so totally unrealistic it’s not even funny (except clearly, its extremely funny or I wouldn’t have just written about it), unless you accept as axiomatic that absolutely everybody who lives in comic books is 200 proof doofus.  Either that, or Richmond is just populated with the most the most observant people ever to walk the Earth (which while distinctly possible, doesn’t excuse the doofishness of the rest of the world).  Next time you think superheroes have it easy then, just remember all the stuff they have to put up with from dumb people.

            If, like myself, you happen to be a child of the 80s, unless you grew up in a cave or some cavelike state, you probably watched a fair amount of Full House while you were growing up.  For those of you who don’t remember, Full House was what he Olsen Twins did before they turned into uber-skanks and developed complementary lifestyle dysfunctions.  On a completely unrelated note (or so it would seeeeeem!), I saw the Dukes of Hazzard movie this week, which, if you don’t remember it, is kind of scary, since it’s been out for like, a week, and if you can’t remember that far back, your brain’s probably busted or something (you’d better call tech support now, it might still be under warranty).  “What do these two seemingly antithetical things have in common?,” you may ask.  No, not the presence of gratuitous mullets (though the Gratuitous Mullets would indeed be a sweet name for a band), nor the fact that both are cited by Kim Jong Il of North Korea to be indicators of Western decadence (don’t laugh, he can make avalanches happen!).  Give up?  It’s Uncle Jesse.  Not the same Uncle Jesse, mind you, one was played by Lord of the Damned, John Stamos, the other by the only white guy who can have pigtails and still look cool in spite of his Pippi-Lomhstockitude, Willie Nelson.  This of course begs the question: Which one makes a better Uncle Jesse?  Let’s find out.

            First let’s take a look at Full House Uncle Jesse.  To his credit and his shame, he had a big goofy 80s mullet, which in one episode got caught in the wheels of a cable car, dragging him more than a mile before Bob Saget could gnaw him free with his mighty incisors.  He also believed himself to be Elvis, though obviously he wasn’t, since there’s really only one true Elvis (and I am he).  He lived in the basement, subsisting off of small rodents and things that people threw at him whilst he was on stage.

            In the course of the show, Uncle Jesse accomplished a number of significant feats (3) that one him the admiration of all those who dwelt in the accursed house of Bob Saget.  For instance, there was that one time that he found out that there were actually no fewer than three different Olsen Twins who were all just dressing alike and pretending to be one person so that the other two could go sell third world refugee children on Ebay and snort Pixie Stix.  Upon being found out by Uncle Jesse though, they all flew into a harpy-like fury and attempted to set his mullet ablaze.  Thinking quickly though, Uncle Jesse picked up one of the three, Zlognar Smacktropolis Olsen, and threw her into a conveniently located bottomless crevasse or eternal torment, which pretty much put an end to the shenanigans of the other two for the duration of the show.  Then there was the time when Uncle Joey ran away to join the circus but was abducted by Iranian terrorists who offered him a new bike if he got in their van.  Upon learning this news, Uncle Jesse took his power pills, and using the awesome powers that they granted him, flew off to Iran like Ross Perot and single-handedly rescued Uncle Joey from the evil clutches of Ayatollah Khomeini and his hordes of flying monkeys.  Finally, there was that time when DJ got arrested by Federal Agents for helping Kimmy Gibler to smuggle pandas into Quebec, and Uncle Joey had to use his awesome Mullet-Fu skills to break into the secret caves underneath the Lincoln Memorial to rescue her from a legion of zombie orangutans.  So yeah, John Stamos Uncle Jesse is pretty cool, when taken in isolation.

            But now let’s consider for a moment, the virtues of Willie Nelson Uncle Jesse.  For one thing, he’s an infinitely better guitarist than John Stamos Uncle Jesse ever was.  For another thing, he’s got greatly superior car chase experience and knows the importance of not letting one’s babies grow up to be cowboys (nor letting one’s cowboys grow up to be babies, which happens just as often nowadays).  Finally, he’s way more gritty than John Stamos Uncle Jesse.  Like, if there was a nuclear war, and both Uncle Jesses somehow survived and had to drive around the post-apocalyptic wasteland in freaky-looking battlecars while fending off mutants, does anyone truly doubt that Willie Nelson would quickly demonstrate atomic survival skills and panache of Mel Gibsonesque proportions, while John Stamos would last about as long as a one-legged possum on Route 95 (which is, after all, infamous for its great rate of possum squashage).  And suppose that that time that DJ had locked the keys in her car during an ill-planned Chinese fire drill she called on Willie Nelson Uncle Jesse rather than the other one, instead of merely pretending to be Elvis and getting everyone killed again, Willie Nelson would have just made a Molotov Cocktail out of some moonshine and thrown it at the offending car, and then sung a soulful yet bitchin’ song about it.  And instead of living in the basement with a bunch of old pizza boxes and hair control products, Willie Nelson would have built a still, so everyone in the house would have always been drunk off white lightning and bootleg Smirnov Ices, which honestly, would have made the show far more interesting.  Finally, Willie Nelson is just inherently more awesome.  Like, if you had to go on a coast to coast road trip, and you had to choose between the two Uncle Jesses, only mullet fiends and other weirdoes would pass up a chance to travel across our great nation with Willie Nelson.

            So, in conclusion, Willie Nelson just straight up makes a better Uncle Jesse than does John Stamos.  Therefore, when they finally get around to making Full House: The Next Generation, make sure you cast your vote in favor of Willie Nelson, otherwise, should you find yourself in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland with no one to help you out but a guy with a mullet and delusions of grandeur, you’ll have only yourself to blame.

            Ever since man’s first shambling progenitors first emerged from the primordial mini-mall that spawned them, mankind has oft gazed up at the infinite blackness of the night sky and pondered the question that consumed the lives of some of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, driving some mad while others merely got bored and went on to invent things like the hamdinger and the walk-in juicer.  Indeed, it is a rare man who hasn’t had the occasional sleepless night from musing upon that ageless question which defines human existence itself: “Who would win, astronauts or cavemen?”

            Perhaps you think believe that only a fool would endeavor to answer a quandary of such giganimousity.  Perhaps I am that fool.  After all, both sides have their champions in the modern debate, and both make compelling cases in their side’s favor.  So before we go with bold entreaty wither no man has gone before, let’s take a look at the strengths, weaknesses, and aromas that cavemen and astronauts bring to the table.

            Going in chronological order, we start with cavemen.  First off, cavemen have the advantage of not being freaked out by astronauts.  Your average caveman who’s never been frozen and unthawed in the future, or transported by space aliens to the modern day has never seen an astronaut before, so he won’t be stopping to think “Oh crap, that’s a friggin’ astronaut!  He’s gonna drop a Hubble on me or something!  I better find a cave, now!”  Also, since cavemen are generally not famous for their masterful command of the subtleties of the English language, they probably wouldn’t even be able to panic so eloquently.  An actual caveman panicking would sound more like this, “Crap, ooga zonga noop noop grunt snarf!”  Clearly, it loses a little something in translation.  Next, cavemen are good at hitting things with other things, and tend not to focus on meaningless technical distinctions.  No caveman ever said, “Damn, this is a Mark III brontosaurus femur, I did all my training on the Mark II!”  Also, cavemen are not above throwing their own poop should the occasion demand it.  Fashion-wise, cavemen still have the advantage, wearing saber tooth tiger hide togas, and the occasional tasteful business-casual necktie, while astronauts wear those clunky moon suits.  Finally, cavemen have Caveman McGuyver Powers^®, which means that they can build just about anything out of a couple of trees and a dinosaur, though more often than not, it’s just a dishwasher or a roto-tiller or something.

            Astronauts meanwhile have a number of advantages of their own.  For one thing, they can sing, which would surprise the cavemen and make them wonder at the beauty of their trippy space music, while some other astronauts snuck around behind and clubbed the cavemen over the head like so many saber-toothed baby tyrannoseals.  Next, astronauts might have phat kung fu skills.  They might not too, but the cavemen don’t know that, so all the astronauts have to do is wave their arms around menacingly and say “Whaaaaaa!” and the cavemen will probably fall for it.  Astronauts also usually have sucky space guns (at least in all the movies I’ve ever seen).  I don’t know why they don’t just use regular guns since they work just fine in space, but every time you see an astronaut in a movie, he’s got some kind of lame compressed air stun whiffle gun that’s completely ineffective against anything other than space wusses (of which there are comparatively few).  To their advantage though, astronauts are well inured to the effects of things that make you barf, so all hey have to do is each pick up a caveman and give him an airplane ride until he throws up, a propensity towards nausea being the one notable caveman weakness, as everybody knows.

            Now, it seems to me that it would be altogether too difficult to reason out the conclusion of such an epic battle were it to be fought out by all the cavemen and astronauts that one could find, and if you just made them form teams and play football or something, that’d just be silly, cuz the cavemen would think you meant soccer, and wackiness would ensue.  No, the only solution is to choose from each side a champion; the greatest caveman and the greatest astronaut who have ever lived.  This is why I choose Captain Caveman, from the eponymous Captain Caveman Show and Major Healy, from I Dream of Jeannie.

            The battle is not nearly so one-sided as you might at first believe, for even though Major Healy has Barbara Eden using her magical powers to help him, its important to remember that more often than not things go horribly awry when she intervenes and likely as not, she’ll end up sending her hero to a swift and gory death with her bumbling.  At the same time, she is totally hot.  Captain Caveman, not to be outdone, also had a couple of girls who followed him around, and since I can’t remember anything about them, we’ll just say that their names were Slorg the Soulrender and Peggy, and that they ddin’t really have any magical powers.  Without Jeannie helping him though, Major Healy is just a worthless honky with a helmet on, while Captain Caveman has his go, go, gadget club of awesomeness with him at all times.  To make a long story short, Captain Caveman would pretty much completely kill Major Healy in about 3 minutes, and then go and make out with Jeannie.

            So, in conclusion, we have learned, um, uh, that animated cavemen are better than sitcom astronauts.  So if you’re ever at some kind of weird cartoon troglodyte vs. sitcom space cracker guy illegal bloodsport cagematch thing, invite me along, because I’ve always wanted to see one of those; but also put all your money on the caveman.

            If I had to pick just one event that’s common to all the people who have ever lived, I would, without reservation, have to choose that noblest of institutions, the car chase.  Seriously, who among us hasn’t ever had to flee via automobile from an army of evil robots from the future, or rogue secret agents, or a pickup full of crazy farmers, hellbent on wreaking horrible vengeance upon you?  Sometimes it’s because you did something, like steal a top secret bioweapon, or worse yet, the mascot of a rival high school (Captain Oinky XIV).  Whatever the reason, car chases are frequently rather stressful affairs, as you speed through the urban jungle that is Southside, with The Man (Calvin Coolidge is, in fact, the original Man), or possibly Smokey on your tail, as you desperately try to make it to the Batcave, or, if you don’t happen to be Batman (not all of us can be, don’t feel bad), Waffle House.

            Finally however, after a great deal of cogitation and having seen Dukes of Hazzard over the weekend, I think I finally understand the ancient and subtle are of car chase mastery.  Come with me then, won’t you, and a fun-filled learnventure of knowledge, as we explore the finer points of taking control of your next car chase.

            Now, the first thing you have to remember to never do if you’re being chased by the authorities is put on some really intense techno music.  Almost without fail, this summons either federal agents, who more often than not have been co-opted by an evil crime syndicate or space aliens.  Sometimes though, a guy made out of liquid metal will show up in a semi and start chasing you.  This guy, who’s name is Gus, by the way, is a complete tool, and you so completely do not want him chasing you in a semi that even if the only thing on your MP3 player is techno, you’re better off to just flee in silence.  Now here’s where the trick comes in; you see, if you happen to have anything at all available with more than 40% banjo to it, playing this at top volume will almost invariably bring about a drastic improvement in your situation.

            First, instead of being chased by the government’s mercilessly effective enforcers, all of a sudden, you’ll look back in the mirror and see a bunch of corrupt yet loveable hick cops chasing you.  And instead of ramming your car off the road and into a wall, while ever keeping a deathly silence, they’ll shout stuff like, “Woo, got you now, boy! Yee-Haa!,” at which point they’ll all spin out of control and start colliding with each other in a humorous manner, running into pigpens and fruit stands which will invariably be close at hand.  Pigpens and fruit stands or course being the two things in this world best known for stopping a car without seriously hurting anyone, so that they can get out of the car and have like a watermelon or a pig on their head, as they shake their fist with impotent fury (the cop I mean, not the pig on his head nor the watermelon) as you speed off to freedom.

            Also, banjo music helps to smooth out your escape route.  Like if you’re listening to techno chase music, you’ll keep running into all the blind alleys and dead ends, as the soulless minions of orthodoxy draw ever nearer and you start freaking out, cuz they work for space aliens and/or Calvin Coolidge.  If you play banjo music though, every time you think you’re trapped, there’s like, a ramp on a construction site, or a barn you can drive through, though when you emerge, there will be a chicken in the car.  Don’t even ask how it got in there, that’s just the price you pay for your continued freedom.

            Of course, the banjo chase method also helps if whoever happens to be chasing you is armed, as they usually are.  Like if you’re listening to techno and being chased by FBI agents, and they start shooting at you, bullets will start ricocheting around inside the car and you’ll get a tire shot out and it’s all scary.  If you’ve got banjo music going on though, they’ll be armed with stuff like shotguns and rocket launchers, but it’ll always miss, or just take off a rearview mirror.  Mostly, it’ll just blow unrealistically large holes in funny things that you drive by, like mailboxes fashioned in the likeness of trout, or lawn jockeys, or squirrels.

            And even if you should happen to get caught, banjo chase music is still a lifesaver.  Like if you get caught by the FBI space alien liquid metal Calvin Coolidge guys, they’ll take you to a big scary office building and slap you around like a duck in a cotton candy machine, before leaving you to ponder the evil that shall surely befall you.  If you get caught while playing banjo music though, they’ll just handcuff you and stop to gloat for a while, at which point your hot cousin or Wonder Woman will feign car trouble and distract them while the lovable yet bumbling doofus you keep around for emergencies just such as this sets you free and then takes the cop car off for a joyride.

            So there you go, a veritable plethora of reasons to always keep a little banjo music in your car, lest you happen into an unexpected car chase unprepared.  Just be careful, if you try and listen to a techno remix of banjo music while you’re in a car chase, you’ll probably be thrown into some crazy alternate bizarro world dimension, where everything is just like Earth, but with one horrible difference, like Hitler won the American Revolution, or monkeys run the Home Shopping Network, or Elton John turned into Dr. Octopus unopposed and using his four extra arms, wrote even more crappy songs for dead royalty based on his already existing crappy songs.  So yeah, be careful about that.

            Be sure to tune in tomorrow for the Uncle Jesse vs. Uncle Jesse!

            Remember how back in high school English class, your teacher would pull out some classic piece of literature, and then forcibly you and the rest of the class to slog through its endless morass of boring characters, humorous old-fashioned words and literary devices (some of which being the screw, the pulley, the inclined plane, and the toaster), so that by the time you were finally finished, you were convinced that any book over a hundred years old must have either been written by space aliens with an extremely sick sense of what constitutes good writing, or had been developed by some mad Victorian scientist with the intention of making high school students hate him; but then years later, whether out of boredom or curiosity, or merely the need to settle things with your own personal demons, you’d pick up the book again and discover to your delight that in fact it was altogether enjoyable and edifying to read once more, opening up as it did magical new vistas of understanding and appreciation of the fine art of English writing as well as being an adventure in learning(that was like, the longest sentence ever)?  Me neither.  Seriously, all the great works of literature I’ve enjoyed since high school were the ones we never looked at.  My conviction is that this is due to one of two things; either all English teachers are in fact from France, and secretly part of an international plot to make American kids hate English, in hopes that they will forsake their native tongue and start speaking French, of maybe just that English teachers are usually middle-aged women.  I mean, most of my favored classics are stuff that involves pirates, monsters, and monster pirates.  Everything we read in English class seemed to be about women named Madeline throwing themselves out windows for the love of Some Guy I Always Hated Named Edmund.  Neither Treasure Island nor Treasure Island vs. The Wolf Man, for instance, had Some Guy I Always Hated Named Edmund (or SGIAHNE, for short), and if they did, he must been considerate enough to fall overboard during the opening paragraph.

            WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!! So if, despite the fact that this book has been out for something like 300 years and even though you never wanted to read it before, you’ve suddenly been seized by a passionate yearning to go out and read it, don’t read any more here.  If you do, I’ll only give away the surprise ending, thus sapping your existence of all meaning and crushing you dearest dreams like a Siberian hamster beneath the merciless wheels of my minivan, leaving you a broken, empty shell of a human being, devoid of joy and bereft of social skills.  If, on the other hand, you don’t really want to read the book anyways, than bully for you!  Go right ahead and keep reading this blog, it’ll probably actually make you better than you are now.

            Which brings us to Wuthering Heights (How does one wuther, anyway?  It sounds mildly unpleasant at best).  Now, most people these days suppose that it was written back in the 19^th century.  Nothing could be further from the truth however.  It was in fact a brilliantly insightful piece of science fiction written back in the later days of the Byzantine Empire, imagining what awesome new scientific wonders would have been invented by the far-oof year of 1800 (for instance, they would have stopped putting two Os in “off”).  Wuthering Heights was written by Emily Bronte, a crazy cat lady who lived in Yogi’s Haunted Cave at King’s Dominion with her two evil stepsisters.  All day long, they’d stir a big cauldron o’ evil, and pass around the one magical glass eye that allowed them to see.  In reading the book, should you ever be so unfortunate as to try, this will become all too obvious.

            The first thing you ought to remember about literature (okay, if it were really the first thing, I’d have written it about two paragraphs up) is that any book that takes place on a heath is to be looked upon as highly suspect of being a sucky romance novel.  Honestly, I don’t even know what a heath is, I suspect its some kind of a swamp, but with more angst and broken dreams.  Never, in all my experience, has a book started with the words, “There upon the heath, Captain Zlarg the pirate readied his flamethrower,” or “The heath was thrown into darkness as a great swarm of flying monkeys blotted out the sun and flang poop on the undead cyborg army below, ” or “’I wish I had a Heath Bar,’ Dick Cheney mused as he delivered an Xtreme Flying Tiger Uppercut to William Shatner, thus winning himthe Tri-Wizard Tournament and saving Christmas.  Again.”  No, books with a heath in them always start out describing a house of sorrows, and then spend the next 400 pages making you sorrowful for having picked up the book in the first place.

            The story is as follows:  A bunch of angsty people live on a heath.  One of them, a gypsy foundling named Heathcliff, is hated by everybody, just like Cher.  Everyone is miserable and dies.  Heathcliff dies for no apparent reason.  The three people who are actually left alive get married and are happy.  That’s pretty much the entire thing, in about 402 ½ pages less than it took Emily Bronte to write it.  Also, what kind of a name is Heathcliff for a guy who lives on a heath?  That’d be like calling me Whiteboy Suburbscliff, which might be kind of cool, but not really very original at all.

            So there you have it, Wuthering Heights in a paragraph or less, now do yourself a favor and go read something with a vampire and a submarine in it, like The Brothers Karamazov.

            In the course of human history (as opposed to the history of weasels, or doorknobs, or cabbages, or whatever the viable alternatives may happen to be), man has developed many a devilish contrivance intended to spread suffering and misery amongst mankind.  Most terrible of all these things are those which are developed ostensibly for helping people, because then you can just go and inflict them on everybody, and say it’s for their own good.  Examples of this sort of course include the metric system, light beer, those necklaces made out of candy, Janet Reno.  One well intended piece of deviltry, however, which oft is omitted from the lists in that most detestable of garments, the Polo Shirt.  What, you say, you thought that polo shirts were supposed to give casual professionals a tolerably nice garment of median fanciness and thus make their lives easier?  That’s what people used to say about communism too, you know.  No, the polo shirt is in fact the single most evil garment ever conceived of, in no small measure because it seems so very innocuous to those unschooled in its dark powers.  Happily though, if you do but read on, I shall enlighten you, gentle reader, as to the manifold perils of the polo shirt, which not without good reason is called “El Queso del Diablo”.

            First, polo shirts are made from some magical material woven from the souls of the damned (cotton) which somehow possesses the capacity to make you equally uncomfortable whether it be hot or cold.  In the wintertime, a polo shirt will suck the very warmth from your body, like a herd of vampiric death gerbils (The Vampiric Death Gerbils, by the way, would be a most excellent name for a band).  Perhaps this might lead you to believe that in the summer, a polo shirt would cool you off, but your hopes would soon be shattered like a poorly-made El Salvadorian bootleg G.I. Joe action figure being flung from the top of a moderately tall armoire.  No, in the summer, a polo shirt might just as well be made out of duct tape, for all the heat it allows to escape.

            Next, polo shirts are coated with some kind of weird space-age Teflon substitute, which has the effect of making them incredibly slippery whenever you’re not paying attention.  “Why do such a thing?” you may well ask.  The answer is simple, so that no matter what you try to do, if you so much as move a muscle, your entire shirt comes untucked and you look like a slubberdegulion or some sort of a street muffin (neither of which, mind you, is a thing you want to be perceived as in a professional environment).  Adding to this most unfortunate effect, all polo shirts are about three inches shorter than shorts made to fit humans (it being now supposed that they were first designed to punish a diminutive race of troggles at an office supply warehouse in central Iowa).

            From whence did they come from though?  I suspect that someone, perceiving polo to be a namby-pamby rich boy sport, designed these shirts that polo players might suffer more, thus making their sport more interesting, rather than just soccer on horses.  The polo players (Is there a better word for that?  Like polonists? Or poloroids?), being a tad hung over that day (having just spent the night partying at the official “Every Single Polo Player In The World Annual Boxing Day Gala”) didn’t really question it at the time, and by the time they’d sobered up and realized that they’d somehow adopted the fiery Hell-shirt as their official uniform, it was too late.

            Recent Biblical research with the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that the book of Genesis may have originally been intended to contain one more verse concerning man’s banishment from Eden, “And also shall Satan have dominion o’er Business Casual Fridays, and all related fashion choices, and great shall be the ruination thereof, with much wailing and gnashing of beef.”  Other leading Biblical scholars however disavow this new passage on the grounds that it is exceedingly silly and obviously made up by Saint Augustine, whose loathing of polo shirts was remarkable even back in the day.

            So there it is, the horrible, sordid, poorly ventilated truth of the whole affair.  Rise up my brethren, take your fate into your own hands, and never buy a polo shirt unless you absolutely have to!  And even then, you might be better off just making a shirt out of duct tape, at least then it would look cool.

            If I had to choose one thing in this world that everybody loves (besides Raymond), I think I would be perfectly safe in saying that that one thing is clearly zombies.  Really, zombies are just cool like that, virtually any situation, be it Junior Prom, the President’s State of the Union Address, or Kim Jong Il wrestling a flaming puma (not that that wouldn’t already be pretty interesting, even aside from the fact that Kim Jong Il and the Flaming Pumas would make an ineffably sweet name for a band), all it takes to spice up an otherwise dull social occasion is a tasteful sprinkling of zombies.  But before I get any deeper into the sprightly subject of the walking dead, let’s have a little history.

            The zombie was first invented in 1657 by Sir Isaac Zombie, who, while catching a nap in a nearby graveyard next door to an accursed swamp of evil and a Hardee’s, first noticed the convergence of evil and unholy powers betwixt the three, and theorized that with enough dark power concentrated on a graveyard, it might be possible to raise up innumerable legions of undead zombie minions, or as the Indians called them, maize.  Simultaneously, and a continent away, Nelson Mandella made much the same discovery, though his inadequate grasp of international magical patent laws allowed Sir Isaac Zombie to take full credit (which is why, whenever you throw a party, you can’t get the two of them to even talk to each other).  Zombies were of course, an immediate hit; everyone from mad scientists to diabolical warlocks to soccer moms wanted a few to guard their fortresses of doom and/or drive the kids to bassoon lessons.

            Eventually though, the zombies grew restless,  and after learning that, as unholy abominations crudely knitted together from the flesh of the departed and imbued with a shoddy and blasphemous simulacrum of existence, they would be last in line to buy Playstation 2s, they rebelled.  It wasn’t long before one of the zombies, attempting to perform a noogie, accidentally discovered that human brains were delicious, which did very little to settle down the zombie mob, who might never have been stopped, had they not made it into Washington D.C. and starved to death.

            After the Great Zombie Debacle of Aught Two (also a good name for a band, in case you have an aversion to pumas and North Korean Dictators), as it came to be known, newer, more user friendly zombies were developed, and pushed into early production by overwhelming consumer demand.  It wasn’t long before every child’s birthday party had forsaken ponies in favor of the ever-popular zombie ride, zombie petting zoo, and of course, the zombie clown making zombie balloon animals.  It wasn’t long before they started showing up on network television, though their poor oratory skills and penchant for eating the cue card guy ensured that that particular venture was a short-lived one.  On a more successful note, Dick Cheney recently bought a few hundred of them, that his Ziggurat of Doom and Make Your Own T-Shirt Emporium might be all the more impressive.  Zombie-flavored Slurpees, on the other hand, were a complete failure in every state except for the evil ones (New Jersey, Wyoming, and Mexico.  Also, The Zombie-Flavored Slurpees would be a severely good name for a band, and I promise I won’t point out any more of those today).

            It was with all this in mind, that I found myself in a pool hall, this Tuesday last, playing billiards with a couple of my crackers, and thinking about zombies, as I am wont to do.  Serendipitously enough, the resident Jukebox had “Don’t Stop Me Now” in its repertoire, and we decided to reenact a scene from “Shaun of the Dead”, you know, the one with the zombies in the pool hall.  Alas, something went horribly awry, and instead of playing suitable zombie-bashing music, we were treated to a lengthy selection from the Dixie Chicks, who, for all their charms, don’t exactly inspire me to wield a chainsaw and start hewing away at the living dead.  To make matters worse, this was followed by a song by N’sync, which made me want to wield chainsaw and start hewing away at the nearest boy band, though unfortunately, this being a pool hall of great poise and classiness, none were to be found.  So there we stood, wondering which of the people there were actually the zombie we’d get to beat up when our song finally played, and though many of the patrons shewed signs of zombism, the Jukebox continued in its orneriness and we had to leave.

            It was all just as well though, since after I got home, I learned that zombies are in fact a protected wetlands species in the state of Virginia.  I’m not sure how exactly this came to pass, but I suspect it followed on the heels of a night of horrendous debauchery.  Or possibly it was merely the powerful and affluent pro-zombie lobby which grows more powerful in local politics by the day.  Either way, as long as the zombies don’t join forces with Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, I think we’ll be okay, though perhaps next time you’re out, you had better buy a chainsaw, just in case.

            It is a generally accepted fact that everyone drives a car of some sort (unless of course, you’re poor, Amish, or Superman).  Maybe you drive land yacht, or a semi that transforms into a robot, or possibly one of those new hybrids that run off of a combination of soybeans and lost souls.  Maybe if you’re especially favored by the gods, you get to drive a tank, or that nigh-universal attractor of babes, the 1989 Plymouth Voyager.  Regardless of what kind of car you drive though, you can be sure of one thing above all others; you’re lucky you don’t live in Eternia.  Now I know what you’re thinking, “But Ben, Eternia is the coolest planet in the universe!  Where else can you have an aluminum elephant for a head and just walk down the street without attracting any attention?”  Maybe you’re right, and if you, gentle reader, do have an aluminum elephant head (as many young folks do, nowadays) I would certainly encourage you to pay a visit to Eternia today (just make sure you spend all your Skelebucks before they switch over to the Euro though).  In terms of vehicular choice however, Eternia has got to be the most retarded planet in the Universe.  Without further ado then, let’s take a look at some of the truly awful ways that He-Man and his various homies were forced to get around:

            Now, lest you allow the awesome name of the Bashasaurus to seduce you, let me begin by pointing out that this has got to be one of the most ridiculous designs for a battle tank thingie ever.  For one thing, you just know that Man at Arms was paying through the nose to have the alignment fixed on that thing every couple of hundred miles, not to mention the horribly uneven tires wear that almost certainly resulted from absolutely horrible balancing issues.  I mean, imagine a hippopotamus driving a Mini, now savor that thought for a minute, and now think about what kind of shape the suspension would be in before long.  Ever wonder why Man at Arms wore that silly Tron helmet?  Clearly, it’s because every time you used the bashy thing on this car, it was gonna club you like a baby seal; really anyone other than Orko (since everyone else in Eternia is exactly the same height) would be taking their own life into their hands if they took this monstrosity out on the road.  Leaving aside the fact that it’s only good for hitting minions of evil who are nonetheless polite enough to stand exactly three feet in front of you, the Bashasaurus is clearly just one more automotive disappointment from Daimler-Chrysler.

            You know how Skeletor’s flunkies, toadeaters, and minions were always whining about things?  At last we can see why.  I mean, look at the Battle Bones here; if anything is worse than having to sit on the transmission hump in the back of a station wagon, this is it.  And you just know that every summer Skeletor would come downstairs to the Snake Mountain Kitchen of Doom (The Snake Mountain Kitchen of Doom, by the way, would make a most unprecedentedly excellent name for a band) and announce that it was time for their annual road trip/teambuilding expedition to Iowa.  This would never fail to elicit a general groan of dismay from his legions as none of them looked forward to spending the next 17 hours being held by about the waist by ribs of a dead dinosaur that Skeletor had apparently turned into a short bus, somewhere along the line.  I’m not even sure whether this thing had its own power source or not, in which case Beast Man and his fellow villains would have had to move the whole thing along ala Fred Flintstone.

            Next we get to the most dubious conveyance yet, the Roton.  I’m not even sure if this thing has any wheels under there, or if Skeletor had to just put it somewhere and hope that he could taunt He-Man into walking into its many swirling blades of doom.  Except they weren’t really blades, because Skeletor had gone and put these big safety plugs on all of them so that Trapjaw wouldn’t keep getting his hand cut off while he was waxing it.  I dunno, maybe Skeletor would wait until winter rolled around and then drag it up on top of the a hill overlooking the Eternia Ice Skating Rink, where, after thoroughly Criscoing up the underside, he’d get Stinkor to give him a good push down the hill, in the idle and improbable hope that He-Man and Teela would be so busy falling in love that they wouldn’t even notice this giant thing sliding down towards them at breakneck speed.  However it worked, Skeletor was clearly not a slave to practicality (or for that matter, to wearing pants of any sort).

            Finally, we get to the Dragon Walker.  This is vehicle so brilliantly stupid that it fills one’s very soul with awe to even contemplate it.  Seriously, imagine going to all the time and effort of building a device as complicated as the space shuttle, the only purpose of which is to smack you in the face with a two-by-four.  That’s what the Dragon Walker is like.  See, the way it moves is that the little cab on top slowly moves forward, and upon reaching the front, the entire body of the thing swivels forward until it’s reversed itself.  The upshot of this being that it’s a vehicle that will be equally disastrous anywhere you try to use it other than the Gobi Desert.  Every time Skeletor would try to take this monstrosity to work in the morning, it would knock down every single Japanese Maple planted along the left side of his driveway.  Once he was out on the road, it would be nigh impossible to avoid knocking down every mailbox on the street, starting with his own (which, for the curious among you, was shaped like a dolphin wearing a comical hat).  And then, when he’d finally get out on Jeff Davis Highway (Skeletor lived in Southside, back in the day) he’d take a big chunk out of every single other car he passed, which is great for him, assuming he’s running neck and neck with Mechaneck, but every on and then, he’d pass Beast Man riding off to the office on his Vespa, and Skeletor would just smash into him like some large, heavy object that smashes into a smaller, furry object with bad dialogue.  I’ll bet Skeletor had to buy like, 37 new Vespas for Beast Man over the years, but he kept driving the stupid friggin’ Dragon Walker anyway, because that’s just the kind of brave, stubborn, wonderful, retard he is.

            So happy trails, Skeletor; and if you run into Mechaneck, make sure you tell him just how useless he is, it’ll make him cry.

            The Maytag Repairman, as the story goes, is the loneliest man in the world.  Generally, this unhappy circumstance of his has been attributed to the extraordinary quality of Maytag domestic appliances, but in truth, I think all of us, including the eponymous repairman, know that reality is far less flattering.  First though, lest I spend this entire blog calling this lamentable fellow “The Maytag Repairman”, let’s come up with a more convenient name for him.  Thusly, I dub him “Grelkar the Deathreaver” for the duration of this blog, and all cocktail parties pursuant thereto.  Now honestly, why exactly is he the loneliest man in the world?  I mean, there are a lot of people on the planet whose jobs call for just sitting around for eight hours a day waiting to be called into action, like they guy who carries the launch codes for all our nuclear weapons.  If you think about it, he’s gotta hate all the waiting.  Like, one day, we’ll finally have to go ahead and nuke Canada, and everyone else’ll be all like “Alas, that there is no other way to do this,” but he’ll be all like, “W00T! Finally my job has meaning!  My wife is going to be so surprised at dinner tonight when she asks what I did at work today!”  I mean, regardless of your job, you’ve still got 16 hours a day to have a social life, and clearly Grelkar has greater problems than mere time management if he can’t accomplish such a thing.  Let’s take a look then, at some of the other possible reasons why he might be missing out on the society of his various and assorted crackers.

            Like many of us, it may be that case that Grelkar was raised Amish.  However, from his youth his obsession with maintaining appliances earned him the scorn of his fellow Ammlets.  All the bullies on the school playground would shun him when the teacher wasn’t looking, and he kept an old Cuisinart hidden in a cow out on the family farm.  One day though, when he was 18, his parents discovered a disassembled washer/dryer combo under his bed and he was banished from the farm.  Out of shame he abandoned his Amish name, Jethro Methuselah Bootylicious Yoder (which, upon reflection, was not so very great a sacrifice on his part), and went to dwell with the Battling Appliance Sherpa Monks of the Himalayas.  There he learned all the mystical arts of fixing dishwashers, as well as being trained in unholy and forbidden kung fu skillz.  Eventually, he made his way to the Maytag Repair Facility, where he secured employment.  To his horror though, he discovered that their fine products never required his services only after signing an eternal contract of employment.  And so he goes on, trapped in a living Hell, unable to practice the art for which he forsook all those that ever loved him, crying himself to sleep at night while eating marshmallow fluff straight out of the jar and watching Mama’s Family.

            Or, maybe his parents (Mamie Eisenhower and The Riddler), repelled by his hideous visage, left him on a mountaintop to perish from the elements; a fate from which he was saved by a passing band of baboons (Mamie Eisenhower and the Band of Baboons, by the way, would make a most triumphant name for a band), who raised him as one of their own.  For many years young Grelkar dwelt with them, frolicking amongst the jungles and earring boutiques of Borneo, until at last he felt drawn once more to human society.  Alas, his freakish appearance, penchant for poop flinging, and the blue butt that he had picked acquired as a consequence of living with baboons tended to disqualify him from all jobs which called for dealing with people, so at last the Borneoan Ministry of Doofus Employment shipped him off to America for the one job in the world where it was expected he would never have to see anybody, that of a Maytag Repairman.

            Or perhaps he was born into a life of luxury and wealth, but on his seventh birthday his parents were both killed by Jack Nicholson before his very eyes.  As a result he spent his youth in training and seclusion, withdrawing from the society of all humanity save for Commissioner Gordon.  At last when his preparations were complete, Grelkar donned the costume of that most fearsome and dreaded creature of the night, the Maytag Repairman, fighting all the psychos and freaks who would seek to oppress the good people of Maytag City.  Never seeking friendship or conversation, but always brooding and lying in wait, until he sees the spotlight with a refrigerator on it, at which time he swings into action, delivering merciless justice to all evildoers.

            At any rate, suffice it to say that at last, after all these years, the Maytag Company, either to give this poor fellow some company or to tacitly admit that it’s products are not of the quality they used to be.  Unfortunately, the new Maytag Repairman, who, in the interest of brevity, I shall call “Snarg the Nancy-Boy” seems to be the very embodiment of evil.  Every time I’m in Lowe’s and I go by the Things You Can’t Fit In a Cart section, there they are, big as life, in cardboard cutout form.  Snarg, who kind of looks like an evil version of Bruce Campbell, always has this sort of a “I’ll fix your washer and steal your woman, cur!” sort of a sneer on his face, while poor old Grelkar mostly just looks listless and confused, as if he knows deep down in his pudgy old man heart that if he doesn’t just go along with this, Snarg’s gonna beat the tar out of him with a trout as soon as thy get back from the photo shoot.

            So there you have it; an excellent example of the importance of getting out during the day and spending some time around people, lest you too end up like Grelkar, the Maytag Repairman.  Oh, and also, even if you were raised by baboons, do try and get over that whole poop flinging thing.

            August; it’s usually decent enough month, aside from the heat, humidity, and occasional spate of elevator weasel attacks, and for the most part, I think most of us put it too pretty good use, overall.  If there’s one thing that August lacks though, it’s a patron cause.  Think about it, just about every other month (including the made-up ones like Smarch and Febtober) is “Official Something Month”.  Maybe it’s “Americans With No Dancing Skills Month” or “Don’t Put Steel Wool In The Microwave Awareness Month” or the much maligned “Say Something Nice About Canada Month”, but however silly and frivolous the cause may be, there’s a month for it (September, unfortunately, somehow came to be both “National Cookie Appreciation Month” and “Dental Hygiene Month” simultaneously.  One can only imagine the resulting fights as both sides try to book convention centers on the same dates).  August however, has nothing of the sort and, as a result of all these years of neglect and bottled up angst, has become something of a rogue month, a seething cauldron of rage and bitterness merely awaiting it’s chance to wreak havoc upon all those who cast their scorn upon it as one would cast the toupee of derision upon William Shatner (William Shatner and the Toupees of Derision, would of course be a totally sweet name for a band).  With all these things in mind however, I believe I have finally found a purpose for August; a cause both appropriate and underappreciated, that nearly always gets short shrift in our modern society.  By which of course I mean “National Evil Month”

            Seriously though, isn’t it about time we all started to recognize all the contributions that evil and its practitioners have made to our society?  And what about the many Evil-Americans whose evil heritage has so long been ignored in favor of nearly all other special interest groups (excepting of course, Uglo-Americans and People Who Like Boy Bands)?  And indeed, what month could possibly be more rife with evil than August anyway, containing as it does the birthdays of Martha Stewart, Fidel Castro, Steve Guttenberg, and the Snufflufagus from Sesame Street (lest you get him confused with all those other snufalufagi on TV).  With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the things we can all do to help make August more Evil-friendly.

            First, why not send a little note of thanks to all those people in your life who work so hard to destroy all that is good and decent in the world?  Take your nemesis out to brunch, write Josef Stalin a flattering haiku, maybe even send that guy you work with who’s always nicking your paper clips a Candygram.  Whatever you feel like doing, just as long as it’s something.

            Next, try and get your local schools and civic groups to spend more time learning the valuable contributions that evil people have made to our society.  For example:

Chairman Mao, who though often remembered for being a murderous dictator, introduced the idea of “Business Casual” dress to modern society.  Yes, thanks to his penchant for wearing his pajamas all the time, some of us can now get away with jeans and a blazer on Fridays.

Dr. Zepplin Von Devious, who back in 1879 first invented first invented the modern waffle iron (before which time, people were forced to pour their waffles with holes on just one side, and then go back with a special waffle chisel to cut out the other side).  Admittedly, he was trying to build a lightening gun that would allow him to destroy South Dakota thereby ridding the world of Mount Rushmore, which even then had, through some freakish effect of natural erosion, predicted that at some point Teddy Roosevelt would become President, but still, you’ve gotta give him credit for the waffles.

President Chester A. Arthur, who, to ease his boredom on long railroad trips, would throw kittens at passing road signs.  He also invented margarine.

Adolf Hitler, who in addition to being absolutely evil, invented the Volkswagen, as well as being the first evil dictator to make wide use of the smiley face on coffee mugs.

Sydney Bloopmeyer IV, who once snuck into Mother Theresa’s room while she was asleep and drew a goatee and Harry Potter glasses on her face with a magic marker.

            Also, maybe the newspaper could run a little weekly feature about up-and-coming evil people in town, describing their fiendish machinations, neuroses, and hobbies in general.  And of course, since nary a holiday can escape commercialization nowadays, I think we could expect the see a surfeit of “Happy Evil Month” Hallmark cards hitting the market almost immediately.  So there you have it, finally a purpose for August.  Go forth then, with a new appreciation for our most evil citizens, especially next time you make waffles.