As most of you who’ve been keeping up with teacupmammoths for a while now probably know, Mark Trail is the most thoroughly awesome nature-oriented superhero ever.  Seriously, he’s not like all those hyper eco-sensitive ones like Captain Planet, Jimmy Carter, and Aqua-Man, he still goes fishing and throws petrified trees at airplanes now and then.  Anyways, it happens to be the case that while he spends most of his weeks involved in incredibly long and ridiculous storylines.  The present one (which involves what has to be the least well-planned murder ever to be attempted in the funny pages by a woman with a double racing stripe in her hair) will most certainly be the topic of a rambling, long, and completely silly blog by myself after it finally finished up sometime near the end of 2007.

            But that’s all beside the point, which is this: that every Sunday, Mark, in reverence for the Sabbath day, holds of beating up people with sideburns for a day and instead goes all full color to explain stuff about nature to us.  Now, usually (by which I mean every single time ever in the course of human history up to this point) Mark just walks through the forest, surrounded by gigantic monster wildlife while explaining some important facts about whatever animal he seems to have found this week.  Generally, it includes a lot of lines like this, “Hamsters, though widely prized for their ability to survive in the harsh vacuum of space, are also a natural source of riboflavin and can be used to ward off the minions of Satan.”  This past Sunday however, Mark Trail seems to have gone completely off-topic, because instead of telling us about how orcas were first built by the ancient Mesopotamians, or how toothpaste was originally inspired by baboons, Mark Trail just goes off on this completely random tangent about caffeine.  And it’s not like it ties into the whole “surrounded by animals” thing at all.  It’s just caffeine.  Take a look:

My guess is that Mark was just really tired and hung over that day, and so while he was supposed to be talking about how throwing axes at rabbits is a fine thing to do with the kids, or how a homemade forest meth lab can often attract enormous hell squirrels, he was just too strung out and tired to do it and kept rambling on about caffeine.  Really, it just makes so little sense that it confuses me just looking at it.  Why on Earth is Mark Trail wandering around in nature like this, yet talking about caffeine, which, as I recall from Crap You Can’t Make Out of Trees and Weasels 101, is found nowhere in nature (except for Starbucks).

So then, we have to wonder, has Mark merely gone flippin’ loony, or is there something else going on here, something so sinister that even Mark Trail can’t just come out and warn us about how important it is.  Let’s take a closer look then, at the last panel, the one where Mark is brewing himself a iced double viente mocha latte in front of his tent.  And, of course – Great googly moogly!  It’s a bear!  It’s being attracted by the sweet, sweet aroma of the coffee!  Yes, that must be it; look, even Mark Trail himself is running away (or possibly flying away on a wisp of smoke, the picture doesn’t really make it that clear), so well does he know the ferocity of a bear separated from his coffee!

What’s that you say?  You doubt that bears so completely lust after coffee?  Well then, let’s just take a minute and review the facts Mr. Bears-Don’t-Like-Coffeerson.  First, let’s recall the tragic tale of Davy Crockett, who, as the song goes, was killed in a bar when he was only three.  A coffee bar.  Who could possibly kill a person in a coffee bar?  The only kind of folks that go to those are emo kids, Davy Crockett, me when I’m getting dumped by some girl, and bears.  Now, emo kids rarely went and lived in the wild frontier, owing to the paucity of angst out yonder in the early days, and all the coffee bars I’ve ever been dumped in were here in Virginia, which really is neither wild, nor a frontier, nor has it been either since about 1644.  Which once again, leaves us with bears.  Yes, clearly, a bear came into the coffee bar and mauled young Davy Crockett, and now, all these years later, another, or possibly the same immortal death bear, is on the loose once more.

Now normally, Mark Trail would be the first to warn us of this, but I’ll bet he’s been taken hostage by the bear, who wanted Mark to use his awesome powers of persuasion to do a strip about caffeine and how delicious it is.  That way, after everyone read the strip and made a bunch of coffee, the bear could just wander around, mauling innocent people and getting all high off caffeine.  But no bear is smarter than Mark Trail (except for Yogi Bear, perhaps, or that one Care Bear who went rogue a few years back), and so, though the bear was sitting right there off screen, probably holding a flaming 2x4 wrapped in barbed wire, Mark Trail cleverly snuck in a warning to all of us out in comics land who love coffee and hate bears, as all true red-blooded Americans should (the Russians, of course, are just the opposite; they start every day with a freshly brewed cup of bears, and never go out into the woods alone lest they be eaten by a ravenous cup of Taster’s Choice).  Now, there’s probably a good lesson in here somewhere, or at least a funny ad idea (We’ve replaced Mark’s Folger’s flavor crystals with a bear, let’s watch and see if he notices the difference. “Mmm, this tastes better than usuaaaaaaaagh!”), but instead I’m just going to end with a warning: Watch the skies - For bears.

And lastly, lest you start thinking that Mark Trail is too wholesome to be interesting, I leave you with this, the most disturbingly weird Mark Trail strip I could find anywhere on the internet:

            Throughout all the ages of human history and civilization, there have been many numerous standards and definitions of hotness.  But ever since the dawn of time, during all the ages of the Earth, there has been one woman perennially thought by all to be the very epitome of babetude.  That woman, of course, is Wonder Woman, the one human being on the planet who can fly around in a pair of star-spangled panties and still command respect from evildoers (Bill Clinton tried it too for a while, but it just wasn’t the same).  Yes, possessed of the awesome superhuman powers of being able to throw a tiara in a straight line (Have you ever tried doing that?  Whenever I do, mine just kinds of zings off in a random direction, hitting Lex Luther purely by chance, if at all), and never having to fix her hair, Wonder Woman tirelessly works to raise the glass ceiling in the superhero business.  But of course, no hero is complete without a little bit of mystery, and Wonder Woman is no different in that regard from any other.  Come with me then, as we explore one of the great questions of our age.

            Why does Wonder Woman’s Battle Brassiere have a big WW on it?  I mean, while she was on the island of the Amazons, her name was Diana, and the armor is way older than she is anyway.  Nobody started calling her Wonder Woman until she got into the superheroining business (originally they tried calling her “Flying Around Punching Stuff Girl” but that didn’t look nearly as good on a lunchbox).  So unless like, every woman before her who wore that armor had the ancestral sorority nickname of Wonder Woman, it just doesn’t make sense that there’d be these concentric Ws on her Corset of Invulnerability.  Which leaves us with the question, “Where’d the WW come from?”  Really, if we’re going to be scientific about this, the best thing to do is to simply start with a list of all the people who have the initials WW and then narrow it down from there.

            Okay, it turns out that there’s no website that can help me to do that thing I just proposed to do, so I’m gonna just have to work from memory, and um, yeah, there aren’t any women ever who have those initials so, by infallible process of elimination, we arrive that the one possible conclusion: Woodrow Wilson.  No, really, who else could it be, Wendell Wilkie?  I think not.  No, Woodrow Wilson is actually a frighteningly likely candidate for being the first to wear Wonder Woman’s outfit.  For instance, since we know that the Amazons are all sorts of ancient and Grecian and all that, whoever came up with the armor must have been incredibly old, and since Woodrow Wilson was born back in the Pleistocene Epoch, it all works out from a timeline point of view.

            Also, didn’t you ever wonder about why Wonder Woman needs an invisible jet?  I mean, she can already fly without one, and since its invisible she’s always forgetting where she parked it anyway, until the Flash runs into it at approximately 3,000 miles and hour and creates some kind of a rift in the space-time continuum or something.  Besides, isn’t being an Amazon princess with a lasso and a Frisbee tiara already mixing your media a little too much anyways?  Why push you luck by bringing a completely random and unnecessary invisible aircraft into the picture?  If you recall though, Woodrow Wilson was one of the few Presidents of the early 20^th century who couldn’t fly under his power, so if he were the first Wonder Woman, he would need a jet.  And since jets hadn’t officially been invented yet (despite the fact that Chester A. Arthur had already discovered jet technology by taking apart a crashed alien spacecraft that he found in his kitchen pantry) making it invisible makes perfect sense after all. 

And didn’t you ever wonder why, despite being from a completely different civilization, Wonder Woman’s suit is still red, white, and blue? I mean sure it’s possible, but then it’s also possible that space aliens would just happen to all speak English and be attracted to William Shatner, but it’s not really all that likely.  If Woodrow Wilson was Wonder Woman once though, it all falls into place since he would surely have used the colors of America.  And what about the lasso anyway?  Those aren’t Greek or Roman or Canadian of whatever ancient civilization the Amazons are supposed to be from.  They’re from America, which is why Woodrow Wilson would have felt perfectly comfortable using one to catch monsters and make bad guys tell the truth.  And what about her bullet-proof bracelets?  The Ancient whoevers didn’t have guns, so why would they bother making something bullet-proof.  Woodrow Wilson however, had grown up during the Civil War, and had seen the horrors of modern military technology during World War I, so he would certainly have seen the necessity of making such a mighty accessory as a pair of bullet-proof bracelets.

The way I see it, Woodrow Wilson did not in fact die in 1924, rather he was seized with remorse for having held up women’s’ suffrage in America for so long, and decided to make it up to the world, as well as to women in general.  So, after consulting with his magic 8 ball, he moved to the ancient Amazon island of Themiscira and changed his name to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.  There he grew his hair out and started wearing a slinky-looking evening toga around, all the while working to promote women’s causes and being the first person in history to use the phrase “Grrl Power”.  Eventually though, he realized that he wouldn’t be around forever, and so commissioned a magically hot looking outfit for his successor to wear as she battled evil and kind of had a crush on Batman.  Unfortunately, while out shopping for shoes one day, Woodrow Wilson was slain by a rogue narwhal, and Princess Diana had to put on the mantle of Wonder Woman without having time to go out and get it re-monogrammed with her own initials.

So there you have it, the truth behind Wonder Woman’s costume, and the true end of one of the 20^th century’s nerdiest Presidents.  And as for the star-spangled panties, you’re really better off not knowing absolutely everything sometimes, so try not to be too curious about that.

            Of all the movie theatres in the Richmond metro area (and yes, I did deliberately decide to spell theatre the pompous fancy-shmancy lah-de-dah way in the interest of increasing my hits on all those high-falutin’ search engines the rich folk are using nowadays), my favorite by far is the Commonwealth 20.  Now some of you may say that the Byrd is far superior if one is looking to catch a midnight showing of Goonies for less than $2, and that argument is a sound one, so far as it goes.  However, the Commonwealth 20 has something far more awesome to offer than even an extremely late and economically priced showing of Sean Astin while before he became a hobbit.  What is that, you ask?  Allow me to answer your question with another question, which is really less of a question than a rambling soliloquy about what is probably the least thought about thing related to movie theatres ever, the computer-generated “Go Buy Some Snacks Dammit!” thing.  You know, like after you’ve already sat through three repeats of Coke-sponsored trivia questions about Barbara Streisand and Snoop Dog, and after the Jeep commercials (which always make me sad, cause I always hope that this time it means they’ve finally gotten around to making Jeep: The Motion Picture, but no, they haven’t) (yet), and after the 72 different trailers for movies that are coming out soon, 57 of which star Keanu Reeves as the chosen one fighting something like zombies, robots, or childhood obesity.  Then, right before the actually movie starts, there’s the snack thing.

            Now, most of these are so sucky and lame that you might be forgiven for thinking that there’s some Federal law requiring it (there’s not though, I checked with the Federal Bureau of Things That Have to Suck, and even though it ought to be right there between vacuum cleaners and Ben Affleck, there’s nothing on the books about the snack dealie).  And of course, every theatre company has their own version of this thing, most of which look like they were done in 1958 by transferring the fevered dreams of a beatnik directly to film.

            Like, at Regal Cinemas, they have that one where you get into this incredibly lame-looking Amtrak of the future from Tron, and it drives through this horrible war zone of snackage, with all the popcorn kernels detonating right as you drive by and stuff before it finally safely arrives right back where it started.  Or at United Artists, where they drive this unspeakably fake looking hovercar through some bizarre, Orwellian urban wasteland, where all these giant monuments have been built to honor chilled beverages and Milk Duds.  At one point, you buzz the gigantic popcorn tower, and all the popcorn falls out of it, probably crushing countless citizens on the street below, thus freeing them from a nightmarish life of perpetual torture and marketing in Snacktopia.  I forget exactly what the one at Carmike is about, but I’m pretty sure I had a dream once where Lee Iacocca punched a Diet Pepsi off of a flaming blimp, so we’ll just pretend that it was poorly animated and assume that’s their snack thing.  So, after all these, a person is hardly filled with hope and optimism that any CGI snack promotion thing could be other than blasphemously opposed to all that is good and decent in the world, but such a person would regret their harsh and hypothetical judgment when they finally went to the Commonwealth 20.  What makes it so awesome?  I’m not sure I can do justice to it here in mere words, but I’m just gonna start at the beginning and go from there as my muse leads me (yes, there is a blog muse, and she just so happens to be Margaret Thatcher).

            Okay, (and mind you here, I’m just going by memory) it all starts in this big stadium, and immediately, you realize that if ever a team of monkeys threw together an awesome piece of CGI animation, this is it.  All these snack foods start coming out of the various locker rooms and training facilities, and processing out onto the field.  They’re all there, M&Ms, Skittles, quality Coke Products, walking, nay, marching out there into the light of a sunny Spring afternoon.  Some of them are even dancing and doing backflips and stuff.  It’s completely awe-inspiring.  Then, right out of nowhere, the jumbo-sized popcorn tubs come out of nowhere, with a mighty thumpage that shakes the very foundations of the Earth itself (I know, this is fast becoming the dorkiest thing I’ve ever written, but it’s already too late to turn back).  Then, you get to see who’s sitting in the stands, and it’s even more snack foods, though they’re mostly all the ones that come in a bag, rather than popcorn and beverages, and they’re all dancing too; well, if you can call anything that a seated bag of mini-Snickers can do “dancing” (but then again, you can’t really call anything I can do “dancing” either, and I’ve actually got legs, so I don’t even have a good excuse or anything).  Finally, the camera pulls back far enoguht hat you can get a good look at the stadium, and it suddenly strikes you that it’s not just a stadium, it’s the Roman Colosseum, and you’re all like, “Zounds!  They’re going to fight to the death!  Oh, the humanity!”  And then the whole thing spins around a lot and becomes the Commonwealth 20 logo. 

I’m sure that it’s all actually an incredibly deep bit of symbolism, or possibly a biting commentary on our modern way of life, but for the life of me, I have no idea why.  What I do know however, is that if you’ve ever wanted to know what drugs are like without actually trying them, watching this thing is the closest you will ever get.  Really, it’s absolutely awesome, especially the part where when I’m there with Matt (to lean more about Matt, check out his bibliography on this very site) and when this thing comes one we both start giggling like schoolgirls as everyone else in the theatre gets totally weirded out.  Seriously though, even if there aren’t any good movies playing, it’s worth the price of admission just to see it.

            If you’re ever building a sentient computer and you don’t want it to go haywire and become evil, then maybe you shouldn’t give it an eerily soothing voice and a big red evil-looking light for an eye, cause yeah, if you do that, you’re just asking for some evil backlash.

            You know how Olympic swimmers always shave all the hair off their bodies?  They say it makes you swim faster, but that’s ridiculous.  Just look at otters, they’re the furriest dang things ever, and they can anybody.  The same goes for baby seals, fur-bearing trout, and Kevin Costner.  Honestly now, if the only things that lived in the ocean were say, Gorbachev and other whales, I could see how a person might believe that being bald would make you a better swimmer, but c’mon now, what about otters?

            If I were ever President and I made a mistake or something (not a big one like “accidentally” bombing France, but just something minor like falling off a Segway or sticking a lobster in my ear), instead of trying to act all dignified like my cat does when she falls off a chair or something, I’d just go “NARF!”  Just imagine, people all over the world seeing you fall down at an airport and narfing about it.  I’m pretty sure that peace in the Middle East would happen pretty much automatically after that, not to mention bombing France.

            I’ll bet that for people in Africa, lions are like cows.  So if for instance, you went to some college out in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Botswana, you’d be used to driving past all these fields full of lions on your way to school.  And in like, the Botswana Maymont petting zoo, there’d be all these lions, and only the city kids would be freaked out/eaten by them.  But say the circus came to town, and there was like, a cow tamer there, and he’d taught it to jump through fiery hoops and maul koalas and stuff, then that’d be totally new and different.

            I was at the hardware store looking at rulers, and I saw that all of them had a warning on them. “Always wear eye protection when using this tool” they all said.  Seriously, if you need to wear goggles to avoid blinding yourself with a ruler, maybe you shouldn’t even be leaving the house and going to hardware stores.  Okay, maybe if you were trying to measure something less that 12 inches long in a hurricane or something, you might want to wear goggles, but that’s the great thing about rulers, pretty much anything that you can measure with them is small enough that you can just pick it up and carry it to a non-hurricane-infested environment, like inside your house, or at the nearest Applebee’s.  So maybe rulers should just have a warning on them that says, “Do not use this tool during a hurricane; do not stab yourself in the eye with this tool.”  Then all the rest of us could stop worrying that rulers were somehow terribly dangerous or something.

            Also while I was at the hardware store, I noticed that there’s a drill bit manufacturing company called Freud.  That’s just silly.

            If you’re a pirate, then you’ve probably got really bad depth perception on account of your having an eye patch.  So if you were out at the mall or something, and you saw a whole bunch of smurfs, you shouldn’t get all excited right away or anything, because it might just be the Blue Man group really far away.

            You know how they make those little calendars where every day is a new puppy, crossword puzzle, or tropical harwood?  That’s great and all for people who want to start each day with something happy, but what about evil and/or really depressed people?  You don’t want them having a puppy calendar, it would just remind them how sad they were, or possibly motivate them to declare a jihad on puppies or something.  That’s why they should make like, the Hitler-a-Day calendar, where every day is Hitler.  Maybe one day, it would be like, a Hitler-related word search, or a humorous picture of Hitler in a foam rubber cowboy hat, or maybe a picture of Hitler hanging out of a tree, and the caption would be something like, “Is it Friday yet?”, or “Hang in there, Adolf!”

            Everyone thinks submarine sandwiches are named after the ocean-going vessel of the same name (minus the sandwich part).  That’s ridiculous though, because submarines only go back to the Civil War (and then I bet they were called something goofy, like bathyspheres, or aquavelocipedes).  Sandwiches, on the other hand, go all the way back to Earl of Sandwich, who wanted foodstuff that was long enough to beat a street urchin with.  He probably spent a lot of time with his friend, the Earl of Submarine, and together they came up with the submarine sandwich.  Then, after some other guy invented a boat that could (and was supposed to) go underwater, someone else was all like, “Hey, that thing looks like a submarine sandwich!”  And the rest was history.

            You know how some people just age really well, so even after they’re seniors, they still always get carded for the senior discount?  Most people find this flattering, but you know who probably doesn’t?  Vandal Savage, the immortal caveman supervillian.  Like, he’ll be at Commonwealth 20, buying a ticket to see Milo & Otis 2: Judgment Day, and the guy at the window will be all like, “That’ll be $8 sir.”  And Vandal Savage will be all like, “Hang on there sonny, I’m over 12, 000 years old and that mean I get in for $5.50!  Why, back in my day, you could buy one of those big stone cars we used to drive around in for that much money!”  And then he’d have to show his license anyway, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, the ticket guy at Commonwealth 20 rarely believes you when you claim to be an immortal caveman supervillian, even if you bring a club along.

            If you died, and went to Heaven, and at freshman orientation Moses was there, and he looked exactly like Charlton Heston, that would be the coolest thing ever.  Also, I’ll bet that once he dies, Charlton Heston and Moses will always be like, dressing the same and getting into all manner of shenanigans, and confusing everybody.  They’ll be like just like the Olsen twins that way, except for the fact that this’ll be in Heaven, and since the Olsen twins are probably Scientologists or something, that means that instead of heaven, they’ll just come back to Earth as identical Walruses, or go to the Planet Vulcan, or whatever happens to Scientologists when they die.

            There are two people in the world who can get away with calling me whore.  One of them is Jennifer Connelly.  The other, (and the topic of tonight’s blog) is Jessica, who would probably smite me if I put off writing this one any longer.  But who doth she be, this Jessica woman?  From whence dost she come?  Whither do she goest?  Why writest I all olde timey like thus?  All the questions, and fewer, shall I answer here tonight.  So sit back, gentle reader, grab a beer or possibly a box of Ecto Cooler, if you happen to have a time machine, and prepare to get your learn on.

            Jessica was born in the lost and improbable forests of Eenrok, where the gelatinous friths gibber at the three moons of Utan, as they sun their scaly and supple hides upon the banks of the ambivalent river Kalderon.  Mind you, it wasn’t like she just showed up in the wilderness one day and was raised by the wild and woolly were-squirrels which frequent those places for unspeakable rites of evil and the occasional game of bridge; she was rather raised in the yurt of her parents, Wulfgar Trollrender and Helga Weaselflinger, who guarded the paths of the mysterious forests of Eenrok, and slew the vile and unfashionable Krelthak beasts which were in those days wont to wander through the woods in search of unwary travelers, unguarded caravans carrying black rubies from the land of Tarnoria, and perhaps the occasional submarine sandwich (which, in the tongue of her people, is called a “hoagie”).  In these wilds was she reared by her parents and taught by Jedi Master Dick Cheney to keep the forests safe for wayfarers, as had her ancestors from way back in the day during the Nixon Administration.  And so might she ever lived, had not fate (which is not without a sense of humor) intervened.

            Indeed, it so happened that one night, whilst she was at Wal-Mart buying individually-packaged bottles of Yoo-Hoo, a particularly repugnable and fangorious monkey man crept near with his +7 Cloak of Greater Invisibility and annoyed the hell out of her.  At once, she felt a new power within her, and drawing for the first time upon her primal rage, Jessica gave voice to an unworldly cry of vengeance, hulked out, and promptly broke her pocket book.  The monkey man quickly fled to the frozen bakery isle to gnaw upon one of those little ready made tubes of corn biscuits, and Jessica knew that her destiny was far more differenter than she had previously imagined it to be.

            In accordance with the law of the land and the traditions of the Ancients (who also wisely insisted that their name always be spelled with a capital A, lest they be confused with any of those other store-brand knock-off sorts of ancients), Jessica traveled across at least two states and possibly a decent sized bit of the galaxy or perhaps even some sort of eternal interdimensional barrier (which may seem like a lot, but then again, a person can’t just go gadding about the dairy isle of Wal-Mart, hulking out and breaking pocketbooks all hither and thither either).  At last after many weary minutes of travel, she arrived at her destination, Meadowbrook High School, Secret Superhero Academy (which would more likely have remained a secret longer had they not gone and put that last part there on a big sign out front for all the world to see).  There she honed her hulking skillz, riding to school each day on a fiery chariot pulled by a thousand fiery guinea pigs until Mr. Higgenbotham got tired of the parking difficulties this caused and told her to go buy a Toyota Camry like a normal person.

            And so it went, until one day at the ancient tribal gathering place of bored people without much money, Putt Putt, Jessica chanced to wear the ancient traditional made out of Mah Jonng Tiles bracelet of her people, and chanced to meet Jason, who had just finished dating the one hundred and fifty consecutive crazy girls prophesized by John Adams in a blog I wrote some months back.  Since he knew full well about this prophecy, and had been keeping track of the numbers better than anyone, he figured the odds of this new girl not being a complete and total psycho were tolerably good, and as you may have already assumed, they ended up getting along quite well together and falling in love in that sappy sort of a way that would thoroughly spoil the epic qualities of this tale were I to describe it at greater length.

            After school, Jessica secured a job as the receptionist at Grolok’s House of Torment and Hair Salon Emporium, running the cash register, answering the phones, and making sure than no vicious Narlaks got in (Narlaks, it being generally known, being completely bald anyway, and having at best a rudimentary conception of the science of tipping).  To this very day she works there yet, ever training, ever breaking pocketbooks, and awaiting the day when she and Jason, Techno-Warlord of the Electronics Department, get married and go off to slay some nameless evil or impolite beast in a suitably epic and blogaboutable manner.

            Most concerned citizens, upon hearing the news that Wal-Mart is considering building vast underground cities where their employees can live and raise their families, might be understandably concerned about the alarming social changes that such a move could bring about.  I on the other hand, could think only of one thing, “Cool!”  I mean really, a vast subterranean Wal-Mart metropolis would have all sorts of benefits to society, assuming that by benefits you mean “Things that could herald the end of humanity as we know it while simultaneously being totally friggin’ awesome”.  How, you may ask, could such a simple declaration have such great and far-reaching import?  Well, just sit back, grab a pork soda, and read on me mateys!

            Now, as most of you know, I’m no stranger to the earthy subject of sub terrene existence, whether it be concerning morlocks, supervillians, Bigfoot, or of course, Spanky, Lord of the Mole People (who may be seen exhorting his evil followers below in a picture recently sent to me by alert and perceptive teacupmammoths reader Matt Hoover).

It is with no small measure of self-aggrandizing authority then that I say that people living underneath Wal-Mart would be ineffably sweet, merely in terms of the sort of things that one could expect to happen to people who dwelt beneath a Wal-Mart for extended periods of time after say, a nuclear war or invasion by space aliens wiped out the rest of humanity, or possibly merely reduced them to a Mel Gibsonion life of desert wandering and Tina Turner battling.

First, Wal-Mart would be like, their entire world, like it was for those people who lived in that big non-Wal-Mart city in Logan’s Run.  So finally one day there’d be some disaster or something, or one of them wouldn’t want to renew, and they’d have to evacuate through the aeon-forgotten, killer robot-infested undercity maintenance tunnels, and they’d all be freaking out when they saw stuff like cars and Waffle Houses and Dick Cheney, and they’d be just start totally wiggin’ like space babes on Star Trek used to when Shatner introduced them to the concept of making out.

Next, they’d probably start to evolve in such a way as to flourish more awesomely in there kingdom of endless night.  Like, their eyes would start to get all sensitive to light and stuff, so at first, when some brave souls would venture out to scavenge materials from the overworld, they’d be wearing space goggles and funky enviro-suits made from pleather, old tires, and free AOL CDs.  Eventually though, they would grow to hate and fear the sun, and they’d get all extra white and start looking like Smeagol so that if perchance one of them was banished to the surface world for shoplifting or something, he’d have to thrive within the shadows of the night, ever cursing the sun and gnashing his unreasonably pointy teeth.

            Also, I’ll bet they’d start mutating in all sorts of freaky and improbable ways, like developing psychic powers so whenever a overworlder found his way to him, they could make him fight a giant shadow panda for their amusement.  And, lest each of their cities be an island unto itself, most of them would be connected by a series of tunnels dug with funky steampunk-looking drill trains.  But there’d be like, the one Forgotten City, where according to legend, all the wondrous secrets of the Ancients were stored that could turn all the other Wal-Marts into an earthly paradise and free them from the threat of the Mole People, who would always be trying to steal their supply of Cheese Nips and Brittany Spears CDs.  And then there’d be like, the one Forbidden Wal-Mart (That would be the Forest Hill one, if you’re wondering), where Zoltar, the Tainted One would sit and brood in darkness, plotting his revenge on those who cast him out of the high council (oh yes, there would be a high council).  And like, one day Zoltar would ally himself with Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, and he’d be all conquering all of the other Wal-Mart cities, and only the Chosen Ones, Atreyu, Keanu Reeves, and Bob Dole would escape to hunt for the Forgotten City with nothing to guide them but an old Muppet voiced by Frank Oz and a tattoo on a Welsh corgi.

            Ooh, and I bet they’d have some kind of crazy underground Wal-Mart religion, where they’d all worship a big picture of Sam Walton, or maybe a nuclear bomb they found (at least until Charlton Heston blew it up), and they’d have the Hour of Madness everyday, and everyone would go all crazy and run amok (don’t ask why, in post apocalyptic undercities, you’re required by law to have one of these).  Or maybe they’d all be Lutherans, that would be weird too, but not in the same way.

            So yeah, even if this whole Wal-Mart underground city of darkness thing happens, don’t worry too much, cause it’s gonna be pretty sweet.

            Greetings and felicitations blogheads!  I realize that this pasty week I’ve been a little light on the updates, but rest assured that now that Publick Day is over and everything is once more beer and skittles, I’ll be back to my usual schedule.  As some of you may recall, last Monday I just kind of did a blog dedicated to randomness, and it seems to have gone over pretty well, so here’s some more pure unadulterated chaos, enjoy:

            My parents were getting a new door installed, which in and of itself isn’t really all that exciting (unless you live the dullest life ever, or possibly are some kind of a sick twisted freak).  The company that was going to come and install it for us was called Wolverine Construction.  I was totally psyched about this bit of news, as you may well imagine, but I was worried they’d made some mistake.  I mean, it’s not like we needed anymore wolverines built in the house (heaven only knows, there’s more than enough already), maybe we should have called Build A New Door On Your Grandmother’s Front Porch Construction instead.  It was cool though, cause it turned out that they had decided to branch out and do doors too.  But then I was like, whoa, what if the guys who put in the door are wolverines?  So I was expecting them to be all hairy and voracious, and gnaw the old door out of its frame or something, but when their truck rolled up, I was disappointed to see that they were just a bunch of white guys.  So I was like, okay, maybe they’ve got adamantium claws or something, but lo, ‘twas not to be.  It was just a name.  Also, it turns out that some warehouse troll ate the doorknob whilst it was in storage, and they couldn’t install it today anyhow.  I was unaccountably sad.

            If you were driving around in a Transformer or some other kind of robot in disguise, and all of a sudden an evil Deceptacon and/or President Jimmy Carter appeared and started trying to turn the world’s beef supply into energon cubes or something, you’d better open the door and jump out and do some combat rolls or something, because I’ll bet that if you stayed inside, you’d be squished when he transformed into a robot that still strongly resembled a vehicle.

            The other day I was at the store, and I saw they had a four pack of tape measures.  But tape measures are like, the most unnecessary thing ever to have four of, because you never need more than one, unless you’re some kind of octopus contractor, or maybe a wolverine.  And it wasn’t they it was just four for the price of one, like if you were outfitting an entire truck of wolverines, it was the variety pack of tape measures, and they were all different in magical and fascinating ways.  Who’s their target audience on this, people with ADHD? “I wonder how long this is.  No, wait! I wonder how long this thing is!  Hark, there’s that thing over there, I must measure it as well!”  It was weird.

            Remember in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song, where they say “Donatello does machines”?  That’s always weirded me out.

            There’s one of those Used To Be A 7-11 Seafood Emporiums near my house (don’t ask why, but all extinct 7-11s become either ethnic dry cleaners or ghettofabulous seafood emporiums).  Anyway, lest the fact that they sell seafood be lost on the general publick (I know that’s not how its spelled, but I think I confused my spell checker the other day, and now it won’t let me type it without the K), they made one of the O’s in “Seafood” look like a little pirate ship steering wheel, which as everybody well knows is the universal sign for snow crab legs.  Except their sign isn’t that big, so until you’re right in the parking lot, it looks like they spelled “Seafood” with a little targeting crosshairs thingie.  And that’s just confusing, like they’re trying to mess with your head or something.  It’s like having a sign that said “Day Care” and making the C into an electric juicer.  Or putting up a sign that said “Bed Bath & Beyond” only the little and thingie was a skull or a roto-tiller.  Or if you had a sign that said “Pierre’s Fine French Dining Eatatorium” and one of the Fs was shaped like a little French guy fighting against a Nazi or possibly thanking America for saving their country from whatever happened to be menacing it this fortnight.  Or maybe it’s on purpose and they’re trying to subtly let you know how they got their seafood (Hey, look!  It’s a delicious smallmouth bass!  BLAM!).

            Sometimes I worry about how we’re all just one disaster away from the fall of civilization and that beneath the fine wenge veneer on the armoire of humanity, lies the crappy particleboard shelving unit of barbarianosity.  But then I think, “Hey, twenty years ago, Vanilla Ice and Communism were both popular, and now they’re both trying to reinvent themselves as being all hard core death metal (I myself remember when Communism stopped shaving that lightning bolt into its hair) but everyone just laughs at them anyway”  So you see, we are making progress after all.  Also, now we have EZ Cheez and remote controlled air conditioners.  If that’s not proof that humanity is fast evolving into a Q-like state of omnivorosity and surliness, I don’t know what is.

            Today, it just so happens to be the case, was Publick Day at Henricus, the park at which I work at.  Since it’s a historical park, we are of course not allowed to just say that we made it up as an excuse to move roughly seven thousand folding tables all over the site, so instead here’s the real, not made up historical explanation.  You see, our ancestors had long lived in England, frolicking in the wilderness, wearing short pants, living in cute little underground houses, and hanging out with wizards and getting high.  This, as one might well imagine, was a totally sweet mode of existence and one which they would have been happy to continue with until their collective moms finally told them to stop with all the frolicking and whatnot and go get real jobs.  Unfortunately, the king of England, Queen Elizabeth, decided that really, England would never be known as a stuffy, rain-infested nation with terrible food as long as Englishmen were living carefree lives of pastoral grooviness.  As a result, she took all the cool people (and a choice selection of complete tools) and sent them all over to Virginia on three ships named El Nino, The Pinto, and the Buckwheat Bertha.  Some years later, they actually got here, and in celebration of having partially survived the trip, they proclaimed a day of awesomeness, and called it Publick Day, in recognizance of two of their most precious of freedoms:  Not having to pay $6 for an admission ticket, and being able to add all sorts of unnecessary and superfluous letters to words (Sadly, the early colonists penchant for just slapping letters around all over the place led to a shortage in subsequent years, which is why to this very day, we still have to abbreviate some words in order to balance out the universe again).

            Anyway, today was the day we did all that, and since it’s still just kind of a blur to me (a really long blur) I’m just gonna aimlessly ramble out some of the things that struck me throughout the day.

            First, and foremost, I got to wear a T-shirt today.  The thing is, since I always have to either wear my historical shirt (which kind of makes me look like a pirate, a farming pirate) or my Polo Shirt of the Damned (really, that’s what it says on the little tag in the back, and tags rarely lie about such things).  Whenever I wear a T-shirt though (especially an awesome, stylish and still totally for sale Teacupmammoths shirt), I know it means it’s my day off and I’m doing something fun.  Just for today though, we got to wear T-shirts to work, so all morning long, it was messing me up.  Like, I knew that I had to move say, the entire gift shop over into the James River, but I was still wearing a T-shirt, so I was all irrationally exuberant.  It was weird.

            Then, I spent the morning running the Free Brochures and Childrens’ Workbooks Table.  This would have been okay, except all these grownups kept coming along and taking all the kids stuff.  Like, a couple would come by and I’d be all like, “Yo, yo, yo, Homeslice!  Care for a site map or membership brochure?”  And they’d just kind of go, “Hunh…” and start leafing through one of the kids’ activity books.  Now mind you, these are quality activity books, full of stuff like those word searches that your teacher used to give you to shut you up after you finished a test and the two and a half dumb kids were still working.  So I guess these people would suddenly find a really good one or something (How many of these Historically Relevant words can you find? Beans.  Cholera.  Pantaloons.  Weasels.)  And then they’d just walk off with them (the workbooks, not the historical choleric pantaloon-wearing beanweasels, though that would make a good name for a band).  And I didn’t know whether to say something, “Excuse me sir or madam, if you’re over the age of seven, I’m going to have to ask for that back!”  Or whether I should just go with it and not do anything to shatter their childlike fantasy world of age-inappropriate activity bookage.  So mostly, I just gave out a bajillion activity books.  Maybe next year we should have some adult activity books so they won’t be mooching all the ones meant for the kids, but since I don’t think anyone would even want to think about what might go into an adult activity book, maybe I should just leave it to the professionals.

            And speaking of ice cream trucks, we had one of those too.  It wasn’t particularly historic, either in terms of being made out of like, raccoons and sailcloth (Raccoons and Sailcloth, by the way, would be a totally sweet band name as long as you could find a good gimmick for making it work) and they didn’t have old-timey ice cream flavors either, like chicory, or hardtack, or plague rat, but it was still a big hit.  You ever notice how ice cream trucks are always totally over the top, in terms of decoration?  Like, they never just put some pictures of various frozen treats and maybe a picture or two of a small child eating said treats, lest the short bused among us not be able to make the connection.  Instead, they always go completely insane, and have all these giant ice cream sandwiches and stuff dancing along with the kids, or maybe playing football or going frog gigging with the kids.  I think that’s just counter-productive, cause kids are only gonna come look at the truck and be all like, “Wha?!  Frog gigging?!  What the Hell kind of demonic freaky gateway to the netherworld ice cream truck is this?  That’s it, I’m just gonna go home and snort Pixie Stix for a while.”  Also, does it strike anyone else as a bad idea to make every ice cream truck in the known universe play the most incredibly annoying song ever?  If it didn’t herald the coming of tastiness, everyone would loathe that song, so why not stop playing with our emotions like that and choose a song that doesn’t sound like a bag full of toy poodles being dragged down an old spiral staircase?  I personally would suggest Kashmir, by Led Zepplin (which already is a totally sweet name for a band), because nobody hates it, and it’s like, an hour and a half long, so you wouldn’t have to repeat it that much.  All you’d have to do is take out an ad in the paper announcing the changeover, and then people would know what to listen for.  Then, whenever you heard someone totally blasting Kashmir as they slowly cruised through the neighborhood, everyone would be all like, “Woot, ice cream!”

            For the other seventeen hours or so, I did other stuff, but most of it wasn’t really that funny, so I’m just gonna end here, based on the principal that if anyone seriously wants to read more than two pages of blog about Publick Day, they’ll start up a grassroots effort to deluge me with requests and/or supermodels.

            I don’t think I need to take a poll to say with the greatest of certainty that pretty much everybody likes sailboats.  I mean hey, they’re boats, they’ve got a sail on them, what more could you ask for?  Therefore, I would assume that most of you would be concerned if there were some terrible sailboat blight sweeping the nation and raining untimely destruction upon untold legions of sailboats.  Well my friends, I’m afraid that’s precisely what’s happening out in California, the state where there’s nothing so utterly ridiculous that it can’t cause millions of dollars worth of destruction.  What’s causing this hideous blight upon sailboats, you may ask?  The answer, and I must warn you here that it is more retarded than you can possibly imagine, is sea lions.  No, really, I’m sober and everything, this is really happening.  Apparently, thousands of sea lions have started leaping out of the water and wallowing about on the decks of sailboats there, and, as one might suspect, when you get over fifty ginormous walrus things on a boat, it tends to sink, more often than not.  And yet, since up until now, this has never happened before, it must be asked what on Earth is making sea lions sink sailboats?

            Now, as much as I’d like to blame this all on Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, or possibly just Adolf Hitler, the simple fact is that Mole People hate the water, and Hitler can’t even swim without his little water wings, so the culprit has to be someone else.  But who do we know who loves that water, can control sea life, and hates everybody?  Yup, I’m afraid it’s Aquaman.  Some of you might question this conclusion, after all, Aquaman is part of the Justice League.  But then again, France was part of the Allies in World War II, and we all know what a bang-up job they did that time around.  The sad truth is, nobody in the Justice League ever really liked Aquaman.  Sure he’s the king of the seas, but when the last time a supervillian ever wanted to conquer the seas?  They’re already under water, what else can you do to make them more useless (unless, like Cobra Commander, you’re going to try to blow up the ocean, which is just too retarded to even comment on)?  The problem with Aquaman is that, unfortunately, when he’s on land he’s just fruity-looking guy with fish pants and a bronze wife-beater, which might make him a force to be reckoned with if he was part of the Total Sissy League, but since that’s a completely fictitious league that I just dreamed up to illustrated his wussetude, he’s pretty much completely unimpressive, unless you’re into fish pants, in which case you are most definitely a freak.  The one thing that Aquaman can do, however, is control anything that lives in the ocean.  Whales, kelp, Jacques Cousteau, Kevin Costner, these brute beasts are his only friends and servants. 

            So, since Aquaman has clearly, as a result of being blatantly, ineffably, and humorously useless, he’s decided to become evil.  Unfortunately, when the best you can do, superpower-wise, is try to destroy Washington D.C. with angry kelp (Aquaman and the Angry Kelp, by the way, would make a totally sweet name for a band that didn’t mind tainting itself with the suckiness that is Aquaman), you’re not going to get very far in your mad quest for global domination (especially when Dick Cheney retaliates with his superpower of hurling lightning bolts at total losers).  So, lacking a plan capable of bringing us surface-dwellers to our knees, Aquaman has instead chosen to do what all potentially evil, yet tragically lame people do:  be really annoying.  To this end, Aquaman has marshaled his vast army of sea lions off the coast of California, and commanded them to jump out of the water and sink sailboats.  Here, far from the watchful eye of Dick Cheney and his electric robo-baboon army, Aquaman’s hideous plans come to vile fruition as untold dozens of innocent sailboats are sent to the murky depths of whichever ocean it is over on that side of the country.

            How did we let things get this bad in the first place?  By coddling sea creatures.  Seriosuly, except for a select few ocean creatures (the flatulent coral of the Sargasso and the surly flounder of the Bosporus immediately spring to mind), pretty much everything in the ocean is endangered and federally protected, and has been since the 70s, when at last we forgot the carnage and bloodshed of the Great Manatee Wars of the 18^th century.  As a result, everything that lives in the ocean has gotten all cocky, and now the metaphorical chickens of vengeance have come home roost (The Metaphorical Chickens of Vengeance, by the way, would make such an awesome band name that I’m almost tempted to take up playing the Jew’s harp again.  Almost.).

            What can each of us do to help then, to turn the tide of this submarine war which throws itself upon us as the metaphorical fat drunken frat dude of foreign aggression upon the hot yet thoroughly non-skanky babe of America?  The answer is clear, it’s high time we started putting the oceans and all of its foul denizens back where it belongs, below sea level.  How can you help?  By putting the smack down on any and all sea creatures you meet in your daily life.  That baby seal you pass at Sheetz every day?  Club it.  That orca at work who keeps stealing all of your post-it notes at the office?  Go Captain Ahab on his ass (whales think they’re so great anyway, “Ooh, look, I’m a mammal but I live under water!  Aren’t I special?” what a bunch of freaks).  In a battle like this, there can be no quarter asked, and none given, so even if you see the Little Mermaid while you’re out at Linens n’ Things, call in the sushi bar next door on her.

            Let’s face it, the ocean already has two thirds of the planet in its damp thrall, the last thing we need to be doing is letting them just flop in here and take over the rest of it.  So, all ye good people of Blog World, I call upon thee to rise up against this marine menace and smack it back into the Pleistocene Epoch, right where it belongs.  And Aquaman, if you’re reading this, I know what you’re up to, and so do Dick Cheney and his robo-baboons.

            Well, here it is, the middle of September again, and everyone knows what that means.  Except maybe they don’t, so I’m gonna say what it means anyways.  It means that many, if not all, of you college students, retirement home dwellers, and convicted felons are probably starting to hate your roommates.  Now, some of you might feel a little guilty about this (except for the convicted felons, y’all have enough to feel guilty about already so don’t go getting all angsty on me), but the fact is that a full 87% of roommates are, scientifically speaking, crazy psycho freaks who you really need to get out of your room as soon as possible in the interest of protecting your own sanity, as well as other such laudable goals as taking both the mattresses in the room and making a little fort out of them or possibly just sitting around in your underwear all day singing 99 Luft Balloons (the cool version though, where everything is in German except for the part about Captain Kirk).  “But what can I do?” you may be asking, “My roommate is clearly far more crazy than I am, there’s no way I’m gonna be able to scare him/her/it away without using a flamethrower full of Gummi Bears!”  Fear not young Padawan (that has got to be in the top ten dorkiest things I have ever written here and I apologize for it), for I have more experience getting rid of annoying roommates than anyone else I’ve ever met; experience which I am about to share with you, that you may at last be free of whatever evil your roommate happens to be the earthly embodiment of, whether it be too much partying, smelling like a fetid yak corpse, believing themselves to be a rapper, or merely looking like Fred Savage.  Now, some people (your R.A. and/or your mom) are going to tell you that you ought to go to the Office of Ineffective Guidance Counselors Who Have Never Lived in the Real World, where you and your roommate can work through your disagreements together, and do stuff like draw up contracts and emote and eventually go on long walks on the beach together, because these programs are all actually underwritten by the Communist Party, with the intent of making you a total and unadulterated wuss.  So instead, just do these things:

            First, get a weird hobby.  It doesn’t have to be incredibly weird, like making possums into handbags, it can just be something unusual, like making medieval armor for instance.  The secret here is that the crazier your roommate is, the more likely they are to think of themselves as normal, and the more likely they are to be freaked out if your conversations all start out with, “Don’t mind the trebuchet, I’ll be taking it out on the Quad in a week or two.” Or, “No, no, don’t worry, it’s strictly non-lethal.  Though come to think of it, I could probably fix that in a jiffy.”

            Most people hate at least a couple of the following kinds of music: Dixieland, Techno, Anime Soundtracks, Polkas, and Listening to Petula Clark Songs Backwards to Find the Satanic Messages in Them.  All you have to do is experiment a little and find out which one of these you happen to have a relatively high tolerance to, while at the same time driving your roommate absolutely insane with rage.  And since pretty much all roommate feuds start with your roommate playing the most hideous music imaginable, when they complain you can just say, “But I never complain when you listen to Vanilla Ice sixteen hours a day.”  Say it all innocently too, like you really don’t see what the big deal is.

            One day while they’re out at class or something, totally mess up your side of the room, then take your shirt off, put on a pair of enormous purple pants, and when you hear them coming down the hall, start shouting and banging on the walls.  Then, when they open the door, lie on the floor looking dazed.  If they ask what happened, say you got angry and don’t want to talk about it anymore.  When they keep bugging you, say “You’re making me angry; you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” and suddenly run out of the room making as much noise as you can in the hall.

            Start playing an MMORPG all the time.  Then start talking about it all the time, as if your character is your soulmate or something, and how terribly important it is that they understand everything about your character.  Eventually, insist that your roommate call your by your MMORPG name, and start making idle comments about how you’re they need to respect you because you’re a level 47 Elf Priestess.  If they get angry, mention how many hit points you have, and talk about how many levels you have invested in your Dodge skill.  Finally, when they wake up one day, shout, “By the Hoary Hordes of Hoggoth! An Orc Scout, I must alert the Temple Guard!” Then run out of the room and don’t come back for two days.

            Get a toad.  Lick it, and pretend to trip out and do all sorts of crazy stuff.  If your roommate calls the authorities, deny it all and let the test the toad.  If your roommate is a stoner or something and wants to lick the toad too, act really surprised when it doesn’t do anything to them.  Then, get angry and tell them they must have broken it.

            Stay up all night watching anime and drinking wine coolers.  In the morning, just sit there looking wired and strung out.  When they ask if you’re okay, say “Nani?” and pretend you can’t understand English.  If they get frustrated with you, try to throw a Hadoken at them, and when it doesn’t work, look unspeakably perplexed for a moment, then start crying and run out of the room.  If you do happen to successfully Hadoken them, you so totally need to tell me your secret, because the whole ↓→B thing isn’t working for me.

            Whenever any of their friends come over, act completely normal and friendly.

            Get a dictionary.  Keep it by itself in a drawer of your desk.  Whenever your roommate comes in, hurriedly close it, throw it in the drawer, and act like you weren’t doing anything.  Start blatantly using vocabulary words around them, then look really smug.

            Rent Apollo 13 one day.  The next day, announce that you’ve decided to become an astronaut and get rid of your bed.  Cover one of your walls with Velcro, and then make a suit for yourself out of the other kind of Velcro.  Sleep on the wall at night.  Roll around a lot in your sleep.  Whenever you see them getting into bed like a normal person, shake your head and look mildly disgusted.

            Get a bunch of mood rings and wear them all at the same time.  Rush into the room and declare, “Alright man, now there’s gonna be a reckoning!  Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! Monkeys!”  Throw your arms into the air, and gaze about yourself with a look of manic triumph.  After a few seconds, start looking around like you expect to see Captain Planet, or possibly Dick Cheney.  When neither of them appears, mumble an incoherent apology and take a nap.

            Well, there you have it, whatever it is.  Go forth, and if you try these Ben-tested methods, you’ll be the envy of everyone else on the floor before you know it.

            Just to change things up a little bit and do my part to make the world a more confusing place, I’m a gonna depart from my regular format for the night and just put up a few random thoughts and observations which will hopefully mask the fact that its late and I’m not thinking coherently enough to write a real blog tonight.  Be forewarned however, for what you are about to read below is like, pure 200 proof Benthink.  So you might want to have a few beers first lest any of it make sense to you.

            Suppose you happened to be a convicted felon, and it came to pass that improbably enough, you were having brunch with the governor.   Suppose then also that after this repast, you happened to summon forth a mighty belch, and said, “Pardon me.”  And then, if the governor said “Sure” would that mean you were free to go?

            The other day I passed an Ethiopian restaurant.  At first I thought it was some sort of a gag, like a Chinese Big & Tall, or a French Bed, Bath, & Beyond.  But then the altogether terrible thought occurred to me that it might be legit.  That’s awful though, cause they already don’t have any food over there, what are they doing sending what food they’ve got over here where it might as well rain éclairs every day (I love Microsoft Word, it automatically put that little homeless apostrophe over the E in eclair even though I didn't care enough to add one in manually)(Hey, it didn't do it that time, what gives?)?  It also means they probably sent one of their few remaining Ethiopian chefs over here too, and that’s just not cool.  That’d be like if we rounded up all the white guys with dancing ability in America and then sent all five of them to somewhere where everybody can dance already, like, um, Djibouti, which though the fact is little known here in the states is generally known over in the Middle East as The Funkytown of the Gulf of Aden.

            When you go to Panera, they always ask you your name so when your sandwich is ready they can just call you and you can go up and get it.  But that sucks, cause whenever I go with my parents, my dad orders, and his name is Bob.  And every time we’re eating there, it’s like we’ve chosen to go on the same night as the Great Festival of a Thousand Bobs, so when they call him, like, fifty other guys named Bob come running too.  That’s why whenever you go to Panera, you ought to come up with some awesome and original name, like Abominus the Desecrator.  If there’s more than one of those in the restaurant, you probably don’t want to meet the other one.  Or, when you go up say that you’re name is Bob Dole, and that way when they call you up, everyone else will be all, “Huh?! Bob Dole?! In Panera?!” and they’ll be all looking around and stuff, and maybe you’ll even get some Bob Dole groupies (of which there are many).

            People always ask their friends, “Would you take a bullet for me?”  But that’s totally lame, cause you’re kinda guilting them into it with a question like that.  Instead, how about asking, “Would you take a mullet for me?”  No one’s gonna lie on that one, and then you’ll know who all you’re true friends are.  Also, if a mullet-wielding madman ever starts running towards you, you can just be like, “Hey Abominus the Desecrator, time to make good on your promise!” and then throw him to the mullet fiend (also, The Mullet-Wielding Madmen would make a somewhat unwieldy name for a band, so I’m gonna suggest it for a large, multinational corporation instead).

            You know that commercial where there’s that random Indian standing by the highway and someone drives by and throws a potato chip bag out the window and he cries?  Maybe it’s not about the environment at all.  I think what that Indian is probably thinking is more along the lines of this:

Hey, here comes another car!  Maybe this one will pick me up and drive me to Atlantic City!  Maybe I shouldn’t have just worn a loincloth if I’d known I was gonna be thumbing a ride all the way there.  Nuts, he’s not gonna stop!  Ooh, what’s this?  He’s throwing something out the window for me!  It’s a bag!  Man, I hope it’s full of Doritos, I could really go for some Doritos right now.  What the?!  It’s empty!  What kind of jerk tempts a big loincloth-wearing Indian with Doritos like that?  Damn, now I’m all sad.

Indians love Doritos.

I spend a lot of time in hardware stores.  And if I stopped right there, that would be the least thought, ever.  Fortunately there’s more.  You see, they sell a lot of goggles and various other eye protectors there at said hardware emporium, and all the snazzy futuristic-looking ones have pictures on them of all these attractive young people standing outside, mostly not doing anything that should require fashionable yet dependable eye defense, though there’s always one guy welding Batarangs just so you don’t forget what the goggles are for.  “I’m certainly glad I’ve got these trendy goggles to protect my eyes as I protect the city from evildoers!”  he seems to say.  Anyway, further on down the isle they’ve always got the discount goggles, that don’t make you look like the Matrix, they make you look like Mr. Flugelman, the Shop teacher from your middle school.  But instead of trying to play it off and put cool-looking people on the box, they always just go ahead and find the biggest, dorkiest-looking, whitest white guy ever and put a picture of him riding his lawnmower and looking like the least cool thing ever to walk the face of the Earth.  “Look at me!  I’m a big white guy riding a lawnmower and wearing goggles just in case it decides to shoot sparks at my face!  I only paid a buck fifty for these!  Gorp, gorp, gorp!”  Honestly, it’s just sad.

You know how we call that thing where everybody gets out of the car and runs around it before taking a seat other than their original one a Chinese fire drill?  I’ll bet that in China they just call that a fire drill.  And you know that thing where they set off the fire alarm on purpose so everyone can practice leaving the building in a safe and orderly fashion to escape the theoretical fire?  I’ll bet they call that an American fire drill.

If you’re ever in the restroom at Panera or something and there’s some other guy in there talking on the phone like he’s such a big powerful business executive that he can’t possibly hang up while he takes a leak, don’t just sit there and rage in idleness.  Rather, wait until you’re sure that there’s no one else around, and then unlock your mighty word-horde and shout, “Thunder, Thunder, Thundercrap! Hoooo!!”  and then cut loose with a Force 10 Pantsbuster or a reasonable approximation thereof.  Depending on who he’s talking to, you’ll probably get him fired, or possibly dumped (which would be additionally funny, owing to the multiple possible meanings of the word “dump”).

No matter who is in the car next to you, it is never a good idea to rawk out to Brittany Spears at a stoplight with your windows down and the bass crankin’.  Especially if the person in the car next to you happens to be the Pope or Dick Cheney.  Unless it's both of them together, and they're on some kind of a Footloose and Fancy Free partying montage where they go into town and chase pigeons in the fountain and then they go try on lots of funny hats while some Cindy Lauper song plays in the background.  That would be kind of cool.

Whenever I go to the post office, they always have all these ads up for postage stamps.  But’s that’s retarded, cause you don’t have a choice about it anyway.  “Mailing a letter?  Why not try Stamps?  It’s just ridiculous.  Have people found another way to convey letters and other physical objects to distant locales that I’m just not aware of?  Are we all using owls now?  Did somebody invent a transporter and decide to use it solely to convey their personal correspondence and occasional cable bill around?  If the post office didn’t tell people, would they just start driving everywhere that they wanted to send a letter to?  “Crap, it’s time to send Aunt Clarice her birthday card again, and she lives all the way out in Saskatchewan!  I wish there were somebody else who could take it there for me for ¢37!  What’s that you say?  Stamps?  How very novel, is this a new thing they’re trying?  Oh.  My bad.”

            Growing up in the 80s, as certain members of the younger generation might well be unaware (yes, Lindsay Lohan, I mean you), had a certain way of bringing together those of us who were raised during that particular golden era of human history.  There were in those marvelous days, and still remain to this day, people, things, and events which will forever bind us together whether we want to or not, just as the Planeteers had to keep the Heart kid around if they wanted to summon Captain Planet.  Our shared experiences during the closing days of the Cold War, as well as all the other epic and historic challenges that the 80s represent, are in fact generally not all that memorable, since most of us were seven years old at the time.  As one might imagine, most of us were really none too worried about all the great and important things because the mental world of an 80s child could be accurately described thusly:

            Now, I know we’ve all changed a little since then (I myself rarely dwell long on the deeper meaning of Pop-Tarts anymore), but I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you think about it way too hard late on a Saturday night, Thundercats is a lot like Gilligan’s Island.  But with robo koalas.  No, no, I’m not crazy, hear me out.  You see, if you think about it, you’ll see as well as I have the number of eerie similarities and parallels between Thundercats and Gilligan’s Island.

            For instance, on Thundercats, everybody always wore the exact same clothes, every single day, just like on Gilligan’s Island.  I mean, everyone has always wondered how Gilligan wore that red shirt every day of his life without needing a new one (much less being eaten by a Horta or having all the iron in his body sucked out by an evil cloud monster, not to mention being bitten by a big, white, uni-ape), but has anyone ever asked why Lion-O had a wardrobe composed solely of a single blue unitard of eternal vigilance?  I mean, at least Gilligan didn’t have anything else to make a shirt from except for bamboo and guest stars, but the Thundercats were way more resourceful than that.

            Next, on both Thundercats and Gilligan’s Island, they could build pretty much anything they wanted, as long as it wasn’t a ship to get them off their planet/island.  The Professor could build a radio out of coconuts if he wanted to, and Gilligan could make little cars out of bamboo, along with things like hot tubs, home entertainment centers, electron tunneling microscopes, anything at all.  Panthro, on the other hand (who, much like the professor was the all-knowing technically masterful babe magnet who nevertheless remained mysteriously single) started out with a crashed spaceship and ten minutes later had built a totally sweet thematically unified Thunder Fortress (and yes, I know that’s not what it was really called, but for copyright-related reasons, I am unable to use its proper name, The Sanctuary of Snarf), and then, when Lion-O (whose name I am loathe to type due to the thoroughly unnecessary hyphen it contains) started whinging about how that wasn’t good enough, Panthro went and threw together a tank just to shut him up.

            Just as Lion-O was the chosen one, who alone had the power to defeat Mumm-Ra, likewise was Gilligan the chosen one who looked exactly like the god of the headhunters, thereby enabling him to save is island-dwelling homies from near-certain death.

            And let us not forget that while Gilligan’s band was brought to the island by the Skipper, a big dude in a blue shirts, the Thundercats were brought to Third Earth by Jaga, a dead Obi-Wan Kenobi-looking guy, who was also blue.  Pretty creepy, eh?

            And let’s not forget the striking parallels between the Monkeyans that the Thundercats fought, and the love-crazed chimpanzee that was always hitting on Gilligan (no, not Mrs. Howell, the other one).

            And remember how Mumm-Ra was this gnarly little undead dude who would often go and stand in his big pyramid and be all like, “Spirits of Evil, blobbity blobbity blah, make me all beefy and badass, Mumm-Ra, the EVER-LIVING!!!”  At first this might seem a little out of place, but not to those of us who have seen the rare episode of Gilligan’s Island where Zha Zha Gabor gets stranded on the island and does the exact same thing.  Really, you need to go out and rent it sometime, it happens.

            Clearly, some TV executive somewhere realized early on that while Gilligan’s Island was a great source of important values and moral lessons, it was, in a very real way, just a little too classy and refined for the children of America to grasp.  Therefore, the idea to make a cartoon based upon the same premise and wrought in terms that children and the sort of adults who have to get cliff notes for Danielle Steele novels could understand.  Thus was Thundercats born, for which we are all both richer and wiser.

            Okay, as most of you who haven’t been living in a cave this week probably already know, Gilligan is dead.  Now, were I to just stop here, this would be a depressingly un-Benlike blog, so clearly I’m still just setting the stage.  Of course a thousand other blogs, European heads of state, and various and sundry poobahs (The Various and Sundry Poobahs, by the way, would make an excellent name for a band) have probably already gone public with all manner of eulogizing of a far better nature than anything that I could possibly write in memoriam of Bob Denver, who, to the best of my knowledge, is related to neither John Denver nor Denver the Last Dinosaur (he’s my friend and a whole lot more!™).  Anyways, lest there be any doubts as to whether I mean this honestly or facetiously, just let me state in the most unequivocal of terms that I am, and have been since at least as far back as the Reagan Administration, a total Gilligan fan.  Seriously, he’s like the older quasi-retarded brother I never had, or if I did, he was abducted by dinosquirrels before I was born and my parents never told me.  I learnt so much about life from Gilligan, like how to get a bowling ball stuck on your hand and turn invisible, or what to do if a monkey is throwing exploding dinner plates at you, or that if you find a lion and/or a mine down by the lagoon, you should definitely tell the Skipper right away.  But what has often been overlooked these past few days by all those extolling the virtues of Gilligan is the very important fact that he was, in addition to being a source of inspiration for untold billions of sentient beings on this and countless other worlds, but also that he was a critical part of our victory over the Red Menace (no, not helltoads, though they’re bad too), The Soviet Union.  Gilligan, you see, was no merely an entertainer, but also a patriot, a positive bulwark of awesomeness against the commie peril or the 1960s.  Finally it can be told, the wonderful, terrible truth behind Gilligan’s Island.

            Though we didn’t know it at the time, most people in Russia back in the day, were less than completely enthused about Communism.  Sure it came with some bitchin’ hats, and national leaders who weren’t afraid to beat a shoe on the table at the U.N., but there were also more than a few drawbacks, such as insanely long toilet paper lines, getting killed by the KGB, and the fact that by the age of fifty, all Russian women who weren’t actively being seduced by James Bond looked like hideous potato trolls in nappy scarves.  So yeah, there was some resentment there.  When Gilligan’s Island came on though, the simmering cup of civil unrest noodles at last boiled over onto the hotplate of Soviet domestic stability.  How, you may ask?  Simple, when people in Russia saw Gilligan’s Island, they were filled with awe at the way that Americans, even Americans stuck on an island, were so much better off than they themselves were.  “Look, Gilligan screwed up again and the Skipper’s not having him executed!” they would exclaim.  Or, “Hey, how come they have a helicopter made out of bamboo?  If Russia’s such a worker’s paradise, where’s my bamboo helicopter?”  The Soviet leaders knew that if something wasn’t done soon, the Soviet Union was going to unravel like a cheap dog sweater on the cute little cocker spaniel of freedom.  Therefore, Nikita Khruschev, already angry because he had a girly first name, decreed that Russia would create it’s own sitcom about a bunch of people on an island on a tropical island in the middle of the North Sea, thereby showing that there was no American idea so awesome that the Soviets wouldn’t try to copy it like a bunch of unoriginal losers.

            The Skipper was to be played by Yuri Gagarin, who, after the failure of the Russian version of “I Dream of Jeannie” needed a new gig anyway.  Gilligan was to be played by Josef Stalin, who would get into wacky situations every week before ordering the deaths of all those who dared to laugh at him, after which he would go back and Photoshop them out of every picture ever taken of them.  The Professor was played by Dmitri Mendeleyev, who would always be building radios out of walruses and explaining how impossible stuff had just happened by using hokey made-up Russian science.  Mary Ann was played by Rasputin, who looked improbably fetching in pigtails, but never really got into the part since he was still stewing about how the Americans had co-opted the demon he tried to summon for Hitler.  Ginger was played by a very young Gorbachev, who just grew his Great Red Spot out for the part and combed it back, thereby looking incredibly bizarre and thoroughly unsexy.  Mr. and Mrs. Howell were played by nobody since they were both evil bourgeoisie capitalist oppressors and no self-respecting Russian desert Island would put up with that sort of thing.

            Needless to say, the show was a complete failure, despite the fact that it featured a wide array of Russian film stars including Peter the Great, Don Knotts, Ivan the Terrible, and Karl Marx in an orangutan costume.  The peace-loving workers and farmers of the U.S.S.R. continued to prefer the American version of the show, and a mere thirty years later, the Evil Empire collapsed and the leaders of the free world threw a Muppet Dance Party the likes of which had never been seen before.

            So when your thoughts turn once more to Gilligan (as those of all good people often do) don’t just remember him as a comedian, ninja, and one-time Harlem Globetrotter, but also as a hero who probably ought to be put on the next dollar coin the U.S. Mint is foolish enough to think anybody would actually use.

            If you go back far enough, pretty much everybody is descended from somebody famous, or better yet, infamous (except for people who aren’t, and just decide to lie about it anyway; so if you ever meet someone claiming to be descended from George Washington or Uncle Fester be aware they’re just trying to beef ya).  Most people’s ancestors seem to have lived lives full of romance and adventure, and doing all sorts of other things that would be kind of impressive if not for the fact that it’s just kind of expected that most people’s ancestors did things like invent the ham sandwich or invent the first monkey-fez.  As you might have suspected, my own forefathers came not from so common a mold, rather, as family legend goes, most of them spent their time looking craggy and running away from Indians (Like, a whole bunch of Indians, mind you, not just a few.  More Indians than there are in Cleveland even.  Yeah, that many.).  Also, one of them jumped off a cliff in Pittsburgh while indulging in this great family tradition.  In fact, if you go back far enough, pretty much everybody I’m related to has some connection to either running away from Indians or Pittsburgh, which is kinda weird, come to think of it.  Also, according to family legend, I am the proud descendent of the only family ever to go out West on the Oregon Trail, live in Oregon for a couple of years, and then get so bored with things there that they came back (though at least the traffic on the Eastbound lanes must have been a lot lighter).  I guess what I’m trying to say is, my family is weird, and they always have been.  So let’s just pretend that that was a terribly witty segue instead of a rambling, nonsensical paragraph full of goofiness, and get on to telling the story of one of America’s greatest and most poorly documented folk heroes, Bigfoot Wallace.  Now, being as how there’s that whole poorly documented thing, a lot of this is going to be written in accordance with the fine historical tradition that we professionals like to call “making up stuff and hoping that nobody ever calls you on it”.  That said, here we go.

            Born in Virginia in 1817, Bigfoot Wallace (who, according to my sources was not, scientifically speaking, a Sasquatch, Yeti, or Abominable Anything of any sort whatsoever) probably had your regular old American folk hero upbringing.  He spent his days wandering through the woods, wrestling trees and chopping bears into firewood.  He was most certainly not killed in a bar when he was only three, but statistically speaking, it’s almost certain that somewhere along the line he found a large blue animal freezing in a blizzard somewhere and adopted it, after which point it inexplicably grew to an enormous size and followed him in all his travels thereafter, like some kind of blue wookie or something.  I’m really temped to go with the giant blue squirrel route, but since recent evidence suggests that Bob Dole already has one of those, I’m gonna be a bit more original and say it was an enormous stoat of some kind, and it was probably named after some great American baseball player or another.  Also, in case any among you doubt the veracity of my tale, just check out the nose on old Bigfoot there.  That, my friends, is the same nose that every single man in my family (and a good share of the women) has had ever since my great, great, great, grandfather, Og Strohm first evolved away his tail (big mistake, Grampa Og) and ran away from the first big group of Cave-Indians somewhere around what would someday become Pittsburgh.  Also, he kind of looks like Zephram Cochrane, which if you’re a dork (and if you’re reading this, you probably are) opens up all sorts of temporal paradoxes and stuff.

            Anyways, in 1836, Bigfoot Wallace learned that his older brother had been killed in the Texan War for Independence.  So he put a colander on his head, grabbed a sack of yams, and headed West with his faithful giganamous blue stoat, Willie Stargell.  Unfortunately, Bigfoot Wallace also had the family sense of punctuality and by the time he got to Texas, the war was already over.  Happily enough though, there were already a number of good hardware stores in the area, so he just decided to stay and become a Texas Ranger (This, might I add, would have made an infinitely more awesome show than anything about Chuck Norris.  Unless Chuck Norris had like, a flying battleship and a giant blue Gila monster named Roberto Clemente). 

            Anyhow, Bigfoot Wallace went on to fight in the Mexican War and probably spent the rest of his time doing all that obligatory folk hero stuff like rasslin tornados and carving Mount Rushmore with nothing but a pocket knife and a bag of moldy yams.  Most say that he died in 1899 and has remained dead since.  I suspect that he probably just went back to the 21^st century so he could finish his warp ship and bring the first Vulcans to Earth.  Either way, if you’re reading this, Bigfoot, send me a comment or something, and maybe a giant blue gibbon called Dizzy Dean.  That would be totally cool.

            So, here it is, Labor Day, a day in which we Americans celebrate the awesomeness of our nation much as our forefathers did, by driving all over the country in ridiculous urban assault vehicles named after endangered trees and vanquished Spanish naval forces (Abraham Lincoln himself was a big fan of this, and often could be seen cruising around Illinois in his Eponymous towncar, which, being as how dinosaurs still roamed the Earth instead of turning into oil as they all did in later years, actually ran by burning squirrels, which were at the time our nation’s leading export).  But hark, with gas prices way totally high, this great American tradition is in great and sucky peril as never before.  What made gas prices go up so much anyways?  While most of the folks on TV say it has something to do with China using it all to build Robeasts and Coldstone Creameries, the truth is that Spanky and the Mole People have been stealing it all from underground pipelines as they foolishly pursue their mad scheme to build a chain of subterranean gas stations thus cornering the global Shmuffin market and bring the world to its knees.  Also, the Amish are buying it all just to mess with us.  Whatever the case may be, its certain that until Dick Cheney finally finds a way to turn his idea for flying monkey chariots into a marketable product, we all need to be looking at ways to conserve gas and save money (not carpooling though, that’s how Satan gets to work in the morning).  Without further ado (there having been quite enough ado already here), let’s take a look at a few of the options available to the traveler on a budget.

            Get a Conestoga wagon.  Now, that might not seem terribly efficient, seeing as how your average ox, even on the best of days, can rarely travel at highway speeds.  But think about it for a second, Conestoga wagons are what people took on the Oregon Trail, which was really the ultimate road trip of all time (okay, maybe the penultimate road trip of all time, if you want to go way back in the day and count the Exodus, though that’s a story for another blog altogether).  I mean, if someone can take a wagon all the way across the country, don’t go and act like you’re all of a sudden too good to drive one to work everyday.  Just make sure that you bring plenty of wagon tongues (I don’t even know what those are for, but trust me, you’ll need ‘em) and whenever you get to a river, just hire an Indian to take you across, unless you want to sink and lose all your ammunition and family members.

            Go with the Mad Max method, and start living like you’re in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  How do you do this?  Simple, first get a sweet looking leather jacket and a crossbow (if, like myself, you’ve already got this equipment, you might want to go ahead and try this on your way to work tomorrow), then get a bunch of crazy stuff like cowcatchers and harpoon guns and stick them in your car.  Then just run any mutants you see off the road and after delivering them to a swift and fiery death, take the gas from their car.  While some might criticize this method owing to its horrible ruthlessness/total awesomeness, just remember, Mel Gibson did it first, and he’s fought the British, space aliens, and Pontius Pilate, so anything he came up with can’t be but so bad.

            Get a hover conversion done on your car.  Now, I’m not sure if this would actually help you to save gas, but it would be pretty cool.  Also, as long as you go all the way and get a Mr. Fusion and a couple of flux capacitors installed, all you have to do is go back in time to when gas was cheaper and buy some then.  Just make sure you don’t change history by making out with Leah Thomson or stepping on any butterflies, that can be trouble.  Though on the other hand, 1980s Leah Thompson was pretty makeoutable, and butterflies are so much fun to stomp on, don’t feel too bad if you end up doing either of these things.

            Get a Segway.  No, I’m lying, Segways are one of those things like eugenics, Communism, and the Metric System, where they seemed like a good idea once, but after they killed 20 million people they didn’t seem quite so cool after all.  Besides, George Bush the Elder fell off of one once, and that’s just not cool.

            Switch you car over to steam power.  Why?  Well, because if you do, your car can burn anything to go.  Wood, coal, propane, kittens, emo kids, whatever’s cheapest that day, just throw a heap of ‘em in the hopper and light it up.  Also, your call will make that cool chugga chugga sound like a train, and if you plan ahead, you can even get one of those totally sweet whistles installed.

            Get some of those Russian-made power boots.  Never heard of such a thing?  Oh, they’re all too real, believe you me.  You see, after the fall of the Soviet Union, all the Russian scientists who’d spent all their careers working on ways to kill us capitalist pig-dogs were unemployed.  Some of them got jobs working at the Food Lion in the Outer Banks, but most of them either went rogue and started building killer robots or decided to make cool stuff.  One of them made the gasoline-powered boots that can make a man run 25 mph.  Think about that for a minute, the way you’d look as you leapt through traffic like a briefcase-toting gazelle, while all those other chumps sat stuck in traffic.  And should you get to work only to find that the city is in peril and you need to rush off somewhere, you’ve still got the boots to give you awesomely superhuman jumping powers, so you could become some jumpy thing-themed superhero, like Toad Boy, or Kangalad, or Goofy Looking Cracker with Some Boots On.  Whatever, the point is that you should get some of these boots.

            So there you have it, all the answers to all your gasoline woes.  Now just go out and try a few of these handy methods and be amazed at the results.  Happy Trails.

            As all of you who read the newspaper probably already know, this is Dagwood and Blondie’s 75^th anniversary.  Leaving aside for the moment all of the observations which I could make regarding the two of them (for instance, why did Blondie abandon her lucrative 80s band in favor of opening a catering business, and how come Dagwood eats a jillion sandwiches a day while staying skinny as a rail?  My guess is that he’s probably addicted to toad-licking, or as we call in on the streets, “Doing the T”), I’m just going to focus on how weird this entire anniversary thing is just bay itself.  For instance, if they’ve been married 75 years, that means that, assuming they’re not part of some weird Indian childhood elephant-giving arranged marriage, then they’re at least 93 years old.  C’mon now, a healthy diet and exercise will only carry a person so far, and I think we all deserve a better explanation.  I suspect that Dagwood and Blondie are both actually vampires or one of your other less common varieties of greater undead, and then each night they transform into their true hideous forms and fly out the window to go and feast on the blood of the innocent (this is why Dagwood is always late getting to work, he’s still hung over from the previous night’s horrible death-feast).  Or, maybe they’re like the Dread Pirate Roberts, and every so many years they choose someone else to take their place while they return to their ancestral birthplace in lower Madagascar to eat carob nuts and hurl koalas at one another.  Or maybe Dagwood made a pact with a demonic being back in the day (demonic being flavor of the month: Jamocha Double Fudge Cthulhu) and gained for himself a perpetually hot wife and immortality, but at the cost of the single dorkiest haircut in all of human history (worse even than that of little-remembered Saxon monarch Brokthlurgh Death-Mullet) and always having to wear a ridiculous talisman of power smack dab in the middle of his shirt.

            But whatever, it matters not.  The real mystery is how he and Blondie got all the other cartoon characters to put aside their differences and go to a big party peaceably.  Take Hagar the Horrible, for instance.  Even assuming he has a time machine (which, according to today’s paper, he does) why would he just go to the party and have a good time?  I mean, he’s a Viking, he’s gotta be fighting the urge to do some serious pillaging.  Really, the strip ought to show him and his horde standing on Dagwood’s front porch with all their torches and stuff, with Lucky Eddie coming out of the house and saying “Sorry, Hagar, they say they just got a new carpet installed and we have to wipe our feet.”  Because that always happens when Hagar goes anywhere, he’s got to the be least murderous Viking ever, unless every day right after the third panel ends, he and his troops fall into an orgy of untold carnage and bloodshed, which would actually be kind of cool.

            And what about all the comics who didn’t show up for the party?  I mean, Curtis is some kid from the inner city and he made it to the party, Dick Tracy was able to take enough time off from fighting improbably yet serendipitously-named deformed theme villains to drop by, even that Christian caveman guy managed to show up, despite the fact that everybody knows that Dagwood is so totally a Darwin groupie and a noted Atheist.  Who’s missing from this picture?  Yup, Mark Trail.  Now, I understand that during the week Mark Trail has lately been busy with his Retarded Murderess Skunk Lady Canoe Trip of Doom (full details in a blog yet to come), but what’s old Mark doing this Sunday?  I’ll tell you what, he’s watching kangaroos make out.  C’mon Mark, you can indulge in your vile perversions on your own time, today someone else needed you for once and you just had to go get a little time at the Outback.  Jeez man, you need an intervention or something.

            And where’s Snoopy?  According to today’s paper, he had already promised to take Woodstock and his homies on a “picnic”, but what’s up with that?  I think we can all see that someone thinks they’re too good to hang out with all the other talking animals at Dagwood’s Party.  Honestly Snoopy, are you saying you think you’re too good to hang out with such greats as Garfield, Grimmy, and That Annoying Little Oval Headed Kid from Family Circus?  At least Funky Winkerbean was off stepping on a landmine in Afganistan, and he’s been such a downer lately you wouldn’t want him at a party anyhow.

            Also, who’s that guy in the back row, between Dick Tracy and Ziggy (who, by the way, must be wearing a jet pack or something, cause he looks like he’s about seven feet tall)?  He kind of looks like Aquaman (the pansy Superfriends version) or maybe the distilled evil of every boy band ever all boiled down and poured into one hideous ungodly abomination of a human being.  His short kind of looks like he might be Captain Marvel, though everyone knows that Captain Marvel hates Ziggy with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns and has ever since Ziggy stole his prom date back in the 70s.  I suspect he’s actually a Communist Chinese secret agent, sent to steal our country’s humor secrets and use them to improve the only comic they have back in China (it’s pretty lame right now; it’s most just about Chairman Mao living in a Canadian Suburb and getting frustrated with his incompetent coworkers while trying to balance career and family, often with hilarious results)

            Finally, while most of the characters present have tastefully chosen to just have a glass of champagne (though Hagar has clearly opted for a nice, foamy PBR), Snuffy Smith has brought a big ol’ jug of three X moonshine.  Sure, it seems funny now, but wait until later on tonight when he gets all wasted and makes a crude pass at Sally Forth before collapsing in a smelly, drunken, white trashy heap in the foyer.  Okay, on second thought, that might be kind of funny after all.

            ACHTUNG, MEINE KLIENEN BLOG AFFEN: the following blog may contain 80s club music and brief scenes of me dancing to it.  As such, it is not recommended for the faint of heart or anybody with any rhythm whatsoever.  For all the rest of you though, read on, and experience the complete and utter horror of, “Ben Goes to a Retro 80s Dance Club!!!!!”

            Last Thursday started normally enough.  There I was, sitting in front of my computer, talking with various and sundry homies of mine.  All of a sudden and completely without warning, I got an IM from, Zardok, daughter of Wulfgar, a girl of my acquaintance informing me that she and her fiancée, Glarg the Orc-Render, who is also very much a good friend of mine (in order to protect the innocent, their names have been changed to protect them from the socially lethal uncoolness radiation of shame which my actions might otherwise be exposing them to) would being going out to an 80s dance club in Richmond later that night.  At first I was somewhat reluctant to go along, “I’m somewhat reluctant to go along,” I said.  “But Ben,” she replied, there’s gonna be dorky 80s girls there!”  And of course, there are few things more loathsome to me than missing out on the chance to dance with dorky 80s girls, so I relented at last.  Now, owing to my unfortunate lack of hammerpants, I don’t really have anything that looks very 80s, except for my Viva La Reagan shirt, which somehow didn’t seem right for the occasion (if only I had one of those Ayatollah Assahola shirts that everyone was wearing back in the day).  Not to be discouraged however, I girded on my finest dancing clothes.  I donned my stylish yet edgy teacupmammoths.com t-shirt (only $9, buy one today!) and found my post-apocalyptic Mel Gibson death boots (which never fail to add like, 10 points to my dance skills), donned my Roman Gladiator Watchband of Fury, and put the +7 Chinese Magic Jade Monkey Amulet of Luck that my sister got for me in China in my pocket, assuming that it could only bolster my move-busting abilities (I was not to be disappointed in this, as we shall see).  Also, I wore pants.

            Richmond, as befits a city of its awesomeness, has a veritable plethora of neighborhoods which sociologists frequently describe as “really sketchy”, and last night I think we drove through most of them in our poorly planned quest for the 80s.  Happily though, we eventually found our way there, and within a few minutes, were surveying the scene.  Now, as happened to be the case, my fellow club-goers had some other friends to talk to there at first, so I found myself momentarily left to my own devices, and accordingly set out for the dance floor.  Now, I do not do a whole lot of clubbing, and except for the occasional homecoming dance in high school, haven’t really spent a great deal of time on the dance floor, and at first I felt some trepidation about just wading out there and trying to dance.  But then, it struck me like duffel bag full of yams being thrown from the international space station:  nobody else there could dance either!  Indeed, as I looked around with a somewhat keener eye, I beheld naught but an endless sea of completely rhythm-deprived dorky white people kind of flailing around like a bucket full of electric sea weasels (The Electric Sea Weasels, might I add, would make a totally sweet name for a band).  Heartened by this epiphany, decided that the time had come for me to at last unleash my dance moves.

            Now, it happens to be the case that the Good Lord saw fit, in his infinite wisdom, to equip me with but two different dances; one being the White Guy Shuffle, which is that universal dance that all white guys do when they’re thrown by some cruel circumstance onto a dance floor.  I’m pretty sure its actually genetic or something, like how when a cat into the bathtub, he instinctively remembers how to swim, just before he instinctively remembers how to jump out of the tub and gnaw your face off.  So there I was, doing the White Guy Shuffle, feeling relatively at ease with myself there on the crowded and anonymous dance floor.  All of a sudden though, something went horribly wrong, and I found that everyone around me had momentarily backed off a little, thus giving me a bit of room to move around in.  This is where it gets bad.

            Remember how I said I know two dances, and one of them is the White Guy Shuffle?  Well, I chose that moment to do the other one.  For some weird and mysterious reason that always hits me at dances eventually, I did The Ben.  What, you may ask, is The Ben?  It sort of defies human description, but I’m gonna give it a try anyway.  Once it started, I didn’t really notice much until it was all over and the survivors fled the building, so most of what follows is based upon the testimony of those who were brave enough to watch.  Where shall I begin?  Okay, imagine that I’m some badass computer guy from the Matrix, and I can move faster than humanly possible, and imagine that at this same time, my pants are full of weasels and silly putty, and now imagine that my Uber-fast pants-weasel silly putty dance is strangely in sync with “99 Luft Balloons”.  It was like an atomic bomb had been dropped in the middle of the dance floor; people instinctively recoiled in amazement and terror, and when it was all over, the living would envy the dead.  Seriously, everybody around me stopped to stare.  It was as if Godzilla had walked into Tokyo, but instead of making balloon animals out of commuter trains and breathing radiation breath all over the place (I myself had tanked up on Altoids not a hour before all this), he suddenly stopped kicking over building and had a seizure.  It was that bad.  According to those who lived to tell the tale it was tough to say whether people were mostly impressed or horrified, so I’m just gonna go with saying that they were all completely weirded out.  In short, it was totally freakin’ awesome.

            Alas, no dorky 80s girls saw fit to dance with me that night, but most of them didn’t run screaming into the street like they used to back in middle school, so I counted it to be a decided improvement and went along on my merry way.  Anyway, the moral of the story is, um, I dunno, kids, don’t do drugs, and don’t watch me dance either, because in terms of messing you up, they’re probably about the same.

            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.