If your hometown is destroyed by meteors, why do you still call it a meteor shower?  Showers are supposed to be refreshing while revitalizing your hair.  I’m pretty sure that if Richmond was destroyed by meteors, we’d call it something appropriate, like a meteordeathageddon.  Also if it were in Richmond, we’d find a way to turn it into a massive scandal involving Confederate generals, beavers, and the performing arts center.

            If you illegally downloaded a song about pirates without paying for it, that would be completely ironic.

            If you were a marginally literate vampire, I bet you would foolishly stay away from steakhouses.

            You know how Green Arrow’s super power was dressing like Robin Hood and having 137 different kinds of arrows?  Why did he need say, an arrow that turned into a boxing glove and an additional arrow that turned into a net, while yet another turned into a tiny green miniature schnauzer?  And it’s not just that he was too noble to kill people, because he also had an arrow that was a quantum detonator.  It’s like if you got in a fight with him, he could either shoot you with something that might hopefully render you temporarily unconscious, or launch a device at you capable of tearing the very fabric of the universe asunder, but without any middle ground whatsoever.  That’s why when I become an archery-themed superhero, I’m just gonna go with the pointy arrow, and possibly one that has an angry raccoon tied to it.

            If you had a preternaturally enormous head, and you got a job as a driver for Napa, and one day the boss came in to find that all their truck hats were mysteriously gone, you would probably have some ‘splainin to do.

            I want to see a Waffle House fight an Ihop.  It would be totally awesome, because Ihop would be the uber-classy one, where they all wore blue blazers and were named Nigel and hung out at regattas after they got off of work.  Waffle House though, would be composed of a wide variety of loveable misfits from all your various socio-ethnic classes.  Like you’d have the fat kid, and the kid who was always complaining, and the Asian kid who was always building ingenious yet unreliable contrivances, and the black kid who didn’t say much but was a total badass, and the tomboy, and that Central American kid with the power to control monkeys, and the Waffle House manager would be John Candy (who, for our purposes, will have risen from the grave for one last epic battle of ineffable sweetness) and he’d be all working against his bad reputation for having once foolishly thrown a previous ultimate restaurant showdown.  But they’d all learn a lot about teamwork and sticking together, and then they’d end up punching the Ihop crew from off of a flaming Nazi Zeppelin.

            You know how at the end of King Kong, that guy says, “No, it wasn’t the airplanes; ‘twas beauty killed the beast.”?  That was actually a last minute substitution made to avoid offending the people of the 30s.  The original line was, “No, it wasn’t the airplanes; ‘twas your mom!”

            You know how sometimes in other countries American stores have different names so that people there won’t be boggled by our obscure cultural references?  I hope this means that in Spain, instead of calling it “Old Navy,” it’s called “The Armada.”

            You know how a couple months back someone kidnapped that baby penguin?  Well, I just found out that it wasn’t just any penguin, its actual scientific name was a jackass penguin.  Which leads me to suspect that it was never really kidnapped at all; it just ran away.  And then of course it got a show on MTV where it crashed shopping carts into things and performed Xtreme skateboarding stunts.

            I want to go to an emo concert (not for its own sake, but for a greater, and soon to be revealed purpose) and while everyone else there is just sort of leaning in time with the music like emos do, I’m gonna start really getting into it and start busting out my many and wondrous moves and skillz.  And then once they’re all looking at me with unadulterated horror, I’m gonna throw off my trench coat and enormous black pants and underneath I’ll be wearing all sorts of brightly and cheerfully colored garb with smiley faces and mood rings and bling bling of all sorts.  Then they’ll all go home and write really humorously depressing and formulaic poems about suffering on myspace while I go on a wacky roadtrip to Hollywood to try and sell my Waffle House vs. Ihop idea to Peter Jackson.

“Even the Lone Ranger had his white horse and Tonto.  You can’t do everything yourself.”

            Those were the words which stared back at me from my horoscope for today.  Epic and meaningful words, fraught with, um, important stuff as everything fell into place in a horrible, wonderful way.  It’s no secret that I’ve been pretty busy these past few weeks, and then right out of the blue, here’s a personal message just for me and every other person on the planet who happens to be a Scorpio, hot off the presses of Astaroth the Horoscope Demon.  I can run from reality no longer, because it already tied my shoelaces together while I was eating breakfast and administered unto myself a truly fiendish noogie until I submitted and said my name was Gitchy Goomastink (reality, it seems, has a completely retarded sense of humor about such things).  So here I am, and I need a sidekick.  Not just any old sidekick though, because there are so many places to go wrong with this choice that it’s not even funny, except of course for the fact that it’s actually extremely funny, or at least it will be if I can possibly frame it in suitably ridiculous terms.

            First, it’s generally a bad idea to get a sidekick who happens to be of the same gender as you yourself happen to be.  If he’s close to your age, he’ll always be bitin’ your style; if he’s way younger people are going to think you’ve got a little Batman-Robin action going on on the side, which you can’t really blame them for, because why else would anyone choose to be followed around by another man who dressed exactly like them only with more rainbows and a nickname like, “Boy Wonder”?  Also, just going to opposite route and choosing a girl for your sidekick doesn’t really work out either, unless she’s your orphaned niece and you’re teaching her to fight crime that she might one day replace you.  Otherwise, it’s just a bad idea, because she’ll either fall in love with you and not let you mack on all the various and sundry supervillianesses and police comissioner’s daughters, or she’ll always be bringing boys home to your fortress of doom and totally messing with your vibe of mysteriousity.  And no ethnic stereotypes.  Ever.  It’s okay if you want an Indian for a sidekick, but don’t ask him to wear a loincloth around and talk in broken English about sky spirits and earth mothers; this is the 21^st century, and we’re all a little too liberated for that nowadays.  Finally, no space aliens.  I mean, if you just happen to hang out with a lot of space aliens and one of them is qualified, then hey, go for it; but don’t go and hire on a Venusian just to score diversity points and impress the ladies.  Also, space orphans are almost invariably retarded.  Seriously, there’s a reason their home planet of Zoopdar tossed them off to Earth, and it’s usually got a lot to do with them being clinically annoying.  Which is to say, in brief, that if you hired on a blue Neptunian kid who wore an exact replica of your own costume but with more pastels and a turban who only spoke in clicking sounds and girlish giggles, you would have committed the ultimate in sidekick faux pass?

            Where does this leave us then?  With two main choices, animals and robots.  And not just any animal or robot will do here (Remember back when Bill Clinton tried to replace Al Gore with that Furby?  Not a pretty sight.)  Nope, any animals used have to be large enough to roll over a de Soto and talk like they really like cigarettes while having the personality of an aged jazz musician or possibly Worf.  When auditioning animal cohorts, a good test is to ask which of the following statements they would be more likely to utter in battle, “Dishonorable cur, I shall teach you to fear Groth’nar, Ragebeast of Toranok!” or “Wait up guys!  I think I left my flan in the easy bake oven back in the fortress of doom!”  Nobody respects a flanmeister.  Also, monkeys, green tigers, and anything with giant bat wings (such as Carl, the bat-winged tiger monkey) are good sidekicks; manatees, koalas, and anything else endangered are not (this being based on the unimpeachable rule that if it allowed itself to become endangered, it isn’t badass enough to fight evil by your side).

            As far as robots are concerned, the most important thing is that they have at least one arm that turns into a machine gun, rocket launcher, or T-shirt cannon.  Also, none of that cute beeping business that so many robots are into these days, a proper robot has a funky faceplate thing where his mouth would be that kind of moves when he talks.  And if you’re doing this properly, then he needs to be either an escaped military prototype, a mercenary from space who mysteriously crashed on Earth, or a lifeless metallic shell from which the immortal soul of your best friend/mentor helps you to battle the forces of evil.  Built-in universal remote is a plus; integrated whininess circuits are not.

            Which means, all in all, that all I have to do now is find a giant cyborg robo-puma who sounds like Louis Armstrong, eats metal, can fly, was built by the ancients of your tribe, knows how to fix a starship, can set stuff on fire ten different ways from afar, and who can help you pick up girls in a bar.  So, if anyone out there either is, or merely personally knows, such a beast, go ahead and give them my email address so I cans tart auditions as soon as possible.

            What’s the latest craze that’s sweeping the nation?  No, not Sam Alito and his loveable band of musical scamps, The Aleatles.  No, no, not electric pants either.  Beef Chisels?  I don’t even know what those are, and I’d rather not learn.  Okay, class, the answer I was looking for was reality shows.  However, I take your point well that they’re not really sweeping the nation anymore.  They’re a lot more like Communist nations; they used to be a big deal, and there’s still a few left, but the only people who think they’re cool are their die-hard fans.  Still, my entire purpose here wasn’t to initiate a conversation on the socio-political trends of governance and entertainment so much as it was to spice things up by starting with a rhetorical question.  My actual subject for the day, popular or not, is that clearly there’s a bit of a shortage in the reality show word of new ideas at the moment.  Gone are they days of such classic tests of the human will as “Gilligan’s Island,” “I Dream of Genie,” and “The Beverly Hillbillies vs. An Army of Ravenous Zombies,” leaving contemporary audiences with nothing better to do than tuning in to see which castaway gets an Xtreme makeover from Donald Trump this week.  With this in mind, I have once again taken it upon myself to single-handedly save American television from the smelly morass of suckiness in which it has managed to mire itself once again (no, no, don’t thank me).  Follow along then, all you junior programming executives out there in TV land, as we go over a few reality shows that don’t make your brain want to put your head up for sublet while it flies to Acapulco Laugh not, this has actually happened to the guy who draws Marmaduke (his head has since been leased to a tiny little Starbucks).

            First, let’s go with the classics and start out with “Who Wants to Marry Captain Caveman?”  Let’s face it, if there’s one thing that skanky gold-digging women from California love, it’s the chance to marry a guy who owns a Swiss Army Club and has 97.3% of his body covered in hair (it worked for Chewbacca, anyway, though the new Mrs. Bacca is of course a woman of surpassing taste and good unbringing).  Every week Captain Caveman would go on a date with one or more of them, and they’d all vie to win his prehistorical affections by being shameless brazen ice age hussies.  Finally, Captain Caveman would choose one, and in a surprising twist, reveal to her that he was not, in fact, either a Captain or a caveman, but rather an electrician from Iowa who lived in a fiberglass tree.  She would of course marry him anyway, and two weeks later the marriage would be annulled while both of them got generous book deals.

            I’m sure that if you’re like most Americans (and by most Americans, I mean me and my Waffle House Posse, not that I or anyone can really own a posse; they’re like the wind), you think magical stuff is pretty damn sweet.  It is in the interest of shamelessly cashing in on this that I offer up “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in which a group of wannabe Machiavellian orc-roasters have to debase themselves and betray each other to win the favor of famed wizards and humorously mismatched police officers, Saruman and Dumbledore.  Every week they’d all have to do wizardly stuff like conjuring Danishes, transmogrifying a mouse into Xerox machine, and rolling a natural 20 (only seven people probably got that last one, but they found it hilarious).  Finally one of them would get to be THE Sorcerer’s Apprentice and be awarded a lucrative job in a mystical tower full of gnomes somewhere in Chicago where they would listen to classical music and foolishly create an army of magical brooms to do their bidding.

            Finally, because truly there is nothing less irrelevant to life than  interior decorating, we come to “Captain Planet Eye for the Straight Guy” (I’m sorry, but it’s late, and try as I might, I couldn’t think of a funnier title to go with this idea).  In every episode there’d be some poor sap living in an apartment by himself and his well-meaning but insolent churl friends would sic the Planeteers on him so that they could redecorate him.  Like say that he had a shower that was just tiled with plain ol’ boring grout ‘n stale pancakes; they’d all come in (the Planeteers, not the pancakes) and replace it with say, lava, which is much more natural and energy efficient, though slightly more deadly.  And instead of just bumming around the house in a wife-beater and “I Heart Will Wheaton” boxers, they’d make him a trendy suit composed of nothing but environmentally friendly telepathically controlled live rhesus monkeys.  The highlight of course would be when Captain Planet (who, after his untimely death from a spotted owl overdose, will be played by occasional alpha male and full-time inventor of the internet, Al Gore) would burst in through the wall ala Kool Aid Man and torch all his appliances before saying something sappy about natural resources and pandas etc.  Then the guy whose apartment it was in the first place would get angry and call Dick Cheney, who would show up in his pollution-powered Cheneymobile and throw toxic waste on Captain Planet, who would then cry like a little girl and go off to regenerate or possibly just grow a goatee and take a job as a university professor.

            In modern society, we tend to believe that we have advanced beyond the point where most forms of discrimination are both behind us and beneath us.  Gone are the days of Segregation, women being barred from becoming starship captains, and the prohibition of romantical relations between consenting adults and most forms of livestock.  Indeed, we have come a long way in such matters.  Alas, there is yet among us one minority nigh-universally discriminated against by all the fashions of the world, lefties.  How, you may ask, are left handed folks (or as we prefer to be called “differently-handed Americans”) so reviled by society?  Well, let’s take a little tour of the oppressive society in which we live as we take a look at all the myriad ways in which Righty is always keeping a brother down.

            First and foremost of course, are scissors.  Honestly, if you’re left-handed, trying to cut with right-handed scissors is like trying to kill a yak by throwing peanut butter at it; it’s very messy, everyone else thinks you’re retarded, and it rarely works well enough to justify the effort.  How tough would it be to just make a few pairs of left-handed scissors and then sell them at your usual scissor emporiums?  I mean, something like 10% of Americans are lefties; it’s not like we’re some weird little conclave of freaks like people who drink decaf or something.

            And don’t even get me started on soda machines, every single button and coin slot on those things is way over to the right side, so you can either try to successfully feed a dollar in with your right hand, thereby making all onlookers think that you’ve got some horrible ailment that makes you a clumsy doofus (such as Clumsiticus Doofitus, named after it’s discoverer, Dr. Isaac Doofus) or you can just use you left hand, which means standing way off to the right side of the machine like you’re afraid it is liable to dispense your Dr. Pepper with altogether inappropriate vehemence, thereby necessitating you getting the hell out of its way.

            And what about those little debit card pads they have at stores these days?  Why is it that the little writing stick for them is always on a cord three inches long?  That may be fine for right-handed folks, but for the rest of us (by which I mean not only lefties, but also the ambidextrous and people who write with their ears, known collectively as the LAPWWTE Community) this is way too short and as a result our collective signature always looks like we were wrestling our own weight in rabid midgets whilst trying to pay for a sack of potatoes or other ammunition.  And it’s not like they couldn’t just make the cords longer, unless they’re made out of kryptonite or monopoles or honest lawyers or some other incredibly rare and expensive substance.  No, whoever made these things just didn’t care whether a tenth of the human race could use them comfortably or not.

            On the bright side, we lefties totally rule at tossing quarters into toll booths.  Often times a bunch of us will all pile into the car and just park out near the Powhite toll plaza just to watch you and your imperious ilk ham-handedly lob coins in the general direction of the quarter taking thingie (and yes, that is the technical term for it).  It’s not a problem for us though; I don’t even have to slow down for toll booths, I just kind of do a drive-by quarter tossing and it’s all good.  Heck, if I’m feeling generous sometimes I’ll just fling an entire handful of quarters as I go past and every single one of them will amazingly hit their mark, because that’s how much lefties rule the toll booth.  Seriously, if the toll booth was France, left-handed people would be Germany, because we totally conquer it on a daily basis and plunder it of it’s many berets, exotic cheeses and skanky chain-smoking women.

            Also, toilets are left-handed, and I’m not sure why.

            So, perhaps all you right-handed people think you’ve got a pretty sweet thing going on right now, oppressing I and all my sinister brethren like you do, but wait, and chortle at your own peril!  For you see, living in a right-handed world as we must has taught many of us to use our right hands as well.  Indeed, after years of necessity, I can now operate a computer mouse with either of my hands.  And since computer mice are often (and not without good reason) compared to battle axes, it follows that many of us southpaws get something like, +18 to our dual wield ability.  Not only that, but we can also play the guitar upside down and do the Vulcan Death Grip with either hand we choose.  This coupled with our innate quarter chucking ability means that if and when the revolution does occur, you’d best be prepared from ravening hordes of left-handed persons roaming the streets, pelting their oppressors with pocket change and battle axes, while upsetting soda machines and ATMs.  Toilets, however, will be spared, on account of their strange but ever so welcome compliance with our special needs.

            You have been warned.

            Everyone knows about the Boston Tea Party insomuch as it was a vital step in our young nation’s quest to annoy the British into letting us do our own thang.  However, it was also really risky, because they ran the risk that a harbor full of tea would in fact attract one or more gigantic tea-thirsty monstrous British dudes who would then proceed to drink their tea harbor and make frilly toothpicks out of their ships’ masts.  Then where would Boston be?  Probably in some blasphemous interspatial hell dimension of eternal suffering; so pretty much things would be the same as now, but with more baleful cosmic vortices of gibbering vileness and a few less goat demons.

            You know how on notebook paper the last line is always all extra narrow so you can’t fit any letters with tails on it?  Well, I carry a little notepad and write all my blog epiphanies down in it, and this last line never fails to be the very bane of my existence.  “Hey, I should write a blog about Klang and the Yak Yogurt!” I’ll think to myself, but nay, it’s got to go on the last line, so instead I end up writing a blog about Klano and the Vak Voaurt, which sounds like some existential house-cleaning novel by a white supremacist, which isn’t really as funny as one might suspect.

            Apparently, on MSN, teacupmammoths is the #6 site to go to for blue-butted baboons.  So make sure you recommend it to all your scholarly blue-butted baboon enthusiast friends for their research, that I may better keep climbing the blue-butted ladder of internet success.

            This week NASA launched a space thingy to go to Pluto and see if they have any good miniature golf courses there, but since Pluto is way out in the Franklin County of the Solar System, it’s gonna take it a while to get there.  Ten years, in fact, said a NASA spokesbeing, “assuming we make good time”.  How can you not make good time in space?  You either get there on schedule or you get blown up; its not like the spacecraft is gonna get stuck in traffic around the Saturn beltway, or it’ll drink too many jamocha space lattes and have to make more restroom stops that NASA thought.

            Also, this thing was apparently launched at ten times the speed of a speeding bullet, which means that now Superman has to worry about two things: Kryptonite and NASA launching stuff at him.  Thanks a lot, NASA.

            I really suck at solitaire in real life, because playing it on computer totally ruined it for me.  Like, I’ll get all my cards taken care of and win, but then I feel like I have to throw them all across the room in a carefully controlled and visually appealing cascade effect, but it never works in real life, at least for me.

            Everyone loves shuffling cards, but that’s just because shuffling cards sounds really, really cool.  If shuffling cards sounded like something completely different and bad, like say, a sack full of babies being thrown down the stairs, nobody would play cards.  “Hey Dave, we’re gonna play some poker, you want to shuffle?”  GATHUNK, KNUNK, WHUMP, GENERIC LOUD NOISE, “Okay, Dave, never mind, I think we’re just gonna do a couple of rounds of Hungry Hungry Hippos instead.”

            The other day, I was out driving and I saw this car with a totally huge antenna on it, which is okay if you’re a crazy old loser who wants to pretend he’s a cop, but this particular car happened to be a Miata, the tiniest of not-really-sports cars.  So instead of looking like a pretend copmobile, it looked like a giant remote controlled car.  I was all freaking out though, because at any moment I expected an enormous 7 year old the size of the British guy from the first paragraph to appear and start making Miata Guy crash into giant coffee tables and such.  Sadly, this scenario failed to transpire as visualized by myself, and I had to seek consolation at the hardware store.

            If you wanted to invent a product that would make no sense at all and quickly render you thoroughly poor, a good place to start would be by marketing a chia Patrick Stewart.

            Fifty years ago, one of my grandmother’s students told her she ought to go to the 350^th anniversary of Jamestown, because she wouldn’t ever get another chance to.  However, my grandmother is in fact still kicking ass and taking names to this very day, and fully full-on plans to be there for the 400^th anniversary of Jamestown (locally known as Jamestownberfest).  So if she sees her old student there, it would be unspeakably awesome if she toddled up to her in that cute grandmotherly sort of way, asked her name, and then shouted, “Haha, bt y ddn’t xct t s m h, btch!.

            And, my keyrd just wnt ll retarded

            Some people these days are concerned about oil shortages.  Others are worried that we’re running out of rainforests.  Yet more live in fear lest mankind exhaust its supply of Cooler Ranch Doritos.  Not I, however (well, okay, I do worry about a paucity of snacks from time to time, while not worrying in the least that A Paucity of Snacks would be like, the best snack shortage-related band name ever); I fear that our race has lost a resource, nay, a very piece of our collective birthright, in our present lack of suitably awesome novelty musical artists.

            Clearly, I do not exaggerate when I say that this problem has already gone on far too long.  Alas, our memory grows short concerning such matters, and many alive today recall not how during World War II we were able to field a vast and unstoppable force of guys writing silly songs about Hitler and his implied fruitulosity whilst simultaneously making a mockery of those who made Pearl Harbor a day that will ever live in infamy (I am here, needless to say, referring chiefly to Ben Affleck, may a thousand curses be all up in his grill).  After the war was over, many of these great men successfully made the transition back to the peacetime novelty song business, finding that with the newfound wealth and affluence of the burgeoning middle class came an insatiable thirst for music about monkeys, the undead, and Jimmy Durante.  They rose to this great challenge, and as late as the 60s, these proud veterans of the Greatest Novelty Song Generation regaled America with ditties about goofy stuff.

            As their numbers waned however, newcomers, raised on the legendary work of their elders, took the metaphorical rubber chicken/torch in hand and carried on this fine tradition, using new cutting edge technology left over from NASA to make chipmunk voices and thereby ensure that even through the tribulations of Vietnam, skanky hippies, and that time that Richard Nixon built a groovy time machine and tried to steal Captain Caveman’s funky mojo.  This generation too, passed into the goofy and baboon-infested mists of time but nobody really noticed for a while because even regular 80s music was pretty silly a lot of the time, while simultaneously being decisively sweet (not to mention being my greatest weakness, assuming that you consider clearing out a retro dance club with my inhumanly dorkalicious dance skillz to be a weakness).

            So anyway, now here we are; we’ve got Weird Al (who, for all his badassitude, is but one man, and unable to usher in a new Renaissance of silliness all by his lonesome) and a hideous Pandemonium of Boy Bands (which, in addition to being funny, in a tragical  trainwreck full of clowns and beef stroganoff kind of way, would also make a pretty good name for a band, as long as it had nothing to do with actual boy bands and everything to do with pandemonium).  Sure we’ve got a few guys out there working in basements to remix “Feelin’ Groovy” to imply that Osama bin Laden is all too fond of goats, but really, if China declared some kind of a novelty song war on us right now, we’d be caught in an altogether with-our-pants-down-like fashion (and not in the good way, like when you’re trying to smuggle a bunch of ferrets into a theatre so you can let them loose during The Wild Thornberrys vs. Predator and you forgot to wear a belt so there you are in the line for popcorn with your pants full of ferrets waiting for your trough of Raisinets and all of a sudden Henry Kissinger melts out of the shadows and commands you to partake of a spontaneous DDR tournament against the ghost of Macaulay Culkin so your pants fall off and there’s ferrets everywhere and there’s your 2^nd Grade English teacher standing over there with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Batman, and the Harlem Globetrotters all looking at you with mute embarrassment and they know it’s you because all of you were in that benefit concert last year to raise money for ugly kids so you want to just run away but you know that if you do you’ll have to pay a heft late fee on ferret rentals but you can’t afford it because you already stopped by the railroad tracks and squashed all your pennies so that Abe Lincoln looks like some kind of funky presidential troll, which would also make a sweet band name but anyway you’re still there with no pants and a bunch of ferrets that you’re trying to drive before you that you may hear the lamentations of their women, but they’re just freakin’ ferrets, so they don’t lamentate anyhow, which is why you need pants in the first place).

            So yeah, America, let’s get on the ball here and start farming some new talent in the novelty song industry by taking existing pop singers even less seriously than we already do and trying to get the government to subsidize increased goofy song research so that our great nation may once more be a shining beacon of musical retardedness unto the world.  Also, look out for ferrets.

            Richmond, it will generally be known, does not do anything by half measures if it is the least bit possible to completely spazz out and make our entire city look like Tardsville, U.S.A.  Civil War generals, mole people, tennis players, nothing is considered to be too silly for half the people in Richmond (the half who live all alone with their 36 cats) to become appropriately outraged and turn the editorial pages into a train wreck of doofutude for the better part of a month.  Until now, however, at least one subject had remained sacred and above the public debate.  Until now.  The matter to which I am referring here is, as you have no doubt already guessed, the assassination of beavers by local botanical gardens.  But first, let’s have a little history.

            It all started a few months ago, in the Ginter Botanical Garden, a Richmond park dedicated to funky trees and other stuff that grows in the ground.  As one might expect, they have a lot of freaky-looking exotic trees that you can go to look at and walk amongst, so when a beaver (who possibly had once been a Mark Trail villain) ran his Impala off the road near the gardens and after stumbling out, surveying the wreckage, and sleeping his hangover off, decided that this would make a fine place to set up shop.  Unfortunately, this entailed him gnawing down numerous trees of botanical significance, and after attempts to have him evicted failed hilariously, it was decided that Mr. Beaver would simply be shot.  The next day, a cap was busted in his sheisty dome, and the problem was solved, or so we believed.

            Unfortunately, about 17 jillion crazy people decided that us shooting this beaver was literally worse than international terrorism.  Indeed, from the general gist of the letters to the editor, killing this beaver put Richmond on an equal moral plane with the Third Reich, and the ensuing beatification of the late xylophagous swamp rat made one wonder why people even bothered with Mother Theresa or Mr. T when we had such a sterling example of beavitude among us.  In short, it got real stupid, real fast, and continues to remain so unto this very day.  The problem is, that Richmond is nigh infested with beavers, and it is generally acknowledged that it is merely a matter of time before one of his furry kinsmen settles back in with a vengeance.  Therefore, I offer to you, o readers of mine, a number of other ways that Richmond might rid itself of future Canadian death squirrels (to use their scientific name, as well as a scientifically awesome name for a band).

            First, instead of just shooting the beaver outright, for all the world to see, let’s make it look like an accident.  Like maybe they could arrange for his cleaning lady to find him dead in the pond with a toaster or something.

            Or maybe they could have it arranged to look as if he were the victim of a driveby by a rival gang of woodland creatures.  The police go say they got a tip that an Escalade full of possums was seen leaving the scene of the crime and then plant some crystal meth in his lodge to make it look like a drug deal gone bad.

            Buy him tickets to a show at the theatre, and when his bodyguard goes to catch a smoke, send a lone assassin up to shoot him in the head.  Then, jump onto the stage, say something pithy, and plunge the South into fifty years of turmoil.

            Then of course, there’s always the option of hiring the Rocketeer to punch a beaver off of a flaming zeppelin, which would make people just as angry as shooting him would, but it would be so totally awesome as to justify any imaginable repercussions of whininess.

            Plant a cactus and allow his natural appetites to be his downfall.

            Make it look like a suicide by shooting him, then leaving a little note about how depressing life in the gardens was turning out to be and how he should have listened to his mother and gone to med school instead of striking out on his own for the big city.

            Buy him one of those old-timey washing machines with the rollers and hope that his tail gets sucked into it.  Probably not fatal, but still highly entertaining.

            Put out an ad in the nearest magical wardrobe and see if we can’t get the White Queen to come on as temporary park manager in charge of oppressing the hell out of beavers.  Admittedly, the never-ending winter that would likely ensue would be a steep price to pay, but one can never be too thorough.

            Kidnap a beaver and hold him hostage.  Buy him a little suit of clothes and name him Bucky, Bucky Beaver.  Then, just take him on the 6 o’clock news and say that if anyone else complains about the assassination of the last beaver, Bucky will be used as ammunition in the new Richmond Gigantic Flaming Catapult of Diversity.

Everybody hates cancer, with good reason. But you know who really hates it more than anyone? Barbers, because every person out there who loses their hair from chemo is one less customer for them. Which means, if there’s anything to this necessity being the mothewr of invention thing, the person who someday finds a cure for cancer will inevitable be named Smitty.

Why is it that salad forks are shorter than regular forks? I mean, your salad is always farther away than the rest of your meal, so it ought to be the other way around. In fact, to get right to the heart of the matter, why do we even need a second fork for salads anyway? Even if you’re such a sensitive soul that you can’t bear to have the taint of raspberry vinaigrette on your fork when you dig into your spotted owl souffle, you can just wipe it off on your napkin. C’mon people, there’s folks in China that have to eat with sticks, so let’s stop hogging all the flatware.

You know what would be totally awesome? If you got like, 54 copies of Jenga, and then built a tower out of the boxes and played Jenga with it. It would be like life-sized Jenga, an totally rule until it collapsed and someone perished horribly because of it. Also, since Jenga isn’t actually a naturally-occurring phenomenon, I guess it wouldn’t so much be life-sized, as it would be merely ginormous.

White people are always getting dream catchers and putting them in their cars, which makes all the Indians laugh at us since sleeping while driving is generally contraindicated by the driving experts of the world. Don’t feel too bad though, because Indians are probably always buying fuzzy dice and hanging them over their beds, which is an equally embarrassing transgression against the traditional ways of our ancestors.

If you were writing a want ad because you needed to hire an undertaker, and in the list of job requirements you put, "must enjoy working with people" you would probably be run out of town right then and there, but it would be funny enough to make it worth it.

If you went through a bowl of M&Ms and painted all the brown ones purple, you could tel somebody that they were just Skittles with an unfortunate typo on them, and then you could laugh them to scorn when they ate some and realized that you had bamboozled them. Unless of course they were allergic to chocolate, then you’d just be evil.

It’s a good thing people have skulls, because otherwise, wearing a hat would kill you.

I saw a car the other day, the license plate of which said 2TH BRSH, probably because it belonged to a dentist of just some freaky tooth dude. Either way, as laudable as good dental hygiene is, it’s also important to have good grammar, so really, his plate ought to have said 2^ND BRSH if he didn’t want people thinking he was illiterate.

I was at the hardware store the other day, and I saw that they were selling powered tape measures. I’m sorry, but if you need to buy a powered tape measure, then you’re definitely too weak to be building stuff. I mean, after you finish measuring whatever you needed the tape measure for, odds are you’re going to have to cut something, and if you can’t even wrangle a regular tape measure, then a saw is totally gonna is kick your ass, to say nothing of hammers, sandpaper, and those funky octangular pencils that you have to use when building stuff.

Leonardo is a great name, but in recent years, it has been terribly abused, leading people to think that people named Leonardo are always falling off of boats and trying to escape from Tom Hanks. That’s not cool at all; it ought to be against the law to be named that unless you either design renaissance helicopters or wield katanas and live in a sewer.

Why is it that Oprah needs an entire magazine dedicated to herself? Isn’t this the kind of thing that Soviet dictators used to do? I mean, even Jesus doesn’t have his own magazine, so what makes anyone else so awesome that we need a monthly chronicle of the printed word detailing their deific awesomeness. Which all leads me to suspect that Oprah may well be the Anti-Christ. Also, I am fully aware of the irony of talking about the evils of self-aggrandizing media outlets via my own personal blog, thus earning myself a sound thrashing from the rubber chicken of hypocrisy.

The doctor on Star Trek must really hate his job. Here he is, all ready to do stuff like set broken bones and treat ear infections, and instead he has to spend all his time finding cures to ridiculous space ailments that are about to kill the entire crew. "How can I help you today captain, come down with a case of the mumps, have you?" "Why no doctor, Sulu’s gone and gotten himself space drunk again, and Ensign Redshirt just had all the iron sucked out of his body by a malevolent death cloud." "Oh, um, right, I think I’m gonna go play some golf then, see ya later."

Okay, first off let me apologize for not posting more often this week; this have just been really random lately and what with saving the world from evil and all I haven’t been able to work on the blog as much as I ought. Secondly, owing to the uncommon randomness of the past week, I find myself presently with a plentitude of grist for the Monday mill, so even though it is, technically speaking, Sunday, I’m gonna write a Monday blog today anyhow, and then do another one tomorrow. So, if you’re the sort of person who sets their calendar by my blog, you’re about to get completely thrown off and miss all your appointments, mwahahaha.

They need to make brass knuckles out of the same stuff the make ring pops out of, that way you cold punch someone, and then just eat the evidence. Then when the cops showed up and were all like, "Hey, this guys been punched with brass knuckles!" You could just feign innocence, unless they knew what you were up to and checked to see if your tongue was purple, then the jig would be up indeed.

When my sister was younger, she and three of her friends dressed up like WWII global leaders for Halloween. So they got to this one woman’s house and were all like, "I’m Winston Churchill," "I’m Josef Stalin," "I’m FDR," etc. To which this woman replied, in a statement which shall forever dwell in our family lore, "I’m sorry, but I don’t know any of them; I just moved into this neighborhood."

What’s up with all those signs out that say, "We Pay Cash for Houses!"? At what point does someone say, "Y’know honey, I’m tired of our lot being cluttered up with all these houses, let’s go trade a few of them in for fast cash." Do people actually think this way? Who in their right mind thinks, "Hey, I’d like to be temporarily wealthy and homeless, yeah, that seems like a good and well-thought out idea to me."?

Why is it that whenever someone suspects that Clark Kent is Superman and they need to know for sure, that always set his car to blow up? First, if you turn out to be wrong, then you’re in for some serious embarrassment at having just blown up some non-Superman guy. Also, even if you’re right, he’s gonna be pissed. Why not just run up and try to give him a Dutch rub or try to get him to run with scissors or something? That way if you’re wrong, you haven’t just committed murder, which is frowned upon in many localities.

I was at the mall the other day, and I saw Gandalf hanging out in Sears. Seriously, he was this old guy with a big gnarly wizard staff just chillin’ down by the escalator. At first I was kind of surprised, but then later on, I think I saw a Mallrog hiding in the back of the Gymboree. I’m just glad I got out of there before an epic battle ensued or anything.

I was at the bookstore, as is my wont, and in the science section, they had a bok called Nanotechnology for Dummies. You know, if you’re a dummy, then maybe it would just be better for all concerned if you just left nanotechnology the hell alone and stuck with politics or interior decorating. Remember what happened when Wesley Crusher made all those nanites that messed up the Enterprise? Don’t be that guy. Instead, why not pick up a copy of Shiny Objects for Dummies? You’re less likely to unleash techno-Armageddon on the world that way.

McGruff the crime dog always says we should take a bite out of crime, but really, isn’t crime bad enough that we need to do more than take a bite of it? That’s like suggesting that crime is like a cookie, or a delicious waffle, which it is not. Instead, how about if we proceed from the assumption that crime is like Hitler, then McGruff’s motto could be, "Destroy crime’s war machine with systematic bombing until is hides under Berlin, then poison it, shoot it in the face, and set it on fire. Then years later make a humorous Mel Brooks musical about it." That’s not quite as catchy, but if you really hate crime, you can’t treat it like a cookie, or even a steak, unless it’s an evil criminal steak, then maybe a bite would be acceptable.

If it really takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, is there like, a sliding scale of toughness, or is this an absolute thing? Like, as long as you’re moderately tough, will all your chickens be tolerably tender, or is it that the tougher you are, the more tender all chickens under your aegis will become? Like, if Mr. T owned a chicken farm, would that make all the chickens to tender that they’d just turn into nuggets right there in the field? I hope so, because while my understanding of poultry mastery is decidedly incomplete, I get the distinct feeling that the benuggeting phase is among the less enjoyable steps of chicken processing, especially if it really does involve the use of a giant melon-baller.

            When you think about visiting friends, family, and the more occasional members of your pick-up league of superheroes, what immediately comes to mind?  Good company?  Road trips?  Crushing all those who have the temerity to oppose you?  All, good answers, of course, but doesn’t it ever remind you of looking for the holy grail and exploding Nazis?  Cleary, the very fact that I saw fit to ask this question implies that I have a unique point of view concerning this subject, which springs from three qualities which I possess in abundance.  In no particular order, they are that I am a guy, I am hopelessly out of touch with that which is hip, and I am crazy.  Also, let me warn you here before you wade any farther into the depths of this expose on  nothing of consequence that, much like the Cowardly Lion and Calvin Coolidge, this is gonna get weirder before it gets less weirder.  So, now that we’ve got that out of the way, on to the main business of the day!

            Okay, my story, such as it is, begins in the shower (don’t worry, it’s not that kind of story, unless you’re the kind of person who is merely scandalized by things like monkeys playing the harmonica and people whose last names include fish; not that either of those things is going to be playing a real role here, mind you).  The problem stems from the fact that, as a guy, and as the sole denizen of my bathroom, the only things that I require to successfully take a shower are pretty much a bar of soap, a bottle of Wally World Brand Demonic Evil Hair Control Shampoo, and a towel.  Also, a large quantity of moderately hot water that needs to fall on me in a controlled and refreshing manner.  That is all.

            Unfortunately, whenever I go to visit anyone and stay overnight, I inevitably discover in the morning that whomever I happen to be staying with has taken part in some radical new toiletry revolution that has replaced such fundamentals of cleanliness as I am accustomed to with approximately 750 different ill-labeled bottles, all of which are named after rainforests, fruits, and meaningless words that would make good names for basketball teams or Toyotas (like Jazz, Fusion, and Troutmiester).  Each one of them makes all sorts of dramatic and impressive claims concerning their ability to revitalize, rejuvenate, and grant you the power to teleport directly from your shower into the crashing surf of some tropical beach, which would be kind of cool, except for the fact that you’d still be naked.  The one thing that this veritable Noah’s Ark of junk that claims to be good for you is that none of the bottles ever tell you what exactly is in them, which is a bit of a problem, from where I stand at least. 

The problem is, these days you never know what you’re supposed to do with the stuff in a random shower bottle.  Sure, maybe it’s shampoo, but it also might be soap these days; gone are the days when all soap helpfully came in bar form, as God intended.  And if it is soap, what are all those eighteen different synthetic koosh loofa tribbles used for?  Are they like washcloths?  Are they some kind of shower defense system in case Osama bin Laden breaks into your bathroom and decides to wash up a bit?  All I know is, I’ve lived my whole life without touching one, and somehow my skin has remained intact.  And even if you manage to avoid all the usurperous soap bottles and find one the contents of which go on your head, that still doesn’t mean that it’s shampoo.  It could be something called “hair conditioner,” which I’ve also never dared to try, even while I was in college and experimenting with that sort of thing, but which, owing to the fact that it’s just a letter away from “air conditioner” must somehow make your hair cool.  This is of course even still completely ignoring the possibility that if a woman lives in this house, any of the bottles around you might in fact be meant to remove your hair, or possibly dye it some funky emo color.  So there you stand, the loofa tribbles (which would at least make a good name for a band, once you stagger out of the bathroom in a possibly bald or with an electric teal coiffure) mocking you insolently as you stand there like Indiana Jones trying to figure out which of these vessels is in fact the one that is supposed to go on your head.  So you start freakin’ out, because you know that there could very well be an 800 year old medieval guy out in the linen closet waiting for you to choose poorly and die, to say nothing of Nazis who want to shoot Sean Connery (which, if you happened to bring him along, would be a very bad thing).  In the end, there’s only one real question to ask yourself: which of these is the hair treatment of a carpenter?  Which is why I usually end up going with a novel mixture of toothpaste and bourbon, which doesn’t really voluminize or bring out my natural curls as well as what I’m used to at home, but at least I know I’m not going to walk out of the bathroom looking like Patrick Stewart, the Bride of Frankenstein, or Chromatically-Pigmented Skittles Sell-Out Chewbacca.

So, to conclude, I really probably ought to just start packing an overnight bag when I travel, rather than just expecting to survive off of whatever happens to be living in my van at the time (except when it comes to weaponry, in which case my van is more than adequately armed).

            ‘Twas a couple of weeks ago, as the above title implies, and I and my usual band of veteran band of ne’er do wells and Waffle House voyagers had gathered for our usual journey to the Big Yellow (Waffle House, that is, not Chairman Mao).  We were strong in numbers that night, with Jason the Orc-Render, Jess, Daughter of Wolfgar, and Brandon, The Guy I Haven’t Made Up a Funny Legendary Title For Yet.

            Anyhow, we were all of us gathered at Waffle House, rockin’ out stale Christmas songs and the greatest hits of Brittany Spears, whilst enjoying a midnight repast of the finest of viands.  Though someone woefully derelict in their waffular duties had failed to apply that strawberry goop that reminds me of Vigo the Carpathian to my particular waffle, this was more than made up for by the helpful delivery of a liberal supply of those little coffee creamer thingies, of which I have never been a fan (I like my coffee like I like my women, cheap and available at four in the morning) (sorry, I couldn’t pass that one up), but which we obligingly hurled merrily at one another until the waitress started looking at us funny.  Okay, that was a lie, the waitress always looks at us funny there, but this was more than funny, like the waitress was looking at us hilarious, which doesn’t make sense at all.  At any rate, after about two hours of such behavior as young folks liberated from the bonds of good manners by caffeine and an excess of chortling as wont to engage in, we struck out on the road once more, with nary a thought to where we might next be bound.

            It just so happens, you may already be aware, that Chester sits almost at the very nexus of the Richmond beltway, completed just this past year, and since after careful calculation we decided we didn’t have enough time to drive all the way to Jamestown and back, a brilliantly ill-conceived plan was hatched to, like Christopher Columbus before us, circumnavigate Richmond on the briny asphalt deep that is Route 295/288 (perhaps you doubt that Columbus was the first to circumnavigate Richmond, but the trendy fountain statue at the end of the Boulevard would prove you wrong).  So off we went, over the suspension bridge, northward and eastward, doing our little part to drive up gas prices and keep the highway from curling up overnight for want of cars to hold it down.  Indeed, the only thing that could have made our situation better was if we had broken down outside of Don Knotts’ and the Harlem Globetrotter’s Haunted Taffy Factory (Just 15 minutes from downtown!) and had to solve a wacky mystery.  But oh well, maybe next time.

            One among our party, one who shall not be named for this act shall ever live in infamy, had with her a flashlight.  A blue flashlight.  A blue flashlight which managed to attract the attention of a police officer somewhere around the northern 95 interchange.  And so it came to pass, as it does in any adventure worthy of song and remembrance, that we found ourselves pulled over by a police woman who was, objectively speaking, decidedly more hot than any other officer of the law whom I have ever had the pleasure of having to explain myself to.  So there we were, Jason and I both dressed about 60% Mnogolian, Brandon wearing the Canadian Bacon Hat, and even though Jess wasn’t really dressed funny, I’m just going to say that she was wearing a mink astronaut suit, just to make the whole mental picture a bit richer.  Also, as usual, my van contained at least half a dozen things which, while not being outright illegal, were at least objects of dubious purpose, including half a dozen chainmail shirts, a quiver full of crossbow bolts, numerous potato gun accoutrements, and a melted Skeletor record.  Also, I had a taillight out.

            As is often the case, nothing demonstrates a man’s innocence like being a ridiculous spectacle does, and we either talked our way out of things or someone somewhere else in town was kind enough to rob a bank at that exact moment, prompting Officer Hotness to rush off to save the city from some new peril, thus allowing us to arrive back in Chester no richer, but a great deal wiser, or at least really, really, tired, which is kind of the same thing, but not really.  Also, I think we crossed Hull Street Road like, five times, so VDOT might want to check the beltway for rifts in the space-time continuum or something.

What’s up with those little cookies they sell in those tins?  You know, the ones that look like pretzels?  Pretzels, nor pretzeloid objects should be sweet like that.  Imagine the public outcry were someone to sell something that looked like a steak but tasted like Dr. Pepper?  That outcry would be one of awesomeness, because a Dr. Pepper steak would rule all-encompassingly.  But not so with pretzel cookies, they are an abomination unto the Lord, just like it says in the lost sixth book of the Pentateuch, The Book of Moses and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

            If someone sold you a Welch’s grape juice beverage and then you never paid them for it, it would be extremely ironic, yet subtle.

            The following is absolutely true: In a talking Elmo story book sold to thousands of children before Christmas, Elmo clearly says, “Who wants to die?”  When will the world at last see the truth behind this monster?

            In Williamsburg, they have all this extra historic stuff all over the place, but all their tour buses are all modern and boring looking.  Now, clearly it would be difficult and totally sweet to just make everyone ride around in coaches or worse yet, expect all them lazy crackers to just walk a mile now and then, but what about if they painted all their buses to look like stagecoaches or something?  And they could put some mechanical horses sticking out of the front of the bus, and then the driver could sit up on the roof and wrangle them.  It wouldn’t be historically accurate, but at least it would be ridiculous, which is at least halfway the same thing.

            My usage of the word wrangle immediately above has just spawned an entirely new and magical grammatical error message from MS Word.  Apparently there is such a crime against English as “Verb Confusion” and I am found guilty of it by none other than Azathoth the Desktop Paperclip of Eternal Annoyance.  Like so many hypocrites though, he is quick to judge me, but offers no suggestions on how to redeem myself from literary purgatory.  I swear, if Word doesn’t stop inventing rules that don’t exist, I’m going to wrangle it in the face.  Hey, it worked, it didn’t call me on it that time!  W007!

            I was in the bookstore the other day, and they had all sorts of “For Dummies” books in the religion section.  You could get Islam for Dummies, Catholicism for Dummies, Judaism for Dummies, pretty much anything you wanted.  I noticed, however, that they had no Scientology for Dummies.  You know why?  Because for dummies is the only flavor that Scientology comes in.  Take that, Aston Kutcher!

            You know how over the past decade there has been a great proliferation of sucky Monopoly ripoffs?  And most of them have names that aren’t the least bit witty because the room full of monkeys that made them just sticks the suffix –olopy onto the end of whatever it is the game is thematically unified under and hell with the consequences.  It is because of this that we have such lyrical gems as Virginia Techopoly, Crimean Waropoly, and Keanuopoly.  None of these words lend themselves in the least to such violence, so I was surprised when I saw a Batman-themed variation for sale the other day.  You might suspect that it would have been called Batmanopoly, which would be both funny and appropriate, seeing as how the last syllable of Batman and the first of Monopoly are similar, suggesting a name both fitting and euphonious.  But no, they called it Batman Monopoly, I kid you not.  Their one chance to create Batmanopoly and thus redeem their wretched franchise, and they failed as a sea of hummingbirds fails to stop a Sherman tank.

            If you ever have to get someone a generic Christmas present for the office party or anything, just get them wine, unless you work at Recovering Alcoholics Incorporated, which would be a silly premise for a corporation anyway.  The key is, don’t get anything where the bottle has a handle on it, and do get anything with a whimsically foolish name.  Boone’s Farm, is not a good gift wine.  Iron Kumquat Josef Stalin wine, is a good gift wine.  If all they have though is something called Plaid Rutabaga Tsunami but it comes in a bottle with a handle on it, then I’m afraid that the very laws of the universe have at last shattered to tiny little bits and fallen about your ears like so many wiener dogs flung from off the Empire State Building which, for purposes of this simile, you must be standing directly at the base of, and preferably on whichever side the wiener dogs are falling on today.  In any case, you have no recourse but to flee screaming from the store, an empty shell of a man, and tear off into the darkness where you’ll be raised by bears.  And by raised, I mean eaten.  The moral of the story being, don’t go to the office Christmas party unless you’re a bear, which you probably aren’t.

            There comes a time in the e-career of every blogger of worth when, in order to make it to the big leagues of bloggitude, he must generate some kind of controversy or scandal.  As a general rule, this tends to involve the generation of truly Nixonian quantities of hate mail from those offended by the aforementioned aspiring blogger.  Therefore, in my never-ending quest to achieve the greatest degree or terrestrial notoriety imaginable, I present just a few of the controversial and outrageous theories, facts, canapé recipes, and outright dissimulations that I can only hope will help me to offend enough people to beat out Gorbachev and the Olsen twins as Time magazine’s quasi-sentient being of the orbital cycle.  Or just sell a bunch of T-shirts and start dating a supermodel.  Whichever.  What kind of epiphanies could I possibly to reveal to unleash such a torrent of awesomeness?  Well…

            A lot of people are buying those hybrid cars these days.  And why not?  They burn less gas, they have all sorts of nifty lights and gauges on the dash, and none of them have names that actually mean anything.  But wait, would you be so eager to scurry out to your local Prius dealership if you were to learn that they achieve all these wonderful things because hybrids are actually manufactured from a new experimental alloy?  A new experimental alloy made out of kittens?  Because they are; every last one of them, made from only the cutest and fluffiest of kittens, hand-picked by Honda kitten polymer specialists deep within their secret lair beneath an Arby’s somewhere in Iowa.

            Perhaps you grew up playing Super Mario Brothers, I know I did.  But did you know that this beloved game was in fact based upon the lives of convicted murderers and anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti?  Sure, you thought you were saving the princess and her three hundred worthless shroom-headed attendants, but you were actually assassinating the leaders of a legitimately elected koopa government in the vain and foolish hope that the ensuing chaos would eventually usher in a utopian socialist paradise.  In fact, the guy who shot President William McKinley played a lot of Mario Brothers when he was little, and it so thoroughly warped his mind that he built a time machine out of an old colander and a 73’ Buick Skylark just to break the very laws of time and space to further his radical nihilist agenda.

            Beloved child actor and all around sassy little bloke Gary Coleman is not in fact totally short as we have always been lead to believe.  In fact, Sir Coleman is over nine and a half feet tall and weighs upwards of half a metric ton.  The illusion of his minisculinity is maintained only by having him always stand twice as far away from everything as everyone else. Also, he’s made out of kittens too.

            If you caught the movie Mulan a few years back, you might be forgiven for believing that the Chinese are a peaceful people while the Mongol hordes are a bloodthirsty band of psychos.  You would, however, be wrong, as it turns out that the entire film is nothing but a piece of total and complete anti-Mongol propaganda cooked up by the frozen undead brain of Walt “General Tsao” Disney in hopes that he might lull us into complacency so that when his army of genetically engineered tiny dragons voiced by Eddie Murphy come to conquer America, we won’t realize that we need to call Mongolia for help until it’s too late for the ghostly and Alec Guinnessian spirits of Genghis Khan and Davy Crockett to deliver us from their scaly red comedic reign of terror.

            For all you vegetarians, vegans, antelopes, stegasauri, and other herbivores out there who probably enjoy the great array of soy burgers and other seemingly fine line of soy processed foodstuff products available, I fear I have some shocking news as well.  It turns out that they make all these things from only the nastiest and most unsellable parts of the soy.  The snouts, the tail, the femurs, the venom sac; these are the loathsome soy remains that go into your beloved soy burgers.  Also, soy is in fact a Chinese word meaning, “made out of kittens,” so if you became a vegan in the belief that you had eaten you last kitten, I’m afraid its just bad news all around for you today.

            A lot of you, I expect, love Raymond.  But the truth is that not everyone does.  A recent survey by the U.S. Department of Too Much Funding and Not Enough Brains recently revealed that only 97.8% of Americans love Raymond.  More shocking still, the producers of Raymond’s dishonestly-named show had access to this little bit of information as early as the second season of the show, but they chose to hide it rather than telling the American people that Raymond was not quite so universally loved as they had been lead to believe.

            Finally, after a great deal of painstaking, messy, and extremely silly research, I have discovered that it is indeed a physical impossibility, even with the help of a sledge hammer, to put a chicken into a biscuit.  As such, you may expect to read within the week about my pending class action suit against the makers of Chicken-in-a-Biscuit, lying bastards that they are.

            So bring it on, corporate America, I know all your secrets, rarrrr!

            Outlet malls, much like fascism and mayonnaise, are one of those things for which there is no gray area, no middle ground.  They’re either a large part of your reason for living, or the absolute bane of your existence (well, technically, Ashton Kutcher is the official bane of my existence, but outlet malls are still pretty high on the old bane-o-meter).  By way of not being creative enough to come up with a better segue than this, I just so happen to have been at an outlet mall this very week past, just outside of scenic and historical Williamsburg, home of funky hats, horse crap, and the House of Burgesses (a burgess, of course, being a female burge).  Why, you may ask, do I loathe outlet malls so?  It is quite simply because it is as if some telepathic land developer read my very mind, discovered exactly what stores would be incredibly boring and of absolutely no use whatsoever to me, plunked down five acres of them somewhere and then threw in a secondhand record store just to make it easier for my mom to justify taking me there for an hour and a half (sorry Mom, but it is indeed a clever ruse on their part).  For those of you so blessed as to have never been to one of these abominations of commerce (and The Abominations of Commerce would, by the way, make an excellent name for a band) here followeth a brief description of just a few of the manifold evils and bits of deviltry which may be seen at that most blasphemous of commercial establishments (other than Ashtaroth the Soulrender’s Office Supply Warehouse and Strawberry Farm, of course).

            First, you’ve got all these stores named after people I’ve never heard of, like Harry & David, or Joaquin & Beldar.  Clearly, I’m supposed to know who these two guys who’ve opened a store here and be impressed by their legendary fashion acumen and just take it on faith that whatever they happen to be selling there is going to be awesome.  But I never know who these guys are, they might be world famous for dressing like Hare Krishnas for all I know, and after what happened to me at prom Junior year, I know for a fact that the Hare Krishna look is not a good one for me at all.  Now if they had a store there called something like Batman & Skeletor, then I’d pretty much be willing to just run in the door and start throwing money at them like a congressman at a highway bill, but alas, such classy establishments are nowhere to be found at the Williamsburg outlet mall.  For one brief shining moment, I thought fate might have smiled on me, after I passed a store called Hagar.  I ran in and was all excited and junk, because I simply adore Viking apparel and accessories, and I’ve been in the market for one of those horn helmets ever since I foolishly washed my last one under the assumption that it was dishwasher safe (in turns out it wasn’t microwave safe either, just in case you were wondering).  Sadly, it was all a terrible, terrible lie.  All they had there was button-down shirts, khakis, and ridiculously expensive sunglasses.  I’m kind of amazed that they can sell anything at all after luring people in with a lie such as that.

            You remember that guy that Superman fights from time to time, Mr. Myzplytyk?  It turns out that he’s opened a store at the outlet mall, called Bcbgmaxazria.  At first I was kind of psyched, because I thought that he’d have all sorts of crazy alien space gizmos there left over form his many battles with the Son of Krypton, but no, it was nothing but women’s clothing.  In a rage, I tried saying the name of his store backwards, in the hope that it, like himself, would be cast back to his home dimension by such an act.  Alas, I must have said it wrong or something, because despite my sepulchral intonations it refused to budge from this particular plane of existence, sitting there like a sack of three-toed sloths which has been flung from off the EiffelTower at the teeming hordes of Frenchmen below, but with fewer berets fluttering gaily in the Autumn breeze.

            The Bass outlet store likewise turned out to be a great disappointment, as I discovered to my dismay that they carry neither fish nor electric guitars there, favoring instead a wide selection of shoes that look like they might be good for wearing outside, but really aren’t (Take that, Bass outlet emporium, your hideous secret is at last revealed to all the world! Mwahahahaha!).

            All the paper towel dispenser machines there are those electronic ones built by some guy who got tired of people being able to dry their hands.  They’re the kind that have that little motion detector eye in them, and they’re all extra stingy with the towels, so you have to just stand there in the bathroom, waving your arms like you’re about to backhand the towel machine until eventually your hands just dry off from all the waving and the towel machine can smile inwardly from the depths of its cold, unfeeling, mechanical innards.

            And finally, an unexpected high note which I conveniently forgot whilst earlier listing my litany of suffering, is Kirkland’s, the most absolutely ridiculous home decorating store ever to grace the face of the Earth.  Seriously, it’s like, the only place where you can walk in looking for a set of bookends cast in the form of anthropomorphic chicken butlers, and find three different styles from which to choose.  Or say you want a coffee table shaped like a small elephant and can’t find one at any of your more patrician furniture stores.  It’s all good; Kirkland’s probably has at least seven different ones, for any style of home décor.  Or maybe you’re looking for a colorful statue of a gnome riding a bullfrog while smoking a bong.  Guess what, Kirkland’s can help you out there too.  I can’t even begin to figure out how they do their ordering.  The senior management probably all just gets completely stoned and sits around looking on the internet for stuff that reminds them of Jerry Garcia and elves.  Honestly, it’s the one store at the outlet mall that’s worth going to; a single dinghy of awesomeness in a dark and roiling sea of As Seen On TV kitchen gizmos and preppy paraphernalia.

            With the coming of the New Year, there also comes uncertainty.  What manner of global mayhem does 2006 hold for us?  Which celebrities will die horribly in tragic, yet humorously appropriate accidents?  When I finally sober up, will I be on the same continent on which I began the night?  Fear not however, for my utilizing the dark and forbidden arts of necromancy, asking my Magic 8 Ball, and just making stuff up, I have complied here the authoritative list of 2006 predictions, that y’all, my readers, may laugh, chortle with fiendish glee, and start building a fallout shelter, as necessary.

            The whole panic concerning the avian flu will come to a sudden and anticlimactic end after it is revealed that, due to a simple biological classification error on the part of an intern at the Federal Office of Things to Freak Out About, humans are not, technically speaking, members of the bird family, and therefore need only worry about catching the human flu, and in some cases the inveterate buttweasel flu.

            Osama bin Laden will finally be found, not by Coalition forces in a cave in Afghanistan, but by Doris Tinyhamsters, a housewife in Eastern Iowa, under a sofa cushion in her suburban home.  Though slightly malnourished after three years of living off of old cashews and pocket lint, Osama will be otherwise unharmed and go on to star in a Broadway musical comedy with Saddam Hussein, after which he will be fed to hungry, barbed-wire encrusted fire sharks.

            Germany, hoping to bolster the value of the Euro, will embark upon a novel and innovative plan to invade France, which, as usual, will fight manfully for nearly fifteen minutes before surrendering, as usual.

            Paris Hilton’s career prospects will continue to flag after increased competition in the skanky celebrity ho field after Luxembourg Hampton Inn and Vatican Doubletree begin to also do controversial Hardee’s commercials and steal the front pages of tabloids everywhere.

            Jimmy Carter and Rick Moranis will at last collaborate on a major project, for which they will be awarded an Oscar, and a Nobel Peace Prize, respectively.

            Ben Affleck will, through the most unfortunate of wardrobe malfunctions, be at last revealed to be a hideous space monster, hellbent on global destruction and being a complete tool.  One angry crowd of villagers armed with torches and pitchforks later, however, the problem will be resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned parties.

            At some point in the year, my name will appear in a major metropolitan newspaper, along with the words, “catapult,” “Richard Nixon,” and “Fiery Capuchin Monkey of Death.” 

            The metric system will continue to baffle all reasonable people.

            My life, so far as romance is concerned, will drastically improve after I make the song “My Friend the Witch Doctor” into a guiding principle of life and love.

            George Bush will be impeached.  This will be hailed as a great victory by his foes for all of three seconds, at which point someone will mention that Dick Cheney is now President of the United States.  Howard Dean, in a heartfelt and carefully-worded press release will tell the American people, quote: “Narf.”  The construction of a Death Star will shortly follow.

            Keanu Reeves will turn his sizeable dramatic talents to a remake of the beloved children’s classic, “The Wind in the Willows.”  By the time it hits theaters, it will be called “Bill & Mr. Toad’s Bogus Killer Demon Robot Adventure.”  A thousand years of peace will ensue as the human race at last falls into a state of universal harmony.

            Another vacancy on the Supreme Court will occasion the nomination of renowned constitutional scholar and badass Patrick Stewart, who will use his starship and freaky mind powers to interpret some serious awesomeness into the Constitution.

            Hurricanes will continue to have dopey names.

            Teacupmammoths.com will become a pop culture sensation the likes of which have been neither heard nor seen since Charles Dickens teamed up with My Little Pony.  I will become totally, totally famous, as well as incredibly wealthy.  Woot.

            I bet if Darth Vader had a secretary, she totally hated her job.  Because every time the phone would ring, she’d be perpetually wondering if this was an obscene phone call, or just her boss doing his asthma thing.  In fact, one suspects that on the Death Star there was pretty high turnover in most jobs, especially in the field of being an incompetent death-choked feet admiral.  And when you’ve got those kinds of HR problems, all the inspirational kitten-themed coffee mugs and posters in the world aren’t gonna save you.

            Did you know that at McDonalds, a cheeseburger costs a mere 99¢?  And a double cheeseburger costs only a penny more, at the price of $1.  Which means, logically, that that extra burger on the double cheeseburger only costs a cent.  This, in turn suggests that McDonalds is making their burgers from only the finest meat that fell off of the back of the dead rat delivery truck (oh yes, there is a dead rat delivery truck).  Unless of course, it’s the same kind of thing as where buying a round trip plane ticket only costs like, $20 more than a one way, which would make a double cheeseburger more like a round trip flavor adventure for your mouth, which sounds a lot more delicious than that bit about the dead rats.

            I was at the hardware store looking at padlocks, and they had one that was advertised as a gate lock, but it was really just a generic ol’ padlock.  So, just in case you had no imagination at all, they had a helpful list of other stuff that you could also keep closed with it.  “Also good for: toolboxes, utility sheds, minimal security prisons, etc.”  Honestly now, does anyone really need to be instructed about all the various used of a lock?  “Damn, I wish there was a way to stop people from stealing the contents of my utility shed all the time.  Oh wait, here’s something called a ‘lock’.  Hmmm, how very novel; curses, it’s for gates only!  What the?! It says here I can use it for other things as well, including utility sheds!  Suh-weet; you just saved my life and my marriage, Masterlock Incorporated!”

            I was walking through Sears the other day, and I passed their little portrait studio place there.  They had a sign out though, advertising, amongst other things, their skilled photographers and unique poses.  What the hell do they mean by unique poses?  Even if you keep your mind out of the gutter on this one, it’s still tough to come up with something that’s not completely weird.  “Okay guys, instead of y’all just standing there looking all boring and Rockwellian, I’m gonna need Timmy to wrestle this puma in a vat full of jello; Mom, you take this broadsword and foam rubber cowboy hat and get in this Oldsmobile over here; Dad, you go put these Kleenex boxes on your feet and play poker with all these strangely anthropomorphic dogs; and Rasputina you put on this stainless steel bustier and a few extra arms with swords and severed heads and stuff and do your best impression of an enraged Buddhist deity.  Say Cheese!”  Okay, on second thought, that would be pretty sweet after all.

            On a similar note, if a Sears burned down, it would be almost ironic.

            On a not at all similar note, when my mom was in college, she had a poster on her wall that said, “Freedom is My Mistress”.  I think we’d all be a lot better off today if more people randomly shouted this helpful little phrase throughout the day.

            In the mall, they have a big sign with a picture of Mohammed Ali above the words, “His Biggest Fight Yet Isn’t in the Ring.”  If you didn’t know he was sick though, you could easily walk away with completely wrong/awesome ideas about what his biggest fight would be with.  I personally would lean towards him fighting an army of evil robots, or maybe Paris Hilton riding a bear.  Either way, it’s an inspiring poster.

            At the Sprint kiosk in the aforementioned mall, they’ve got a big sign bearing the legend, “Yes You Can!”  Which is only a great saying of affirmation if right before you read it, you asked yourself something like, “Gee, can I too afford the quality and convenience of a Sprint wireless plan?”  But what if you had just asked yourself something else entirely, like, “Can I fly?” or “Can I eat lava?” or maybe even, “Would spandex look good on me?”  None of these questions should ever be answered with a yes, unless you’re Superman, which you aren’t (Unless Superman is actually reading my blog, which is totally sweet), because he can get away with all three, or unless you’re Kirsten Dunst, in which case you can only do two of them.  So thanks a lot Sprint, I hope when the 2006 numbers for lava-eating and spandex-wearing related fatalities come out, you all feel proud about what you’ve done!

            I saw a car on the road the other day, the license plate of which said UR JLO.  No, car, I’m afraid I’m not.  And the worst thing was, it was a Virginia car, so the odds of Jennifer Lopez ever reading that license plate are pretty much nonexistent, which means that this car is the biggest liar on the road since that other one with the 2SEXY4U plate a couple of years back.  Unless of course they meant JLO in the sense of the Justice League of Ontario, in which case it’s absolutely right that I am indeed a member of that particular august body of heroes and hotties (I myself fall more into the “heroes” category, in case you were wondering), though I’d rather not have a car driving around blowing our cover like that.