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.

            With the start of the New Year nigh upon us once again, it is altogether natural to become somewhat reflective concerning the passing of the years and the changes they bring to this world of ours.  Of course, it is even more altogether natural to become somewhat reflective concerning getting drunk off of cheap beer until you reach the point where a lampshade becomes a compelling sartorial choice before kissing a random girl who didn’t look all that attractive when you first showed up at the party that night, but hey, I’m sure y’all know all about that part firsthand and don’t need me to explain it to you.  So instead, I’m gonna take this opportunity to delve once more into the sock drawer of history, as we travel way back in time to learn about the first New Year’s ever.

            ‘Twas the year 785 B.C.  Indeed, it had been the year 785 B.C. since anyone could remember, because nobody had really gotten around to inventing the concept of New Years yet, which, needless to say, complicated things considerably.  Every single person on Earth was one year old; driver’s licenses were absolutely useless as a way of determining who was allowed to buy any of the fine prehistoric beers then available.  The calendar industry suffered terribly, as all you needed to do after December was flip it on back over to January and start again (this, incidentally, was what spawned the first off the wall calendar, when Gary Larson realized that there was money to be made off of nomads, monkeys, Paris Hilton, and other creatures that didn’t know how to use walls yet).  VH1 only had one show running at the time, “All About The 80s” and it encompassed all of human experience up to that point.  “Hey, remember Noah’s Ark?” people would say, “Yeah!  Man, the 80s were crazy back then!”

            Federal governments the world over were constantly in a state of abject poverty, having already collected all the income taxes for the 785 B.C. fiscal year many generations ago (they subsisted pretty much entirely off of speeding tickets and selling naming rights on the royal family to advertisers, a phenomenon generally held responsible for the hapless Emperor Bubble Yum of Rome and the widely forgotten Pharaoh Little Debbie of Egypt).  Time machines didn’t work properly at all, since all you had to do was punch in 785 B.C. as your destination year and the entire universe would implode in a shower of causal paradoxes and trippy special effects with melted watches and flying clocks and whatnot (fortunately, this only happened a couple of dozen times).  Time magazine had only had one Man of The Year ever (Bob Dole).  In short, it was a particularly silly time to be alive.  Science fiction writers had no way whatsoever of explaining how far in the future their stories were taking place, and had to rely completely on the novel innovations of hovercars and jackets with little shoulder fins on them to convey futurosity.

            This state of things however might have gone on far longer than it already had, had not a great and visionary man stepped forward and tripped over the ottoman of greatness in his quest to enlighten mankind.  That man was none other than Copernicus’s most august of forefathers, Carlpernicus, who, after failing in his quest to develop the wireless abacus, the three hump limousine camel, and Michael Jackson, finally hit upon the notion that the Earth was in fact forever circling the Sun and that it was conceivable that this new discovery might be used as a point of demarcation for something he called “The New Year.”  The rulers of the civilized world, giddy as a bunch of prehistoric schoolgirls at the prospects for increased taxation and calendar sales, agreed almost at once to this bold new proposal, and plans were made to usher in this new and wondrous thing with all the pomp and tackiness that it deserved.

            Preparations were made.  A young Dick Clark was brought onboard to be master of ceremonies.  A giant ball was manufactured by tying a bunch of sheep together and soaking them in pitch.  A forsaken swamp in central Pangaea was christened Times Square and humorous novelty glasses shaped like the number 784 were made in truly epic numbers (unfortunately, 784 is not a number which lends itself at all to glasses, and as a result most of the people who bought them ended up walking off cliffs or getting eaten by mastodons.  Scientists now refer to this great moment in natural selection as “The Culling of the Tards”).

            At last the blessed night arrived.  Dick Clark said some stuff, the sheep ball was set gloriously ablaze and hurled from the mightiest catapult in the land, and all three computers in the world crashed because their programmers had neglected to design them with an understanding of any year besides 785 B.C.  People drank large quantities of mead, lampshades were worn, Jimmy Stewart movies were watched, and all around the world, a good time was had by all (except in China, which had been out taking a leak when the news went around, so they didn’t get word of this whole New Year thing until around February; so they just decided to have their own New Years then, and make up for being late by having a bunch of dragons and stuff).

            And thus has it been every year since (except during World War II, when Dick Clark was needed for the war effort and his part was played by a herd of woodchucks in a leisure suit), and so may it be forever hence.  At any rate, however, have a happy New Year, and look out for those mastodons.

            Living in this trouble-fraught world of today, it’s altogether too easy to get caught up in worrying about the challenges and difficulties of the day to the extent that we forget to ask the big questions that really define us.  Why are we here?  What’s up with cars getting progressively uglier?  Did Josef Stalin ever try to create an unstoppable race of monkey men?  Well, if you were wondering about the first two, I’m afraid you’re out of luck, because while I, omnivorous demigod of eternal verities that I am, know the answers to both of them, I’m not gonna tell you tonight, maybe later, if you’re good.  But as for question number three, I can say with certainty and downright gleeful abandon that Josef Stalin was in fact responsible for what authorities are calling the most far-reaching and officially funded monkey man breeding program of the 20^th century (but not of all time, of course, if one takes into account Albrecht Durer’s monkey man program of the mid 16^th century, which for over a dozen years consumed the entire gross national product of the Holy Roman Empire).  So how did old Uncle Joe do this anyway?  Was it merely a case of keeping up with the Joneses after Adolf Hitler announced his plan to create a race of Frankenstein zombies with gatling gun arms and cheese helmets?  Or was there more here than meets the eye?  All these questions, except for the one about the cheese helmets, shall be explored here tonight.  So batten on your learnin’ trousers, its time for a magical voyage back to the heyday of the Soviet Union as we take a look at just a few of the possible scenarios that could have brought about Stalin’s monkey man plan.

            First, the Charleton Heston Theory:  It is possible, though not at all likely, that one night as he lay dreaming in his bed shaped like a fur-bearing trout, that Josef Stalin received a vision from the 70s, when a rift in the time-space continuum fortuitously beamed a late night showing of Planet of the Apes directly into his little commie skull.  Taking it to be a foretaste of things yet to come; an age in which apes would rule over men, Stalin decided that if apes were indeed to be the eventual masters of mankind, then at least they would be soviet apes.  So, after kidnapping a young Roddy McDowell, getting him really drunk, and putting him in a room with a bunch of chimpanzees dressed up like the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, Josef Stalin merely sat back and waited for nature to take its course.  Unfortunately for him, chimpanzees hate the Dallas Cowboys with a passion beyond all description, and instead of submitting to Stalin’s evil schemes, drunken Roddy McDowell and all the chimps hatched a brilliantly wacky escape plan, stole a jet, and proceeded to embark on a truly epic misadventure which was later turned into the motion picture, Titanic Saves Christmas.

            Next, the Christopher Lee Theory:  While we generally accept the fact that Tolkein (whose name Microsoft Word is too malevolently ignorant to accept as being an actual word) drew most of his storylines from ancient history and folklore, but what if in fact, he was merely harkening back to Josef Stalin’s monkey man project during WWII?  Perhaps Stalin in fact sought to cross orcs with goblin men deep beneath his magical fortress of Isengard?  They would not know pain, they would not know fear, they would taste man-flesh!  When his great monkey man army was at last complete, Stalin would gaze once more into his Palantir and then deliver a stirring speech to his assembled forces before marching off to assist the Dark Lord Sauron (Charles de Gaulle) in his quest to dominate all Middle Earth.  And he would have gotten away with it too, had not Winston Churchill carried Franklin Delano Roosevelt up Mount Doom and cast the One Ring into the unquenchable fires within, thereby saving mankind from the monkey man menace.

            And finally, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Theory: Deep in his Technodrome beneath Moscow, Josef Stalin schemed away looking for a way to augment his massive army of robo-ninjas.  As fate would have it, he stumbled across a supply of radioactive mutagen, a chemical capable of transforming any human or animal into an awesome premise for a cartoon series.  After an unfortunate series of events which culminated in Nikita Khrushchev getting turned into a bear that was also on fire, Stalin finally enlisted the help of Krang, evil brain from Dimension X and Lost Backstreet Boy, to help him concoct a diabolically stupid plan to make monkey men.  Unfortunately for him, the FBI was just then putting the finishing touches on their Army of Robot Richard M. Nixons and in serendipitously-timed battle involving a faming blimp, the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, and a basket of very distraught pygmy marmosets, Stalin’s monkey man army was no more.

            As long as there have been men, there have been monkey men, and indeed, who among us can claim to truly know the truth behind Stalin’s vile plans to twist nature into a tool of human suffering?  Actually, I can, because I’m pretty sure that what really happened was the second one up there, the one with the orcs, though I wouldn’t want to just rule out either of the others out of hand.  Really, the important thing is, that my internet connection is finally fixed, so instead of having to put this online at work, I’m sitting here late at night in my pajamas drinking Super Chill Cola and writing this, which, in the end, is really the most important thing of all.

While I was in China, we got totally lost once (well, more than once, but once in particular) and a nice earthquake prevention lady helped us find our way by writing us some directions. She wrote them, however, in the same notebook I write my blog ideas in, so the other day I sat down to write an article and found the Chinese directions, but I was really tired at the time, so I just ran with it, so I had a post that was going to start out, "You know what the funny thing about turning left at Qinghuadonglu is?" But then I realized that wasn’t a humorous observation that had actually occurred to me, but was rather one that had stealthily slipped into my humor repertoire unannounced.

It is a generally acknowledged fact that the richer and more hoity-toity among us regularly drive around in their fancy automobiles politely inquiring each to each about the availability of Grey Poupon. But what about us more plebeian types? Don’t we deserve a mustard commercial relevant to our unique socioeconomic status in life? Like how about if some guy is sitting at a stoplight and a dude pulls up in a Pinto, and says, "Hey, you got any French’s, sucka?" That would be a condiment advertisement for all mankind.

Whenever there’s a volcano-related article in the paper, they always mention the "red-hot lava." No offense, but I’m pretty sure that red-hot is the only flavor in which it comes. You don’t need to point it out again, like I’m not going to understand that its hot like that. "What, a Peruvian village was destroyed by lava? What a bunch of sissies!" "Oh, what’s that you say, it was red-hot lava, well, that’s an entirely different and more horrific geological phenomenon then, my bad," is not a conversational exchange I can imagine transpiring because the paper neglected to point out the red-hottitude of the lave in question.

Do you ever notice how the only section of the newspaper with women’s underwear ads is the front page? Why do they do that anyway? Is it because they want to balance out all the serious stuff that happens in that part of the paper with scintillating undergarments? Because it doesn’t work, it just distracts you. "Oh no, Nelson Mandela was enveloped by red-hot lava again; that’s not good at all. Oh, wait Victoria’s Secret is having a brassiere clearance event, come on Helga, we’re going shopping!"

In case you were wondering, it was established this past week to the satisfaction of all concerned, that Elmer Thudpucker, of New Weaselport, Connecticut, did in fact, let the dogs out. Which means that those of you who insisted on asking the now-infamous question regarding who did, in fact, let out the aforementioned dogs, may now rest easy that justice has been served and may cease asking it repeatedly and musically, at football games, Bar Mitzvahs, and State of the Union Addresses. Really, thanks for caring, but you can stop now.

I want to get a job at an aquarium in the eel department (The Eel Department, by the way, would make an aquarialicious name for a band), and then I want to work there every day as a tour guide until some guy comes in and asks, "Hey, what kind of eel is that?" Because then I can reply, "Oh, That’s a moray!" And then I’ll quit, because really, even the best of puns wouldn’t make it worth knowing that some of my coworkers of were seals.

I went to see the Narnia movie last week, bt before it started, they had a Coke ad where a bunch of polar bears were drinking Coke and mauling Eskimos and generally living it up in a wholesome and family-friendly fashion. But then in the actual movie, these same digitally-created polar bears showed up again pulling the sleigh of the White Witch, who is a total demon ho hellbent on stopping anybody in Narnia from having any fun or allegorical Jesus lions. So yeah, polar bears are now officially sellouts, soulless mercenaries willing to enlist in the vile ranks of whatever army of evil is paying this week, owing allegiance to none save for the almighty dollar and their overpowering addiction to quality soft drinks.

I love doing my Christmas shopping on Mongolia, because you can leave the price tags on and nobody knows how much you spent anyway. "Whoa, 45,000 Tugruks, you shouldn’t have!" Unless of course they checked online and got a conversion chart, which is why I’ve had to make sure that I only give presents to people who are either lazy, incurious, or have woefully inadequate math skills. Happily, most people are at least one of the above already.

Merry Christmas y’all, I hope everyone is having a totally awesome Christmas thus far, firmly ensconced amongst in some cozy home or another in spirit if not if not in actual physical form. Now this being Christmas and all, I thought I’d go and take the classical route by going all Biblical and doing the Christmas story, in proper teacupmammoths style. So sit back, stop playing your Xbox 360 (or your Xbox 359, for the less fortunate among you), a grab a nice refreshing novelty tumbler of one of the finer sorts of nog presently on the market, as we bust out some New Testament flava.

Way back in the day, Joseph and his espoused wife, Mary, who was totally about to have a kid, had to go to Bethlehem (not the one in Pennsylvania though, it wasn’t founded until like, 150 years after all this) to file their taxes with the Roman Empire IRS. Usually they just did it online like everybody else, but Roma Empire government tech support was almost as bad as ours these days, and so they had to go on down to the main office and straighten stuff out. "Dag, yo," quoth Mary, "it’s almost Christmas, traffic’s gonna be crazy!" Joseph, who never gets any lines at all, mutely agreed, so instead of taking their Subaru Outback, they just loaded all their stuff up on their magical talking donkey, and set out for the Holy Land.

When they got there though, they found that there was no space in any of the various fine Bethlehem Metro Area motels and Bed & Breakfasts. Finally, they found a Hampton Inn, which was also full up because they had complementary Biblical crullers there (and the Biblical Crullers would be a most triumphant name for a band). Fortunately, the kindly innkeeper ,Dick Cheney, was willing to help them out a bit. "Sorry we’re all full up right now," said the Vice-President, "but there’s a big Anime convention in town and all those guys kinda scare me so I can’t kick them out or anything." "Okay," said Joseph "I wondered why we passed like, fifty guys dressed up like Inu Yasha on the way into town. Also, this is my only line in the whole story, I certain hope they don’t end up cutting that part out where I fight all those ninjas." "It’s all good though," replied Senor Cheney, "because I just so happen to have an undisclosed location available that I can totally let y’all have for the night, at least until some of these freaks leave and I can hook you up with an executive suite with a minibar and stuff." "Word up," said Joseph, who’s ninja fight scene did indeed end up getting cut from the final version. And with that, they headed on out to the barn.

While they were there, Mary went ahead and had her baby, and since barns are generally not known for their exemplary nursery facilities, she went and wrapped him up in some swaddling cloths and put Baby Jesus in the manger, which, because he was all hardcore and stuff, didn’t really bother him. Joseph wanted name the baby Horatio Hufnagel, after his grandmother, but Mary, who is not all over Roman-Catholic screensavers and whatnot to this very day without good reason, shot that idea down straight off, because she knew that it was a dippy name, and Jesus fits a whole lot better in Christmas carols. Also, an angel showed up and was all hovering around, being radiant and stuff, and all the animals could talk (except for the cow, because as anyone can tell you, cows do nothing but swear the air blue and Mary and Joseph were planning on raising Jesus in a swearing cow-free environment). After a while though, the whole flying around, being radiant thing got a bit old, so the angel went out to get himself a coffee at Sheetz.

There wasn’t a Sheetz in Bethlehem though, just a Wawa, and since the angel didn’t exactly feel like settling for less, he just lit out for the next town over. While temporarily landing however, in order to scrape all he bugs off his flight goggles, he ran into a bunch of monkey wranglers, who were out wrangling their monkeys by night and regaling each other with Parick Stewart impressions. "Dudes," saith the angel, "First, freak ye not out, I don’t bite, and I’m not gonna smite you or nothing. I just thought you might like to know that unto you is born this night in the city of David, a savior, so if you want to go hang out and ern yourselves a spot in creche scenes forevermore, hie ye hence and if anyone asks, just tell ‘em Bob sent you!" (It being the case that all angels not otherwise explicitly labeled, may be referred to properly as Bob, even in the most polite and formal of social circles).

Meanwhile, off in the Orient, three wise men were wisely avoiding their mother-in-laws by hanging out at the bowling alley. All of a sudden though, one of them got a text message from Bob, saying unto them, "Hey guys, we’re having a bit of a party for Baby Jesus over in the East Side, why don’t y’all come on over for a spell? P.S, we’ve got Doritos." Now the wise men, whose names were Mr. T, Batman, and Harry S Truman, all thought that this was a capital idea, so they saddled up their funky, pimped out two hump racing camels (with ground effects and those shocks that make them jump and stuff and all that) and headed off on a random late night yuletide road trip. On the way out though, Harry S Truman wisely pointed out that they should get some presents, so as not to just show up and be a bunch of Johnny-come-lately Dorito moochers. So they pulled in at the first Wal-Mart they passed and found to their dismay that, being as how this was the first Christmas ever, there wasn’t a whole lot of selection, present-wise. They were however, extremely glad that their wives weren’t there, since they knew that they’d have wanted to get Baby Jesus stuff like Halloween costumes that look like fruit, and tiny little boots he’d never wear anyway. Instead, Mr. T got him some badass gold chains, to symbolize badassitude and help to pay Jesus’s way through college later on. Batman got some myrrh, which isn’t really something that most kids want these days, but he said he had really loved it when he was a little tyke himself, and the other two didn’t feel like fighting about it. Harry Truman got him some Frankenberries, because marshmallow-based breakfast cereals are like Christianity, people who don’t like them go around pretending that they’re all extra grown up and stuff, but really they make life all sorts of more flavorlicious.

While they were following a conveniently appointed giant mapquest star to Bethlehem though, the three of them ran into King Herod, who for our purposes, will be played by Osama bin Laden. "Greetings, my infidel friends!" Said he, "Might you three blokes happen to be off on your way to see Baby Jesus tonight?" "Whoa, that’s creepy! Yeah, we are," said Harry Truman, who was in truth, very freaked out by this. "Good, good," said Herod, "I don’t suppose you guys could tell me where he is, because I too want to go and horribly murder, um, I mean, buy him a bed shaped like a race car." Batman however had gotten another angelic text message informing him of Herod’s true intentions, so he cleverly foisted a ruse off upon him. "Why certainly, said Batwiseman, Baby Jesus is um, right over yonder, in, um, City I Just Made Upsville; just head directly away from that big magical star in the sky, you can’t miss it." "Whoa, thanks," said Herod, "I’ll go see him directly. Also, I do hope than in the extended director’s cut of the Bible, I don’t get eaten by a giant sand worm later on." So the wise men went off along on their way, secure in the knowledge that Mr. T had already downloaded the director’s cut off the Internet and that whole thing with the sand worm so totally does happen later on.

Eventually, they found their way to Bethlehem, just as the monkey wranglers, the angel with his coffee, Dick Cheney, and a guy in a very distinctive red suit were arriving. So they all had a good old time, all going on about how Baby Jess was cute as a button and giving out presents and stuff, and while in the process someone did end up mooching all the Doritos, a good time was had by all, especially after they all got some music going on and sang themselves a few Jesus chanties. The angel then proceeded to settle on top of a conveniently located indoor spruce tree, and say a few brief words about how this really was a pretty epic day, and things were gonna change soon, and Joseph, please stop whinging about your stupid fight scene with the ninjas, peace on Earth, good will towards men.

And so the camera slowly panned back from the manger in which Baby Jesus lay, back until you’re just kind of looking at the whole scene from afar off with the star way up above, and then the score cuts in with that Silent Night Charlie Brown version that always sounds really cool at poignant moments such as this. So merry Christmas, and of course, party on.

Here is again, Christmas Eve, surely the one day of the year when incipient joy and presently-occurring exhaustion go traipsing merrily hand in hand through the mal at 11:00 at night as everyone tries to find that last minute gift for that last minute relative. Rather than expounding at greater length though upon the humorous and all-too-predictable situations which can arise in such an environment, allow me to instead trot out another old yuletide chestnut, which other writers, many more adroit than myself, have bated around before me for quite some years. I am referring, of course, to the fine and worthy tradition of bitching about how you can’t say Christmas anymore in the public discourse.

It is, of course, almost needless to point out all the traditional ways that our modern society of oversensitivity seeks to scrub the reason for the season from all communication, from Holiday Trees, to Winter Break, to the fact that Happy Holidays has, in certain sectors, so eclipsed more meaningful salutations that to nowadays to even utter the words, "Merry Christmas" is an act of an almost conspiratorial nature. As I said, none of this is new, and I therefore ask your forbearance, gentle reader, in permitting me this occasional foray into the realms of politics and curmudgeonitude (the two of them oft being more closely entwined than either is wont to admit to).

First off, a brief observation from my time in Mongolia (you know, I have always hated those people who go abroad and then act as if their travels have given them some magical and vast insight into everything under the Sun; should any of you see me becoming such a creature, do not hesitate to send me the most scathing of comments, I will take them to heart immediately), that there are, in the entire nation, something like half a dozen Christians; everyone there being Buddhist as a general rule. Nonetheless, just about every store, restaurant, and many a home, proudly bear banners emblazoned with the phrase "Merry Christmas." Amazingly, no one seems to be offended, no monks go about being scandalized at the insensitivity of their Christian brethren, the government sees no need to intervene on behalf of tolerance, indeed, to wish someone in Mongolia "Merry Christmas" is as noncontentious an act as may be imagined, save perhaps for commenting favorably on the badassitude of Genghis Khan. What is more, in China, a nation where Christianity itself is largely outlawed and those who adhere to it are flung into prison more often than not; yet even here, "Merry Christmas" is to be seen everywhere, usually even in English. In short, it would appear that those backwards fools in the East don’t even know that they should be mortally offended at the evangelical spirit which has so deviously infected their nations.

But back to the States. You know, never have I personally wished anyone a merry Christmas and had them react with offense. Now, it is possible that every single person I have ever thus spoken to is merely a Christian, or if they are otherwise that they merely bore with enviable stoicism the degradation of being publicly wished to enjoy a holiday of another religion. But I think it is far more likely the case that individual men and women (who are almost without exception far wiser in their dealings than governments and other such committee-infested things) are simply good enough to know that even if they are not Christian, I am offering the best of wishes in the finest of spirits, rather than engaging in a bit of cavalier Christmas imperialism, as the myrmidons of political correctivity would have us believe.

And also, can we please just ban the phrase "Happy Holidays" from the English language? It once was meant to bear good tidings for both Christmas and the New Year, but now has been stretched so far to contain the meanings of every conceivable celebration regarding the Winter Solstice that it has become virtually meaningless other than as a byword of banality. Indeed, I would infinitely prefer that a Jewish fellow would wish me a happy Hanukkah than that he merely offer me a happy holiday for fear of offending. Hanukkah is, after all, most likely a day close to his heart and of great import to his faith, and for him to wish me a good one demonstrates an incalculably greater measure of good will and brotherhood than does any catch-all saying bereft of any real meaning.

And to all of you who might go about this time of year, whatever your ostensible religion may be, just hoping that someone will, in the best of spirits, commend to you a good day in the tradition of whatever particular faith their people observe, only so that you might take umbrage at them and mount up upon your high horse of tolerance whilst truly proving yourself the most intolerant of wretches (not that any such person would be reading my site here anyway, I suspect), then only know that you are in truth, the worst of creatures imaginable so far as Christmas is concerned. Even Scrooge, old miser that he was, was not offended by Christmas so much as he merely considered it a waste of time, an unfortunate belief which has the lone virtue of being honest with itself. Far more evil is the idea that by squelching the souls of those who wish you nothing but the best, delighting in it, and all the while pretending that you are somehow the noble one in your little morality play of lametude, is indeed immeasurably more reprehensible in each and every way; to you, I have nothing to say, but "Merry Christmas!"

And to y’all who happily have escaped this modern cancer of the soul which plagues so many among us, take heart and do not give in, but rather rebel against the demons of the day in what has long been proven the most efficacious of means, by ignoring them at all times except for when actively making light of them in snarky blog columns and other such shout outs to the world at large. Be sure to tune in tomorrow then, as I shall be back away from politics and more in the proper spirit of Christmas.

Whether you’ve picked up a newspaper today, or are simply an omnivorous telepath forever aware of the slightest will and whim of all humanity, or even if you’re a little bit of both, you’ve probably already read/perceived with your awesome mind reading powers about the woman in Mississippi who was mauled by a kinkajou. Now, for those of you who hail not from the land down under (not the one with Mole People, by the way, but the one with all the kangaroos and Subaru Outbacks), a kinkajou is a smallish marsupial (I am of course using the "royal" marsupial here, rather than the more common "botanical" meaning) or possibly some kind of reptile, insect, game show host, or breakfast cereal that looks kind of like a raccoon, but more like the embodiment of all the unknown terrors ever dreamt of by the fevered minds of man.

Anyway, this 82 year old woman down in Mississippi, home of great authors Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, was getting out of her car when this wlatsome hell beast leapt down upon her from a nearby tree, gibbering and gnashing its many worpulent teeth, landed on her, wrapped its tail around her arm, and bit her on the hand. This, of course, sounds bad enough, but the kinkajou is also known, not without good reason, as the ankylosaurus of the furry arboreal mammal world. Its tail, you see, is covered with dozens of venomous death spikes, which it can shoot over half a mile away with deadly accuracy. And on the end of it, it has this big spiked ball sort of a thing that can generate enough electricity that if you were to catch a barrel of kinkajous and plug them into an electric car, you’d never have to stop and recharge until they all went mad and ate each other fifteen minutes later. So anyway, this bloodthirsty ravening kinkajou (you know, a lot of Biblical scholars think that the second beast of Satan in the Book of Revelation was really a kinkajou by the way) gets the drop on this poor old gal, starts kidney punching her with his tail, and were it not for the fact that all old ladies in Mississippi are required by law to carry harpoon guns around, she’d probably not have survived.

The article also stated that the offending kinkajou had recently escaped from someone in the neighborhood who had been keeping it as a pet/demonic sacrifice (the very word, "Kinkajou" being, after all, from the Ancient Sumerian for "Snack of The Dark One"). Which leaves us at something of an impasse, since we don’t know for sure who would keep such a vile creature around. But wait, it just so happens that I recently read in a seemingly unrelated article this very week that She Who Giveth All Skanky Ho Slut Women a bad name, Paris Hilton, did, in fact, recently buy a kinkajou of her very own.

You may of course be shaking your head at this point whilst making some derisive sound of dismissal, and I know the scenario I’m painting seems somewhat outré. But wait, there’s more to this grisly little morality play that we see unfolding before us here. For you see, Paris Hilton who, if you’ve been watching the news these past two weeks or so, has recently been set on fire by a bunch of militant Islamic rioters, recently acquired a pet kinkajou of her own, after her seventh Chihuahua perished deliciously in an unforeseeable taco-related accident. Now, I’m really way past the point where I’m even going to doubt that someone like Paris Hilton (whose very name connotes almost as much evil as that of her twin brother, Normandy Motel Six) would seek, nay, demand a creature so full of vileness and evilosity as a loathsome and repellent kinkajou. But still, the question remains, why? Now for all we know, (and I’m not assuming anything here) it could just be for something kinky (please take a moment here to let your imagination out to play for a spell), or one of those weird Scientology things where she has to run 3,000 volts through it to cleanse her aura of toxicity, but I suspect that she’s actually been collecting a bunch of kinkajous with the twisted goal in mind of using them to create a hideous, ravening, old-lady-eating army of kinkajous, each more evil than all the others combined, with which she will lay the world (and anyone else she meets along the way) to waste, establishing a dark and tyrannical slutocracy with which she shall rule o’er all the Earth, ushering in 1,000 years of darkness (or 50,000 miles, whichever comes first).

What can we do to stem this dark and skanky tide? First, write your congressbeing and tell them that if they don’t start wearing a tutu made out of bagels, you’ll vote for Nader next time around. This won’t help with Paris Hilton any, but it’ll look funny, and that never fails to improve even the most dire of situations. Then, build a giant paper mache old lady and hang it from a helicopter. Then, just fly over Paris Hilton’s Fortress of Skankitude (also known as Hollywood) and get all the kinkajous to follow you. From there it’s just a short flight out over the Pacific Ocean where the briny deep will melt the unholy kinkajou army and all their beautiful wickedness, thus saving mankind from a fate worse than death itself.

So, watch the skies, carry a harpoon gun at all times, and if you’re a little old lady, you’d better go get a baseball bat. Now.

With the recent success of such epic films as Passion of the Christ, Lord of the Rings, and the release of C.S. Lewis’s beloved children’s story of Christian allegory, King Kong, it can come as no surprise that Hollywood is looking with new earnestness and unbridled avarice at overtly religious movies. Unfortunately, most of the stories worth telling have already been done by Charleton Heston (such as the Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and Planet of the Apes Saves Christmas). Therefore I offer up, in true Hollywood fashion, a number of cinematic notions which I believe would be just the thing for the theologically-minded movie-goer of toady, while at the same time not descending into the festival of sucky hackitude like Armageddon did, departing almost completely, as it did, from the Book of Revelations (except for that bit about the space shuttle that they kept in).

First, since if there’s one thing that always brings down the house and sends a crowd home feeling that all is right in the world, it’s watching Egypt get their ass handed to them, it’s time for "The Eleven Commandments." Young Moses (Brendan Frasier) learns of his Hebrew heritage, and soon sets out to deliver his people from bondage. But what kind of wacky shenanigans get going when his brother Aaron (Chris Tucker) shows up and brings his own brand of in-your-face blackitude to everyone’s favorite exodus? Can his life in the hood help him to get his people let go? Will the Egyptians, led by Pharaoh Ramses (Ellen Degeneres) back down in the face of old favorites like the blotting out of the Sun (Rosie O’Donnell) and the new, CGI-enhanced plagues, like the plague of retards (Aston Kutcher)? Will Moses learn not to touch the radio on his brother’s golden calf? Thou shalt tune in this holiday season and find out!

And watch this Summer as worlds collide in "Abraham Meets the Jetsons!" Badass monster truck driver Abraham (Christopher Walken) and his smart ‘n sassy wife Sarah (Christopher Walken) are the founders of the Israelite race, but what happens when a wacky rift in the space-time continuum catapults them forward into whatever stupid century the Jetson’s are supposed to live in anyway (I want to say, the 19^th, but I’m sure that’s not it)? Will Abraham get George (Tim Allen) fired from Spacely Sprockets? Will Jane (Pope Benedict XVI) and Sarah go on a musical shopping montage where they try on lots of funny hats and drink expensive future coffees grown in Neo-South America? Will Elroy (Mickey Rooney) have to be sacrificed to appease the wrath of a vengeful god? I’m certainly not going to tell you, because it’s clearly a dreadful enough idea that you probably aren’t going watch it anyway, and if I spoil the ending now, you’ll only go out and see "The Care Bears vs. Gorbachev" instead.

Make sure you don’t miss the musical hit of the season though, when bumbling cops David and Goliath (Gary Coleman and Rick Moranis) have to put aside their differences and find some Rich Lady’s (Sigourney Weaver) annoying little yippy dog (Matt Damon). Can the two of them solve the case while also winning back David’s estranged wife (Queen Elizabeth II) and patching things up between Goliath and his father (Morgan Freeman)? Will David win the Crazy Rich Lady’s heart? And make sure you don’t miss the uproariously uproarious scene where our two protagonists accidentally pick the wrong bar in Sodom. It’s a recipe for wackiness in "Honey I Smote the Apostates" (with new soundtrack by Elton John).

And finally, it’s the sure-fire hit romantic comedy of the year. He’s an escaped government cyborg raising a precocious youngster; she’s an Israelite princess and kung fu master. Together, they’re King Ahasuerus of Persia and Esther (Meg Ryan). Can Ahasuerus’s son Destro (Robin Williams) bring the two of them together? Can Esther fall in love while keeping the wicked Haman (Zombie Gregory Peck) from committing genocide on her people? Camp out in front of the theatre like a complete doofus now, for your tickets to, "Sleepless in Shushan!"

As I have oft remarked before, few cultural phenomena, past or present, offer us the same veritable cornucopia of cultural introspectivity as does He-Man (laugh now if you must, but some day I’ll write a terribly silly thesis paper and get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize or something, like Jimmy Carter, The State of Missouri, and the Snufalufagus, who, in case you haven’t been reading the papers, has recently made great strides in bringing peace to the Middle East through an innovative fusion of interpretive dancing and punching people in the face). Today, we’re going to take a closer look at an issue that He-Man always dealt with this surprising and brutal yet refreshing frankness: The place of giant talking cats in society. Okay, not really, that one’s for later. In truth, we’re taking a look at the eternally aggravating and befuddling generation gap.

Seriously, no show ever dealt so honestly and openly with the inevitable frictions which arise when children choose a radically different path than their parents did. For instance, He-Man’s parents were King Randor and the ever memorable Queen Whatsherface. One imagines that they expected their only son to grow up to be a king (or, barring that, a tolerably butch queen of some sort). Much to their certain disappointment, he spent most of his days wearing tights and a pink sweater vest around the palace while hanging out with the Cowardly Lion’s brother and some kind of a faceless wizard in a giant monogrammed tube sock. And you thought your parents were dismayed when you came home sporting a mullet that one time (assuming, of course, that a person truly can, in any real sense of the word "sport" a mullet).

And what about Teela’s mother and adoptive father, the Sorceress and Man-at-Arms? I’m sure that between the two of them, they expected her to spend all her time mumbling incoherent prophecies, wearing a suit of armor with a built-in feeding trough while frequently turning into a bird and getting captured by Skeletor. Instead she goes gadding about Eternia all whored up with some skanky valkyrie armor on, beating all manner of things with her energy staff and maintaining an on-again-off-again relationship with a large, deeply tanned man who goes about in his underwear and talks like the god of monster truck announcers.

But that’s just the beginning, for I find it extremely doubtful that Fisto’s parents wanted him to buy a wife-beater off a dead pirate and start a career in the lucrative field of having a giant metal hand that looks silly and makes you walk in circles like Grover Cleveland. They wanted him to be an accountant with a giant metal hand that looks silly and makes you walk in circle, like his father, Carl Fisto. And of course Spoutsnout’s mother was absolutely apalled when his guidance councillor steered him into the field of having an aluminum elephant for a head; she wanted him to be a rabbi like his Uncle Mordecaisnout.

Last of all, we come to the saddest of tales, that of Beast Man and his estranged but ever beloved son, Bob Dole. Beast Man, who had always hoped young Bob Dole would follow in his footsteps as an evil comedy relief flunky was terribly disappointed when his eldest son enlisted in the armed forces instead, but what really drove them apart was when Bob Dole decided to run for the Senate as a Republican. Beast Man, of course, was a stalwart pro-union, yellow dog Democrat through and through, just like his coal mining forefathers back in Eternia City, West Virginia had been before him. Of course, for his son to throw his lot in with the GOP was simply too much for him to bear, and aside from getting the occasional tear in his eye when a Viagra ad comes on TV, Beast Man denies to this very day that he ever had a son at all.

Take note then, lest any of you fall to similar fates, for if tragedies such as these can strike such noble souls as Beast Man and Spoutsnout, just think what may befall us lesser mortals. To close with the immortal words of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (Young not available in Alaska, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico), "Teach your children well, otherwise they’ll turn into Bob Dole."

When I was getting off my flight in Newark, we passed a bunch of other planes arriving, one of which was proudly emblazoned with the Hooters logo. Needless to say, from here on out I’ll be making my own plane reservations rather than letting my sister do it for me.

Why is it that they always have shoe shine guys at airports? I mean, if there’s one thing in the world that won’t scuff up your shoes, it’s being on a plane. The whole notion really, is about as useful as selling lawn mowers on the deck of a cruise ship. Now, if they had a chainsaw kiosk at the airport, that would totally rule, because when I get off of a plane, what I really want to do is go deforest something or kills some zombies, and then maybe get a duty-free burrito.

Okay, this whole thing with sticking a lower-case I in front of things and pretending that makes them magically cool has got to stop before it goes too far. It was cute for a while when Apple started doing it, but now it’s starting to give boy bands a run for their money in the Dumblympics (which aren’t really an officially sanctioned sporting event so much as a thing I just made up to be the metaphorical embodiment of dumbness). What’s next, a vacuum called the iSuck? A new line of caskets call the iContain A Dead Guy? How about something called the iCan’t Think of an Original Name for My Lame Product?

You know astronaut pens? Those ones they always sell at science museums that write upside down and all that? Why does anyone who isn’t an astronaut need one of those? And don’t go and say that science museums are just marketing to astronauts but eight-year-olds are buying them instead, because astronauts already get them free from businesses that cater to astronauts only, like Big Ed’s Space Shuttle Transmission Shop or Neil Stretch Armstrong’s Cold Stone Astronaut Ice Creamery.

You know how all toilets North of the Equator turn one way and the ones South of it go the other? Well, what would happen were you to flush a perfectly equatorial toilet (The Equatorial Toilets, of course, being a perfectly awesome name for a band)? Would it even work? Would it open up a rift in the space time continuum like it does when you tie a piece of buttered toast to a cat or when you go back in time and give Hitler a wedgie? I hope so, and that’s why I am presently in search of massive government funding for a fact-finding voyage to carry out this experiment.

When you go to China, they make you sign off on a list of things that you’re not supposed to be bringing into the country. Opium is still #1, well above wildcats, the black plague, and Far Side calendars (which the government rightly believes would undermine their soulless communist regime with cow-based humor). I’m kind of surprised that they’re still bitter about the whole opium thing. It’s not like when people come to America from Japan and we make them fill out a "What is the purpose of your visit?" card, the number one reason is "To Attack Pearl Harbor". C’mon China, move on, it’s been way too long already.

Did you ever really think about Jolly Ranchers? I mean, it’s all well and good if he wants to be jolly, but what does being a rancher have to do with making brightly colored candies that melt in your bookbag and stay there forever in a perpetual semi-molten gloplike state? Ranches are for just three things, cows, salad dressing, and monkeys, and unless I’m horribly mistaken, none of those things go into making candy, unless it’s some kind of hideous salad dressing beef monkey flavored candy, which they probably would eat in China anyway because they’re weird like that here.

In Beijing, all the phone booths are shaped like Pac Man, and to use the phone you have to put your head inside his mouth, and that’s all nice and whimsical and whatnot, but what about for me, because I’ve always been afraid of having my head bitten off by Pac Man? Perhaps I was a piece of fruit, or a ghost in a past life (can you even be a ghost in a past life?), but next time I’m in China, I’m just going to take a cell phone, or a tin can on a really long string.

So, we finally get into Newark at about 6:10, and my flight out of Newark, from a completely different terminal is at 7:00, all of which means I have to hurry. So I’m completely booking through Newark, dressed like a Mongol raiders, sweaty, unshaven, reeking of airline peanuts, and flying on nothing but caffeine and my boundless rage. So first there’s a big hold up even getting the baggage off of the plane and I’m just standing there, watching the precious seconds slip past like some kind of thing that slips past some other thing, until finally my bags show up, after which point I get into a lengthy and heated altercation with Manny, the vicious baggage gnome who wants to eat my shoes or ship me to Houston or something. All I know for sure is that he’s very short, very bald, and very shrill, and that never have I more missed the quaint charms of Virginia than at this instant.

And of course, at every point along the way here, my somewhat manic and extremely odd appearance is making every possible security obstacle in my path into a veritable morass of confusion and wasted time. Then of course, I have to catch a monorail all the way across Newark while sharing a car with no one save for an elderly Asian man who keeps looking at me the whole time like he expects me to zark out and conquer him, which I, considerate even in extremity, refrain from doing. And my luggage is already in the system, so I need to catch the plane now more than ever, lest my suitcase find itself alone in Dulles like Babe, Pig in the City or something, so my mad dash continues, much like Lola’s, in that movie where she runs a lot, only I’m pretty sure that even if I miss my flight, nobody is going to be gunned down by the cops after robbing a German grocery store. Still, better to be safe and not risk it.

Finally, I get to the gate, ticket in hand with what is, I might add, a fairly impressive margin of time in my favor, come running up to the ticketmeister, and learn that the flight has been delayed for an hour anyway. Which is still waaaay better than missing it, especially because over the next 20 minutes, people keeps running in all freaked out because the think they’ve missed their flight, while I’m sitting there boldly feigning calmness and collectitude, sipping my preposterous airport beverage of choice (a viente jamocha carmel latte) and pretending that I know what’s going on while laughing with dark and inner fiendish glee because I beat them all there and, had there actually been a plane leaving, I would have been the only guy on it. Kudos to me. So, in brief, Newark is no longer the capricious mistress of my heart, that honor now being reserved for ham danishes and Lt. Uhura.

Okay, so now our plane has been delayed because there’s primordial muck on the DC runway, which means that now our plane won’t even be getting here until 9:00, which is a less than completely thrilling development, but okay, because at least it’s finally on the way here.

Okay, 9:15, and I am on a tiny plane bound for DC. Really tiny, like flying on a school bus with wings and less headroom. So tiny that instead of a jet engine, it runs off of a rather large rubber band and happy thoughts. Half the people on this place have both a window seat and an aisle seat, so tiny is it. It is very tiny. Even the Wright brothers would be put off by it’s utter minisculity. Very small. Also, I have now been continuously wearing my pajamas under my clothes for three days now, ever since we left Mongolia. Just in case you were curious about that. So, back to the smallness of our plane; if the engine failed, we could all just roll our windows down, put our arms out, and flap furiously, and the plane would likely stay airborne.

9:50, we’re up at last, hurtling along at a speed almost certainly in excess of 40mph. It is very dark and rainy outside, and our plane remains very tiny (in case you thought it was made out of the same stuff as those rubber dinosaurs that grow when you put them in the water).

Well, here I am again back in Virginia, home safe and sound, very, very tired, but still very much alive. I’ll start posting normal stuff again (normal being a highly relative term) on Monday, meanwhile, I’m going to sleep and hope I don’t dream of Tom Hanks.

After a refreshing night’s sleep, we rose early in the morning to do a little more touristing before our afternoon flight back to sunny and ignominious Newark. Our goal for the day was to hit up the world famous pandaquarium, home of pandas and other such fantastical aquatical beasts. So we bought our tickets, found the map that came with them to be thoroughly useless while still being visually impressive, and headed off to see the panda, exotic and delicious creature that it is.

Okay, everybody knows the pandae are all extra endangered and rare and that we all need to feel exceptionally guilty about not doing enough to find homes for them all and recycling and blah, blah, blah, but what a lot of people (including myself until just this very second), don’t know is that the panda is in fact amongst the animals most spectacularly ill-suited for continued existence (being narrowly edged out by the play-in-trafficasuarus and the now extinct delicious-no-leg-gazelle). For instance, there are about 1,000 different kinds of bamboo native to China, and of those 1,000 varieties, pandas eat precisely three. Honestly, if there’s one thing no one can stand, it’s a choosy panda. Remember that kid you knew in first grade who would only eat Spaghettios, fruit roll ups, and bologna with the edges peeled off? And how he was all like, extra anemic and broke his arm more often that Little Timmy did in Oregon Trail? And how years later when you heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that he died from starvation while in a functioning Arby’s, you didn’t feel all that bad about it? That kid was a panda, in spirit, if no by unhappy accident of birth, and ought to be mocked accordingly. But wait, there’s more! Pandae also usually just have one or two cubs (or as the Indians call them, maize) at a time, and when they have two, the standard panda practice is to sit on one of them until it attains the shape of a beer coaster and the consistency of a melted Snickers bar, and thus is no more. So, in short, pandas really aren’t all that brilliant, and they smoke way too much and swear whenever there’s kids around, and I for one wouldn’t mind too terribly much if they’d all just shuffle off this mortal coil in the form of panda cordon bleu and trendy totebags.

The aquarium part of the zoo was much better, with all the various freaky things like sea lions, regular lions who were just really good at swimming, those goldfish with all that crazy mess growing out of their heads (What is that anyway? Is it some kind of mutant super brain thing? And if so, shouldn’t we stop them before they o’erthrow mankind?), and a big funky Legends of the Hidden Temple Olmec Indigenous American Head (also, over 750 little nautical gift shops selling 2008 Olympic Aquarium doohickeys). Now finding ourselves inexplicably in the mood for seafood, we all went to the Indonesian Giant Gourd Bug Restaurant and slaked our thirst for some marine life (except me, I got a pork chop, which is not without good reason oft known as the pileated rockfish of the land).

After a quick trip back tot he apartment where I packed once more with far more haste than care and made our way past the Chinese Door Nazi, who makes you sign a paper for the bags you take out, but not the ones your bring in (which means that he probably gets in trouble every month when it turns out that his total of bags is something like -937 in arrears), it was back to the airport where they have approximately 7,000 ticket counters for all sorts of made-up red-herring fictional Chinese airlines that they only put there to deter the impure of heart and those wanting in courage and chutzpah. We finally found our way to the Continental gate (Continental: where the stewardesses are dudes, but the food is pretty good), checked our 28 pieces of luggage, and boarded a 777 capable of leaving Beijing at 5:00 PM and arriving at Newark at 5:30 PM, a mere half an hour later. I’m not entirely sure how this is supposed to work, but I can only hope that something in our transwarp matrix or our dilithium crystals will go wonderfully awry and hurl us back into the 80s. Meanwhile, the in flight movie is A Christmas Story, that one about that kid having a mystical vision quest for a BB gun back in the 50s and where it ends up, appropriately enough, with the family in a Chinese restaurant where the waiters speak pidgin English and they get a duck with the head still on, much as I myself had had not 24 hours ago. The only porblem is, I laughed uproariously at this particular comedic juncture and our Chinese stewardess shot me a really dirty look. I can only hope that none of the other movies they show accurately make light of the foibles of other ethnic groups, because then I’ll have to laugh at all of them too, unless I want to look like some kind of anti-Chinese only guy. Also, the fact that my Genghis Khan hat wouldn’t fit in my suitcase and I had to wear it on the plane probably didn’t do anything to improve her opinion of me, since wearing a Genghis Khan hat in China is kind of a bad historical reminder to them, like wearing a Ronald Reagan shirt in Moscow or driving a lawn mower through Mexico.

Continental, much to their apparent credit, gives out free headphones for the in flight movies. Then, however, you realize that these are the most legendarily sucky headphones ever. Imagine that instead of headphones at all, you’re listening through an eight foot long toilet paper roll tube, to a tiny man with a bad sinus infection inside of a minifridge who doesn’t speak English but is trying to perform the musical score to your movie with nothing but a piece of moldy wax paper and a handful of squirrels. Actually, that would be a lot more entertaining than these headphones, and a whole lot funnier to visualize. Alexander Graham Bell’s first call home to his mom had better sound quality than these headphones. In fact, I suspect that the only reason that they’re free is that ten years ago, Continental foolishly bought a jillion and a half of them off the internet whilst in a drunken stupor, and after discovering that federal law forbid them to just bury them all in the deserts of New Mexico like so many E.T. Atari cartridges, were forced to just pawn them off on unsuspecting customers for the next thousand years.

You know how they always say that planes fly over the North Pole because it’s shorter? I don’t think that’s it at all; I think it’s just because when you flush the toilets on a plane, it all just falls out and plummets to the Earth below, and they thought they’d get fewer complaints if they dumped on penguins than if they were always bombing Iowa. But this can backfire, because Santa lives at the North Pole and I bet nothing gets you on his naughty list faster than dropping a chunk of frozen poop on his head from ten miles up. And at what point, exactly, did naughty stop meaning "bad" and start meaning ""delightfully skanky"? Or is Santa really just a somewhat jollier fellow than we tend to believe and all those switches in your stocking were really more of a twisted reward than a punishment all a long.

There’s some show on right now about a bunch of nurses, a nun in love with chewing gum commercials, and a loveable Donald Sutherland Hobo who all live in a hospital and kill people. Everyone around me is watching it raptly; I think it’s some kind of mind control thing or something, like that time Wesley Crusher brought that weird alien stereo opticon game to the Enterprise and Data had to save the day by building a funky strobe light and throwing a rave to make everyone chill out again. I can only hope that my stores of willpower and raveability are up to the challenge. It has now been 37 hours since last I slept; I wonder when I’m gonna start getting punchy and imagining crazy stuff. So far, so good, I suppose.

Now watching the Polar Express; this is the most messed up movie I’ve ever seen, at least while riding on an airplane, and the fact that we just passed the North Pole only makes it weirder. Remember the Final Fantasy movie and how inescapably creepy everyone in it looked? Imagine that Tom Hanks took a whole lot of acid and decided to make a sequel. If he did, that sequel would be the Polar Express. This movie is like scientific proof that there is no Santa, because if there were, he would never have allowed such a freaky movie to have been connected to his noble franchise without taking out a full-page ad in the newspaper denouncing and disavowing any connection to this completely bizarre and unnatural film where all the kids sound like grownups and Tom Hanks is bald. Way. Too. Weird.

Okay, now Santa looks like Moses, and sounds like Abraham Lincoln, I mut be hallucinating this. And now the dude beside me is watching me write. Yes, dude, you, I’m on to your little game. And now Santa has a whip. Okay, Santa’s sleigh just took off with those fire tracks that Deloreans leave behind when they go back in time, this movie can’t be real. Man, I hope that nerdy kid gets eaten by velociraptors or something equally ghastly.

Man, I hope I don’t go back and read all this tomorrow morning and have no idea what I"m taking about here.

Oh crap, it was done by the same guy who did Back to the Future! It all makes sense now! Horrible, horrible sense. I wonder where I left that ice cream cup they gave me when we took off in Bejing. Oh well, here comes Newark.

So, at last, after any number of adventures and travels in Mongolia, the time arrived at last to make my way back to America, this time with my sister safely in tow. So, after rising early in the morning and catching a ride to the Ulan Bator International Airport (though really, since it’s just about the only airport in Mongolia, it pretty much has to be international if you want to go anywhere from it) we got to spend a last couple of hours in Mongolia lounging about the concourse looking at all the famous Khans (Genghis Khan, Shakka Khan, Wratha Khan, etc.) and doing a bit of last minute duty-free yak wool Christmas shopping, we embarked upon the Kubla Khan (appropriately enough) and set out once more for Beijing.

The Beijing airport being altogether uneventful and uninteresting, we caught a shuttle bus in accordance with our instructions and it thoughtfully deposited us in the middle of a freeway in the middle of Beijing, a city of some fifteen million people who don’t speak American, with all our luggage. Things looked bleak indeed, our only map of the city shoed only where all the Captain D’s in China were located, and someone had already solved the Jumble shaped like a lobster. For a few brief and terrible minutes, I considered doing a British and French Allied Army of 1860 thing and wreaking a bit of unspeakable havoc upon the unwitting metropolis, but happily, a woman who had just gotten back from preventing earthquakes in India (home of Hinduism, Kwikimarts, and America’s finest tech support) was there to call Meg and Bryan on the phone and sound incredibly intense as if Liz and I were in the very extremity of peril, thereby freaking them out and getting us some taxi directions which ultimately brought us safely to our destination. All in all it was kind of like that Bill Murray movie where he’s over in Japan and nobody speaks English and everything is weird and he gets all angsty, Ghostbusters.

Beijing being our home for the next day and a half, we decided to go out and take in a few of the local sights. First up was Tiananmen Square, which is kind of like the Mall in Washington D.C, the primary difference being that the government never ran any protesters over with tanks on the Mall. Anyway, the whole square is surrounded by all the various things you might expect, governmental capitol buildings, national museums, and the Chairman Maonument, where the Great Leader is kept pickled in an old mason jar for the enjoyment and worship of onlookers. Also included is one building which you might not expect, the world’s largest Kentucky Fried Chicken. No, seriously, its like, a three-story department store with a big glass front and café seating and a huge picture of the Colonel the puts even the giant one of Mao across the square to shame. It is nothing short of absolutely awe-inspiring on so many patriotically deep-fried, eleven different herbs and spices levels. And the thing is, it’s not the only one; there’s hundreds of KFCs in Beijing, the Chinese absolutely love them, it’s the most awesome thing ever. Also, Beijing now has a Wal-Mart, which pretty much means that communism there has maybe ten years, tops, before it falls before an unstemmable tide of Dale Earnhart memorabilia and 67¢ pizzas.

We stopped for lunch at a place offering such delicacies as "roast uncooked cow-tongue-shaped object (mmm) and then at a little coffee shop where I made a most amazing discovery. The Chinese have invented the uber-danish. Okay, we all know that danishes are already one of the most highly advanced snack foods in the galaxy, being as how they have that croissanty outer crust, that delicious frostingy mantle, and finally a molten core composed of jam or cheese or something. What could possibly be better than this, the very pinnacle of pastry evolution? In a word: ham. It’s that simple, and that diabolically brilliant, a ham danish. But that’s not all, they also do Kielbasa danishes, and even the rarely attempted pizza danish, a pastry which defies all the laws of nature and good nutrition as mankind understands them. They also had something on the menu called "Sea World Pizza" which makes me kind of wonder if anyone’s seen Shamu lately.

And of course, there’s the 2008 Beijing Olympics coming up too. You remember how when you were a kid there’d be something cool coming up, like the Transformers Movie or the fall of the Soviet Union or getting a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas or something? And you would dedicate every waking moment and bend every fibre of your very being, mind, body and soul to wanting it to get here as soon as possible? And finally your mom would just get tired of you being such a little spazz about it that she’d flip out and be all like, "Dammit Ben, Christmas isn’t for another two weeks abd for crying out loud you’re 25 years old anyway why do you need a BB gun anyway?!" That’s how excited Beijing is about the 2008 Olympics. Like, everything in China say 2008 Olymipics on it, whether or not it’s even remotely Olympically oriented, like car keys and door knobs. They have a giant Dick Clark clock right in Tiananmen Square counting down the very seconds until the Olympics. They’ve already chosen five cute little repulsive teletubby/enraged Buddhist diety mascots symbolizing diversity and the inexorable progress of socialism. They’ve even started a program encouraging all the cab drivers to learn English (rumor has it that if it works well, they might even try it in New York next). So yes, Virginia, China is totally psyched about the Olympics, one might say with some justification.

So anyway, for dinner, Avian Flu be damned, we went to a Peking Duck restaurant way back in what appeared to be Beijing’s mogwai-infested Chinatown. There they brought out the duck (head still attached so we could tell that it, indeed, a duck and not merely some hapless midget or a plague marmot or some other such simulacrum being culinarily foisted off upon us) and proceeded to carve it for us right there at the table, which was very nice indeed (the carving, I mean, not the table, though it did match the decor nicely, I might add). Also we got a side dish with Chinese cabbage (or as the Chinese call it, cabbage) and some Chinese Death Peppers. You see, they put these insanely hot peppers in the dish while they’re cooking to give a bit of kick to the rest of it, but really they’re like tea leaves and cauliflower and not intended by any stretch of the imagination for human consumption, a fact which nobody alerted me to until I foolhardily ate one and spent the next three hours feeling it burn its wicked death peppery way through my upper digestive tract like a tiny little porcupine made out of lava and jujubes.

After this, we caught a taxi back to the apartment and had some ice cream, and sat around chatting amicably until my radical and partisan political beliefs about terrorism (kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out) put everybody else off, leaving us with no recourse but to discuss baby names and kittens, until my radical and partisan political beliefs about kittens (kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out) put everybody off and it was time to simply call it a night.

Seeing as how it would indeed be a terrible thing to come all the way to Mongolia and not spend a night in a yurt, my sister, a couple of her friends here and I travelled out of the city yesterday to pass the night in true Mongolian style at the Mongolian National Park and Xtreme Offroad Thunderdome of Terelj. So we packed up some overnight things (including a decent quantity of Mongolian beer and long underwear; both of which are absolutely essential for passing a night in relative comfort) and, before you can say Bogd Khan, we were on our way out of the city in a thoroughly Road Warrior Japanese SUV with the steering wheel on the wrong side, about a half dozen little mirrors around the front to compensate for said steering wheel anomaly, no functioning seatbelts, and an excellent onboard cassette collection featuring the greatest hits of the 80s.

Now, it happens to be the case that while the city streets of Mongolia are far from the best graded and surfaced in the civilized world, once you get to the countryside you soon realize that the Mongolian definition of "flat" is more along the lines of the American definition of "pock-marked cratery wasteland of death and devastation", because honestly the whole thing is so full of moon craters, nooks, crannies, gaping abysses, and a healthy sprinkling of good old-fashioned potholes large enough to lose a yak in that the only way to stay anywhere close to upright is to simply drive in the least devastated part of the road, which is of course, always in the oncoming lane, the sidewalk, or occasionally the fifty feet of open desert on either side of what, strictly speaking, is actually the road.

Which brings me next to the observation that while it is the case that back in the States, a road is generally considered to be a sort of a long, straight, asphalty kind of a thing with a nice little line down the middle and a good distribution of dead possums on it, in Mongolia a road is more rightly designated as whatever piece of real estate (or, in some not uncommon cases, whatever inland sea or frozen river) happens to be beneath your car at this particular instant. Out on the steppes in fact, the roads are often the worst of possible driving surfaces, and many wisely elect therefore to just go traipsing off across the open fields.

So anyway, there we were, cruising along at some speed which sounds absolutely fantastic because its in kilometers and I never could figure out what those are, small boulders merrily hurling themselves at our transmission case, avoiding perhaps an even half of the innumerable yawning fissures in the road and occasionally slipping, for but a moment, the surly bonds of Earth and soaring a bit skyward. Really, it was almost like driving on the Boulevard back in Richmond. Once we finally made out way into the park, we successfully negotiated a number of bridges which had more waves to them than the rivers they spanned.

Finally, we made it to the hotel (such as it was) checked in to our yurts, and went to find the horse-riding guy that we might rent ourselves some acceptably noble steeds. Five minutes later, there I was, astride my +60% Mongolian War Pony kind of bouncing along in the most biting extremity of cold and wondering why God saw fit to design horses without suitable handles, or at least making out of something compatible with Velcro. All of a sudden, with a great and lusty shout, two crazy drunk pony-wielding madmen hove from out the darkness and charged up to me, rammed into my pony, shouting and carrying on all the while, and generally making navigation (which was already far from a certain business for me) altogether worrisome. I (who haven’t been on a horse that wasn’t made of plastic with a pole through it for over twenty years) finally manage to get my pony into something vaguely resembling an equine holding pattern until our two drunken commando pony-master wannabe crackhead guys are properly shooed away, at which point I can safely resume my previous activity of looking uncomfortable and trying to avoid fatal thigh chafage (at which I was moderately successful).

It was now, the Sun having long since passed o’er the horizon, very cold indeed, and it is likely that it would have been very unpleasant were it not the case that apparently all the horses in Mongolia are kept to a strict diet of tacos and petrochemicals and are more or less jet-propelled. So, by the time we made it back about an hour later, we were all nearly frozen to death, the ride in the land rover seemed upon reflection to have been the very pink of comfort and security by comparison, and our horses had caused something like a 20% increase in the methane levels over Outer Mongolia (indeed, it is a good thing that we didn’t get our campfires going until a good bit later on or all the horses would likely have gone up in a massive fireball visible from Borneo).

The yurts were really very comfortable after they got comfortably warmed up (though all the coal we burned left me smelling quite bituminous the next morning) and after a supper of deep-fried Mongolian hot pockets and 14 proof philosophical discussion, it turned out to be a most comfortable night after all.

The next morning we struck out for town again, stopped by Turtle Rock (thus proving once and for all the ages yet to come that Legend of Zelda did indeed take place in Mongolia), all froze half to death one more time for good measure, and drove past one of those shamany totem thingies that you walk around three times and throw rocks and empty beer bottle at to appease the local spirits, who all seemed like nice enough ethereal beings since they had seen fit to not let my horse burst into flame while I was riding it the day before. And so, without further incident or accident, we returned home aside from the occasional brief episode of being airborne.

            So, after all manner of unquestionably interesting journeys, voyages, tribulations, Chinese breakfast cereals and so forth, here I am at last in that very cradle of awesomeness, Mongolia.  I am staying here at a rather well-appointed apartment (or, as the Mongolians call it, a flat) here in the heart of Ulan Bator, capital city of Mongolia, with my most excellent sister, Liz (coconspirator and originator of the entire “Bring Ben to Mongolia” plan) and her housemate Daniela (who is from Australia, land of shrimp, barbies, Vegemite, and is an all-around nice gal herself).

            Mere words (not even really big, impressive ones, which almost invariably do the trick in ineffable situations such as this) cannot even begin to convey the inexpressible awesometude of this nation.  Therefore, by way of one very poor segue and a few similes of greater quality, allow me to endeavor to impress upon y’all, Gentle Readers, how absa-freakin-sweet it is here.  The people here are a hardy and robust lot, and rather like Klingons in the best of ways (pointy boots, funky language, forehead ridges, etc.).

            Now imagine, if you will, that in all of America’s history that George Washington was our nation’s only founding father, national hero, and wearer of wooden teeth (of course now we have Gerald  Ford and the Squirrel Nut Zippers, but that is neither here nor there to us in this instance).  Imagine that he was practically the patron saint of our fine nation, and the least inkling that he might have any done anything less than quintessentially awesome would unthinkably impugn his universal badassitude.  Imagine then, that even now, centuries after his death, his is still the name to conjure with, and that to name a ritzy hotel, coffee house, beer, pants cartel, or pug after him is still the very apogee of eponymous approbation.  It is in this way that the Mongolian people think of Genghis Khan.  He is, quite simply, the very quintessence of all that is worthy of exultation and emulation to them.  What Mr. Spock is to trekkies, thus is Genghis Khan to Mongolians.  He is, in brief, uncommonly popular here.