So, as most of you probably have heard by this point, Dick Cheney shot some dude while they were out hunting for quail.  First, let’s clear a little something up here that every major media outlet up to this point has gotten terribly and irresponsibly wrong; they weren’t hunting for quail, they were hunting with Quailman, who has been lying low the last few years but remains a tireless warrior for all that is grood in the world.  And what were they hunting?  Zombies, the greatest threat to our nation’s security since slap bracelets.  What actually happened was that this lawyer guy foolishly wandered away from the main zombie hunting party and one of the undead fiends grabbed him.  With just seconds to think before the vile creature ate this dude’s brains, Dick Cheney decided that his best bet was to use his heat vision to set the zombie on fire.  Alas, when one is being held by a burning zombie, one tends to get a bit singed around the edges, to say nothing of being thoroughly soaked in that on-fire zombie smell that even Febreeze can’t properly get rid of.  Of course, after all this happened, the mishapular dude who was so recently liberated from the cold and smelly embrace of the living impaired needed a bit of medical attention, and since all concerned were worried that CNN couldn’t be trusted not to reveal all America’s top secret plans and tactics in the War On Zombies, they came up with the story about quail, shotguns, and all that jazz.  A great hullabaloo has since ensued, as many politicians and TV reporters, though rightly suspecting a zombie connection to Dick Cheney (though little suspecting that Dick Cheney & The Zombie Connection would be an awesome name for a band), but altogether lacking proof, have become outraged as usual.

            As often is the case in matters of this sort, a little historical perspective can do a great deal of good when it comes to dispelling the rumors of the day, and it just so happens that contrary to popular belief, Aaron Burr (who, incidentally, knew for a fact that Alexander Hamilton had long since been replaced with an interdimensional ninja vampire assassin but chose not to tell anyone out of a sense of honor and awesomeness) was not the only vice president to shoot someone while in office.  So put on your learning trousers and suspend your disbelief, because we’re about to take a little trip down our national memory lane.

            Hannibal Hamlin (1861-1865), for instance was forced to step down during Lincoln’s second term after a furor arose in which Charles Sumner was revealed to be a werewolf and in which Mr. Hamlin subsequently slew him with a silver weed whacker.  I could go on, but the entire episode will probably be made into a Hugh Jackman movie at some point in the next year, so you can just go and watch it then.

            George Clinton (1805-1812) inadvertently started the war of 1812 after he learned that British parliament was plotting to steal all of our fledgling nation’s reserves of funk and funk-related paraphernalia.  Failing to convince Congress of the dire need to take action, he nonetheless received permission of James Madison to travel secretly to England and preemptively steal all the funk belonging to British Parliament.  In an audaciously badasstacular caper, and with the assistance of his awesome dreadlock-derived powers, George Clinton did indeed make off with the official funk of the U.K, but realizing that the King’s army would never let him escape as long as the funk remained in his possession, he was left with no choice but to travel to the distant future and start a band, after which point the statute of limitations had long since run out.

            Adlai Stevenson (1893-1897) was briefly at the epicenter of a swirling vortex of scandal and mixed metaphors after he discovered that the Lincoln Bedroom was not only haunted by the ghost of our nation’s only President to have ever gone into the future and fought the Klingons, but also by a groovy taffy monster.  Enlisting the help of the Harlem Globetrotters and Phyllis Diller, Adlai Stevenson came up with a brilliant plan in which he and his dog would dress up like hair stylists and distract the taffy monster while the rest of his kooky gang would drop a net on it or hit it with a barrel or something.  Although it was eventually proven that the taffy monster was in fact merely Levi Morton trying to chase everyone away from the White House in order to dig up George Washington’s secret pirate treasure, it was all the same decided that the whole tawdry affair was better kept a secret.

            So there you have it, just a few of the vice presidents of America who have been compelled by the national interest to issue beatdowns to the forces of evil.  And next time you can go out for a walk in the forest without having to take your zombie repellent along, just remember who’s out there tirelessly setting zombies on fire.

            So, I would imagine that most of you out there are familiar with L.L. Bean, purveyor of fine mail-order garments and seasonal ham baskets.  But has the thought ever occurred to you that nobody knows who this L.L. Been fellow actually is (not that it has to be a guy, mind you).  I mean, if we’re going to be going around wearing flannel shirts and cardigans fashioned by him, I think the least we can do is verify that he is not, in fact, one or more supervillians.  Alas, all of my research into this subject has suggested that the truth may be exactly that.  But before you all recoil in collective horror at the implications of such an audacious thesis, let’s take a walk through the evidence and see just how deep the rabbit hole of diabolical fashion goes.

            First, let’s take a look at the L.L.  Now, there are only two people who have those initials that I can think of.  One is Lucretia Lunchferrets, whom I am fairly certain that I just made up, while the other is Lex Luthor, nemesis of Superman and all around evil genius.  Why, you might ask, would he want to sell clothes to anyone?  I suspect that he makes all his sweater-vests out of kryptonite in the hopes that one day Clark Kent will decide to go for the business casual look that only sweater-vests can make, and in doing so shall plunge headlong into a certain, yet trendy, demise (however, the fact that The Kryptonite Sweater-Vests would make a great name for a band would, to some degree, mitigate the terribility of such an event).

            Now, as for the Bean part of things, I think that our best bet here is to start out by casting a catawumpus eye at none other than Sean Bean, who was played by Boromir in Lord of the Rings.  Though once a good and noble man perhaps, the power of the One Ring has clearly corrupted him, and as a result one suspects that he has some plans which involve selling sweaters to Frodo, so that he’ll lose all interest in the ring and go on to play a cannibal in Sin City.  Or perhaps he just got tired of Gondorian shopping malls always getting beaten out by the Gap of Rohan and wisely decided to start up his own franchise of trendiness.

            The way I see it, the two of them were probably both at say, the evil laundromat, or at one of those evil speed dating things, or maybe just serendipetously happened to frequent the same evil needlepoint shop.  Sharing many things in common, they would have both soon lamented the general paucity of affordable yet evil clothing on the market and so, by pooling the endless resources of Lexcorp, and the endless creepiness of the Steward of Gondor, they started selling flannel shirts with the ultimate goal of taking over the world.

            Of course, this entire scenario leaves out the one other possible player in this diabolical little duo of doom, Great Britain’s own Jim Varney, Mr. Bean.  Long a very vocal critic of the increasingly intrusive British government (he recently helped to defeat a bill which would have made it illegal to not be a total sissy), Mr. Bean surely realized long ago that his best bet was to amass a great fortune using his own innate humor-generating abilities and to invest these gains in his own personal army of like-minded free-thinkers, so that when the fateful day or reckoning did at last arrive, Mr. Bean’s Army of Doom (which would also make a great band name) would be able to sweep the vile oppressors before them as all the normal people shall be swept away before the unstemmable tide of force-wielding geeks when they start selling tickets for “Star Wars: Episode VII: Mr. Bacca goes to Coruscant.”  Clearly, to have a stake in such a profitable enterprise as a major garmenteer.

            Either way, L.L. Bean is at best devoted to overthrowing the legitimate government of the United Kingdom and killing superman, and at worst is only gather funds to help ensure that hobbits turn evil and have to fight Bruce Willis.  Not that I’m trying to start a boycott or anything, I’m just trying to burnish my Upton Sinclairian credentials so that next time a real controversy comes down the pike, I’ll be able to lie about it more convincingly to Oprah.

            You know how football players always wear those mouth guard thingies that make them walk around with their mouths all halfway open looking vaguely dumb?  Well, if I had a football team, I’d make buy mouth guards that looked like orange slices, that way all of my players would look like the Godfather.  Because if there’s one thing that NFL players fear nigh-universally, it’s the Godfather.

            The other day I saw a license plate that said IM4 BUCS.  In order to get that plate you must either really like deer, or be a severely discounted prostitute.

            Why is it that evil doctors, upon capturing someone, always feel the need to demonstrate their evil by doing something evilly doctorious to them, like making them into a freak or giving them a bad haircut or something?  It’s just so cliche these days.  That’s why if I’m ever an evil doctor and I catch a good guy, I’m going to do something completely non-medical to them, like feed them to a tiger that happens to be on fire, or shoot them in the face with a paintball gun full of bees, neither of which, to my knowledge, is an actual medical procedure anywhere except in Mexico.

            I saw an ad for cars the other day, and it said that Dodge was a registered trademark.  I sincerely hope that doesn’t mean that I need to use a different word to describe not getting hit by something.

            To Treebeard,, mosquitos are nothing, but yellow-bellied sapsuckers are like tiny little vampires of death (as opposed, one imagines, to all the other varieties of vampires out there which are not of death, such as the vampires of tragically poor fashion choices, and the dreaded vampires of chronic typographical errors).

            Duck hunters are willing to spend like, all day out on a freezing river in the dead of winter just on the off chance that some ducks will fly by and they can shoot them.  Don’t get me wrong, I hate ducks too, just not enough to go to all that trouble to vent my boundless fury upon them.  Most types of hunting are like that, you just sit around in the woods being all extra quiet, hoping that you can shoot something and eat it.  With one exception: zombie hunting.  Zombie hunting is sooo much better, because not only are they marginally more evil than ducks, but you also don’t have to build a temporary treehouse and wear an orange hat.  Also, you can use chainsaws, which, if I recall correctly, are generally discouraged in duck hunting.

            Neptune is my favorite god of the ocean if I had to pick one.  Not because I love the ocean though; I just really enjoy the sugarless gum he invented.

            It must really suck being an Indian superhero, because everyone expects you to have thematically Indian superpowers.  So, you can’t just be like a guy who flies around and stops crimes; your motivation has to be to avenge your ancestors.  And your name, by law, has to either make reference to a specific tribe, or bears.  So, Captain Badass is not an acceptable name. Chief Mataponi Thunderpants I Really Love Bears, is much more appropriate.  Also, you can’t just be really strong or really fast, unless right before you use your powers, you say something about spirit pumas and your ancestors.  Finally, you will never get your powers thanks to a scientific accident or radioactive Toby Macguire bite.  Rather, you will find an ancient relic of your people, like a dreamcatcher, or a casino.  So yeah, if you’re an Indian, just forget about being able to try being a cyborg, ninja, or time traveler.

            Someone needs to make a sitcom where the Cowardly Lion and Aslan share an apartment in New York and hilarity ensues.

            You know those bumper stickers that say, “Don’t Let the Car Fool You, My Treasure is in Heaven”?  The other day I saw one on a brand new PT Cruiser.  This suggests that, contrary to the bumper sticker, at least a good $35,000 of their treasure is in fact driving around Richmond.  Really, if you’re going to get that sticker, then your car needs to be either at least ten years old, or a Daewoo.

            First off, allow me to apologize for not posting more this past week.  Unfortunately, I seem to have incurred the fiery and diminutive wrath of the bandwidth gnomes, and as a result, Comcast has been a magical world of high-speed wonkiness all week.  Please be assured that at some future date my merciless armies of doom will deliver a mighty whomping to these craven offenders, thereby setting all the world aright once more.  So, the story which I am about to relate unto you is true.  It is also one which children, those with heart conditions, and people who go to bed at 10:00 every night like my grandmother should ever try to reenact.

            ‘Twas ten o’clock, this Tuesday past, and I was at the fabled and oft-visited Waffle House of Chester, delighting in the company and conversation of Amy, whom I, to my boundless chagrin, have yet to come up with a suitably legendary epic name for.  The evening started off in an altogether normal and reasonable fashion, the coffee (billed as the best in America, though whether that includes South and Central America remains to be seen) was good, the jukebox, having gone rogue just the day before and, in a fit of pique, devoured any number of quarters without rendering its usual service in exchange.  Indeed, we passed some two hours in such an amenable that even the silences which inevitably occur when two persons of an introverted nature congregate seemed not the least bit troublesome.  Talk turned to all the universalities of human existence, assuming that Star Trek, contra dancing, and Andre the Giant count as universalities.  At length, however, we both remarked upon how regrettable it was that there were not more places open on a late Tuesday night.  Truly, the only choices available are Walmart, Walgreens, and, of course, Waffle House.

            It was then that we hatched the Idea.  The wonderful, terrible, not the least bit thought out Idea which was to rule the night.  That idea, of course, was to set forth on an epic voyage about Richmond hitting every Waffle House beknownst to us.  As I mentioned before, it was already well past midnight at this point, and we both had work upon the morrow, but since the best ideas in life rarely take such trifles as good sense to mind, the die was cast, and we soon set out along our way.  By the time we left, the denizens of the Chester Waffle House bid us a tearful adieu, and off we went, in Amy’s Civic, listening to some of the finer modern works of Turkish pop music.

            First stop was the Dubious Waffle House of Hull Street, where their jukebox has waaay more songs, the cops usually hang out (though not on Tuesday, it would seem), they have a well-stocked larder of chocolate chip waffles, and where the kindly wafflemeisters found our mad quest both silly and endearing.

            From thence we struck out towards the Other Waffle House of Hull Street; the new one, where all the cool kids hang out and where there’s usually way too many people to properly rawk out.  Happily, that night there were but a few lost souls dining there, lonely and disconsolate creatures who must surely have incurred the wrath of the waffle gods and thus been condemned to an eternity of restless waffle wandering and wastrelry.  On the bright side, their pecan pie was quite good.  Now, by this point, we were both, as a result of sleep deprivation and considerable coffee imbibery, getting a tad bit punchy, with any breaks in the conversation being quickly taken up with giggling.

            Next on our journey was the far away and exotic Waffle House of Brook Road, which they built after some guy got shout outside the old one in that part of town.  It was totally far, and when all we ordered was a round of coffee the waiter looked at us like his puppy had just died.  He did complement me on my shoes though, and after yet another long voyage upon the untrodden roads of early morning we returned once more to Chester, from whence we parted ways and tried to get a few hours of sleep lest we conk out at our respective jobs the next day.

            It was, in short, a most fantastic expedition, and one which many worthy explorers shall most certainly seek to attempt for themselves in search of similar renown.

You know how at stores sometimes they have say, a $10 and less rack? Well the other day I saw a $10 and up rack, which is absolutely ridiculous, because you can put anything on there, as long as it’s over $10. Yup, space shuttles, the Hope Diamond, most congressmen, anything, as long as it’s over $10.

If I was friends with the Incredible Hulk, I think I’d buy him a mood ring, that way I’d always know if any hulkification was immanent. "What’s that Bruce, you’re anxious or slightly agitated? I think I’d better go out to the store and buy us some pork cola until you’re back to calm and peaceable."

If you really hate Brussel’s sprouts, then you will also probably never go and try to retrieve a cabbage that’s more than 50 feet away, especially if you’re a pirate and your depth perception is bad.

I think that maybe the Incredible Hulk just has really bad self esteem, and that’s why he’s got so many issues. Maybe it would help if when he met someone, he tried saying, "I’m getting angry; and while a lot of people don’t like me when I’m angry, why don’t you stick around and see if maybe we hit it off anyway?" Seriously, I think that whole "you wouldn’t like me" thing is just him trying to keep anyone from getting too close to him because he’s had some bad relationships in the past. Hulk need counseling.

What puts the ape in apricot? Courage.

Pier 1 is always advertising their unique blend of ridiculous home decor, which I happen to be a big fan of. The only thing I don’t get is why they keep limiting themselves to just that one pier. Come on guys, when I want a coffee table shaped like an Indian elephant with surfboards for tusks, if it has to come from Pier 2, I’m not gonna complain as long as you can get it for me. "Hey, do you have any fake bronze lamps shaped like a cobra riding a unicycle here?" "Nope, all those come in up at Pier 7, and we don’t even talk to them anymore. Not since the Chinese Emperor bookends incident." (And of course, The Chinese Emperor Bookends Incident would make a great name for a band)

Just once, I would like to see a cartoon or motion picture where someone who wears glasses can successfully navigate the world without them. Like you know how in Scooby Doo, whenever Velma lost hers, her eyes would get all squinty and she’d stumble into all sorts of wacky situations in which she mistook the taffy monster for the Harlem Globetrotters or something? Yeah, that’s not the way it happens in real life at all. I want to see a cartoon character lose their glasses and just be like, "Don’t worry guys, as long as solving this groovy mystery doesn’t involve me having to drive, operate heavy machinery, or shooting a man in the head at over 60 yards, I’m okay."

If your name was Al, and you were dating a woman named Betty, and you had to pick a song to be y’all’s special song, and you chose "Still Crazy After All These Years" you would never hear the end of it from all your Paul Simon afficionado friends.

The other day, I saw a car with the license plate "14 QPS" and all I could think was, "Whoa, that’s a lot of quilts per second!"

If I was Clark Kent, I think I’d get one of those Superman T-shirts and just wear it around town on my day off just to see how truly clueless everyone in Metropolis was. And then, if anyone did actually, for once, at long last, suggest that there was some similarity between myself and Superman, I’d laugh nervously, then set their shoes on fire and fly off.

I was at Maymont the other day, and whilst there, I saw what has to be the most messed up chicken ever. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was a rooster, but instead of crowing in a manner appropriate to saying, "Hark, I am a rooster, bring me my dinner, woman!" It would just sit there in the chickenarium, looking confused. Every few minutes though, it would get this look of abject horror on its face, as if up until a second ago, it had in fact been Pat Sajack and this whole being a rooster thing was a new and altogether hideous development. Then, instead of crowing, it would make this weird, soul-rending, Witch-King of Angmar shriek, and then go right back to looking confused.

Chickens are weird.

            Well, here we again, at that most blessed day in all of February, Groundhog Day, when about a jillion people make the pilgrimage to tiny Punxatawney, Pennsylvania to see if the eponymous groundhog of that fabled burg will see his shadow.  Of course, if he doesn’t, then it means that Spring is just around the corner, while if he does see it, it means that Bill Murray will be doomed to ten thousand years of immortal suffering while learning valuable lessons about life, love and not allowing rodents to drive.  At any rate, suffice it to say that Groundhog Day is one of our nation’s most hallowed and sacred of traditions, being as how it is the one holiday on the calendar that Hallmark hasn’t really managed to cash in on yet.  And verily, I would like nothing better than to leave you all secure in the belief that all is well in groundhog world, that you might go on with your wholesome and decent lives, battling zombies, solving wacky mysteries, and making fun of foreign countries that happen to have silly names.  Alas, as a blogger, it is my responsibility to stir up scandal, garner headlines, and by doing so do my part to kick the mainstream media in the face like Bruce Lee in the Face Kickalympics.  Therefore, it is my solemn and silly duty to inform you that I have it on the best of authority that Groundhog Day is rigged.

            Okay, now that the collective gasp of horror which surely just rose from all my readers has hopefully dissipated like the delicious smell of a double steak bacon waffleburger, I shall commence with the getting into of all the gory details.  You see, it happens to be the case that the night before Groundhog Day (or, Groundhog Eve, and it is called within the Catholic Church), the unscrupulous city fathers of Punxatawney issue a press release to the newspapers of the world in which they say what Phil, that most revered of ground-dwelling earth squirrels, has prognosticated for the year.  And what is worse, all these newspapers, these so-called bastions of liberty and incorruptibility gladly buy into this hideous and smelly web of groundhog-related lies and deceit.  Clearly, something must be done to stop his dreadful perversion of groundhog weather prediction.

            All this does however beg the question of why anyone would even go about thus pulling the proverbial wool over the eyes of America in such a way?  Who, indeed has anything to gain by lying in the stead of the inestimable groundhog?  Nobody, except of course for the Weather Channel.  You see, while more and more Americans have, in recent years, turned away from listening to old men talk about their knees, looking at the bands of wooly bears, and throwing spaghetti at the wall in favor of such things as Doppler radar and accuforecasts, a recent poll showed that nearly 3072% of Americans still find their most reliable source of weather forecasts to be an underground rat living in the Keystone State.  As a result, the soulless minions of the Weather Channel have doubtless tried to buy off said groundhog with all manner of blandishments and promises.  But nay, all their efforts have come to naught, and they have now resorted to a most duplicitous plan of action.  What they conspire to accomplish is nothing less than the complete destruction of Punxatawney Phil’s good name and reputation by putting out spurious and inaccurate forecasts in his name in the hope that the people will lose faith in him.

            This, my friends, is one outrage with which we must not put up.  Indeed, as a fellow member of the alternative media I feel a particular responsibility to making sure that the truth on this matter gets out and that assuming that a diplomatic solution cannot be reached, a rescue attempt will be the only recourse left to us.  I foresee a brilliant and unexpected night raid where, under cover of darkness, I and a crack team of ninjas will infiltrate the Weather Channel’s compound, gnaw through the electric fence, leap o’er the moat full of firebreathing pumas, kick a bunch of people in the face, and affect the daring and audacious liberation of our nation’s greatest weatherman.  From there, we will surely have to go underground, so to speak, moving from town to town, ever watchful of outsiders, while transmitting our own pirated signal to the world so that good men and women everywhere may still know whether or not it’s going to be partly cloudy or partly sunny tomorrow.  True, sacrifices will have to be made, but in the end, I have no doubt that justice will prevail and that the edifice of lies which the newspapers and the Weather Channel have built will crumble like an alabaster hippopotamus struck with a stinger missile.  Viva la Groundhog!

            With more and more people these days wanting to earn their degrees, and with just as many people as ever wanting to take their money and spend it on hot tubs, supermodels, and death rays, it comes as no surprise that everybody and their grandmother is starting up online universities (Coming Soon: Ben’s Grandmother’s University) where, with as few as three or four professors, who are often imaginary and/or actually housecats, enterprising young P.T. Barnums of the ether can start their own institution of higher learning and making money.  Clearly I cannot allow such corruption and exploitation of the naïve to continue without trying to get a piece of it for myself, which is why I now introduce to you the newest cyberian learnatorium, Captain Ben’s Online University, College of Dark Overlordery, and $1.57 Ethnically Thematical Dry Cleaning Establishment (motto: El Queso del Mundi).  Yes you too can now learn such Sally Stutherian arts as home pet repair, crossbow design, not totally lame interior decorating, crushing all those who dare to oppose you, band name making upology, monkey wrangling, the art of maniacal laughter, global domination on a budget, sending me money, funky Waffle House styling, and dwarf tossing.  But before you just start hurling cash in my general direction as an Indian doth fling cashews at the screen during a showing The New World, let’s stop and meet just a few (by which I mean “all”) of our qualified and mostly non-fictional professors.

            First, we’ve got Professor The Ghost of Colonel Sanders, who has generously agreed to return from his watery grave that he might instruct the youth of America in the manly arts of deep frying things, wearing a white linen suit, and ancient Sumerian kung fu.  Not only that, but he’ll also be your freshman year academic advisor and lunch lady.  Just remember, he doesn’t accept cash or checks, only mint juleps and livestock, so prepare accordingly.

            Next, we come to The Professor from Gilligan’s Island, who is also, thanks to the miracle of podcasting, no longer dead.  Embark on a three hour tour of finding stuff out with him in such mostly not made up classes as building a radio out of coconuts, turning someone uninvisible, setting up a wireless office network made out of orangutans and corned beef, and of course, not being able to patch a hole in a boat to save your life.  While studying with the Professor, you will have the opportunity to bask in the canola oil-colored glow of his extensive wisdom concerning life in the tropics, as well as learning why nobody around here ever mentions what is euphemistically referred to as “The Mary-Ann Incident” more than once around him.

            Then of course, we have Professor M.C. Hammer, who has recently returned from an extended sabbatical while working on his latest book concerning the history of pants.  Under his flat topped Yoda-like tutelage, you will learn such ancient Fritos of wisdom as not touching this, stopping, introduction to carpentry, and horribly mangling the Addams Family theme song.  Students in all of our programs are welcome to attend his weekly Pantsravaganzas of the many specialized uses of pants that nobody ever thinks about for any number of very good reasons.

            Finally, we have Professor Emeritus Vigo the Carpathian, who, despite being suffering from an acute case of Carpathian Kitten Loss (don’t worry, it isn’t contagious. much), lectures on a wide variety of topics, such as having a giant Christina Ricci-like forehead, not smiling ever, and controlling the weak-minded.  While attending his classes students are to refrain from wearing anything depicting the Statue of Liberty and all Romanian students with poor interpersonal skills are to exercise extreme caution when visiting the Professor during office hours.

            Whether you’re taking a break between classes or merely out recovering from a cyber hangover after a night at one of our many wild and crazy virtual frat parties, you’ll love the majestic and not actually there at all scenery of our fine and capacious virtual campus.  Or stop by our online Bistro and download deliciousroastbeefsandwhich.exe.

            What ever you plans for higher education may be, I can safely and without fear of contradiction say that Captain Ben’s University & All That Other Stuff will serve your needs equally well, regardless of whether you’re a college grad looking for better credentials or a stay at home mom trying to get back into the filed of global domination.  Either way, the smartest thing you could possibly ever do is to fill out an application today, and start sending me money, I mean, learning stuff, today!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            You have been warned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            And, my keyrd just wnt ll retarded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            The metric system will continue to baffle all reasonable people.

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

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

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

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

            Hurricanes will continue to have dopey names.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            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.