We live in a thoroughly modern and fast-paced age, in which all too often our technological prowess runs far ahead of our understanding, much as a Chihuahua on one of those extendable leashes runs out into traffic and is squashed like a yippy annoying little pudding cup beneath the  harsh and awesome wheels of the merciless Ford Pinto of reality.  By which of course I mean to say, time travel can be risky business indeed, and whether you’ve got a stolen Klingon Bird of Prey, a DeLorean full of plutonium, or just a funky Victorian armchair with a knack for opening up controllable rifts in the space-time continuum, there are more than a few rules and helpful pointers which many people fail to take into account before zipping through the temporal aether and creating all sorts of wacky paradoxes and junk.  And so, assuming that many of you either already have, or will shortly be given by your future self, a time machine, I publish here a handy little list of things to bear in mind, should you happen to transport yourself to some other point in history.

            First, you have to know when in fact, you are traveling through time.  Happily, the best way to be sure is to look around you.  If there’s a bunch of clocks and movie montages of historical events going on, then you’re probably traveling in time.  Unless of course you’ve merely driven into the antique mall by mistake, which is still a perfectly decent fallback plan should you be unable to secure a time traveling phone booth.

Should you happen to go back in time and meet your ancestors, you must remember that while your parents will merely look like younger version of themselves, your grandparents and all those who came before them will look exactly like you/your sister/Leah Thompson/etc, except with hilarious old-timey accents and different hairstyles.  This is normal, and you oughn’t allow it to freak you out overmuch.  Also, they will all be hopelessly oblivious, and other than remarking that you seem somehow familiar, will completely fail to call you on the fact that you look exactly like your great uncle Zebulon.

            If you’re traveling in your time machine and like, your sunglasses blow out the window or something, make sure that when you go for them, you don’t reach out with the hand you wear your watch on, because the last thing you want to happen when you land in the late Cretaceous is have to try and figure out whether you’re still on daylight savings time or not.

            Don’t overdo things.  For instance, instead of going back in time and killing Baby Hitler, just go back and make sure that Teenage Hitler makes it into art school.  Also, while you’re back there, make sure that someone starts a band called Baby Hitler.

Most temporal physicists agree that there is at least an 80% chance that in the future, people will dress in the goofiest manner imaginable.  Also, all slang will be the most incomprehensibly silly gibberish that you have ever heard.  Should your destination be at some point yet to come, do your best to bear this in mind and try not to giggle too much when you see everyone walking around in foam rubber space trousers.

            The bad news, of course, is that the above rule holds pretty much constant when traveling into the past as well, and just about any time you end up in, you’re going to get laughed at like Jabba the Hutt at a line dance. 

            Remember: They are not the hell your whales.

            When you eventually run into a crazy evil dictator or funky barbarian warlord at some point, just remember that as soon as you can lure him into your time machine, he’ll become your friend, and you can take him to the mall for your history project with only modest mayhem ensuing (Modest Mayhem, by the way, being a modestly awesome name for a band).

            Make sure you check the local geology and find out which parts of your neighborhood were once composed of lava.  Try to avoid these if at all possible.

            Thus armed as now you are with this veritable fount of wisdom concerning all matters of extralinear temporal legerdemain in which you may happen to engage.  Use them wisely and you will most likely avoid such common pitfalls as dating your mom, running into morlocks, and assuming that in the year 2132 wearing your shirt collar up like a preppy will not be an offense punishable by death.  Also, if you’re going back to the early 20^th Century, make sure you get me tickets to the next Baby Hitler show.

            If you’re like most people, you probably want to get ahead in this old world of ours.  Maybe you’re already in school, or thinking about taking some night classes at Ye Olde Communitie Colledge, perhaps you’re still calling for that free information Sally Struthers spoke about, or maybe you’re just playing the Armageddon Lottery, where after the coming nuclear apocalypse you hope to be the last survivor of mankind and to rule the blasted sphere of Earth with an iron hand.  Whichever route you may happen to be planning on, I can safely say without fear of contradiction that you probably ought to consider another line of career self-improvementizing, getting yourself some super powers and being professionally awesome with them.  Maybe you can use them for the good of the human race, or more likely, use them to get all sorts of beverage and sneaker endorsements.  Perhaps you can became a pro-wrestler or a black ops government interdimensional ninja assassin.  Or maybe you can just be super angsty and live in a flophouse, like Spiderman.  Whatever you decide to do with your awesome powers, it’s all just so much frying up of nachos in the empty metaphorical microwave of your soul until you actually get some super powers.  Contrary to what you may have been told by your guidance counselor, the school nurse, and Bill Cosby, super powers aren’t all that difficult to come by (they just say that they are because they’re sooo much fun they want to keep them all for themselves), and it just so happens to be the case that through my many aeons of studying the ways of all which is totally freakin’ sweet, I happen to know of most of them.  So put on your learnin’ cape, kids, and find a big Technicolor letter that you can iron on to your pajamas, because you’re about to get a crash course in super power acquisition!

            First, the easiest way of all is to have just been born on another planet.  All you have to do is go find a copy of your birth certificate.  If it says something like, “Zornar VII” then you’re in luck and you can probably start flying around and saving people immediately.  If on the other hand, it says something like, “Alabama” then odds are that you’re from Earth, and must proceed to one of the more involved methods of getting powers above and beyond those of mortal men.

            Getting bitten by something radioactive is always a good standby, though in this post-Cold War era in which we live, getting bitten by something genetically engineered is fast gaining popularity amongst the younger generation.  The key thing here is to remember that mere radioactivity isn’t enough; the animal/crustacean/kitchen appliance in question has to be something that you’d want to gain the salient features and abilities of.  So for instance, getting bitten by a ninja, or a dinosaur, or maybe Dick Cheney, would probably result in you getting powers that could be described as super by even the most jaded observer of such things, while getting bitten by a radioactive blue-butted baboon, or a genetically engineered Richard Simmons could have only the most dire of consequences.

            Power rings, of course, are always a good way to go, but before just picking up and putting on any old power ring that you get out of a gumball machine or from a little blue alien.  Instead, you ought to follow the stoplight rule when it comes to such things.  Green, for instance, means go ahead.  You’ll most likely receive the power to make any big green thing your little superhero heart desires, not to mention getting the power to fly, wear tights, and generally rule.  Yellow or gold means slow down, because even though the ring in question will likely give you awesome power and near immortality, it will also slowly but surely corrupt your very soul and turn you into a gibbering guy in a loincloth.  Red means stop and run away, because what you probably have there is the Heart ring from that Mayan kid who ran around with Captain Planet.  All it let’s you do is be more understanding and namby pamby.  Don’t be fooled by the notion that it will let you control monkeys either; because they’ll all be nancy boy enviromonkeys, who will turn on you’re the moment you try to get them to rob a liquor store for you!

            Of course, you could always just build a time machine and go back to a more primitive period in human history where your awesome high-tech weaponry and funky dance moves will wow all the cavepersons there.  Like you could go back to the time of King Arthur with a flamethrower, or teach fear to the denizens of Victorian England with your lightning gun, or maybe you could just go back to the 80s, drive a Prius, and wow everyone there with your self-adjusting Nikes.

            And last but not least, you could always just build a robot or a power suit or something.  You see, while it might seem that the knowledge required to build a truly top drawer suit of power armor might be beyond the reach of most people, if there’s one thing that comic books have taught me it is that really all it takes is a highly motivated person with access to a hardware store.  So as long as say, your brash young superhero niece is off flying around fighting evil, you can magically find it within yourself to build a power suit capable of defeating an entire army just so that you can go out and protect her, despite the fact that you work at a record store and can’t even program your VCR (remember VCRs?  Back when I was but a lad, in the Cretaceous Epoch, they were all the rage; but then so were Communism and slap bracelets).

            So now that you know how easy it is, all you need to do is start hanging out at a poorly secured toxic waste refinery/genetics lab/Incan temple/Radio Shack and before you know it, you’ll be earning your seven Porsches by wrestling monster trucks and eating lava on the Tonight Show.  And if you should happen to go with that “Back to the 80s” route, try and bring me back a copy of Tron on Beta; I sold mine for some magic beans.

            So here we are again at the coming of spring, when a young man’s fancy turns towards trying to be cool.  Regardless of your age, whether you’re merely a precocious tyke, or Pope Benedict the Six Jillionth, you’ve got to be cool if you’re gonna get anything done in this world, and since I happen to possess coolness in nigh Biblical abundance, I thought perhaps I ought to write a blog with the goal in mind of helping any among you who might be suffering from want of this most critical faculty.  Perhaps you doubt that I am, in fact, a paragon of coolness.  The truth is that people everywhere agree on my inestimable coolness.  Even people I work with think I’m cool.  “Dag, Ben, you so cool!”  They say as they walk by (or possibly it’s “Dag, Ben, did you leave all those rubber trout on the floor on the tobacco barn again?”  It gets loud out there in the wilderness and sometimes they kind of mumble at me).  So anyway, as a service to all ye my readers, and indeed unto all mankind, here followeth a brief list of things that you can do to, as the nerds say, get +7 to all coolness rolls.

            First and foremost, get a catchphrase.  No one truly cool ever made it through life without choosing a good personal epigram or witty apothegm and spouting it off in any and all situations.  What you need is something that not only sums up your very quintessence, but also something completely random that nobody else has already taken and which still looks good on a T-shirt.  Calvin Coolidge, for instance, used to bandy about the saying, “I’m here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of gum.”  While Albert Einstein preferred, “Never put anything in your mouth that’s bigger than your head.”  And of course, you can never go wrong with making it about monkeys, which is kind of a good rule to live by anyways.  Also, it can’t be about Chuck Norris, because that one’s already been run into the ground.

            Next, get a mode of transportation that lesser humans lack.  Learning to fly or teleport or throw your mighty uru hammer, Mjollner around are all good, but assuming that you’re kind of a beginner, you might want to start out with something a bit more not forbidden by the laws of physics.  A pair of Seven League Boots is always a good choice, or maybe one of those old-timey penny farthing bicycles that Sherlock Holmes and Margaret Thatcher used to ride around on.  And of course, if you’re already out of middle school and have your license, then the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile (why is it always the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile anyways?  It’s not like there are any other weinermobiles out there to distinguish it from.  Unless of course you count BMWs.) is always a good way to go, especially if you get a hover conversion done on it.  A sedan chair is always nice too, but they usually don’t get you around terribly quickly, and you usually need waaay more eunuchs to carry one than any decent person wants to be associated with.  And of course, you could always just get a 1989 Plymouth Voyager, because those have so much panache that Ralph Nader wants to make them a controlled substance.

            After you’ve got all that taken care of, it’s time to think about doing something funky to your hair, and by funky, I mean not a mullet.  Perhaps you suffer from Mullet Recognizance Deficiency Syndrome, or MRDS (I know I do) and you’re not entirely sure what a mullet is.  In this case, I would recommend that you either contact the mullet disposal squad of your local constabulatory, or go to a free clinic where they have a bunch of little free brochures about the perils of mullets.  Now that you’re safe from the bane of Uncle Jesse, you might want to think about what you do want, like maybe a mad scientist fro, or some crazy blue anime hair, or maybe even a reverse Mohawk, like Bizarro Mr. T has.  For the more follically conservative among you, you can always just go and shave a big ol’ lightening bolt into whatever hairstyle you already have, like the Right Reverent Vanilla Ice.

            And last but certainly not least, you must properly attend to you wardrobe.  Now, I could take the time to emphasize the importance of wearing medieval armor with any ensemble, or go into great depth on the Ben Theory of Wearing Either No Shoes or Shoes That Weigh More than 25 Lbs, but I’m sure most of you already know about that anyhow.  And I’m not even gonna get started on the importance of wearing a hat from a strange and drastically different decade that whatever decade we happen to be in now.  No, I’m just gonna give you the most important fashion tip in the history of the human race, if not the entire cosmos:  Buy a teacupmammoths T-shirt.  Seriously, as you walk down the street in your mighty T-shirt, many will swoon at the very sight of you; evildoers will cringe in the shadows, and Dickensian newsboys wearing fat guy hats will cheer for your awesomeness.  But I only have them in Large and Mondo Large, so if you’re petite, you’ll either have to only wear one when you’re hulking out, wear a way too big one because it’s all gangsta style, or find twenty other medium-sized people to go in on an order with you.

            So there you have it, do as I say and the very world shall be your pistachio.  Love, fame, fortune, and an army of robomonkeys cannot be far behind!

            It seems like nowadays that all the cool kids are busy rioting over Mohammed cartoons.  That’s great and all, but what about all the other offensive cartoons out there that need to be opposed by burning French cars?  Me, I’ma gonna go riot over Marmaduke, blasphemous infidel running dog that he is.

            At work I’m presently reading a Jane Austen novel on my much breaks, but since my job is supposed to take place in 1622, the only way I can get away with that is by acting as if “Pride and Prejudice” is actually a science fiction novel set in a distant and horrible vision of the future, which actually makes it a lot more interesting, especially the part about where Mr. Bingley has to make a cannon out of bamboo and costume jewelry to stop the Gorn.

            If you were a supervillian and you got arrested for jaywalking, that would be completely unacceptable.

            I saw a bottled water delivery truck the other day, which was emblazoned with the legend, “Untouched by Human Hands.”  Which makes it sound all extra clean and pure until you factor in that two weeks ago unemployment among trolls and orangutans fell sharply after Deer Park opened a new bottling plant.

            It’s a good thing that America is such a wide nation, because otherwise Oregon Trail would have been considerably less fun to play.  There is a good reason, for instance, why Luxembourg Trail never really took off quite the same way.

            I love any movie with an actor from Star Trek in it, because even if the movie sucks, I can sit there and create an entire side plot about how Commander Riker had to travel back to the Civil War and become a pompous sissy boy Union General to maintain the integrity of the space time continuum, or how Geordi LaForge got sucked through a rogue warp bubble and decided to spend his time trapped in the 20^th century well by teaching children to read.

            I want to go to Mexico and open up a store that sells raincoats.  Then I’m gonna name it The Poncho Villa.  Then I’m gonna laugh a lot until I go out of business because I can’t speak Mexican anyway, but for a while there, it’ll be totally sweet.

            Wendy’s claims to sell old-fashioned hamburgers, that’s great and all, but I’m not sure I’d even recognize a new-fangled hamburger if I ate one.  Would it have a lot of little unnecessary LEDS on it?  Or possibly a little repulsor lift underneath so that Professor X could ride around on it if he were even simultaneously tiny and very hungry?

            I hope that some day someone writes a biography of Jim Varney and calls it “The Importance of Being Ernest.”  Then my universe will at last be complete.  Assuming of course that someone else took care of that whole repulsor lift hamburger thing already.

            I love how when there’s a turn in the road ahead, they never just put up one sign with a little arrow on it, but instead they throw like, ten of them out there.  Like if you were driving along and just saw one you’d decide to challenge its dominion of the roads by audaciously going straight and ramming your car into a Pizza Hut, but when there’s fifty of them there you’re gonna be all impressed. “Whoa, all you guys got together to tell me to turn sharply to the right?  Dag, you must be for real this time; Thanks bunch of signs with arrows on them!”

            I was at a minithon last week with Amy (and in which neither of us was running, just in case you were about to be inadvertently impressed) and some guy came up and gave us a card instructing me to do something really Xtreme, take a picture of it, and send it to their website.  I thought little of it until about three minutes later when another guy tried to give us another one and another one after him and so forth.  So yeah, all I can assume from this is that Amy and I must have been the most Xtreme-looking couple in DC that day, which is kind of cool, because I’ve always harbored a great deal on insecurity concerning my Xtremism and the perceived lack thereof.

            Richmond, as most of my regular readers will know, is a most perpetually embattled city.  Sometimes it’s the hilarious antics of our city council, sometimes it’s Spanky, Lord of the Mole People sending his minions out to local Waffle Houses, and sometimes it’s something altogether more epic and awesome.

            It all began this past week when Farmer Bob (name changed for humorous effect), owner and proprietor of the last boviary in Short Pump (home of the Mall of Innumerable Wonderments) decided to sell the farm.  And what did Henrico do with this recently freed up piece of real estate you ask?  Why zone it for the two tallest towers in Henrico County, of course.  Now, you no doubt are wondering by this point why I need to concern either myself or you with such petty matters as traffic planning, urban sprawl, and the NIMBY factor (which is of course short for Never, It’s My Bubble Yak!).  The answer of course is that there is far more going on here than meets the eye.  Why, for instance, did Henrico decide to allow this all of a sudden in an already developed region?  And why two towers, instead of just one big one or possibly a hotel tastefully shaped like an elephant?  The answer lies in the results of the most recent Henrico political goings on, in which one Grima Wormtongue was appointed in an advisory capacity to the Board of Supervisors.  Clearly he has corrupted the Board, whose true charge is to protect Henrico, by convincing them to cave in to the evil machinations of his true master, Saruman.

            Yes, it is in fact the case that this is no commercial development at all, but rather a brutal power grab by the White Wizard and Sauron the Dark Lord to rear up two towers to replace the ones back in Middle Earth that got all busted up back in the day.  Indeed, it has long been known to me that the Richmond Metro Area is at a great interdimensional nexus which eases travel between the various planes and realms of reality, but never had I imagined that this particular evil would visit itself upon us.  As if any more evidence was needed, I ask only that you behold this, the latest concept drawing of what this new “commercial development” is to look like:

            Yes, clearly there can be no doubt, especially since a recently stolen developers’ proposal lists that it will have, among other things, a food court, a palantir kiosk, a Macy’s Department Store, a vast pit for breeding orcs with goblin men to create a master race of Uruk-Hai, a Denny’s, an Abercrombie & Fitch, Dress Barn Woman, Mount Doom, and a Cheesecake Factory.  Yes, a Cheesecake Factory!  When there’s already one just like, a block down the road!  Obviously a grave new evil stalks the streets of the West End.

            Even down here in the Shire (known as Chesterfield County in the language of the big folk) trouble has began to stir as the vile schemes of these invaders begin to clash with those of local elements.  This very afternoon, in fact, an acid spill here on Southside was occasioned when an advance party of orc sappers encountered one of the many armies of Spanky.  Even now a vast subterranean battle may be raging beneath all the city as the Mole People strike back at this new rival faction.

            What then are we to do?  Clearly we cannot sit idle and wait for Gondor to deliver us, since they’re all a bunch of tools anyway.  And although we may now have a common foe, I cannot believe that we ought ally ourselves with the Mole People, who, after all, would probably just build a Hardee’s or some other such den of iniquity on the land if they win.  And with our local forces still fighting that Balrog that Virginia Power unearthed last summer, our list of allies grows thin.

            I propose therefore that our only hope is to gather up a wacky band of misfits and make the journey out to the West End, where with luck we shall evade the spies of the Enemy and be able to hurl this Cheesecake Factory into the very fires of Mount Doom from whence it came, thereby saving all of Richmond, or at least giving us a reason to go hang out by a totally awesome volcano.  And if that doesn’t work, well, we always could just go through the Mines of Moria.

            Well, here we are again, with just about a month until Hitler’s birthday, and as usual, most of us probably seem to be running into a lot of conversations like this:

You: My, but the weather is simply delightful out today.

Joachim von Ribbentrop: Hitler r0XX0rs!

You:  Mr. Phoenix, I beg to differ; if ever someone was so very wack as to deserve a     wiggedy, ‘twas Hitler.

Joachim von Ribbentrop: Nuh Uh!

You: Uh Huh!

Joachim von Ribbentrop: What about Volkswagens then?  Hitler made them and they rule!

You: Damn.

            Yes, many of us, upon getting into arguments about Hitler find ourselves defeated by the invocation of the mighty VW.  Sure, you know in your heart that all the genocide and nancing about was evil, but you just can’t marshal your rhetorical facts in the face of the Volkswagen argument.  Well fear not, because today I mean to arm you with the forensical arsenal necessary to lay a mighty smack down upon even the most stalwart Hitler groupies.  How, you may ask, shall I do such a thing?  The answer is simple, by giving you an exhaustive list of stuff that Hitler invented that is sooo totally lame as to more than cancel out the awesomeness of the VW.  So grab yourself some sauerkraut and a panzer and get prepare to be imbued with some Grade A badassitude.

            First, let’s start with the big one, Fanta.  Yeah, you remember those commercials a couple of years back with all those horribly skanky Austin Powers ripoff hos trying to peddle that loathsome beverage of ill repute?  You can thank Hitler for that.  You see, after the war started, Coca Cola decided to only sell beverages to countries that weren’t fascist and Hitler suddenly found himself with an army of stormtroopers going through severe caffeine withdrawal.  So, he took the manufacturing infrastructure left by Coke and using a mixture of apple cores, Sweet ‘n Low, and distilled human suffering, soon began producing the beverage that helped the Nazis lose World War II.

            The internet, of course, was developed by the Allies after Al Gore traveled back in time from the year 2015 to help them win the war, which of course took Hitler totally by surprise.  In retaliation, Nazi scientists worked feverishly to develop a weapon which would allow them to neutralize this new weapon.  And so, by early 1943, they had invented the first popup ad.  One can only imagine the horror of Washington’s 1337 corps of hackers when they got the first ever “Punch the Monkey and Win a PS2” popup on the screen of their experimental UNIVAC.

            And you know dryer lint right?  I bet you thought that stuff had been around forever, right?  Well guess what, dryers were in fact 100% lint free until a secret Nazi program to summon demons from another dimension went horribly awry and forever changed the laws of laundry physics in our universe.  Happily, the only demon that they successfully summoned was named Zornoroth the Soul-Render, or as he came to be known after he escaped from his evil Nazi masters, Alf.

            And who can ever forget green ketchup?  Yes, as the war wore on, Hitler began to suspect that the staying power of the Americans was in no small part to their prodigious consumption of ketchup, which he believed to be a nasty Jew condiment unworthy of the master race.  In an effort to create a Nazi substitute, Hitler experimented with many strange alchemical decoctions, one of which is known now as green ketchup, the most vile substance ever to disgrace hamburgers.

            While most people are familiar with the various and sundry conspiracy theories about genetically engineered Nazi super agents being cryogenically frozen and then thawed out decades later to lay waste to the world, even the most credulous among them would scarcely dare to believe the horrible reality which I am about to reveal to you in two terrible words.  Aston Kutcher.

            And finally, no matter how great the Volkswagen is, to focus solely upon it as the paragon of Nazi automotive technology would be a grave error, for to do so would be to overlook the disastrous fruits of Hitler’s other secret program, the Deutschland Automotive Engineering Weapons Order of Oogdar, or as it is known nowadays, Daewoo.  Yes, this wicked scheme to create a car so sucky that it could, by itself, make Americans hate and distrust cars altogether was one of Hitler’s most fiendish ideas.  Fortunately, most Americans are smart enough to instinctively recognize a Nazi plot when they see one, and Daewoo’s sales remain encouragingly low.

            So, now that you know the truth, fear not to engage any and all Nazis you should happen to meet in a battle of rhetorical wits, safe in the knowledge that you shall crush them as a school bus crushes a pudding cup into the asphalt of historical smackitude.

            The ATM at Ukrops talks to me in an English voice, which makes no sense at all.  I could understand if like, 83% of Ukrops were in England or something, but no, they’re all in Richmond, which means that they purposefully went and got a bunch of pretentious ATMs just to make me feel like an uncultured American.  Unless of course there was just a mixup at the ATM/Killer Robot from the Future factory and some bank over in England has a bunch of ATMs that call their customers “y’all”.

            I bet communists really hate Burger King, being as they are opposed to all members of the capitalist burger aristocracy.

            Speaking of which, why is he called Hamburglar when he doesn’t burgle hams?  Honestly, when you’re an example to children the world over like that, you need to either change your name to Hamburgerburglar or start spending way more time down in Smithfield, where all of Virginia’s finest ham foundries are.  My guess is that his parents named him Hamburglar, but then after he turned Jewish he had to start burgling something kosher, and since Matzoburglar was already taken, he had to sell his soul to the man and join up with McDonalds.

            If you worked as a guard at a cemetery, it would be great if you got one of your friends to put on a zombie mask and an old tux, and then you could run around the place chasing him yelling about how he oughtn’t be up and about until after dark.

            We had a Girl Scout camping trip come out to Henricus the other day, and in order that they might not starve in the wilderness, we got them cookies.  Wal-Mart cookies.  I’m pretty sure that to a Girl Scout, that’s a capital offense.  That’s like inviting Juan Valdez and Hitler over to your house and serving Folger’s and Eggos, instead of Juan Valdez Brand Coffee Beverage and Luftwaffles.

            You know, sometimes I think that Walt Disney was actually some kind of weird pagan goat worshipping antler hat sporting freak or something.  Really, why else would you give all of your cartoon characters cute alliterative names and then name your dog after the Roman Lord of the Underworld?  Maybe I’m just out of the loop here, of course, and there was some story arc I never heard about where Pluto kidnapped Daisy Duck and took her back to his twilit realm of shadow and torment to sit upon an ebon throne of skulls beyond the River Styx.  Also, if you’re going to name a dog after a denizen of Tartarus, wouldn’t it make more sense to call him Cerberus?  Good job Walt Disney, way to tard all over my mythology.

            I had to use a studfinder the other day to hang a TV on a wall at work, and tried using it on myself.  Turns out that I’m a stud after all.  Woot.

            The TV mounting on the wall thingie, by the way, was labeled as “The Ultimate Space Saver!”  I’m sorry, but unless it opens up its own little pocket universe in some tertiary subspace domain full of Velcro or something, then I think the Ultimosity of it remains highly dubious.

            Whenever corporations throw marshmallow peeps and other toxic waste into the ocean, somewhere there’s an underwater Indian crying.  Or maybe its just Aquaman, he’s kind of like an Indian, except for the part where Indians are brave, awesome, and can make buffalo explode with the power of their very minds.

            Everybody always goes on about how hardcore the guys in the Iditarod are, all racing dogsleds across the Arctic and all that.  Pshaw, I say, if they were really Xtreme, they’d race dogsleds across Alabama.

            Did you hear how scientists accidentally created a temperature 20 times hotter than the core of the Sun?  They still don’t know how they did it, which has a lot of people worried.  I think it’s cool though, because now for the first time in human history, I can cook a hot pocket in under three yattoseconds.  Also, if you’re one of those people who hated waiting for their G.I. Joe Shrinkydinks do dinkify in the oven the old fashioned way, relief is at last at hand.

Ladies and gentlemen, I fear that I have some most disturbing news to report; the Mole People, lead by their dark lord, Spanky, are once again endeavoring to bring down us overworlders. I had my first inkling that such a thing might be afoot when last month reports surfaced from California concerning evil bubbling up from beneath the very streets. At the time I tried to tell myself that it was nothing more that the Return of Vigo the Carpathian, of the movie gods punishing California for giving all the Oscars to sucky, non-monster containing movies this year. Alas, this last Tuesday I was confronted by, and quite possibly hit upon, by what I now believe to be an actual, honest to goodness, Mole Person. Now, that all the world may hear and heed my warning, I relate the tale of that fateful night.

It was about 10:00 at night, and I was sitting in Waffle House with Amy (also known as That Girl That Ben’s Dating") for my sister and her boyfriend to show up. Suddenly, we were interrupted from our making fun of the waffle menu typos by a being who leant upon the jukebox. He was moderately portly, youngish, and in possession of glasses, which no doubt helped to compensate for the fact that the eternal darkness of his subterrene realm had left his eyes weakened to the glorious light of Chester. Though he had made every attempt to pass himself off as a human, clearly he was not of our world.

"Are you from around here?" quoth he, in a nasal and barely audible whisper, "I need directions to get to Route 95." Now, Route 95 happens to be pretty much next door to Waffle House; to the extent that if you were to run out the front door and take off in any random direction while gibbering like a drunken hyena, you would be more likely than not to end up on this major thoroughfare. Perhaps the openness of our world has disoriented him, or perhaps he merely was on a mission of reconnaissance, that his master might more easily know which roads to blow up in the war to come, whichever it was, he didn’t believe me when I said it was right next door, choosing instead to pretend that he had meant Route 288, which is still pretty much next door.

At this point, things got freaky. "So," he said with a terrible gleam in his eye, "What do you do around here?" I was now officially weirded out, since there are few things in this world that disturb me more than being hit on by a Mole Person spy while in the presence of my girlfriend. Maybe I’m just strange that way, maybe I’m simply old-fashioned, but yeah, I was wiggin’ out. Nonetheless, since my two options at this point were playing along or leaping over the table and heat butting him through the front window, I decided to play it cool. I told him of my job and all the wondrous things I do involving IT, firewood, silly pants, chickens, and kung fu, but he saw through my clever ruse and rightly must have figured out my real plans for global domination. "Gee, you must be very ambitious," said he, "I work for a business that counsels people of how to become millionaires." At this point, I began to think that in addition to being a Mole Person, he might also be a servant of the devil himself, come to tempt me with improbable dreams of fantastic wealth. "Oh, yes" he continued, "one of our people has 17 brazillion dollars now and at least seven Porsches; have you ever met anyone like that?" I replied that, to my knowledge, I had not. Personally, all I’ve ever wanted is a nice screened-in Porsche, but that is neither here nor there. By now his voice had gotten all quiet and intense, and I’m sure the effect would have been terribly dramatic had I been able to hear more than every third word that he said to me, which kind of killed the entire mood which he must have been trying to craft.

Sensing his moment had come, he moved in for the kill, "You know, you two remind me of a lot of the couples I’ve worked with in the past, out to make a future for themselves." At this point someone in the kitchen fired up a grill or something, and I missed just about everything he was telling me. Perhaps he was giving me instructions on how to attain such fabulous wealth, perhaps he was suggesting I take him out to dinner and a movie, maybe he was threatening me with an eternity of underground suffering and torment. I had no idea whatsoever what he was saying though, and my resulting look of coolness and composure clearly caught him off guard. Once more he raised his voice to an audible level, "So, are you two interested?" I myself had no idea what I might be agreeing to here, and as such I turned to Amy, whom he had been standing nearer to through the previous spiel, and gave her what I believed to be a "Gee, I dunno, what do you think, Dear?" sort of look, which alas came off as more of a, "Good Lord, what am I doing here, aaaaaaaaah?!" sort of a look. In any case, after a few tense moments, Amy wisely replied that we were, in fact, not interested, thank you very much, at which point the Mole Man in question, sensing that his quarry had slipped away, quickly left the building.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what on earth happened that night. Clearly he was an agent of Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, sent on some vile quest to corrupt me, steal my money (Americans dollars being of great value to the Mole People, since they foolishly switched to the Euro a few years back), learn what interstates to bomb, or possibly just to completely weird me out. At any rate, I just thought y’all might want to know that I am officially raising the Homeland Mole People Warning Color to Ecru, which means that all Mole People are to be shot in the face on sight. Be careful, they walk among us.

In America today, nation of the automobile that it is, all of you probably drive cars, with the notable exceptions, of course, of my younger readers (teacupmammoths.com is, after all, rapidly overtaking Teletubbies as the number one source of subversive children’s programming) and my Amish readers (to whom the daily contents of my blog are delivered on a roll of vellum via carrier pigeon).  And as all drivers are wont to do, y’all probably worry from time to time about certain of the dangers that are associated with driving, especially those of you who, like myself, are involved in the super mega offroad racing industry.  And indeed, who doesn’t get into a fender bender now and then, or back into a sign in the parking lot, or get chased through a major city by a killer cyborg from the future?  In situations such as these, most of us are probably thinking, “Golly gee, I hope my car doesn’t explode in an enormous theatrical fireball visible for miles in any direction and consuming everything within fifty yards in a seething holocaust of flaming death!”  To you I say, just be thankful that you don’t live in Smallville.

Smallville, best known as the town in which Superman grew up, happens to be the site of many other unusual things, one of which just happens to be what has to be far and away the highest per capita number of exploding cars anywhere in the world.  If exploding cars were fried chickens, Clark Kent would be Colonel Saunders, which would in and of itself make an excellent premise for a comic book, but I digress.  Anyway, go ahead and throw on your asbesto-trousers as well prepare to embark on a magical voyage into the realm of goofy made up pyro-physics.

Okay, like I said way back in paragraph one, most of us have probably either been in or witnessed a car accident at some point, and the fact that we are still all walking around, eating our breakfasts and reading witty and ebullient blogs would tend to suggest that in most cases, the car concerned did not detonate with the force of a Patriot missile.  In Smallville, however, this is not the case, for there even running over a squirrel, small child, or other woodland creature can easily ignite the contents of one’s gas tank.

Now, my real beef here is not so much that cars there seem to blow up with unusual frequency, so much as the fact that when they do, it is with a force altogether beyond that which a car is generally thought capable of.  All I can say is that everyone there must be using the reeeaaaal high octane stuff, because when cars in Smallville blow up, they are generally thrown at least 20 feet into the air, flip over a few times, and then settle to the ground a good distance away as numerous secondary explosions are set off as the fire reaches other flammable automotive contents such as beer cans, laptop batteries, and the warp core.

I know what you’re thinking, there is no way that a car can explode with that much.  Perhaps you believe that I am, so to speak “pulling your leg” or as the writhingly sentient funguous denizens of the 7th Moon of Zaar say as they float indescribably between the loathsome columns of their ancient and unmentionable red-litten cities of onyx beyond the penultimate gate of dreams, “beating you about the nostrils with a languid weasel.”  If only it were so, but alas, it is all too true.  Smallville cars explode with so much force that Osama bin Laden sits around in his cave in his Optimus Prime Underoos eating Cheez Whiz out of the jar watching every episode he can get his hands on in hopes that he may unravel the secret of making cars explode like that.  Indeed, our nation hardly need even maintain a nuclear arsenal at all these days, so long as we keep on hand a ready supply of Smallville cars to drop on the cities of our foes.  Recently scientists in fact have calculated that Hiroshima could have been leveled just as effectively had we dropped a Ford F-150 on it.

If you watch carefully, in some later episodes you shall see that the logos on all the cars are obscured with black tape, which no doubt is a result of the myriad protestations of America’s automakers, who have taken exception to the fact that their cars behave in the least of collisions as if they were made entirely from dynamite and run off a mixture of jet fuel and plutonium.

On the bright side, Superman seems to have a power which was hitherto unknown to us; for he alone is able to guess with complete accuracy whether a given car is going to blow up or not, always running up and rescuing anyone trapped inside just in the very nick of time when detonation is immanent, while taking his time when the car is fated not to combust.  He is so super, that he is never wrong.  Like, never has he gone and pulled someone out of a wreck and run away only to see it continue to just sit there, nor has he ever taken his time pulling Lex Luthor from the remains of a Porsche only to see his nemesis to be consumed by a blazing inferno.  Narf, indeed.

In short, should any among y’all, by clever writing, periodic crossovers, or any of your more common rifts in the space-time continuum, find yourselves in Smallville, I would recommend that you simply get a bike.

            Everyone always goes on about how tough Davy Crockett was because he killed him a bear when he was only three.  Forget that, that kid in Maymont got two bears killed when he was only four; he’s my new bear-slaughtering hero.  Also, though I really suck at math, if the whole formula established by Davy Crockett and Maymont boy holds true for other ages, then I ought to be able to kill 28 bears, while my grandmother should be capable of slaying up to 95 of them, which wouldn’t surprise me, knowing as I do her amazing badassitude.

            Narnia is the best place ever, because if you’re a kid there, Santa gives you weapons for Christmas.

            Remember back when they first invented Cool Ranch Doritos?  Yeah, those were a major breakthrough in Dorito technology back in the day.  And then later on later ranch imbuing epiphanies resulted in the development of Cooler Ranch Doritos, which surpassed all others in their unparalleled coolness.  Alas, I bought some Doritos the other day, and now they’re just back to being Cool Ranch, the er is gone.  You know how they say that America is losing its lead in international science?  I never believed it until now.  Also, they weren’t ever cheaper than they used to be, so I’m getting significantly less coolness for exactly the same price.

            I bet that when Satan plays Diablo, he just runs his little wizard or paladin or whatnot into the first demon he finds and then giggles like a Japanese schoolgirl at an Otacon full of Pikachus.  Which is why he never makes it past level 1 and is always in such a saucy mood.

            I heard the other day about how some guy took his whole family out into the ocean in a three-masted schooner and their ship was sunk by a herd of killer whales.  I don’t came how cute or delicious they are, its high time we realized that, the temporal shenanigans of William Shatner aside, whales are a total menace and we need to kill them all now.  Like killer whales, for example, their very name bespeaks their murderous nature, yet we suffer them to live among us.  I’m just glad they all foolishly evolved away their legs millennia ago, otherwise we’d be seeing even more whale maulings then we already are.

            If you had an owl that was possessed by demons, you’d never know it, because their heads are supposed to turn around like that.

            I want to buy a tanker truck, and put a bunch of radiation warnings on the side of it, and then fill it up with glow stick juice and crash it into a mall.  This will be the inaugural scheme of my brilliant plan to take over the world.  Mwahahahaha.

            I’ll bet that in heaven, everyone has better adventure stories to tell, because you never know which one is going to be the one they die in.

            There are so many coffee places that claim to have the best coffee in the world that nobody believes any of them anymore.  That’s why I’m going to open a diner and advertise the 2^nd best coffee in the world, because no one else ever makes such a claim and everyone will flock to my establishment, drawn by the prospect of penultimate coffee and flagrant modesty (Penultimate Coffee and Flagrant Modesty both making excellent band names, of course).

            I can never be in a movie, because I’d like, ask some girl for her number, and because it was a movie, she’d give me one that started in 555- and then I’d be all outraged that she was trying to fake me out and they’d have to get someone else to play the part of Mr. T’s little brother in A Team, The Motion Picture.

            You know how some people have like, an electric guitar signed by all the original Beatles or Dr. Teeth & Electric Mayhem or the Nixon Administration or something (by the way, The Nixon Administration isn’t actually a real band.  Yet)?  That’s awesome and all, but I want to be different and more random and get an electric guitar signed by all the original authors of the Federalist Papers, because even though their band never really took off, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton did some bitchin’ work when they were practicing out of James Madison’s Mom’s (Sheniqua Madison) garage.

            I was out by the Midlothian Wal-Mart at which I once worked many long and forgotten epochs ago when the world was young and you had to shoo the pterodactyls off of your car when you came out of the house in the morning, and across the road they had a new shopping center called “The Shops at Stonehenge.”   Now, maybe I’m just an old fuddy duddy and my concept of the word “at” is grossly outdated, but if you’re going to advertise your shopping complex as being “at Stonehenge” then it had damn well better at least be in England, which, unless Midlothian goes out father than I thought, is not the case.  Shame on you the Shops at Stonehenge!  Yours is not a henge of stone but rather a henge of lies! (also, A Henge of Lies would make an awesome name for a band).

            Why is it that the Spanish Channel gets Bumblebee Man but the English Channel just gets a tunnel over to France?

You know how if you take the lid off of a lava lamp they have a bottle cap that tells you not to drink the lava?  Guess what, none of its true.  They lava lamp people just don’t want you to drink it because its sooooo good that they want to save it all for themselves and sneak into your house at night and guzzle the substance of your retro lighting accessories.  So if you’ve got one around, you’d better go and snarf it down now just to be sure.  Also, some of them give you super powers.

            If Worf ever opened up a specialty fabric store, he ought to call it “It is a Good Day to Dye”.

            Most people who read that last one didn’t get it, and those few who did wish they hadn’t, because it was the lamest joke ever.

            Most of my myspace friends are, in fact, bands rather than actual people.  Somehow I feel as if this development somehow confers some kind of vicarious coolness upon me.  Alas, none of the aforementioned bands took any naming cues from me, which is probably why nobody outside of myspace has ever heard of any of them.

            I tried some Herbal Essences the other day because the commercials always make it look so utterly transcendent, but all it did was wash and condition my hair whilst also making me smell all fruity.  At no point in the entire process did I feel the urge to cry out with passion, except for when we hot water suddenly cut off, and that wasn’t so much passion as unexpected frozenosity.  So yeah, I think all those people in the commercials are either complete and inveterate freaks, waaay too turned on by smelling like a scented candle store, or maybe they just need to get out more often and discover that there are pleasures in this world compared to which even smelling like a rainforest cannot compare.

            The other day I saw a car called a Mazda Millennias.  No offense Mazda, but if you can’t even properly conjugate the plural of millennium, I’m pretty sure that you haven’t figured out how to build a decent transaxle either.  Unless of course you’re some kind of weird Dustin Hoffmanian transaxle-designing idiot savants who sit around gibbering incoherently in the shadows while coming up with efficient and affordable automobiles.  On the other hand, Occam’s razor says you’re just a bunch of tards.

            If the Muppets did the Diary of Anne Frank, that would be the best thing ever.

            If I’m ever a killer cyborg from the future and I get sent back in time to kill someone, protect someone, or otherwise wreak havoc, and the people who send me are on a budget and just teleport me back into the past naked, I will totally not just walk into the nearest biker bar and pick a fight with someone.  Instead, I’ll just use my awesome cyborg powers to turn a nearby cow into a complete fashion ensemble.  Also, if whoever built me in the future really hates cows, I’ll already be racking up bonus cool points, just in case I mess up at my real mission.  Also, if all else fails, I can just start up Sea Dream Leather again.