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.

I was at Wal-Mart the other day, and whilst there I saw that Wal-Mart now has its own bank.  Now, one might think that such a bank would most fittingly be called Sam’s Choice Savings and Loan or something, but in fact, it’s called Woodforest.  No offense new Wal-Mart bank, but wood is the only flavor in which forests come.  You could have just called it Forest and everyone would have assumed the wood part.  Now, if you called it something like Spatulaforest, that would be kind of cool and I’d understand the whole compound name thing.  So, yeah, no way I’m giving my money to people who don’t even know what forests are made out of; I’m gonna stick with the good old First Bank of Mayonnaise Jar Under My Mattress.

I was at Maymont the other day, and just outside of the pen of the ill-fated bears, I saw these three Matrix-looking government guys, just hanging out and looking all soulless and badass.  At first I though maybe they were just hoping that one of Richmond’s many dialup techno rebels would challenge them to an awesome kung fu battle, but then it occurred to me that them showing up the same week as the bears got killed off was a bit too coincidental.  I’m thinking that the bears didn’t bite anyone after all; they just took the red pill.

Everyone goes on about how awesome the Special Olympics are, but they’re not looking at the big picture here.  I mean, what about all those guys who spend years training and faking drug tests and stuff just to get to the Olympics only to find out that some kid in a wheelchair is more special then they are?  That’s why America didn’t do as well in Turin this time around, all our athletes are suffering from low self esteem.  It’s tough to figure skate when you’re crying on the inside.

I was reading the installation manual for our new security cameras at work, and it had all these pictures of different setups and arrangements you could use with it.  So there’d be like, one picture with a view of a convenience store on it, and another of like, some guy’s family who he apparently was spying on, and a Hampton Inn or something.  But one of the pictures was just of a lionfish.  Now there’s only one person in the world I know of who has an interest in lionfish security, and that’s Captain Picard, who, unless I miss my guess is not a regular Samsung patron.  Shame on you, Samsung, for implying that you handle security on the Enterprise; stop pathetically endeavoring to steal Worf’s flava.

Why is it that evil robots made out of liquid metal always just make their arms into pointy things and stab people, it’s way too cliché these days?  If I’m ever made of liquid metal and have to smite someone, I’m gonna mix it up a little and morph my arms into weed whackers or kittens or something, so that the last thing my victims see isn’t me being unoriginal.  Also, if I ever kidnap anyone, I’m just staying good and clear of iron foundries, cause those things are way too dangerous.  That’s why Pittsburgh has like, the lowest liquid metal robot from the future-related fatality rate in all of America, in case you were wondering.

If you were at the public pool and while you were under water you decided to practice your whale calls, I bet that any marine biologists who were also swimming there would be briefly excited before realizing the horrible non-whale containing truth.

I’m the worst person ever, because the other day I saw an article about National No Name Calling Week and the first thing that passed through my mind was, “Whoa, what kind of retard came up with that idea?”

I think more people would read the newspaper if they started using more internet-friendly writing conventions.  Like, at the end of World War II, instead of being all like, “Victory in the Pacific!” they should have just put up a big picture of the bomb and made the headline, “Pwned!”  If I ever get thrown back in time and start up a major media outlet, I’m gonna do that.  That and learn the Charleston.  And maybe crush all those who have the temerity to oppose me and then rule them with a fist of iron.  And then get a funnel cake.

            The Olympics, let us face it, are really not all that fascinating.  Maybe it’s because they started like, the week after the Superbowl, or maybe it’s because totally awesome car chases on ice didn’t make the cut this time around while curling gets yet another chance to emboreden the airwaves of the world; whatever the reason, this Winter America needs something better to hold its interest.  Interestingly enough, there are one or two new sports recently making a big splash on the political arena (that, by the way, was of course not a Teddy Kennedy reference), shooting people in the face, and choosing new Supreme Court Justices.  And since I already covered the whole matter of Vice Presidential Postality last week, this time we’re gonna consider the matter of who ought to be nominated to the highest robe-wearing gathering in the land.

            Now, perhaps you think that having already done this whole justice-go-round thing twice in the last year that there’s not liable to be any need to choose yet another in the coming months.  To you I say phaw, tsk tsk, pish tosh, and other British grandmotherly saying that MS Word refuses to recognize as real actual words.  It is the case, you see, that the average age of the Supreme Court is 578, which means that, statistically speaking, odds are that any one of them might be “moving to Florida” at any time (and my “moving to Florida” I mean being vanquished by a series of hurricanes before feeding Elian Gonzalez to a lion).

            Which brings us to the real issue at hand here; who should the President nominate when the time inevitably has arriven?  Some will surely say that he ought to choose a woman, to foster a greater understanding on the courts of women’s issues.  Others will maintain that a member of a minority group (such as Lutheran monkey wranglers or Rhode Island) would add much-needed balance to the presently honky-infested court.  Normally I would agree, but the truth is that far and away the best candidate out there is not only totally a dude (fondness for Broadway musicals notwithstanding) but also an inveterate slice of Wonder Bread.  In other words, me.

            Yes America, I blog before you today to throw my name into the metaphorical hat worn by such great justices as William Howard “Tubs” Taft, Oliver “Yo Mamma So Fat” Holmes, and Felix “Actual Name Already Adequately Amusing” Frankfurter.  Some may say that I lack the legal credentials necessary to arbitrate the great debates of this nation of ours, but happily enough, all you have to do to get on the court is convince the Senate to affirm your awesomeness. 

            This is not so difficult as it might appear at first, because many senators are only too aware of the fact that the last two justice hearings have been so legendarily boring that pogs have once again overtaken the network news in the polls.  Therefore, in order to spice things up and pathetically attempt to prove themselves certifiably hip (or “crunk” as they say in Canada) while actually playing right into my diabolical hands, I shall simply challenge them to a dance-off, at which all who dare to oppose my mad quest for power will find themselves epically served by my kung fulicious 80s dance skillz (which are so kung fulicious that I am actually required by international law to use a Z when describing them).  Also, I’ll promise to put root beer in all the Capitol water fountains and train enough monkey butlers for all of Congress.

            Why, you may ask, do I want to do such a thing in the first place?  For the power? From some sense of civic duty to my nation?  Because I want to find out for myself whether what they say about all the justices using their power rings to summon Captain Planet is really true?  Actually, I just want a job where I get to sit at a big table, they can never fire me no matter what, and where I can wear anything I want to work.  Anything (and by Anything, I mean hammerpants and battle armor).

            So, write to your Senator today and urge them to keep calling the White House at 3 in the morning every day until George Bush nominates me!  And if they don’t, call Dick Cheney and tell him they want to go quail hunting with him.

            I read an article in the paper the other day about how pirates had attacked some French ship and made off with a vast assortment of cheeses and unjustified snootiness, which is funny enough all by itself, but the best part was when they were interviewing some French minister of pirate relations who said, and thus I quote, “We reckon it was pirates.”

            I’m really tired of restaurants that just throw a bunch of old junk on the walls and act like it somehow constitutes a coherent interior eatery decorational paradigm.  In an effort to be different, therefore, and needlessly rock the boat, I want to build a restaurant where I travel many years into the future and bring back a bunch of future junk, which I will then use to adorn my festive little bistro.  Then, many years alter when the future actually gets here and my restaurant is no longer  a window into the world of tomorrow, I’ll just sell it to Applebee’s and start a new one next door with an assortment of fresh geegaws of the 22^nd century.

            I wish I had an identical twin, because then I wouldn’t tell anyone about him, and I’d go and be all like, talking to some friends and stuff, and I’d conclude with some witty epigram or pithy observation and then walk off.  Then, my identical twin would come running up from a completely different direction wearing like, a plastic suit and some goggles and be all like, “Have any of you seen Ben?  I have to tell him about something absolutely horrible stuff that he needs to avert in the future!”

            In a similar vein, up along Route 33, there’s a place called Twin Cedars Farm.  Every time I drove by it, I want to build a time machine, go back thirty years and run over one of them, the return to the present and see whether it’s called Lone Cedar Farm.  Unless of course they were really only metaphorical cedars to begin with, which would be totally lame, because if you can’t even grow any literal cedars, you’ve got no business calling yourself a farm.

            If you’re taking a girl out to a movie on your first date and are endeavoring to select an appropriate mix of songs for the occasion, you probably ought not include Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, lest she think it portentous of things to come.  And by “things to come” I mean going on a wacky musical rampage of slaughter.  Unless of course she’s an emo.  Far from fearing death, they actually love it.  Death is their tapioca.

            National Geographic did a cover story on Africa, with the tagline, “Whatever you thought, think again.”  Which probably works great if you happen to believe ridiculous things about Africa, like that they produce over 78% of the world’s tartar sauce there, or that lions are in fact merely composed of a crunchy liony shell and filled with marshmallowy goodness, or other such silly and probably untrue notions of which you ought be disabused.  But what about those of us whose thoughts concerning Africa are instead remarkable only because of their generally insightful nature?  For us, National Geographic implies that we have only been lying to ourselves.  So, you thought that the Pyramids are in fact not the discotheques of the gods?  And you were positive that “Kenya” was by no means an anagram for “Delicious Hummingbird Spectacles”?  Well think again, foo!  Sorry National Geographic, this means war.

            You know how old guys always buy Crown Victorias and paint them white with a bunch of antennae and stuff in an attempt to make everyone think they’re cops and thusly create unnecessary traffic snarls (as opposed, one can only imagine, to all those absolutely indispensable traffic snarls which further the welfare of all mankind)?  I hate those guys with a passion that I usually reserve for Ben Affleck and Hitler, so I have hatched an ingenious plan to look silly.  I want to buy a Crown Victoria and instead paint it like, fifty different wacky non-authoritarian colors so that I’m like, the Technicolor Dream Cop or something, and only hippies and the tragically colorblind will be put in fear of my coppitude.

            Weddings, as a general rule, are happy occasions, but the invitations to them are almost invariably lame and boring, “Myron and Tabitha cordially invite you to attend blobbity blobbity blah…”  Instead, I think wedding invitations ought to be more along the lines of monster truck rally advertisements, “See Ysythrog jump over 7 flaming school buses!  Watch as Brianrietta battles Truckasaurus!  First three hundred guest get a giant foam novelty hand!  Remember, you pay for the whole seat, but you’ll only use – The Edge!”  I think marriages would probably last longer.

            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.