While many of you have no doubt been recently going about your daily lives and epic battle scenes, footloose and fancy free as a metric ton of kittens in a skating rink, I, as always, have been scouring the net for threats to humanity.  Normally, this is awesome, but unfortunately, the other day I finally found one.  Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and unlike that guy from REM who looks like Captain Picard’s little brother, I don’t feel fine.  What fresh horror has been unleashed upon the world, and from whence doth it come, you may well ask?  Well, not surprisingly, it comes from Hollywood, and as to its actual horribulosity, I think it’s best if I begin at the beginning.  So, if you want to have a few last moments of happiness delighting in the joys of this world before I taint them all forevermore with the knowledge of a truth to hideous to comprehend, why not take a moment and go do that?  And then get good and drunk and come back here.

            Okay, said all your goodbyes to the idea that mankind is anything other than doomed?  Okely-dokely.  Well, you may know that the idea is presently being kicked around Hollywood to make a new Star Trek movie, which would be, under most circumstances, uber peachy keen.  This movie, however, is meant to take place back in the day, when Kirk and Spock were still at the academy, doing intergalactic panty raids and putting a Rigelian Beefalo in Dean Fugleman’s office, after which hilarity will inevitably ensue.  And were this the end of the story, all would be beer and skittles indeed; but alas, I have learned from sources too dark and wlatsome to mention here, whom they intend to cast as Young Captain Kirk.  Perhaps if John Belushi were still alive, it would have been different, but the fact is that the role appears destined to go to – it’s still not too late to avert your eyes – Ben Affleck.  Now, I have already made it abundantly clear how much I hate Ben Affleck in all his vile incarnations in this space before, but having him play Shatner is the ultimate atrocity against coolness.  Indeed, it is as if all the very universe itself was suddenly bestirred to give forth a mighty narf, which shook the very foundations of the Earth with its absolute retardedness.  Why did they do this?  Even the very wisest cannot say, but really, by this point we’re well beyond asking about the whytos and the wherefores and must rather work on a solution.  Seriously, this is like having Hitler play the title role in The Diary of Anne Frank, except for the fact that that would actually be hilarious, so let me try a different way to convey my deep and abiding loathing for Ben Affleck.  You know how everyone hates Osama bin Laden?  Well imagine that way back in the day, before he ever became famous, your parents named you something like Osama bin Laden Davidson.  Not only would you hate Osama for all the stuff he ever did, like the time he dipped your sister’s ponytail in the inkwell at school, or the time he rolled your grandmother’s yurt, but the very fact that he had sullied your fair name would make you hate him all the more.  That’s how I feel about Ben Affleck.

            Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave, which technically speaking, is in space; he did not fly a bomber against the Nazis just so that future generations of Americans could throw his hard won victory away by having Ben Affleck play Captain Kirk.  And need I even mention that if Ben Affleck gets this role, then we can be all but certain that Spock is going to be played by Matt Damon.  I cannot emphasize enough how bad this could be for future interplanetary relations.  I mean, the Vulcan’s are going to contact our planet in the year 2063, if they see that we’ve decided to portray one of their greatest people as Matt Damon, then in spite of their logical nature, they’ll be madder than Mohammed at a political cartoon convention, and zark out.  Now, it may be the case that zarking out may lead to the eventual destruction of Hollywood, which would be kind of nice, but still, the line must be drawn here.

            Fortunately, a solution has presented itself to me.  What we must do is convince William Shatner and the rest of the original cast of Star Trek to form a fellowship dedicated to the destruction of Ben Affleck.  They must lead him deep into the Mines od Moria, where he will reveal himself to be the ancient creature of fire and shadow we suspected he was all along.  Then, Shatner will do battle with him on the Bridge of Khazadum, before they both fall into a totally deep hole and Shatner eventually slays Ben Affleck and smites his ruin upon the mountain side.  A nice added benefit of this will be that Shatner will now become Shatner the White, and when he meets Chekov, Sulu, and Treebeard later on in Fangorn Forest, everything will be awesome again.

            Some day, I want to invite Keanu Reeves over for dinner.  I will serve soup, and furnish him with nothing but a fork to eat it with.  Then, when he asks for a more appropriate utensil with which to dine, I shall reply, “There is no spoon.”  And collapse into paroxysms of laughter.  Then he’ll probably kung fu punch me or something, because, you know, he’s the chosen one.

            I hate those books with nothing in them but sadistic questions, like “Would you rather get set on fire, or fed to a puma?” or, “Would you switch to the metric system if it meant finding a cure for cancer?”  I’ve already got enough decisions to make without stupid hypothetical ones too.  So I want to do a book of easy questions, like, “Would you eat a delicious roast beef sandwich in order to save a kitten?” or, “Would you rather take a nap or get punched in the face by Mr. T?”

            When you ask people what the one book is that they’d take along with them were they to be stranded on a desert island, most of them say things like, The Bible, or Lord of the Rings, or TV Guide.  But that’s ridiculous; because the book you ought to choose is something like, Myron G. Smackleton’s Compleat Guide to Raft-Building and Navigation for the Novice.  Then when you get back home despite losing your volleyball and most of your sanity, you can catch back up on the great works of Western Civilization.

            If I was writing a book on crazy facts and stuff about the language of the elves, I think I’d call it, “Quenya Believe It?”

            While we were down at the beach, Amy, who hath excellent taste in such matters, got me a P.G. Wodehouse book, which, by the way, is thus far an excellent read.  The thing is, she wrote a little “I hope you enjoy this as much as I did” dedication to me on the front page.  The only book I’ve gotten her yet though, is “At The Mountains of Madness” which is a bit more of a horror story than P.G. Wodehouse.  How do you dedicate a horror novel to someone anyway?  “I sincerely hope none of the stuff in here ever happens to you.  Toodles, Ben.”  It just doesn’t work, even if you dot the I’s with little hearts.

            You know how when they do a stage special for a comedian or other such personage of professional amusement, they always have the camera follow him all the way out from the green room to the stage, which invariably takes, like, just long enough to do all the credits.  Well, what if Billy from Family Circus ever did one of those?  It’d take like, the entire show just to get him out on stage, because he’d be all climbing under Old Man Weaselton’s lawn mower and through electrical conduits and across the cooling pond at the treatment plant.

            Speaking of which, I bet if you took that kid and just put him somewhere where he had to go in a straight line, like at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or something, his head would just explode.

            In the gift shop at work, we sell rabbits’ feet.  The problem with this is that every single person who comes in and sees them makes the infinitely witty remark, “I guess they didn’t bring much luck to the rabbit!”  I swear, when I rule the world and the Culling of the Tards begins, they shall be the first to go.

            Also, people who dress their babies up like fruit.  Seriously, someday future generations are gonna look back on that like we do on slavery and the Partridge Family, and future historians will have to convince people that times were different back then and we didn’t know any better.

            I want to take a math class, and then when we get some homework with a lot of division in it, I’m not even gonna touch it.  Then the next day when my professor sees it, he’ll ask me, “Ben, where is your division?”  Then, I’ll finally get to fulfill my dream of quoting General Pickett in the classroom and reply, “Suh, I have no division.”  Then I’ll be expelled, but it’ll be worth it.

            Isn’t it convenient how all the artificial sweeteners in the world just happen to come in different colors?  How serendipitous that Sweet N’ Low, NutraSweet, Splenda, and Generic Cancer-Inducing Petrochemical Derived Beverage Additive all just naturally decided not to get up in each others’ respective grills by fighting over say, pink.  I however, want to throw a metaphorical monkey wrench into this happy little arrangement by coming up with a new sweetener and making the packages in randomly selected primary pastels, thus throwing the world into total chaos.

            So, as all of you already undoubtedly know, the Spanish government has decided to grant human rights and citizenship to apes, based on the fact that they share a great deal of DNA with us, they’re cuter than most of us, their poop-throwing skillz are vastly superior to those of most Spaniards nowadays, and of course the fact that once they count as citizens, the Spanish government will be able to take up to 70% of their bananas and tire swings in annual taxes.  Some may say that this is a bad idea because apes aren’t really intelligent (though if intelligence became a requirement for citizenship, we would probably see our list of registered voters drastically shortened, to say nothing of pretty much cleaning out congress), other say that if we allow apes citizenship, then it will be merely a matter of time before the Spanish government starts granting human rights to other lower life forms, such as turnips, stoats, and boy bands.  And some just think the whole thing is retarded.  The truth, however, is that far beyond merely being an exercise in doofusulosity, this could be the beginning of the end for humanity. 

            For you see, the three sorts of apes the Spanish plan of granting full equality are chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, the very same three species that took over the world in Planet of the Apes, (The good one, not the new one with Marky Mark and the Monkey Bunch).  Indeed, no sooner shall the Spanish have ratified this new law, than apes from all over the world shall leave their homelands and immigrate to Spain, where they will quickly form a large and fanatical voting bloc, quickly overwhelming the native population and establish a new ape government.

            But it won’t stop there, because as we all know, apes, like Osama bin Laden and the Olsen twins are not merely content to rule over their separate empires of eternal darkness, performing catchy musicals and kicking babies, but inevitably turn their boundless ire to the one object in the universe which they hate above all others: The Statue of Liberty.  Yes, the first thing that the apes may be relied upon to do as soon as they take control of the EU will be to attack America, land of freedom that it is.

            Perhaps you doubt that apes hate us that much.  Remember how at the end of Planet of the Apes Charleston Heston was all walking along the beach and found that it was Earth all along?  He thought it was at least like, a thousand years in the future, but alas, all that had transpired had really taken like, two weeks.  The ape rebellion has begun, and if we hope to preserve the Statue of Liberty for future generations of Americans, that they too may be protected by it from the vile machinations of Vigo the Carpathian, we must act without delay.

            My plan, audacious though it may sound, is, I believe, the best chance we have to stop this madness with a relatively modest, yet totally awesome, amount of gratuitous violence.  I propose that we hire the two greatest ape fighters that America has to offer, Charleton Heston himself, veteran bane of the apes that he is, and Dick Cheney, whose army of robo-baboons and unparalleled shooting people in the face abilities make him nigh unstoppable as well.  These two must immediately disguise themselves as 19^th century opera divas and work their way to Spain on a tramp steamer.  Once there, they’ll lure all the apes out of hiding and into the open by building a humorously large fiberglass banana and hanging it from a helicopter, which they will then fly out over the Strait of Gibraltar, which Charleton Heston will have caused to turn into dry land, thanks to his divine mastery over the elements.  Once the army of apes runs out after the aforementioned banana, Charleton Heston need merely withdraw his providential hand, at which point the ape army shall be drowned and, just for good measure, shot in the face by Dick Cheney, who has at last mastered the art of the Hadoken.  After this, universal peace and harmony will soon follow, as the stars of the heavens come into perfect alignment and all the nations of the world at last agree that football is actually that sort where you where a helmet and score touchdowns, while the one with a black and white ball and really low scoring shall hereafter be known as “curling”.  Gummi bears shall rain from the sky and everyone who won an Oscar this part year will be eaten by trolls.

            When I was little, and I saw that episode of Next Generation where Picard gets borgled, I always wondered why he kept saying “I am so cute as a borg.”  I mean, obviously he was, he didn’t need to keep pointing it out, like Riker was going to be all like, “Darn right you’re so cute as a borg, girlfriend!”

            I was at the bank, and they had a sign which read, “It’s always a good thing to save for a goal!” But what if your goal is something evil, like committing genocide, or buying a bunch of Partridge Family records?  Good job First Market, way to encourage financing for evil.

            I saw a Mercedes the other day, the plate of which said MB OF R3.  Mere words cannot express how relieved I am to know that not only have The Monkey Butlers of Richard the Third come back to Richmond, but they’re apparently traveling in style.

            You know how they have fat camp for the portly youth of today, where they go and earn like, I dunno, fat merit badges, and study fat lore, and fat basket making?  They need a camp like that for kids with ADD and call it concentration camp.  And they’ll learn all sorts of good study skills and like, ways to help them pay attention in class and stuff.  Also, it’d be fun to tell kids who were acting up, “Timmy, if you don’t stop fidgeting this very moment I’m going to send you to concentration camp!”  That would wunderbar.

            There’s apparently a coastal plant called Diablo Buckwheat.  Nothing I can add to that could possibly make it any funnier than it is already.

            I saw a boat being towed down 95 the other day called “Bound for Pleasure.”  There’s just something wrong with society these days when someone can go and take their freakily-named S&M boat down a public interstate like that without some decent-minded citizen setting them on fire, though they’d probably enjoy it anyway.  Freaks.

            There’s a barber shop in the mall called Mr. Nick’s.  You know, if you’re going to be shaving people, maybe your name oughtn’t be Mr. Nick.  At least Abercrombie & Fitch had the good sense to change their name from Mr. Make You Look Like a Three Dollar Ho, take a page from their book, Mr. Nick.

            Barnes & Noble had a book called, “The Book of the Dead.”  So I got all excited, because I love the Dead.  I opened it up though, and it was just full of pictures of mummies and skulls and Bob Dole and stuff, no Jerry Garcia anywhere.  I was severiously disappointed, to say the least.

            They say if you buy an animal and plan on killing/eating it, you shouldn’t name it first.  That can cut both ways though.  Sure, your kids’ll hate you if you get an axe and go out into the backyard to kill Mr. Buttons, but say you got say, a sheep and named it after something unspeakably evil, that’d only make it easier to kill it.  “Where’s my gun woman, I’m a going out in the yard to shoot Paris Hilton!” “But Cletus, you only bought her yesterday!”  “I said, ‘where’s my gun?’”

            The other day I saw Saruman out hiking on the trails at Henricus.  That’s great and all, I just hope he’s not breeding orcs with goblin men back there; we’ve already got enough of that going on down at the boat landing.

            If Ted Danson ever learns how to read and decides to write an autobiography, it had better be called, “Danson in the Moonlight.”

            There’s a restaurant in Carytown, and their sign says, among other things, “We’ve got a Patio!”  Like, in quotes, just like that, which strikes me as really weird, assuming it’s just a regular patio.  I mean, quotes are for saying stuff like, “Our priority is quality!”  or, “Putting the pug in pugilism!”  So unless it’s like, the metaphorical patio of good customer service, I think it’s time someone taught them a lesson.  In grammar.

            It is a generally accepted fact that as role models go, Barbie leaves a lot to be desired, insofar as presenting girls with positive and empowering notions of what women are capable of in this world.  It is similarly acknowledged by all the cool kids of the sociology scene that He-Man, as a general rule, is not a cartoon particularly noted for instilling in its viewers the qualities which make one a well-rounded and badass global citizen.  But, how often does anyone ever take the time to compare the two, each on its own terms, in the view of determining which is in fact doing a better of job raising our children whilst we’re all off playing quoits and drinking absinthe?  Fear not, ye funky readers, for today, I shall do just that, the better that a few loathesome and wlatsome myths may be laid to rest like Zombie Chester A. Arthur.

            First, let’s take a look at their respective family situations.  Barbie has no parents, has been dating Ken (who, it just so happens, is a eunuch) for approximately a brazillion years, and other than occasionally taking the time to be a sterling example of sluttiness for Skipper, is the very epitome of everything that most parents (except for Scientologists, of course) want their little girl to be.  He-Man, on the other hand, is constantly looking out for his parents, King Randor and Queen Whatshername.  He’s put of college and further career plans just so that he can stay home and look after the family business (in this case, fighting Skeletor and growing soybeans).  And how many brothers would drop everything and travel to a completely different and unicorn-infested dimension just to help your sister fight a pig man?  He-Man would (and, as my sister would surely tell you, so would I).

            Now onto the matter of accepting those who are different from yourself.  Barbie has like, a hundred and fifty friends, all of whom look exactly like her.  Barbie doesn’t make friends with fat chicks, or people with less than ideal complexions, nor with anybody whose feet are anatomically constructed for anything other than high heels, nor black people.  And of course, the doors in the Barbie dream house are all too narrow for Barbie’s one handicapped pity friend to fit her wheelchair through (which also explains why we’re all still waiting for that Barbie/Professor X crossover).  He-Man on the other hand, hangs out with nobody except for freaks.  Just about everybody in his posse save for his immediate family and girlfriend has something blatantly non-standard about their physiognomy.  In fact, it can be pretty much completely assumed that if you’re one of He-Man’s homies, then you’ve got like, a giant battle hand that makes you fall over, or maybe you have a mechanical neck that lets you, you know, look over stuff, or maybe you’re just a giant bee.  Whatever the case, He-Man loves you anyway, and not even in that condescendingly patronizing affirmative action way that so many superheroes do.  None of this, “Let’s all listen to the unique cultural insights of Man-E-Faces concerning the phenomenon of lookism in our society before I punch this robot in the face” nonsense.  Nope, aside from valuing the talents of all his compatriots, He-Man never goes and makes them feel all different and freaky, despite their flaming level of freakitude.

            And how about economics?  Barbie seems to never have a steady job, despite having tried her hand at everything from being an astronaut to a 15^th century tavern wench to Nelson Mandela.  Yet she lives a lavish lifestyle in a giant pink house with three walls, drives numerous sports cars, and dines exclusively on endangered species and 3^rd world orphans.  He-Man on the other hand is still living at home to help save up more money for graphic design grad school.  Not only that, but home is Castle Greyskull, which, though no doubt the absolute favorite spot with all his dawgs, is not exactly the kind of romantical bungalow that he needs to win Teela over.  Even so, it’s paid for, and He-Man is a fellow who lives within his means.  Unlike Barbie, he works two jobs, one as the Prince of Eternia, and one as a beefy guy with a tan who likes to punch things.  Also, he occasionally moonlights at Heavenly Ham during the Christmas season.  And he’s a devout Methodist.

            So the choice, she’s a’clear, if you let your kids play with Barbie they’ll soon end up as racist, elitist, unemployed, skankaholic, exhibitionists, while if you introduce them to the wonderful and diverse world of He-Man, they’ll soon learnt he value of getting along with those different than themselves, living on a budget, wearing furry briefs, saving the world, and filial piety.  I rest my case.

            First off, allow me to apologize for being somewhat completely not here this past week.  I was a-vacationing, and it was most righteous.

            It must really suck to be Spider Man, not because you’re poor and all your friends end up turning into supervillians, but because the only way you know it’s time to swing into action is when you hear a police siren.  Which may be all well and good when it’s the cops chasing down some hood who stole Uncle Ben’s land yacht, but I bet Spider Man gets so many false alarms where like, he and Mary Jane’ll be having some nice romantic dinner they’ve been planning all week, and then he hears a siren and leaps out the window and all, only to discover that it was just a guy getting pulled over for a having a taillight out.  And let’s face it, after that, it’s just gotta be tough to recover that lovin’ feelin’.

            Whilst I was at the beach and in a coffee shop (with the ever charming Amy, no less) we espied a fancy-shmancy chocolate bar under the brand name of Dagoba.  Man, I cannot tell you how relieved I am to know that Yoda in not only alive and well, but has started an esoteric chocolate bar company from his wretched swamp planet.  I guess that mess that Luke’s X-Wing sank into was really just a morass of nougat and ground up heath bars after all.  I now shall turn my energies back to eagerly awaiting the day when Chewbacca finally gets his cosmetics company off the ground.

            You know how people always have those stickers in their windows of Calvin peeing on various things like say, losers, or Osama bin Laden, or Chevrolets in General?  That’s great and all, but aren’t there so many other things in the world that Calvin might better devote his time to the taking of whizzes upon?  Like how about if Calvin decided to take a leak on world hunger for a change?  And when was the last time you saw Calvin peeing on racism?  And don’t tell me that you’ve never thought about unfair it is that Calvin never pees on say, the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

            Don’t you hate it when you’re getting on a plane or getting ready to pilot your giant anime robot against one of the vile robeasts of King Zarkon and the guy who’s selling you the ticket is like, “Have a nice flight/totally awesome robeast battle!” and then you’re like, “You too!” but then you realize that in fact, he is not about to fly/battle any abominations and you feel all silly.  Fear no more though, because all you have to do to recover is fake that you were about to say something about the band of the same name as your previous accidental statement.  So instead of saying, “You too…um, in case you ever happen to fly to Mongolia or battle Hnothrag the Defiler.”  You can just say, “You too, is a totally awesome band; I enjoyed their musical stylings on “Stuck in a Moment” particularly.”  Then, not only do you not sound retarded, but they’ll appreciate your fine knack for musical criticism. 

            Does anyone actually call McDonald’s “Mickey D’s” aside from the oleaginous buffoons in their commercial?  Seriously, is that like, what passes for cool in say, Oregon or something and I simply haven’t heard about it yet?  I hope not, because if it is, then Oregon, I’m afraid that one of your oxen has indeed died, and by “one of your oxen has died” I mean “You’re the most benightedly uncool state ever.”  And don’t even ask me to explain what I mean by “Little Timmy has Cholera” because you don’t even want to know.

            Is Vigo Mortensen really related to Vigo the Carpathian?  I hope so, because then they can finally do that sitcom together that I’ve been having fevered and phantastic dreams about in the red-litten arboreal shadows of restless and aeon-forgotten Yuggoth.  You know, they could be like, caterers or ninjas or something, and their other roommate would be an escaped government cyborg.  Oh, and they’d be raising a small child.  That would rule.

            I tend to fall a bit behind on my newspapers, what with my endless battle against the forces of darkness and work and all, so when I picked up Monday’s paper today and read the news: “Celebrate Orlando Jones!” I knew I was already too late.  I hadn’t sent Happy Orlando Jones cards to any of my friends, I hadn’t made it out to the lot to buy my Orlando Tree, my Orlando Menorah was still packed away somewhere in the darker and more raccoon-infested regions of my attic, and clearly the time had already passed for me to leave out a 50 gallon drum of pickle relish by the microwave in hopes that Orlando Jones would bless my humble offering and fill my wooden shoes with pistachio pudding and good fortune for the new year.  For sooth, I had not even remembered to bedeck my bowling ball (Florence) with Snickerdoodles and beef jerky, set it on fire, and roll it down the mightiest hillock in the city to appease and honor the vengeful spirits of my ancestors, as my Viking forbears were wont to do upon this silliest of days.  In short, I had altogether failed to celebrate Orlando Jones.

            Some of you may chuckle to hear of it, and truly it is the case that Orlando Jones is not a holiday widely celebrated amongst the people of my tribe, and to through all of it thoroughly, I’d have to get way more into the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin, and the A-Team than I have space for here (though I do have space to point out that John Calvin and the A-Team would make a most Orlandoriffic name for a band).  Let’s just say then, that ever has my home been a veritable stronghold of Orlando Jonesian good cheer and wassailing during this more blessed at least than Arbor Day season.  Alas, thanks to all the greeting card companies focusing on such made up secular holidays as Ramadan, the birthday of Martin Van Buren, and Spocktoberfest (which has been so far removed from it’s once great religious import that all anyone nowadays does is use it as yet another excuse to put on pointy ears and burn William Shatner in effigy, delightful a pastime as it may be).

            The origins of Orlando Jones are shrouded in mystery, though recent archeological studies have unearthed evidence that it was the ancient Sumerians who first began to worship Orlando Jones as the bringer of Daylight Savings Time.  This of course was a recent development back then, and as it allowed them all a chance to mow their lawns and slay additional Hittites on the way home from the office, they honored the day greatly indeed, and it is with good reason that Sumerian sites so often are replete with small jade idols of Orlando Jones riding a lawn mower, with a scimitar in one hand, a brief case in the other, a funky demon skull thingie in his penultimate hand, and a flaming bowling ball in his fourth, while wearing a necklace of pistachios and mowing down a general mixture of ferrets and other infidels.

            From thence the celebration of the day passed on to the ancient Babylonians, who would frequently inter their greatest of leaders with great bronze vats of pickle relish to buy entrance into the Elysian halls of the Underworld where great Orlando Jones rules benevolently from an ebon throne of legumes.

            Indeed, though some might call it a coincidence, it is altogether a meaningful thing that the Titanic set sail on Orlando Jones, but having failed, in a fit of modern hubris, to observe the proper rituals to Orlando Jones, great god of the seas that he is, many believe that it was he who smote the vessel with the twin plagues of an iceberg and Leonardo Dicaprio.  In fact, sailors have long venerated Orlando Jones, their cry of “Land, Ho!” having nothing to do with the espying of dry ground, but merely being a nautical corruption of the original cry, “Orlando!”

            So, even if you are among those benighted legions who have never celebrated Orlando Jones before, fear not, and neither despair that his day is passed for the present year.  But rather, make an effort to celebrate Orlando Jones every day, both in your heart and life, and in the way you dwell amongst your fellow men.  So happy belated Orlando Jones, everybody, and may all your shoes be ever filled with pistachio pudding!

            I love songs in Japanese, Latin and all the other various and assorted languages which I don’t speak, because that way even if they’re about Greenhouse or the Hitler Effect, it doesn’t have to get in the way of my musical buzz (though Greenhouse and the Hitler Effect would be an awesome name for a band in any language, especially German, because they have like, fifteen different words for Hitler, kind of like Eskimos do for snow).  Anyway, the problem is that my brain is always defying my attempts to bask in my own linguistical ignorance, and keeps trying to make the lyrics into English.  Seriously, Brain, you need a better hobby than that.  What did you end up doing with that Sudoku book I got you last Christmas anyway?  Pawned it for wine, women and song, no doubt.

            I want to get one of those “Republicans for Voldemort” bumper stickers, and then also get one of those “Dick Cheney 4 Evah” ones too.  Then everyone on the road will know of my boundless evil and hatred for all things living.  Mwahahahaha.

            Flies have to be the most uncreatively named insect ever.  Maybe we should make the most of that though, and do with them the same thing they always do with boringly named dorms at colleges – grant naming rights to the richest person who can both write them a large check and who happens to have such a tragically unfortunate name that nothing ought ever be named after them.  That way, instead of ever needing a fly swatter again, you can just reach for the Eugene P. Snothammer Memorial Filth Carrying Insect and Reading Room swatter, which would at least be interesting, if lame.

            I saw an ad in the hardware store the other day for, and thus I quote, “Toilets to Go”.  I’m a little confused here; I thought all toilets were for going.  If you don’t have to go, you don’t need to buy a toilet in the first place; they’re not so architecturally interesting that even if you’re a robot or photosynthetic or something that you want one in your vestibule just as a conversation piece.

            Pity Goofy.  Every other Disney character has a girlfriend, Donald has Daisy, Mickey has Minnie, even Uncle Scrooge can probably afford hookers on a regular basis.  But not Goofy, he’s forever the smelly kid with bad acne wearing a pirate shirt tux and holding up the wall at senior prom.  Going by naming conventions though, if he did have a woman, her name would probably have to be something like Geefy.  But nooooo, Walt Disney decided that Goofy must never breed.  I’m thinking he might want to take a crack at computer dating, I’ve heard that works for some people.

            Why do people even bother buying “No Dumping” signs?  Aren’t most places in America already not particularly dump-friendly?  Just once I’d like to drive by a ravine full of refrigerators and broken time machines and see a big sign that says “Dump Away, Merrill, Dump Away!”  Oh well, maybe they’re just there so I can steal them and hang one over my Toilet to Go.

            My parents bought themselves some new water bottles in the recent past, and according to the lids, they were manufactured by a company calling itself “Mi-go”  Unfortunately, this already happens to be the name of a race of half-funguous crustacean aliens that dwell in the frozen darkness of the distant planet Yuggoth.  So either those water bottles came with a hefty import fee, or some guy making water bottles in Iowa is about to get a call from an extraterrestrial lawyer (which is not, by any means, to imply that most lawyers are terrestrial in origin either).

            Yesterday, I saw a guy whose license plate said BIG FRO, so I got al excited and sped up that I might witness his fro of unusual size.  Alas, his cranium turned out to be adorned with a fro of merely modest gigantitude.  Now, I know that “Fro of Moderate Size” wouldn’t exactly fit on a license plate, but limited space is no excuse for lying, otherwise I never would have given up my “HAM LORD” plate, since in truth, I am merely a baronet of ham (also, the Baronets of Ham would be a most excellently non-kosher name for a band).

            If I ever own a nuclear power plant and on some sunny summer day I decide to close up early and hit the river, I hope I have the presence of mind to put up a sign that says “Gone Fission”.

            I’ve never understood why it’s called the Sylvan Learning Center when it isn’t even anywhere near a forest.  It really out to be called the mall-infested section of Huguenot Road Learning Center, but alas, the people who built it were either ignorant of that true meaning of the word “sylvan” or what is worse, they willfully chose to foist of a wretched pack of lies on the good people of Richmond.  I mean, I could understand if someone had just built the Sylvan Muffler Repair shop, or the Sylvan Industrial Waste and Hammerpants Reclamation Facility, but one expects more of a learning center.  Unless of course it’s just really old and was built back when Lord Elrond was still teaching study skillz in Midlothian, back in the 80s.

            The other day I was at the hardware store and saw, much to my delight, that they had musical saws for sale there.  Clearly, I thought, humanity had at last realized the potential awesomeness of mixing tools and musical instruments.  When I went across town to the music store, however, and inquired about the possibility of buying a piano that was also a drill press, the dude there just looked at me funny.  And not funny “haha” but funny “sheesh”  which is by far the worst kind of funny to be looked at like.

            I saw a poster the other day for National Child Abuse Month.  Okay, I’m all good with celebrating crazy stuff and all that, but I’m afraid I just have to draw the line at celebrating child abuse.  They even had a bunch of helpful hints for things you could say to start abusing your child with, like, “You’re worse than the New Kids on The Block” or “I should have traded you for those magic beans when I had the chance!” and my personal favorite, “If you were a President of the United States, you’d be Martin Van Buren!”  Honestly, if we let this kind of thing slide, what’s next?  National Puppy Kicking Month?

            I saw that Iran has developed a new torpedo to smite myself and other assorted infidels.  I was thoroughly pleased, however, to see that rather than calling it something predictable like, “The Fist of Allah,” or “The Moderately Buoyant Vengeful Fist of The Beloved Prophet” they have christened it “The Hoot.”  It’s just nice to know that even crazy terrorist nations can give endearing names to weapons of death and destruction once in a while (the last time this happened was back when Ayatollah Khomeini named a new surface to air missile “Pink Fluffy Bunnies” back in the 80s).

            It appears that scientists at the Institute of Someplace That I Can’t Remember Offhand have at least developed the nanomanufacturing techniques required to make tiny sunglasses for flies.  Seriously.  All I can say is that this had better have some immediate and unspeakably funky applications in the field of building giant robots and stuff, because flies are already enough trouble without us giving them a reason to think that they’re cooler than us.

            The other day, I saw a dude at the mall wearing one of those little pulse monitors.  If you have to go to the mall to get your exercise and you’re under the age of 80, then you don’t need a pulse monitor to tell you you’re out of shape.

            I saw a truck out on the road labeled “Molten Sulfur” I was really temped to follow him, just to see what it was in Richmond that was either producing, or indeed of additional molten sulfur.  Alas, I was already late for work, so I’m just going to assume that someone is building an unholy gateway to the underworld somewhere in Southside.  Or maybe a Cracker Barrel.

            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.