You know, if it turns out that they never make a fourth X-Men movie, I think it would probably be a wise course of action to just pretend that Kate and Leopold completes the tetrology.

            At my job, we happen to be right next door to a bridge (our other neighbor, a forest, is always keeping us up late by throwing nature raves and getting the cops called on them when the deer get drunk and knife each other) and we also happen to have a number of walkie talkies.  As a result, anyone driving over the bridge who happens to also have a walkie talkie can unwittingly share their thoughts with us as they drive over said bridge.  Unfortunately, these thoughts are invariably something akin to, “Whoa, this is a totally high bridge!”  Every single freaking time.  Mind you, it is a pretty high bridge, but really, is it that important an epiphany that you need to tell everyone else in the convoy and interrupt me teaching a bunch of 2^nd graders about how the Powhatans made their canoes (mostly with nunchuks and their phat needlepoint skillz).?

            I bet that if you were a vampire and you ate a bowl of Sun Chips, you’d probably die.  Again.  So if you suspect yourself to be a vampire, but you still want to be health-conscious, maybe you’d better stick to the Baked Lays.

            You know how when someone is choking, people always run up and pat them on the back?  I think that’s the worst thing you can possibly do.  It’s like you’re offering them kudos for failing to chew adequately.  “Hey,” you appear to be saying, “You’ve managed to get a Swiss Roll stuck in your throat again.  Good work, you deserve a pat on the back!”  All that kind of thinking does is encourage people to keep on choking.  Rather, when somebody is choking, you ought to smack them on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, so they learn that choking is bad, and is the sort of behavior with which you will not put up.  Don’t wait too long to do it though, otherwise they won’t make the connection and will just think you’re beating them.

            If you were a member of one of those South American tribes that can’t count past two, you would also be most foolish for your bowling team to appoint you the task of scorekeeper.

            The bathroom mirror in Sheetz is just low enough that if I had an afro, it would be completely useless for inspecting it.

            I’m really tired of ending letters with things like, Love, or Sincerely.  They seem so trite and I worry that the people to whom I am addressing epistles will fail to recognize how deeply I care for them.  That’s why I propose changing it up a bit.

            “Dear Grandma, thank you for the pajamas, they make me to resemble a plaid marmot and smell strongly of communism.

            May your foes tremble before you,

                                                            Ben”

            Did you ever notice how all Elton John songs sound exactly alike?  I just did the other day, and man, it’s like the whole world has changed for me.

            I bet Gene Simmons, despite all his great contributions to human civilization in the fields of rock n’ roll, monster slaying, and being able to lick his own elbow, lives a life of secret shame because of his brother Richard.  Yeah, just imagine how those family reunions must go.

            Hey everyone!  Guess who got dumped yesterday!  No, not Dick Cheney.  Nope, nope, not Batman either.  No, not Chewbacca either; to my knowledge he remains happily married to Mrs. Francine Bacca.  Give up then?  It was me!  Yes, yet again, a woman with whom I was in love decided that a life of unremitting solitude was preferable to one in which I played a part, and as a natural consequence, I am once more single.  What then is to be done?  I could always get all emoed out, write free verse poems about spirals of darkness and the depressingly high cost of eye liner, and go out to Hot Topic to buy a pair of black pants composed entirely of zippers, but you know, that’s just not really my style.  Or I could become one of those bitter, lovelorn souls who hate all women and decide to take their revenge by being a total loser and spending every night of their natural life sitting around in their underwear, watching Babylon 5, and eating Cheez Whiz out of the jar.  But I’ve never really enjoyed Cheez Whiz nearly enough to embark upon such a plan.

            What then, does a fellow have left to do, when he finds himself adrift in the world in such a fashion, after he’s packed up all the things that remind him of someone and replaced all the “Woot, I’m in love!” songs on his iPod with Bjork?  The answer, as I’m sure you will have already guessed, is for me to turn to a life of supervillainy.  I know, I know, you’re probably thinking, “But Ben, you’ve promised you were going to do this sort of thing before, but you’re no sooner back from Lowe’s with the parts to your death ray when a shiny object distracts you and you once more take leave of your nefarious schemes!”  My friends, this time it shall be different.  Already I have begun drafting plans to make my van into a helicopter with a totally sweet shark face painted on it.  At this very moment I’m researching dental appliances that will allow my dog to bite through steel girders.  I’ve even made a reservation for tomorrow night with a voice coach to work on my maniacal laughter.  Clearly with plans like these, an army of goons with face-concealing helmets and a secret lair beneath Mount Rushmore cannot be far behind (I know volcanoes are more traditional, but I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised when you see a ballistic missile shoot out of George Washington’s left nostril).

            I realize, of course, that getting into the burgeoning field of supervillianation just because of a bad breakup can lead to bad things.  Darkseid for instance, has based his entire reign of terror on getting Wonder Woman to be his wife (she of course, values him as a friend, but simply doesn’t feel ready for the commitment right now).  However, and I know that it’s always risky to go with what’s fashionable at the moment, I’ve decided to go with more of the Lex Luthor model, in which while you most certainly are a big hit with the ladies, romantic woes and tribulations never get in the way of you deciding to raise an America-eating continent from the depths of the Atlantic (no worries though for my readers here in the States, should I ever find that my career path is leading me in a sunken continent-raising sort of a direction, I promise to raise mine way out in the middle of the Pacific, or possibly next door to France).

            Really, I think that what keeps a lot of us unlucky in love types out of the field of global domination is the idea that it takes a lot of work and startup capital.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, all you really need is a close encounter with a radioactive meteorite or a magical alien artifact of unimaginable power, or barring that, to be bald and always wearing white linen suits.  For instance, if Captain Picard and Mark Twain ever joined forces, they could easily be the greatest supervillain ever.  So anyway, I’m going to go out hiking in the mountains a bit alter this month and maybe hit up all the local mystical antique shops, and if nothing turns up, then it’s simply time to shave my head and make a trip to the Big & Tall.

            So, if any of you out there feel like auditioning for jobs and henchmen (and these are the top drawer kind, by the way, where you get to have like, an afro and a katana made out of fire) feel free to send me a resume, and if all the rest of you could possibly see your way to collectively trembling in fear at the very idea of me ruling the world, I would be ever so obliged. 

            Let’s face it, in these times of turmoil, trial, and doubt, there are many things that can keep a person up at night worrying.  Things like international terrorism, Bob Dole’s mullet (which would be a mulletastic name for a band), Stephen Hawking’s techno DJ career prospects, and of course, whether or not any witches from the 18^th century need to be apologized to by the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Fortunately, though all the rest remain major sources of angstiness, you may now feel free to cross the last of those off of your emo list, because as of last week, the Governor of Virginia formally apologized for the trial of Grace Sherwood, the Witch of Pungo.  This is her story, all of which is true, except for the parts I made up.

            Grace Sherwood lived in Virginia Beach in 1706, with her husband and three sons, in a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard.  She was reputed to be thoroughly the epitome of magical hotness, and was well-known for not taking no guff from nobody.  Like most of us, she enjoyed wearing pants on a regular basis (which, back then was kind of unusual, since most women dressed either as ninjas or pirates.  Or pirate ninjas, for the exceptionally fashionable).  Also like most of us, she enjoyed flying around in a teacup and occasionally traveling therein to England.  Whether she made herself all tiny and fun-sized when carrying out this unusual operation is left unsaid.  And one supposes that if she simply kept a mammoth teacup around to purely for such outings it would have turned up the first time the police showed up at her house.  And how did they learn that she’d been going over to England in said teacup anyhow?  Did the mayor of Pungo get a letter from the King of England saying, “Hey guys, just thought you might want to know, some crazy ho from your side of the pond has been hanging out over here lately and stealing all our royal English flava.  If you could drop a house on her or something, it would be much appreciated.  See ya at the Revolution in a few, King Smacky Vander-Cheeselings IV”

            Also, just in case you were wondering about the whole teacup thing, it seems that way back in the day, brooms were far from the officially endorsed for of travel for witches and Harry Potter.  Originally colanders were all the rage, and it wasn’t until later that things like teacups, hubcaps, houses with chicken legs, and William Shatner’s toupee gained widespread acceptance amongst the airborne magical community.  All of which kind of makes sense, since of you think about it, riding around on a broom for any length of time would be totally uncomfortable and even if you’re in league with the Devil, you’re still going to want to avoid unnecessary chafing like that.

            Now, as if this weren’t enough to get a person hauled before a judge, Grace Sherwood was also generally believed to sneak into places by slipping through keyholes, though once she was there, all she apparently ever did was makes someone’s milk spoil once.  In terms of non-keyhole-related witchery, she is said to have once bewitched someone’s crops (how can you tell anyway?  Did his crops start glowing or doing phat beatbox rhythms?), and a brief yet terrifying rash of incidents involving flaming bags of flying monkey poop (that’s poop from a flying monkey, by the way, rather than the more mundane flying bag of poop from a regular, non-flying monkey) on the front porches of her neighbors.

            Now, the people of Virginia, being a fairly inexperienced group when it came to witch detection, didn’t really know where to go from here, and thusly decided that the best way to figure out the matter for sure was to have her inspected for any black marks of demonic allegiance.  And since they didn’t really find anything all that conclusive and she was, as I said back in the first paragraph, rather on the attractive side, they went back and had her looked over again, just to be sure.

            Now, by about the sixth time through with this, it dawned upon people that as much fun as this was turning out to be for the whole family, this trial really had to be going somewhere, at which point they decided that the best thing to do would be to tie her to a big Bible and throw her into the river, the idea being that water hates evil things like Ringwraiths and fat kids with waterwings, and that if she floated, then surely she was a witch.  On the other hand, if she sank, than clearly she was alright after all and not a witch, and someone would be along in a couple of weeks to kind of fish her out and apologize for the mistake.  Amazingly, she agreed that yes, this seemed like a good course of action with no foreseeable problems.

            So, on July 10^th, Grace Sherwood was tied to the aforementioned big Bible and thrown into the river.  Much to her credit, rather than either sinking or bobbing around like a duck, she saw fit to paddle around in the water singing a cheery little song until she managed to untie herself and swim back to shore.  All of which begs the question of whether, even for such an important purpose as witch-finding, it is appropriate for a body of Christians to tie a Bible to someone evil and toss it into a river, which does not immediately present itself as being one of the more Godly uses for the Gospels.

            Anyhow, they sent her to jail for a bit, but after an unexplained series of problems with guards turning into newts, and the fact that no place with a keyhole was going to keep her on ice anyway, they let her go, after which point she went on to live a long life of wacky hijinks, pants, and flying about in tasteful kitchenwares.

Now, were I one of those moralizing political types, I’d probably put something in about the importance about separating politics and religion.  The truth is though, that the whole thing is just too silly to really learn any important lessons from, so instead, just stay in school, don’t do drugs, and always vote for retired pro-wrestlers.

            If you asked me which tribe of Israel was my favorite based solely upon their contribution to the art of sandwich making, I think I’d have to go with the Tribe of Reuben.

            So, in Norway recently, some people were out on one of those whale-watching cruises, and they saw a whale, out cruising all majestically whilst straining jillions of krill and nachos from the frigid arctic seas, and some other boat just came by and shot it, like, right there in front of the tour boat.  Seriously though, if you had told me they had drive-by shootings in Norway, I probably would have suspected something like this.

            If Marvin Gaye was looking to do a greatest hits album, he would be both wise and hilarious to call it “Totally Gaye”.

            The worst people in the world are the ones who run the Paralympics.  Not that it isn’t cool to do athletic competitions for the wheelchair-bound, but you shouldn’t name your organization anything that includes the word “limp” when dealing with the disabled.  Really, not since the Jewlympics back in the 50s has an Olympic spinoff been so crassly named.

            When I’m President of the World (now taking campaign donations!) I’m going to legally add an X to the spelling of espresso, so that all the world shall have to say it the way that my brain always wants to.

            I was always disappointed that in Oregon Trail, when someone in your family died, you didn’t get an extra 50 pound of food (or slightly less if they died of malnutrition).  Also, that when you shot buffalo, they’d flip over and stick their legs in the air; this rarely happens in real life.

            In other news, I am no longer allowed near the wildlife section at Maymont.

            I saw the most ominous billboard for a hospital ever the other day.  It had this really intense-looking doctor on it, and the words, “It’s your health; choose wisely”.  Seriously, sometime the medical industry gets just a bit too cutthroat for me..

            Not that it’s my place to mention it, but if Canada would make the Dudley Do Right song their national anthem, they’d get so much more military respect from us violent ass-kicking nations.

            Those Kryptonite brand bike chains are the most dishonestly marketed things ever.  They’re not real kryptonite, it’s just that Superman hasn’t stolen your bike because of all the superheroes in the world; he has the least desire for a bicycle.  Except for Fat Lazy Couch Potato Lad, he’s not really into the whole bike stealing scene either.  And even if Superman did want to steal your bike, all he’d have to do is stand a safe distance away and melt the chain with his heat vision, or throw Jimmy Olsen at it.

            Just once, I’d like to see a villain just accept the fact that bullets just bounce off Superman without feeling the need to try it and see for himself.  Though no the other hand, it does always look pretty cool, so if you were about to be caught anyway, you might as well get to see for yourself.  Which begs the question: if you shoot Superman, does it count as attempted murder?  I mean, it’s not like anyone realistically thought he’d die, so at most it ought to count as assault, though even then, it’s kind of a flimsy charge.  I’d probably have to go with littering myself.

            If lead can stop the radiation from kryptonite, why doesn’t Superman just sew a bunch of it into his suit?  It isn’t like the extra weight would slow him down.

            Why is it that in movies, whenever someone has a large column or something falling towards them, they always run directly away from it, instead of just stepping slightly off to the side?  That’s why lumberjacks are rarely in action films, because they deal with that kind of thing everyday, and rob the situation of all its drama by just heading in a completely different direction altogether.

            If I’m ever President, Oregon shall rue the day they decided to put a lake on their quarter.  It would have been so totally awesome had they instead put a picture of a Conestoga wagon and the inscription: “One of Your Oxen has Died” That would be unspeakably sweet.  Or, barring that, “Timmy has dysentery.”  Way to go, Oregon, land of broken dreams that you are.

            You’ve probably heard of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s spy agency.  What you perhaps didn’t know is that the initials KGB actually stand for “Kremlin Ghost Busters.”  It turns out that Lenin was actually terrified of Slimer and the Stay Puft Marshmallow man and organized a special security force to keep them out of his hair, so to speak.  Then later, after Stalin took over, he decided the name and the proton packs were just too cool to get rid of so he put them all on spy duty.  And now you know the rest of the story.

            I want to replace my van’s license plate with one that just has a barcode on it.  That way everybody will think I’m from the future and be impressed by my self-adjusting sneakers and uber-leet hoverboard skills. 

            There’s an entire website out there devoted to pictures of cats that resemble Hitler.  Whenever life has you down and you fear there’s no goon left in the world, remember that, and smile inwardly with fiendish glee.

            I saw a package of Huggies in the store, and the box said “Now Baby-Shaped!”  I’m confused here, weren’t Huggies baby-shaped all along?  I mean, if they weren’t, then what the hell were they shaped like?  To my knowledge there is but one legitimate purpose for Huggies and it involves putting them on babies, and yet apparently Huggies Ltd. International only just realized that their intended market was babies, rather than say, gila monsters or chia pets.  I’m just glad that diapers are the only thing they make.  Oh look honey, “New, hand-shaped gloves!”

            They say there’s no wrong way to eat a Resse’s, but I’m pretty sure that if you were creative enough, and/or Hitler, you could probably find one.

            For instance, one totally wrong way might be to put in into your ear.  Because even if you’re the kind of sicko who enjoys that, you have still failed to eat it.  Perhaps Resse’s, you ought to change your slogan to, “We’re not going to judge you for eating candy like a freak.”

You know how Apple started out by putting a trash can on their desktop, so that you could, you know, trash your unwanted files.  Then Windows decided to get in on the act and do them one better by having an environmentally-friendly recycling bin, so you could recycle your hard drive space.  Not I though; I want an OS with something like say, a Municipal Filth Incinerator, so that instead of merely deleting my files, I can take them out and burn them, spewing an acrid cloud of noxious smoke into the pristine bandwidth of the Internet, poisoning the forests of the web and clubbing the baby seals of cyberspace.  Grrrr, I’m evil!

            Whenever people are talking about how bad our society is, they always mention how the Indians used every part of the buffalo, while we only use the tasty bits and the parts containing weapons-grade fissile Buffalonium (atomic weight 247).  What they never mention though is that as bad as we are, we’re still waaaaay better than zombies, because all they do is eat the brain and throw the rest away.  Yeah, take that zombies, you really suck at preserving nature’s splendor for future generations!  Which is of course why I’m not even going to think about buying a hybrid until Al Gore manages to reign in all the zombies, which to my knowledge, he is not presently doing.

            Where are all the agnostic mantises?  I’ve never seen one.