The Amish.  Pennsylvania and many of your other fine Sylvanias are positively infested with them, as they swarm o’er the cornfields in all their pre-industrial majesty.  But who exactly are the Amish?  Keep reading, and learn.

            The Amish are forbidden by their religion to fight back in you hit them.  But don’t get cocky, because some of them are actually Harrison Ford.  And not just the dudes, you could just go up and punch an Amish woman, and she might well be Harrison Ford too.  So you’re better off not risking it.

            The Amish don’t use cars because they make it waaaaay too easy to zip around at 60 mph, so most of them go about in a buggy pulled by horses.  But watch out buggy-riding Amish, because even you’re not hardcore enough for the Jogging Amish, who think if you get a horse you may as well just go ahead and get one of those little George Jetson cars, and you’ll be all out riding along in your buggy, and they’ll jog by and laugh all malevolently at you, but dude, you can’t punch, because you’re Amish already!

            There used to be the Car Amish, but most of them drove away.  The Car Amish were kind of the Crystal Pepsi of Amish.

            Everything the Amish do, they do especially because 18^th century Prussian military guys didn’t do it.  Like Prussians, they had big Teddy Roosevelt Mustaches and lots of buttons, and high speed internet.  So the Amish grow crazy chinstrap beards, hold their clothes together with duct tape, and have to keep their internet out in the barn, where the horses poop on it.

            One time, some guy convinced the Amish that the defining characteristic of the 18^th century Prussian military was the wearing of pants.  The Amish had a cold an embarrassing winter that year.

            The rule of thumb for the Amish and modern conveniences is that they’re okay as long as you do something to make them suck, thereby canceling out the convenience.  So you can have say, a cell phone, but it has to be one of those big-ass 50 lbs WWII D-Day phones.  Or you can have a light bulb, but it has to be pink, so that your farm house will look really fruity.  Or you can buy a trampoline, but it has to be on fire, covered in bees, and not bouncy.

            Almost all of the Amish are from the Yoder family; some of them live on the swamp Planet of Dagobah and make rocks float around.  They are Not cool with R2-D2, unless he stay out in the barn.

            The Amish can eat up to half their weight in insects during a single night.

            Scientists now believe that the Amish mostly evolved from Saber-toothed squirrels.

            If you were Amish and a cyborg, you’d have to stay out in the barn with the internet, otherwise, you’d be too convenient for yourself, and then you might as well just be an 18^th century Prussian, like all the rest of us.

            If you piss off the Amish, because they can’t beat you up, they just shun you instead.  Also, some of them will wait until you park at church, or the beard store or something, and then let all the air out of your horse, so you have to walk home. 

            If you’re Amish and in the bath, and you have a little toy boat, you get kicked out if you make motor boat noises; instead, you have to make sounds like a three-masted schooner.

            You can say anything you want about the Amish on the internet, because if any of them read it and call you on it, they’ll get in more trouble than you will.

            For the Amish, Jane Austen novels are like reading 1984; a Dystopian vision of a hideous world yet to come.