Fortune 7

January 7, 2002

It speaks elegantly about you, yet barely whispers. That's right, Montana. Birthplace of the most dramatic clock radio ever designed, and one of the toughest riding mowers ever built. Like a small boy caught in the jaws of war, like the locusts, like a noogie from your great-grandmother, Montana just is. A focus of world concern, furnished in the style of Early American in Salem maple, the pulse of sober life. The one-meal airline will whisk you to this fabled land, then bite your head off like some kind of pissed-off insect in a nature video. Early settlers discovered Montana by means of sensitive tactile hairs. Damn, that's a tough act to follow.

Montana exists, if for no other reason, to remind us of this eternal truth:

Ants have no ears at all.

You will drink a bottle of furniture polish, even though you're on a diet. Try again later.

Milestones

2003: The infamous "Battle of the Bulge" breaks out at when office wench Ivana Folger-Balzac mistakes Ramrod Hurley's beerbelly for a birthing alien larvae and sets into the Acting-Editor with a can opener. The skirmish and resultant standoff lasts 18 hours and claims the lives of several Crochet! magazine staffers, for whom the commune observes a moment of near-silence.

Now Hiring

Sexecutioner. Why does everybody keep laughing when we say that? We need a dude who can kill some fucking people in an official capacity, okay? What's so funny about that? You guys are sick. Anyway, pay commensurate to experience. Must provide own mask, axe, electric chair, whatever floats your boat.

Least Popular April Fools' Pranks

1.	Entire world repopulated with talking dogs while you slept
2.	Autistic cousin did your taxes for you, but it turns out he's a music savant
3.	You're CNN's Kidnapper of the Week!
4.	Woke up covered in 200 glued-on toupees
5.	Anal rape

Fortune 6
I present to you, the King of throw-away island. Slicing a trench into the past, dogwoods spread their sprays like drifting clouds, the most wasteful member of the tree family. "King Trapper of the North" is how they'd like to be remembered. Hardly.... (11/26/01)

Fortune 5
Growing up with snowflake, one learned to drink their sap in the morning. There was no time for globe-girdling as we chased the bears though the jungle of oil refineries, then were eaten like pudding by Lyndon B. Johnson. "Let's get away from the... (10/29/01)

Fortune 4
From mammoths to giant ground sloths, they buried caches of precious materials-- radiocarbon, obsidian, jasper, Idaho and Anthony T. Bouldurian, hundreds of miles from the Rosetta Stone. The violet-crowned Nero, spanning Cyclopean passers-by, "grave... (10/1/01)