he Bornean junk monkey, Stevensons' slug, Malaysian sitting bird and the world's largest species of blind sea trout are in grave danger of extinction, the World Conservation Union warned an assemblage of world leaders on Tuesday to the sound of one tiny violin playing sarcastically. Also among the newly-threatened species nobody has ever heard of are the shovelnosed arctic frog, the smoke weasel, the Andean left-handed dolphin and the three-toed nervous elephant of lower Peru.

All are among 13,279 varieties critically endangered and possibly-imaginary animal, plant and water life precious to bleeding-heart liberals the world over. Many are new to this year's edition of the group's list, a yearly "wake-up call to the world" that unless serious changes are made to environmental policy, the earth's biodiversity might one day shrink to comprehensible levels.

This year's list, like all that came before it, has drawn a collective boo-hoo from the planet's human inhabitants.

"Excuse me, but what has the Columbian rice shrew ever done for me or my family?" questioned an indignant Don Cloyd from Williamsburg, Virginia. "My uncle lost a logging job because of some stupid owl that didn't want to live at a box at the zoo or something, so sorry if that ruined it for all the other creatures out there, but I still say animals that don't taste good can kiss my ass."

Various world leaders questioned about the organization's list issued similar mock-sincere statements, vowing to halt all future economic progress in order to make the world safe for such hilariously improbable creatures as the Chilean trouser trout and the loud Spanish jackass.

Over 762 animals have gone extinct worldwide since various governments and the NRA began keeping records in the 1600's. Among the beautiful creatures the earth will never again know are the Tittleosen snot sloth, the North American windshield sparrow and the sickly cave bear of Nepal.

Perhaps the most stirring symbol for lost species is the majestic dodo, a once-useless bird that wobbled off into the history books in the early 17th century when Dutch sailors visiting islands in the Indian Ocean discovered the birds, whose strange compulsion to hop into cooking pots and offer themselves up for soups and other entrees led quickly to their extinction.

According to the WCU, thousands more creatures will join these ranks shortly if steps are not taken to slow the destruction of their native habitats in industrialized and developing nations. Saddest of all may be the possible fate of the Scottish brownie hound, once numbering in the thousands but now thought to be down to the last one and a half specimens in existence. Even that shocking number is sinking fast as scientists are unsure of how long you can keep half a dog alive in a cooler full of ice.

In delivering the study to world leaders, WCU Director General Achim Steiner also pointed out the success of recent efforts to save formerly endangered species such as Arabian oryx and the white rhino, news which inspired several unimpressed heads of state to mouth the word "super" while mimicking the jerk-off motion with their hands.

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Welcome to part one of a very special commune promotional feature (what the powers that be at the commune don't know won't hurt them), a series of excerpts from my upcoming book "You Look Like An Asshole: The History of Fads." Unless the world ends in the next month, parts one and two will look at the greatest fad decade ever known to man: the 1950's.

The 1950's were a fertile decade for embarrassing fads, as the national IQ had reached a record low not seen since the days when our ancestors thought it would be fun to take the Indians out and get them drunk. America in the 1950's was still reeling from the fact that the country's best minds had burnt themselves out cracking Nazi code in WWII, so by the 50's they just spent their time inventing crap like the hula-hoop and the scooter. This is the only acceptable explanation for a generation of otherwise passable Homo sapiens running around with tap shoes on their feet all the time. Nobody is certain how that insanity got started, but it wasn't long before you weren't anybody if you didn't sound like a team of Clydesdales walking down the street. Eventually this trend had to be outlawed after basketball spectators started going deaf and there was one too many tragic fires started by workers in the nation's flint quarries.

When looking at Fads of the 50's, few can top the practice of piling a bunch of assholes into a phone booth for the present-day denial factor of all involved. This originally started as a way for Universities to inexpensively house foreign exchange students, but before long the insecure white student populace decided that no foreign pinkos were going to show them how many peer-pressured nimrods you could squeeze into a phone booth. Like all fads, this soon grew out of hand and by 1958 it was impossible to find a phone booth anywhere that wasn't stuffed to the ceiling with dead college students.

Later, after the practice was outlawed, it was discovered that the record everyone was trying to beat (25 people stuffed into one telephone booth) was actually set by two guys who were so stoned that every time the phone rang they thought there was somebody else in the booth with them. Thankfully for the runaways and drug dealers with a legitimate need to use public telephones, this fad was soon replaced with one involving how many duck farts you could squeeze into a Volkswagen.

Another front-runner for stupidest fad ever was the Duck's Ass haircut. Invented by a barber in the 1940's as a joke on neighborhood kids he didn't like, the grease-mop style spread locally as all the other kids became insecure that their heads didn't look enough like the ass-end of a duck and demanded a quick remedy to their respectable appearance. This fluke probably would have ended with that gaggle of lead paint chip-eating imbeciles, but as fate would have it, dimwitted local rocker Roger Stagg of the Jersey Turnpikes inadvertently modeled the style while being beaten by the New York City police on the evening news one night in 1951, and within minutes of the broadcast the Duck's Ass had landed on heads all throughout the faux-tough world. Musicians and movie stars mistook the style for the look of the street, and after they adopted the haircut it trickled down and eventually became the actual look of the street, in some kind of bizarre chicken-eating-an-egg loop that it hurts the brain to comprehend.

However, this look soon faded away after a few dozen greasers bought the farm while blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes, and tales of these grisly grease-fire head infernos spread to suburbia. That part was left out of The Outsiders; but trust me, it was like Vietnam crossed with a Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial.

The 1950's also saw the birth of the panty raid, a masculine rite of passage for guys who would never, ever get laid. This unfortunate craze started when some wiseacre convinced the incoming class of freshman males at Tulane University that if they snuck into the girls' dorms and stole all their underwear, the girls would have no choice but to walk around naked all year and have promiscuous sex with anyone who asked politely. This being the 1950's, the guys bought it hook, line and sinker, and a shallow gene pool tradition was born. At first girls retaliated by staging their own boxer raids, but that turned out to be a lot of work and soon the girls discovered that sleeping only with jerks was the best revenge of all.

There were more ridiculous fads in the 1950's alone than there are deadbeat dads on the commune payroll, but this column is already longer than Leo Tolstoy's wedding vows so you'll have to stuff that curiosity back into the cat until next issue. Until then and possibly after, I'm Griswald Dreck.

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Nancy, sweet Nancy—my heart beats for you and you alone. To see that smile of yours, though the teeth are somewhat crooked, is the only thing worth living for. I would do anything in the world to show you the vastness of my love, like Brando's ass.

If my heart were made of wood, I would break apart the lumber and build you a house, a house made from my heart. You could live in my heart literally the way you do metaphorically now. Sure, my heart is kind of small, I would have to make the walls extremely thin, and we're not talking any kind of mansion here, but a shack—a shack made of love, from and out of my heart.

Even if this were not the case, if my heart were just my heart as it is now, sinew and muscle, probably more muscle, I'm not really sure of the make-up of the human heart, I would still build you a house. It would likely be grotesque and hideous, and haunt you in your nightmares, and once again, would be extremely small and thin-walled; but it would not stop my building it. I would not stop building it even if you demanded I stop, for that is how much I love you: Enough to not listen to you. The only thing that would stop me would be my death, which likely would have occurred as soon as I ripped my own heart out.

Perhaps I could live on an artificial heart. Artificial, like William Shatner's hair. I understand people can only live so long on artificial hearts, so I definitely would have to work fast. It would be a rush job, this heart house, but I'd get it done. Barring the days needed to recover from surgery, assuming I could even find a surgeon who would remove my heart just so I could use it to build your house. I mentioned it to my psychiatrist last week and he said most of them would turn me away at the door. But that wouldn't stop my search.

Come to think of it, this is a lot to ask, you know. Are you sure you want a heart house? I go through the trouble of ripping my heart out and getting an expensive operation and heart that will only last a few weeks just to build you a shitty heart-shack, you know, it all sounds like I'm doing all the work in this relationship. Why don't you give up your heart as well? Or build me a house? If we put them together we can make a bigger heart house, you know, and we can probably share it. I could even make a porch out of my liver and use your lower leg for stairs—it's not much to ask, one lower leg. I'm giving up my liver for the porch, goddammit. You won't even walk on crutches for me.

You know what? Fuck this whole thing. You're starting to make me feel like a big asshole. It's too bad I can't build a house out of asshole, I'd have more than enough at this point. The smell might bother you at first, but if our regular house isn't good enough, you have no right to complain. And I don't want to hear one word about how shitty my heart house is. If you had given up a few more body parts I could have really decked it out, but noooo, not Nancy, it's fine to cut people up and use their body parts to build adobes as long as it's not her body parts. You can be a real selfish bitch, you know? Like when my friends and I are playing X-Box and you yell from the bedroom to turn the volume down, you have to get up for work in 2 hours. Nice, Nancy, real nice.

I'm sick of this bullshit. You know, I think I'll build you the heart house anyway. Why not? You already saved me the trouble by ripping my heart out for me. Might as well do something with it. But don't expect no mansion, you life-draining succubus.

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