ith the upcoming release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith only days away, the nation’s piteous attention has turned to Iowa resident Mark Rubert, who has been waiting in line to see the third Star Wars prequel since 1977, an amazing 28 years.

“Has it really been that long?� asked a surprised Rubert, upon being reminded of his feat. “Man, I really gotta take a leak.�

After seeing the original Star Wars film nearly 30 years ago, which at the time just called Star Wars but is now known as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope2K Special THX Limited Rastarized Edition, Rubert was so impressed he got right back in line and requested a ticket for a prequel. Told that no such movie existed, the former door-to-door salt salesman opted to stick around to ensure that he would be the first in line when prequel tickets went on sale.

Rupert waited in line outside the Mann Theater until 1987, when the theater was torn down and replaced with a Japanese restaurant. Thanks to mistaken customer complaints that there was “always a line� to get in, the restaurant folded in 1990 and was replaced in sequence with a nail salon, a party balloon store, and finally a check cashing service. The building Rubert is waiting in front of is now a discount tire store.

“I got kind of excited when I heard they might be putting a Wienerschnitzel in this spot back in ‘95,� admitted Rubert. “Because I’ve always been partial to sausaged meats. But then they put in a Chuck E. Cheese’s instead, which sucked. This tire store’s been way better, I hope it sticks around.�

To the surprise of many, this locally famous Star Wars nut has never seen any of the four other films in the series, neither the early 80’s sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi or the recent prequels The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.

“I don’t give a damn what happens after the first movie,� explained Rubert. “I just want to know what happened right before Star Wars started. Plus I didn’t want to lose my place in line.�

Many former friends and estranged family members expected Rubert to be excited about the release of the first Star Wars prequel in 1999, but to the surprise of all, he never went to see the movie. Calling filmmaker George Lucas’ decision to jump three stories back in time from four to one without telling part three first “total bullshit,� Rubert maintained his lonely vigil outside what was then a frozen yogurt stand.

When asked what he expected from the long awaited Revenge of the Sith, Rubert was refreshingly honest.

“To be honest with you, I don’t really remember much of the first movie, so I’ll be going into the prequel pretty fresh,� Rubert explained. “I mean, shit, that was almost 30 years ago. I remember something about a giant talking dog, so I hope he’s in this one too. Don’t ruin it for me if you know better.�

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Apparently some construction crew Einstein had a brainstorm watching E.T. the other night, since I woke up Saturday morning to find my neighbor's construction site completely enclosed in some kind of gigantic biohazard flea tent. Thank God I'd ditched out on the idea of camping there overnight, since I'd likely have been trapped inside and I bet everything stinks like malathion in there now.

Cruelly denied access to my neighbor's basement-in-making, I decided to do the next best thing and find out what's in my own basement, since I hadn't been down there in about eight years and my memory wipes clean like a credit report after seven. I couldn't even find the key to go down there until I checked in Foghat's party ball, the strange, amorphous blob of unidentified household detritus he pushes around like a bag lady raised by owls.

After I de-balled the basement key and broke the seal on the basement door that had been keeping everything inside in a permanent state of 1997, I took my last, deep breath of fresh air before voyaging down into whatever mummy farts and radon leaks had been lurking in the air under my house since back when Hanson was on the radio.

At first I was a little apprehensive heading down those stairs, not knowing quite what could be down there in the dark, waiting to jack up my Jill. I had a bad experience once in Canada, getting locked in some stranger's cabin in the middle of the night and having to shimmy up out of the basement coal chute after a misunderstanding about bathroom etiquette. I wasn't looking forward to reliving that again, plus I'm pretty sure I don't have a coal chute.

But then I realized that any kind of creepy naked chainsaw killer down there would likely be way off his game after the eight-year vacation, and probably would have grown some hilarious deep-sea fish adaptations after spending nearly a decade in the dark, too. And I'd pay to see that shit. Then I remembered about the halogen floodlights I had installed in the basement, after Foghat lost his lucky tooth down there and I got sick of blowing through candles for my miner's helmet looking for the damned thing.

After finding the switch and flooding the basement with enough light to incinerate any hiding mutated chainsaw freaks, I took the plunge into a land of mystery and wonder.

Or at least a lot of shit I forgot I had. Hula hoops, an airplane wing, and a gun that shoots billiards balls. And some sick bastard had painted a life-sized portrait of Nancy Reagan using real meat. Then there was the huge refrigerator with a normal fridge inside, and a mini-fridge inside that one like a giant refrigerator Matrioshka doll, I guess at some point I had shit that needed to be kept really cold.

A voting machine? Jesus, did I get elected? And I have no idea where those tricked-out dirt bikes came from.

But the most interesting thing I found down there was the giant crate of off-brand NyQuil I spied behind a wax statue of Evander Holyfield over in the corner. What's the story behind this stuff? Anybody who's got more than FM radio between their ears knows that cough medicine is only good for two things: methamphetamines and hilarious gag ice cubes. But a case? Man, that's a lot of ice cubes.

I'm not sure why I would have bought an entire case. Actually, I'm not sure how I bought an entire case, I don't think they sell it that way outside of New Mexico. Either they get a lot of colds down there or tweakers run the government. Maybe I was on a road trip and just didn't want to pass up the opportunity.

Then again, it was a knock-off brand called NiteWipe, so maybe they had to sell it by the case to get people to buy the stuff. Well, it worked at least once.

So now you know the story behind how that weird blue-green igloo ended up on my lawn, and how I distracted the construction shmoes long enough to make a kamikaze run on the biodome to make sure they didn't really have an E.T. trapped in there. Incidentally, I also added a concrete mixer to my carnival of basement thrills downstairs, which should make for some interesting speculation in another eight or nine years.

Bricks out.

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Ever since we heard Eddie Albert scream out "Dutch Whores!" at the beginning of TV's Green Acres, we've all been curious about hidden messages in popular songs. From the suburban teen getting a much needed self-esteem boost from Ozzy Ozborne's Suicide Solution to the congressman who desperately needs to figure out the lyrics to Louie, Louie before a press conference, nobody wants to be the last kid on the block to know what a song really means. But it's not always easy, between forgetful vocalists garbling their lyrics and clever rockers mixing backward paeans to Satan into their love songs.

The first known instance of a backwards message in a pop song is widely agreed to be Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' 1960 hit Shakin' All Over, which contained the phrase "Listen you tit, the tape's gone in backways" playing in reverse during the chorus.

But it was the Beatles who were the King Tut of hidden backwards lyrics, and they pulled off their ultimate coup in 1968, when they released The White Album, which was actually an entire Laurence Welk album played backwards. The world might never have been the wiser if it weren't for some meddling acid casualties who somehow managed to play the record backwards after dropping the record player into their bathtub in an attempt to hear what the album would sound like to fish.

But regardless, the word got out and before long drug people with serious welfare connections were rigging up elaborate backwards-playing record players by mounting one record player upside-down above another normal record player, then using the second player's needle to listen to a record spinning upside-down on the first.

For reasons unknown this led to a brief resurgence of popularity for the Dave Clark Five, but the main effect was that years of backwards-recording shenanigans were finally exposed. An evangelist from Ohio discovered that when he played the theme song from the TV show Mr. Ed backwards, the lyrics sang as "The source is Satan," and the theme song from the children's cartoon Scoobie Doo hid the back-masked message "Give your dog a doobie too." That same evangelist later discovered that when you play disco music backwards, nobody ever comes to your parties again, and backwards Slim Whitman is more than enough to get you evicted from your apartment building. He was later arrested during an album-burning ceremony when his supporters shot a horse wearing a baseball cap that said Mr. Ed.

Scandal raged for the next twenty years as religious figures from terminally boring states discovered further examples of back-masking tomfoolery. Sales of Queen's dance hit Another One Bites the Dust more than tripled after word got out that the chorus played as "It's fun to smoke marijuana" when run backwards, and there was a brief national shortage of chocolate chip cookies. Religious leaders single-handedly fueled sales of several Pink Floyd albums in the seventies, and were thanked individually in the liner notes for most of Judas Priest's 1980's releases. By the mid-eighties, it became tough to sell a heavy metal album without help from some kind of back-masking scandal, and some innovative groups had their records pressed backwards to minimize damage to their fans' turntables. By the late 80's, record companies were major campaign contributors for all representatives from southern states who advocated boycotts of their satanic recording artists.

The holy grail of all backwards Satan-possessed pop songs, however, has always been Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. Fans have known for years that the song only really makes sense when you play it backwards, at which point the lyrics come together as:

A horse is a horse
Of course of course
And no one can talk to a horse
Of course
That is, of course
Unless the horse
Is the famous Mister Ed!

Go right to the source
And ask the horse
He'll give you the answer that you'll endorse
He's always on a steady course
Talk to Mister Ed!

People yakkity-yak a streak
And waste your time of day
But Mister Ed will never speak
Unless he has something to say!

Oh, a horse is a horse
Of course, of course
And this one'll talk 'til his voice is hoarse
You never heard of a talking horse?


Well, listen to this:
". . . I am Mister Ed!"

So you can all stop sending me emails asking what the hell a wuzzle is doing in a hedgerow, okay?

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