he world took a long, mournful pause, or perhaps a quiet vacation, when Ronald Reagan passed away of natural (or supernatural) causes June 5, after a long bout with Alzheimer's that apparently plagued him all his life. He was ancient.

Despite the week of funeral processions, not all machinations in America stopped, as grief-stricken politicians began the work of "tidying up" the Reagan legacy as president of the United States of America, 1981-1988, and a phantom on the political scene ever since.

A week of remembrance has reminded us frequently of Reagan's strong moral values, his deep faith, his dedication to democracy, how he made it "okay" to be a "patriot," and that charming way he had of ignoring important questions. Mostly forgotten are Reagan's fundamentalist cow-towing, his close-minded prejudices, his fascistic pursuit of global democracy, the mania of conformity he embraced, and how the poor dangled on the shit stick for the entire duration of his reign. All minor changes in the book of American history rewritten in the wake of the president's death.

A proponent of America as the Enforcer, Reagan ran up a national deficit in the trillions of dollars chasing military superiority, even though our nearest rival, Russia, had no hopes of keeping up. Conservatives point to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had begun happening long before, as proof Reagan's policy was a success, which is quite like saying taking out six mortgages on your house is worth it if your neighbor can no longer afford his house payments.

The military build-up came with a price, of course, as social programs were mauled as if by a big Libertarian bear. Welfare slashed, minimum wage ignored for years, leading to a growing body of working men and women living beneath the poverty line, and don't make anyone piss themselves laughing by asking about school funding and the arts. So important was the stealth bomber the president even slashed the runaway costs of school free lunch programs, and made ketchup a vegetable to meet national health requirements.

Blind to any problem created after communism, Reagan led a government effort to ignore the AIDS crisis until it had ravaged whole communities and helped conservatives who believed AIDS a homosexual plague carried on by promiscuity remain comfortably ignorant. A wise decision, since avoiding spending anything to save American lives allowed the purchase of the Patriot missile, which didn't work, and of course allowed him to piggy bank money for his masterpiece: Star Wars, a cheeky name for his imaginative laser defense system that would stop "just about" every nuclear missile aimed at the United States and give us real tactical superiority over Russia should a Roland Emmerich movie ever occur here. But don't worry, nostalgias—the current president hasn't given up on the fantasy.

But we shouldn't, however, forget Reagan the man. The wealth of misinformation he gave us entertained people everywhere. According to Reagan, trees were bad for the environment, homeless people preferred living on the streets, hired mercenaries fighting for right-wing causes were "freedom fighters," and important decisions betraying your own political ideological statements weren't worth remembering. Lest we forget, he also expanded presidential powers into strikebusting by firing the air traffic controllers like a $400,000 a year Pinkerton.

Even as the sorrow winds up for America, text book manufacturers are busy as we speak preparing the Reagan legacy for the next generation of leaders.

According to Shouton-Felix's Greg Ward, a history book editor: "I think we've decided to skip all the irrelevant material from 1981-1988, people only seem to remember The A-Team and New Wave music from the decade anyway. We think Reagan's presidency is best represented by a full-page headshot of the president, with the caption: 'Win one for the Gipper!'"

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Anyone who's ever driven in traffic or attended a sporting event in Los Angeles no doubt has been given pause to marvel at the wide array of human emotions that can be expressed through simple hand gestures. From "Hello!" and "I bet you'd look good giving me a blowjob" to "Go ahead and merge, I'm in no hurry" (reportedly seen in Canada one time in the 70's), commuters and sports fans alike rarely need audible sounds to communicate. Borne of necessity in situations when words are impractical or likely to confuse the point, hand gestures have evolved over the eons to, if not an art, at least a really complex hobby. I'm reminded of the deaf man who just last week used a complex series of sign language gestures to indicate that I should go fuck myself, give myself AIDS and then die.

But one doesn't have to be a sign language prodigy to use the most versatile of signs, the raised middle finger. This can stand for anything from "Hey, fuck you!" to "Fuck ALL you guys over there!" or "Hey, fuck you and that chick sitting next to you who looks kinda like Julia Stiles!"

Sure, it's handy, but where did the middle finger come from? Assholes place the gesture's origin at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, when in the course of talking trash the French boasted that they would cut off the middle fingers of the English archers after they'd won the battle. The joke here being that archers kind of need their middle fingers if they're going to properly flip somebody the bird after shooting them, adding insult to injury in the proper etiquette of the day. Unfortunately for the French, they weren't as good at fighting as they were at boasting, and after the battle was over the victorious English soldiers stood in a line and gave the French the one-finger salute, showing off their still-intact digits. Fortunately they didn't remember the other French boasts, which included forcing the English to eat their own food and using the English flag as a diaper for their most incontinent horse, because God knows what we'd be doing in traffic today if that had been the case.

It's a great story, but like I said, that's the asshole version of history. Believe it at your own risk. Another take on this gesture has it that the bird dates back much further, all the way to dinosaur times when it likely meant, "Hey, look up there, it's the Tyrannosaurus that ate your family. Shit, we pissed him off, run!" Though I find the notion of cavemen flipping off dinosaurs hilarious, and the possibility of a Tyrannosaurus Rex returning the gesture with one of its own tiny little hands even funnier, I can't reconcile the fact that the people telling this story are, without exception, absolute dipshits.

In all likelihood, the true origin of the dirty digit was the Greek playwright Aristophanes. Known to friends and onlookers as "The Bird" for his habit of regurgitating food into the mouths of the poor, often against their will, Aristophanes was also moderately well-known for compulsively inventing hand gestures that only he knew the meaning of. While the playwright and philosopher's name came to signify an unwanted act of charity in his own day, future generations are more in debt to his habit of giving the finger to political enemies and ungrateful paupers when they passed on the street. Aristophanes got away with the inside-joke gesture for years until he slipped up and started including it in his plays around 423 B.C., after which word spread about the gesture's meaning. After receiving several black eyes and an unfortunate black ear, the playwright was forced to invent a new "fuck you" gesture, which he wisely told no one about and took to his grave, literally, as he was buried with two fingers making a "V" on his forehead.

In time the gesture spread around the world like a game of telephone, mutating as people flipped each other off at border crossings and the half-seen insult was carried to a new land. By the time it got to China, the gesture was now a raised pinky finger, a custom which remains to this day. Though according to local legend China did have the middle-finger gesture first, but somehow the Chinese figured out how to turn that into a lethal karate move known as the "Bird of Prey" and it had to be switched to the weaker pinky finger for reasons of safety.

By the time the finger made its way to Italy and the Middle East, it was a thumb. Remember that if you're ever reviewing a movie in Sicily. Two upturned fingers in Australia will get you more than an etiquette lesson stuffed up your ass. By the time the finger got to Africa it was an open palm, however this gesture's literal translation of "eat shit" makes one think twice about shaking hands with an African.

By 1976 the finger had reached nearly to the top when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was photographed greeting New York hippies with a rather uncreative standard bird, though at the time an embarrassed Rockefeller claimed he was just announcing that he'd found his lost contact lens. The modern flipped bird has since adapted for the 21st century, morphing into show-stopping variants such as the Cell Phone, Can You Hear This?, the Blow-Up Balloon, Peel the Banana, and the ubiquitous Sit and Spin. Even politically correct variations such as the Read Between the Lines have been developed for the dextrously-challenged.

Though "the finger" is hardly the only interesting hand gesture out there, it's not a bad place to start, and in future weeks we'll manhandle the subject more completely with in depth looks at the thumbs-up, the high-five and the peace/dos-tequilas-por-favor sign. Until then, you'll just have to read between the lines.

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"One day my brother Goose and I had treed a cat. It was barrels of fun, until we heard mom yell from the backporch, 'Kids! Come in and see!' Obviously we didn't know what she wanted us to see yet, but at the time we were hugely excited, it could have been anything, like a plate full of fresh cookies or the Kaiser's beard torn straight off his face.

We were delighted to see it was a brand new radio my father had bought! Everyone on the block had wanted a radio, even the people who already had them, although they wanted new ones, and now we had one!

My sister Stephanie, Goose, and I all gathered 'round the radio for hours listening to The Lone Ranger, Little Orphan Annie, The Shadow, and several racist radio shows I probably shouldn't elaborate on. It was the most fun you could ever imagine.

And when we weren't listening to the radio, we were talking about the radio. Stephanie and I would talk about what we thought the characters looked like, about the bright colors of the world the radio people lived in, and what The Shadow did to keep his laundry clean. Goose couldn't join in on account he had no imagination, something he inherited from mom.

Sure, we were disappointed later when we found out the radio wasn't even ever plugged in and it had been dad making all those voices we had been listening to. We probably should have guessed since the radio was so light, being hollow and having no electronic innards like a working radio. Goose is still mad at dad, rest his soul, but Stephanie and I say we still have our imaginations and memories, and they can't take that away without highly expensive surgery."

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