acing charges of pandering to Southerners by affecting a fake drawl when speaking to audiences in the South, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton responded to reporters this week with an angry retort of "Shoo, I ayne got no suuthurn assent, y'all" before spitting on the floor and leaving the room.

This latest incident follows a strong trend for Clinton over the last few weeks, leading pundits to suggest she's attempting to poach votes from Democratic challenger and authentic southerner John Edwards, knowing full well that a Democrat who can't carry the South has as much of a chance at the presidency as a black man from… oh. Nevermind.

Adding fuel to the fiery allegations, Clinton appeared at a rally in Raleigh last week wearing a NASCAR hat, and proceeded to pepper her speech with references to country music songs by Clint Black and Toby Keith. Even more strikingly, Clinton spoke to a group of campaign donors in Charleston a few days later, smoking a pipe and ordering around several people of color dressed as servants onstage.

"I don't know where she gets her ideas," questioned Tim Linenbrook, Professor of Cultural Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "No one in recorded history, Southern or otherwise, has ever acted like Hillary apparently thinks we Southerners act. In spite of having lived in Arkansas for years, she seems to have formed her impression of the South from a mix of Deliverance and The Dukes of Hazzard."

Clinton's detractors insist this is not a new behavior for the senator from New York, citing numerous incidents in which the former first lady appeared to pander to African-American audiences by incorporating clichéd and very incorrect forms of Ebonics into her speech and adopting very broadly stereotypical behaviors. The most notorious example of which may have been an appearance in Chicago in March, when Clinton ended her speech by shouting "Fuck tha police!" and tossing buckets of KFC into the crowd.

Leaders from the Latino community in Los Angeles also took issue with Clinton's decision to issue her entire speech at that campaign stop in the form of graffiti spray-painted onto road signs above the 405 freeway.

Valley girl advocates (yes, they exist, and we found them) also charge that Clinton pulled the same trick when speaking at a fundraiser in Orange County three weeks ago, popping her gum loudly while speaking about Medicare and using the word "like" seventy-eight times over the course of four minutes.

"What-EVER," Clinton responded when questioned about her dubious Southern California speech patterns.

Political pundits across the spectrum, however, admit that they're on the edge of their seats in anticipation of Clinton's upcoming speaking engagement in Whippany, New Jersey, a town noted for its unusually high concentration of Kazak immigrants, since Clinton is rumored to do an absolutely killer Borat impression.

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I for one miss the good old days when you could go to the store and know what the hell you were buying. Back then, there were two brands of everything: the kind you bought and the kind your no-class neighbors from Philly would buy because they didn't know any better. They'd save two cents and end up with garbage bags that were water soluble and dog food that was made from lawn clippings.

In those days, it was always easy to tell which brand was which. The good stuff had some smiling white guy with a butchwax haircut on the box. Nice. The other one always had a genie or some shit on it, a laughing monkey. And the crap products always had dead give-away names like Chintz or Uncle Otto's Screwjob.

Nowadays, you don't know what to buy. There are over 800 different kinds of crackers alone. I just want something to put in my mouth, I don't know if I want it stone-ground or not. And half the boxes have Catdog on them, whatever the hell that is. I don't know if that's the modern-day equivalent of the laughing monkey or not. They should've at least kept the butchwax guy on the good crackers, so we'd at least be able to tell what a Catdog means.

You can forget about buying cereal, too, unless you fancy pulling out your eyeballs through your own ass right there in the grocery aisle. Half the boxes aren't even cereal, they're boobytraps filled with leprechauns and all kinds of silly horseshit. At least the bad ones are easy to avoid, as I've never felt comfortable buying cereal from the Irish.

When I was a boy, there were two different kinds of pop: brown pop and water. And if you knew what the hell you were doing, you ordered the brown pop. Water was for the stupid kids who didn't know the difference, they gave that out so as not to waste the brown pop on idiots.

Nowadays you can go into a restaurant and just make up the name of a pop, and chances are they'll have something called that. I haven't been stumped yet, though I do enjoy the challenge. Words to the wise: steer clear of Anal Route Soda and Crampman's Best, those two colas are particularly vile.

And what in the hell is "Sierra Mist" anyway? It sounds like a bad camping euphemism for when a raccoon pisses on your car.

"Shit, it looks like a couple of jellyfish fucked all over the hood of my Omni!"

"No way dude, that's just the Sierra Mist."

"Fuck you, Kenny, next time we're taking your car."

If things keep up at this pace, in a few years we'll each have our own line of products that we're obligated to buy. That may sound like fun to you, but with my luck they'd assign me a cereal with raisins in it. And I hate raisins. Even more so than grapes.

If that's the future, you can have it.

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I say, as long as hiding out from the mob leaves you trapped in a backwards country like Australia, make the best of it. Or at least I'm saying it this week, since it's not yet safe enough for me to return to the states. And make the best of it I will. And I'll make Camembert make the best of it, because making him do things he doesn't want to do is my only source of fun in this primitive aspiring Bayou.

Let it never be said Australia isn't rich in beautiful, untouched natural beauty. Or make sure it's never said around here, since a fat Aussie named Mick will pound you. Since there is so much natural beauty, though, I thought it was high time I lived out my dream of being a rugged outdoorsman. Ever since I was a child, age 41-49, I wanted to be one of those amazing men who made their living off the untamed frontier, like a cowboy, a lumberjack, or perhaps a headhunting cannibal. But since I can't ride a horse, am too short to wield an ax, and get queasy when I taste human flesh, most of those avenues have been closed to me until now. Before, however, I never considered gator-taunting—it's a top 5 upwardly-mobile field here in Australia.

If you've ever seen one of these gator-taunting shows, or their ancestral 1970s kin, the all-kinds-of-animal-taunting shows like Wild Kingdom, you know they're populated by fearless men who can stare dangerous beasts in the face without pissing their pants, are cunning enough to avoid serious injury, and know how to bounce back from those injuries they can't avoid. They also have another requirement—a bold partner, capable of narrating with a dashing voice. This is the job I want.

Yes, the dashing narrator—good people, those guys get laid like eggshell-colored bathroom tile. Not that it's my motivation, but any career admired by the ladies is good enough for Rok Finger. However, I obviously can't narrate to a video of an untaunted alligator, so that's where Camembert comes in. He might be a little slower to get out of the way of their vicious snapping jaws, confined to a wheelchair as he is, but Camembert has more than enough moxie to make up for a lack of agility. And moxie grows back when severed, I hear.

Before you bleeding hearts start emailing me again in defense of Camembert, I should let you know I haven't simply dragged him to the outback and thrown him into the maw of vicious gators without any practice. I brought gators home, and left them in our backyard, where he's sure to stumble across them while doing the laundry. If he succeeds with these "pop quizzes," we should be able to journey to the outback to confront them on their own turf as early as next week, excluding any necessary healing time.

The gators won't be his first experience with wild animals either. For years I have surprised him by letting loose squirrels or hungry raccoons in his bedroom while he slept—I originally started it to make him more alert to possible prowlers, but it worked out better than I could have imagined. I can't say his reaction time was always first-rate, but apart from the paint-peeling shrieks he composed himself respectably. I think perhaps the squirrels were too small, and the raccoons blended into the background of his bedroom too easy. Alligators ought to be much easier to see, and therefore react to. I tested this theory last week by having Felchyana toss a snake at him, and he reacted quite well, swatting it down and crushing its skull under his chair's wheel, all the while asking her what the fuck she thought she was doing.

Of course, none of this prepares me at all. I've practiced a little bit on my narration, turning down the TV while watching nature programs and doing running commentary on what's going on, and I suppose I need a little more background information on animals so I will be able to say something beyond "Look at this pervert" when the times comes. Not that it isn't a wonderful start to a very promising career.

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