he state if Indiana executed convicted murderer Gregory Scott Johnson last week, continuing the state's long-standing tradition of executing men with three names, despite the condemned's requests that he be allowed to donate his liver to his ailing sister before the execution. Gov. Mitch Daniels denied Johnson's request on the grounds that it was creepy.

"Who would want a killer's liver?" asked prison warden Brad Foulke. "Yuck. The last thing we need is some horror movie bullshit where an evil liver turns this girl into an unstoppable killing machine. No thanks."

After hearing that the state of Indiana had offered to buy Johnson's sister a dinner of liver and onions as a symbolic way to apologize for wasting the one inside her brother, fans of morbid humor were disappointed to learn that Johnson was executed by lethal injection, rather than by some cooking-related method.

"It would be kind of funny if he'd been electrocuted," explained Indiana Pacers fan Brett Amrow. "Because then they could have served his liver all cooked up with onions and stuff. I'm not sure if he'd have to eat the onions first or have them surgically implanted or what, I don't know how the science of it works. I mean, yeah, I know that's gross, but you ever try eating liver without onions? Yuck."

The controversy surrounding Johnson's execution has touched off a national debate over whether or not condemned prisoners should be harvested for organs to save the law-abiding. Johnson, convicted in 1985 of stomping an old lady to death, burning down her house, and eating her cat's food, was the rare case of an inmate volunteering to offer up his lousy guts to save another human being, though skeptics have suggested it was just the beginning of Johnson's plan for a piece-by-piece escape from prison.

"The state of Indiana issued me a mandate to kill Gregory Scott Johnson for what he done, and that means every last piece of him," explained Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. "I'm not to leave no part alive, not a liver, not a little pinky finger, to survive a man who's done such things. That just wouldn't be fair to his victim or the victim's family if Gregory's liver lived on in his sister, saving her life and mocking their tragedy forever. And that's one slippery slope to go down, because where do you draw the line? What about a killer's brain? I'm sure somebody could use that somewhere. And that would be totally wrong, an evil brain turning some good person bad. Or even put in a jar, eviling up a lab somewhere until the technology came along to mount that jar on a cyborg body that couldn't be stopped even with bullets. Now I don't know many things, but what I do know is that unstoppable killer cyborgs is not what the people of Indiana were hoping for when they elected Mitch Daniels to office. Not most of 'em, anyway."

Though many doctors have suggested that Johnson's organ would have been useless to his sister anyway, since his was a 44DD size liver a her original just a petit B-cup, the larger question prison officials are asking is if it's ever right to give a condemned prisoner what they want, or if that defeats the entire purpose of punishing them. This question has grown in recent years with the rise of "reverse psychology" stays of execution for condemned prisoners who claimed they wanted to die, forcing states not to kill them out of a fear of appearing to coddle prisoners. Similar efforts by prisoners begging to never, ever be let out of prison have not yet had measurable effect.

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Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful princess named Esmerelda and she lived in a beautiful castle high above the kingdom, Buhtkrack, where her father was a sovereign and noble man. How she longed to be married to the stable boy, Noal, for he was a handsome young man, despite his occasional habit of blowing his nose on the heads of old ladies. But her father would not think of his daughter marrying someone so common. She was to be married to the son of King Goanadd, a harsh man who was known about the countryside for beating his horse for no good reason and leaving the seat up, and never, ever, ever, ever washing his own clothes but instead piling them on the floor in apparent hopes they would be miraculously zapped clean by the laundry fairy, and forcing total strangers to for some reason call him "Earl, Conqueror of the Fish." Esmerelda desired Noal more than anyone else in the world, and King Buhtkrack knew of her love for this man, so, despite his gracious nature, he sent for the boy.

"I have a grave and perilous task for you," the king told him. "In the far reaches of the kingdom, there lives a dragon that has slain a great many of our sheep, stolen many of our most beautiful women, and run up Visa card charges in my name. You can choose to go and slay this dragon, bestowing upon you the gratitude of many gorgeous and attractive single women and bringing nobility to your family name and honor to you and your blood line. Or you can instead clean the disease-ridden, filth-encrusted mortar of the royal bathrooms. I leave you with these choices."

A week later, Noal returned to the king and said, "I have cleaned the bathrooms as you requested my Lord. Now how may I be of service to you?"

So King Buhtkrack once again offered for him to rid the land of the dragon adding that since the last time, the dragon had been making long-distance calls when the rates are really bad and talking for hours and the royal phone service may get cut off. He then offered Noal the options of slaying the dragon or cleaning the stables of every last speck of dung using only his own toothbrush.

A week later, Noal returned yet again, saying to the king, "Pardon my breath, your highness, but I have cleaned the stables using only my toothbrush. Now how may I be of service to you?"

The king became furious and said, "Just go slay the freaking dragon and get the heck out of my life you worthless coward!"

So Noal went forth, and traveled through the dark night on his noble steed, riding fast into the forest in which lived the dragon. He passed through a tiny village mere miles from the dragon's lair when he met a great carriage pulled by magnificent horses. It stopped for him and out stepped Prince Goanadd.

"Hail Prince Goanadd!" Noal said as he fell to his knees in reverence.

"You shall call me, Earl, Conqueror of Fish!" snapped the Prince, as was his way.

"Hail Earl, Conqueror of Fish!" Noal said, still on his knees.

"You have come to slay the dragon, have you not?" the Pri- er, I mean, Earl said.

"Yes, your majesty."

"Know that you will be devoured by its mighty jaws unless you plunge your sword deep into the soft flesh of its belly and kill its evil heart."

"That is disgusting,your Highness!"

"I have told you to call me Earl, Conqueror of the Fish! How hard is it to remember that?! Sheesh! You common people suck!"

"Forgive me Earl," Noal said.

And so Earl rode away and Noal continued his quest. He rode through the night, stopping only once at South of the Border for some playing cards with nude women on them and a picture of himself riding a giant cactus. At long last, he found the opening of the dragon's lair. It was a dark cave, littered with bones of many a maiden.

Fear began to fill Noal, for he knew if the dragon could easily kill an unarmed maiden who had never fought a day in her life and was dainty and petite to a fault, it surely could kill a strong and limber man armed with a large sword and several years of training in hand-to-hand combat. He slowly crept down the dark passage and into the main cavern, where the beast's enormous girth filled the room. It lay, sleeping, its heavy breath shaking the ground. First, Noal went to the maidens, and freed each of them from the heavy ropes the dragon had somehow tied them up with which Noal thought was considerably strange considering this dragon had no real hands or fingers.

"Perhaps he has a maid who ties maidens up for him. I imagine she gets good money for doing that sort of thing. Probably a nice package with EOE certified training and a dental plan and decent bonuses and a 401k. Heck, I might even get into the maiden tying business if the money's right," he said to no one in particular. No one, that is, except the sleeping dragon who awoke to hear some strange man muttering about job benefits.

The dragon reared back its ugly head, and spat fire at Noal who leaped to the safety of a nearby cave that happened to be lined in asbestos. Then, the dragon stood on its hind legs, outstretched its impressive wings, and bellowed forth a frightening shriek unlike anything Noal had ever heard, give for the time he went backstage and heard Black Sabbath tuning their guitars. But then, Noal spied the soft part of the dragon's belly, and quickly he ran forward and jabbed his sword into it.

The dragon said, "Ouch!" and fell over dead.

Noal returned to the kingdom, triumphant and happy that he had finally brought pride to his family name, and a great many beautiful maidens desired to have carnal relations with him. But he choked to death on a poorly chewed piece of meat at the great banquet and the Princess married Prince Goanadd anyway and he turned out to be an all right guy so everyone lived happily ever after.

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The gaudiest fad of the 1950's had to be the 3D movie. The early 50's were a desperate time for Hollywood studios, as audiences were staying at home on their big fat asses in record numbers and movies were faring poorly in competition with television and communist witch hunts. Studio execs were willing to try anything to get more people into the theaters, even toying with the notion of making films that weren't big fetid balls of dung. But before they could go that far, the studio heads at Universal discovered that they'd accidentally made the same movie twice.

Universal had bankrolled The Hungry Jungle, which featured a young Charles Bronson running like hell away from man-eating tigers for two hours, and at the same time they had inadvertently financed D.A. Steuben's cannibal tiger picture Run Like Blood. Rather than shelling out promotional funds for both films to wastefully compete against each other, the studio decided to play both of them, simultaneously, on the same screen. That way they could cover up their gaffe while boasting twice as many stars running away from twice as many man-eating tigers in one movie. Like I said, these were desperate times and it should be noted that back then, guys couldn't hold their liquor.

Unfortunately the "movie" didn't make any sense when played this way, but this was only a minor setback. A young Universal intern soon discovered that thanks to poor quality control each of the films was tinted a slightly different color, and if you watched the composite film while wearing a pair of the red and blue "Wacky Glasses" given away free in boxes Oat Shmote kids' cereal, it came out kind of sort-of in 3D. The intern was thanked for his input, then immediately fired since he was obviously stealing from the studio to be able to afford drugs that good.

The idea stuck though, and the composite film Hung Like a Jungle was released in 3D as a promotional gimmick in 1952. The movie was a gigantic hit, with the 3D technology making audiences sicker than a dog on a Ferris wheel, an experience many filmgoers petrified by the boring 1950's seemed to enjoy. All summer long, audiences suffered through a kind of nausea they wouldn't experience again until The English Patient was released in 1996. The trend caught on like wildfire, and fifteen more films were released in 3D during the next three days, most of them soft-core pornos. Unfortunately for Hollywood, 3D movies were soon banned since public health officials couldn't be convinced that hundreds of moviegoers spending two hours drenched in their own vomit was just good clean fun.

Deprived of 3D cheesecake by The Man's uptight cronies, American youths in the 50's were eager for a new thing to come along and waste their time. Thanks to Australian DUI king Chuckie Dubing, they didn't have to wait long. Dubing discovered the boomerang while pulling the body of a dead aborigine off the hood of his car during a drunken one-man rally race through the outback one night in 1953. The strange crooked stick struck Dubing's fancy, and he extrapolated that it must be a hunting stick used to kill wild game birds in the bush. Dubing further extrapolated that its crooked design must allow the stick to curve in the air and return to its thrower, and this is the concept he sold to Wham-o later that year. In actuality, the aborigine was just carrying it because he wanted to show his family the funny crooked stick he had found under a tree.

Regardless, Wham-o mass-produced copies of the stick as a children's toy, and within a year millions of "boomerangs" (the name came from Dubing's approximation of the sound the aborigine made hitting his car) had been sold despite the fact that nobody anywhere had ever had one fly back to them after being thrown. Wham-o deserves a great deal of credit, however, for recognizing that few would risk appearing physically inept by claiming that the boomerang just flew kind of lopsided and herky-jerky into your neighbor's bay window every time you threw it.

Probably the only 1950's fad that ended up being worth three-quarters of a damn was the PEZ dispenser. The candies themselves had been around in Europe for twenty years, sold hilariously to American tourists who didn't know PEZ was the German word for piss. It wasn't until 1952, however, that Germany got revenge on America for kicking their evil little asses by marketing the PEZ candy in irresistible dispensers with the heads of popular political figures on top. Before long, Americans couldn't help themselves but eat candy out of Franklin Roosevelt's neck, making true Hitler's cryptic vow from 1941 that nobody had understood at the time. Eventually over the years, political bitterness died down and American children were eating candy out of Henry Winkler and Kermit the Frog's necks as well, continuing a bizarre tradition that rivals any of the crazy shit the Orient ever dreamt up.

That'll have to do for the 50's, although I wanted to go into how they pulled the first batch of Silly Putty out of a Yak's ass; there just isn't time. Keep an eye peeled for future columns, when we'll take a look at how other generations wasted their time between wars and the occasional worthwhile dance craze.

º Last Column: You Look Like An Asshole: The History of Fads Vol. 1
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