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Afghan President Steps in for Vice-PresidentJuly 8, 2002 |
Kabul, Afghanistan Snapper McGee Former Afghan President, now Vice-President Hamid Karzai (left, pictured with his Uncle Junior) plays a solemn funeral march on a water bottle. ollowing the assassination of Afghan Vice-President Abdul Qadir by armed terrorists Saturday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai immediately took over the role of Vice-President within a few short hours of the incident.
"As of this time, I am now second in command of the country of Afghanistan," Karzai said to a small gathering of reporters in the presidential bunker.
When pressed by western and Middle Eastern reporters alike on the logic of stepping down to fill a position below you, Karzai did not respond. He ended the press conference when persistent inquiries as to who is now the president of Afghanistan came up. Reporters were shuffled from the bunker by burly guards, one of whom we swear used to work at Studio 54.
The late Qadir was an important p...
ollowing the assassination of Afghan Vice-President Abdul Qadir by armed terrorists Saturday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai immediately took over the role of Vice-President within a few short hours of the incident.
"As of this time, I am now second in command of the country of Afghanistan," Karzai said to a small gathering of reporters in the presidential bunker.
When pressed by western and Middle Eastern reporters alike on the logic of stepping down to fill a position below you, Karzai did not respond. He ended the press conference when persistent inquiries as to who is now the president of Afghanistan came up. Reporters were shuffled from the bunker by burly guards, one of whom we swear used to work at Studio 54.
The late Qadir was an important part of the rebuilding of Afghanistan's government. The veteran Pashtun warlord was believed a stabilizing influence and supporter of U.S. action in the country, and with him gone, that stability is now in question. With Karzai unintentionally demoting himself to a secondary position, it may be up to the U.S. to call upon a new president and then responsibility placed on the people of Afghanistan to "elect" them in a fair election, like the kind that put George W. Bush in office.
With the future of Afghanistan again under pressure, advice is coming in from strange circles.
"This never should have happened, and measures should be instituted to prevent it from happening again," said CEO of WorldCom Inc. John Sidgmore. "I may not know assassinations and domestic terrorism, but I know power structures and fire coming up from below. You never want to have just one person beneath you on a pyramid. I suggest at least three, maybe up to ten Vice Presidents to create that solid second floor. That way if things start crumbling underneath you from the bottom up, you've at least got a few more bodies in the way before you hit the ground."
The president was also reached for his obligatory quote.
"It's a sad day for the Afghanistanian people," said the president, then nodding to affirm what he had said. "That guy they lost was a valued member of our foreign department. It's a sad day for his family and the people who liked him, of which I understand there are many. The people who don't like him are having a happy day, but their happy day will turn into a sad day when we catch up with them. And that will be a happy day for us."
When questioned about Karzai's decision to step in for the fallen Vice President, Bush's resolve was tempered and cautious. "It's a very brave step, although we will wait and see if it was good or not. I have a vice president. I know that I would be terrified if something happened to him, and with his heart running like a '69 Impala, that possibility is always lurking in the shadows." the commune news sends its liver out to the people of Afghanistan, its heart still not yet returned from San Francisco. Ivan Nacutchacokov is a commune foreign correspondent and has been gathering dust with our lack of overseas reporting until lately.
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 April 29, 2002
Sing a Song of EcnepxisEver 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...
º Last Column: Where for Art Thou, Jimmy Hoffa? º more columns
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? º Last Column: Where for Art Thou, Jimmy Hoffa?º more columns
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|  February 23, 2004
More Fads: The 1970'sAll that writing about accidental TV nudity last column got me thinking about one thing: big hair, bare bottoms, and the Decade of the Streak. That's right, the 1970's. Actually, to be totally accurate, the 70's weren't really a historical decade, though they are often mistaken for such. In reality, the 1970's were actually just one giant fad. Sucks for those of us who were either born in the 70's or were the president then, but there are worse things that presiding over the biggest fad in the history of the world.
But back to the bare bottoms. Streaking was the third best thing to come out of the 70's, after Griswald Dreck and taking drugs at work. Random, naked people in public? Forget about it. People even went to baseball games in the 1970's, because that seemed to be as good a place as any to see streakers.
The 1978 film Animal House inspired the toga party, probably the lamest of the 70's fads. What might have been a fun trend and excuse to get fat was done in by the fact that nobody knew how to tie a toga right, and as a result there were more bare asses and exposed flab at your average toga party than there was at a streaker's convention. The toga party fad quickly and quietly died out when people realized "Hey, let's all get together and look like shit!" wasn't really as much fun as it sounded.
Every decade has its own dangerous fad designed to weed out the deficient from the population, it's nature's way. In the 70's,...
º Last Column: Did You See That Shit? The History of Accidental TV Nudity º more columns
All that writing about accidental TV nudity last column got me thinking about one thing: big hair, bare bottoms, and the Decade of the Streak. That's right, the 1970's. Actually, to be totally accurate, the 70's weren't really a historical decade, though they are often mistaken for such. In reality, the 1970's were actually just one giant fad. Sucks for those of us who were either born in the 70's or were the president then, but there are worse things that presiding over the biggest fad in the history of the world.
But back to the bare bottoms. Streaking was the third best thing to come out of the 70's, after Griswald Dreck and taking drugs at work. Random, naked people in public? Forget about it. People even went to baseball games in the 1970's, because that seemed to be as good a place as any to see streakers.
The 1978 film Animal House inspired the toga party, probably the lamest of the 70's fads. What might have been a fun trend and excuse to get fat was done in by the fact that nobody knew how to tie a toga right, and as a result there were more bare asses and exposed flab at your average toga party than there was at a streaker's convention. The toga party fad quickly and quietly died out when people realized "Hey, let's all get together and look like shit!" wasn't really as much fun as it sounded.
Every decade has its own dangerous fad designed to weed out the deficient from the population, it's nature's way. In the 70's, it was glass eating. Linebacker Greg Luzinski started the trend when he accidentally ate an entire beer mug while drunk, thinking it was a beer popsicle. The trend spread across the nation at the speed of stupid and before long college kids everywhere were eating light bulbs whenever they didn't have time for a sit-down meal. University facilities budgets went through the roof and Charmin released a new line of red toilet paper that hid evidence of inconvenient anal bleeding. Unfortunately, the fad proved short lived when Luzinski did, dropping dead of a glassasscopy in 1977.
Every decade, or pseudo-decade, also has its brilliant way to bilk doofuses out of their cash, and the 70's version was the pet rock. Created by a California inventor who dreamed of finding a way to turn the rocks on his front lawn into weed, and unleashed on a public tired of feeding freeloading animals and starving African children, the pet rock was an enormous hit among Americans who didn't know what to get their brother's kids for Christmas. The versatile pet rock also served a dual purpose, both as a gag gift and a weapon to be thrown at gag gifters.
No overview of 70's fads would be complete without a mention of disco, which was not so much a fad as aural wallpaper for the fad of the 1970's themselves. What more can be said about the most misguided musical idea since Mozart's tuba sonata? Not much, though in all fairness you could do worse if you want a soundtrack for doing cocaine and screwing your sister. What you couldn't do much worse than, however, is "Disco Duck," 1976's answer to New Age theories that there was no Satan.
As you're probably starting to catch on, everything in the 1970's was a fad, and thank God. One of the more embarrassing was the practice of talking to plants, originated by hard-up stoners chanting "Grow, weed, grow!" to their closet garden creations and crossing over to the flakiest strata of the mainstream, who took the April 1st edition of Scientific American at face value. Other notable fads originated in this "April Fool's" issue include aromatherapy and cancer research.
Nixon brought acupuncture back with him from China like a rat in his suitcase, and this fad spread faster than you could stick a sewing needle into a yuppie's ass. While certainly high on unintentional humor factor, acupuncture sacrificed some of its usefulness as a fad by looking really uncomfortable and causing people to cringe at the same time as they were laughing at the yoyos being stuck with the needles.
The 70's fad that probably least deserved to die was EST therapy, a revolutionarily hilarious idea based on putting the patient into a room full of assholes and yelling at them. The suicide rate during treatment was 100%, and as a result the fragile members of the species were weeded out of the herd in time for the alpha dog orgy known as the 1980's. The psychiatric profession has seldom known a treatment so efficient or fun to watch, and EST will be sorely missed.
The 70's also saw the invention of the hacky sack, which finally gave American teens something to do while they were in college. George Abrams, the inventor of the sack, was inspired by watching a Massachusetts mental patient who would compulsively kick himself in the nuts as if he were playing one of those ball-string-and-paddle games. Abrams was struck with the idea of how fun this might be if in didn't involve getting kicked in the balls so much, and something sort of like a sport was born.
While 8-tracks, CB radios and hideous string art creations all held their own as ridiculous 70's time-wasters, the moped really takes the cake as the defining piece of 1970's crap. With all the danger and inconvenience of a bicycle, but none of the exercise, the moped captured the cheap-assed imaginations of a country that thought gas was expensive. Hundreds of thousands of mopeds were sold during the Mideast oil embargo in 1973, with every last one of them being traded away for pocket fuzz and spare buttons at garage sales or pushed off a cliff six months later when the Arabs turned the gas tap back on. Which, if you've ever tried to ride a bike in bellbottoms, you know was probably the best thing that happened during the 70's. º Last Column: Did You See That Shit? The History of Accidental TV Nudityº more columns
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Quote of the Day“Give me liberty or give me something better, and kick it in the ass this time, I'm late already.”
-Henry Patrick WellsFortune 500 CookieYou will finally get that monkey off your back, but the tattoo removal fees will cripple your already weak home dog-waxing business. Try parting your hair on the left this week. Couldn't hurt. Look out for people dressed in blue. Nobody likes you.
Try again later.Least Popular Baby Names, 2005| 1. | Katrina | | 2. | Gigli | | 3. | Scott Peterson | | 4. | The King of Pop | | 5. | Skullfuck | |
|   North Korea Pissed Their Real-Life Hunger Games Nowhere Near as Popular as Movie BY Momo 12/27/2004 The IdiotadOf the men who challenged Telio, all were stout and broad-shouldered, hardened of skin and buttocks. They would fight for the glory and honor of Grazi, and perhaps piles and piles of treasure and the occasional loose woman.
And all of this, so the story goes, over the honor of a woman. A hippy, full-breasted woman with lips like a couple of pillows and a tendency to drink a little too much. She was Mildred, Mildred of Grazi, Mildred the golden haired, Mildred of two minds and unsure of who she would rather lie with tonight, Mildred the hussy. She had been chosen by a husband of Grazi, her downstairs neighbor Pithameneus of Grazi; she was taken to Telio by the young and golden-locked Penis.
Outraged, Pithameneus called on his brother Agriculturus, a former...
Of the men who challenged Telio, all were stout and broad-shouldered, hardened of skin and buttocks. They would fight for the glory and honor of Grazi, and perhaps piles and piles of treasure and the occasional loose woman.
And all of this, so the story goes, over the honor of a woman. A hippy, full-breasted woman with lips like a couple of pillows and a tendency to drink a little too much. She was Mildred, Mildred of Grazi, Mildred the golden haired, Mildred of two minds and unsure of who she would rather lie with tonight, Mildred the hussy. She had been chosen by a husband of Grazi, her downstairs neighbor Pithameneus of Grazi; she was taken to Telio by the young and golden-locked Penis.
Outraged, Pithameneus called on his brother Agriculturus, a former farmer and swing king of Cappus. Agriculturus, or Aggie, of the bountiful forearms and delicious sweet corn; Agriculturus, the stubborn fuckhead; Agriculturus, he who has been rumored to have sampled from both sides of the plate, but still considers himself firmly heterosexual, no matter what certain coliseum graffiti might insinuate. Agriculturus came to the aid of his brother Pithameneus and brought 160 ships, all for the purpose of bringing Mildred back from Telio.
Men came to their aid, as men always seem to flock to Agriculturus, the less said about it the better. The first to arrive was Duckus, the swift, son of Doodius; Duckus the unwashed, he of the especially poor hygiene; Duckus the flatulent; Duckus, with the shortest toga in the land, he who could induce the vomitous response in many at once. He brought 6 particularly smelly ships.
The next to arrive was Jargis, the emasculated; Jargis, whose javelin throw was equivalent to that of the goddess Aphrodite, which is not a compliment; Jargis, who ornamented his shoes with rare stones and started gossip amongst the masses; Jargis, son of Unimax, who was quick to deny it. He brought twenty ships, but they were universally ridiculed by all others.
Also came Usyless, he of the lowest self-esteem in the land; Usyless, who needed constant reassurance in the slightest of tasks; Usyless, who raided the self-help section of the local library frequently, he who was quick to tears and too self-conscious of his weight; Usyless of the fad diet, he of not much help in a fight. He brought 40 ships, though no one asked for them.
Another to come was Prickus, the greatest of all assholes in Grazi; Prickus of the hurtful insults, he who was quick to borrow treasure and slower to return it; Prickus, with a girl in every port and a whore stashed away on every boat; Prickus with no friends, who sailed by himself and bossed people around until all good employees chose to jump overboard rather than face insults and endure his spiteful sarcasm for the entire voyage. He brought 1 ship, and was lucky to get it.
And finally was Killalles, the mightiest warrior of all; Killalles of Spago, son of Maximus Painus, who was somehow Roman; Killalles, who could pry stone from rock with his member, he of the arms too thick to wear a proper sweater; Killalles of the big teeth, not that anybody wanted to say such a thing in his presence if anybody knew what was good for him; Killalles who had the eye of every woman in the land, and even occasionally Agriculturus; Killalles with the single downfall of tremendous ego. He brought 89 boats, and one for the ego.
All of this for the love of a single woman, and in the humble opinion of this poet, under witness of the gods, it sure wasn’t worth it.
For more of this great story, buy Momo’s
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