ources inside the Pentagon are now saying that señor capitan Bush easily confuses Iraq and Iran, and though he vehemently hates both countries, meant to go to war with one while appeasing the other with placating words. The trouble is, Bush may have gone to war with the wrong one.

Confirming the reports is recent retired general "Meat" Callaghan, who left his position as a war advisor shortly before the invasion of Iraq began.

"It was the intention early on that Bush meant to go to war with Iran, and all documents were signed to that effect," said Callaghan Friday, at a local café where this reporter had to buy his soup. "Though the country formed even less a discernible threat than Iraq, the president claimed they had weapons of ass destruction and needed to bombardmentalized. We frankly thought there was some sort of intelligence problem—the president wasn't getting the right intelligence to his brain. But he insisted there was no mistake, and thought the newspaper headlines reading 'Iranis Ran From Iran' would be funny enough to make him crap his pants."

No one is naming names, but sources suggest that those in the chain of command below Bush rewrote orders under his name to make Iraq the intended target. A quote attributed to Dick Cheney, addressing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, sums up the alleged view of other Bush administration officials:

"I'm tired of him going to war with every country just because he thinks the name is funny. I tried to explain the complicated politics of the Taliban and the possibility they were aiding Al-Qaeda and all he could come up with was 'Afghanstand sounds like a place where they sell blankets.' Or when the Syrian ambassador came to negotiate the Iraqi invasion with us and he kept saying, 'You Syrious?'"

Sources allege that Cheney and company did not fabricate presidential orders, merely "fixed" them. Retired Gen. Callaghan described the situation: "The president is good-natured and sincere enough in wanting to go to war, he just sometimes gets confused by all the dozens of names and funny-sounding words he gets all day. He just knows good countries and bad countries, coalitions and axis of evils—remembering real big issues and gray areas and such is hard. He knows one of those countries has the real bad leader who tried to kill his dad, and that's the one he meant to go to war with. A good administration knows how to do what the president means rather than what he says."

Answering the allegations in a press conference, outgoing White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer, clearly showing signs of weariness toward the end of his run, told something resembling the truth.

"The White House cannot confirm such reports without closer study, but yeah, it's probably true. You know the man won't go down as the sharpest president in history, I don't think I'm rattling any expectations to say that much. All these reports about the Bush administration manipulating intelligence in the Iraqi war have it backwards—the administration understandably had to manipulate the Bush intelligence. You don't want to see this guy try to do long division, you can actually see the brain cells committing hari kari."

Most reporters, including this one, was so dumbstruck by the forthright revelations we couldn't think of any follow-up questions.

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"There was a roar of the crowd, the chilly wind blowing, the rattling of the weak bleachers we all sat on. It was the biggest game of the year, and our high school was involved. It was Oscar Wilde High School vs. the state champs, Karl Marx H.S. for the title of greatest football team of all time. Though I could be mistaken on the details, my mind grows weary over the years.

I was not a football player myself, but a cherished member of the Oscar Wilde Yahtzee Team. My school pride knew no bounds, including legal ones. I shouted and cheered for the home team through the match, touting our strong defense and lack of homosexuals on the team. I made numerous allusions to the murder of loved ones of opposing team members, but nothing could shake them. They had ice in their veins, or at least freon, if they had drunk from the sports drink I offered the players before the game.

Our boys were not daunted, though. Everyone wanted a piece of the other team, even the guys on the bench and the guys who had been kicked off the team for befriending non-caucasions. So many wanted a piece of the other team that the other team would have to bring in many more players just to have enough pieces to go around, even cut up into many small pieces.

The game was tough, and even playing our best we could only come within mere points of the opposing team in the last few minutes. Then, as contrivance would have it, my brother Goose was brought in off the bench to score the deciding field goal in the last few seconds.

Goose knew the pressure was on, as every fan on every side had yelled to him as he came in from the field. He didn't have a regulation helmet, but fortunately a hairstyle he wore at the time qualified as a helmet by the lax rules of the era. Goose sized up the goal, huffed and puffed like a wolf at the door of a pig house, and ran up to kick the goal.

He caught the ball with the side of his foot and it rolled just a few feet before stopping. The game was over and our team had lost, which was fine with me. As much school spirit as I had, it was a thousand times more satisfying to see Goose humiliated in a way I would forever lord over him. Even to this day. How you like them apples, Goose?"

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Last issue's tome on the metric system inspired more reader mail than any column since the My Friend Polio where Omar Bricks offered to sell naked pictures of my sister to the highest bidder. This time, however, readers weren't asking if I could beat Omar's price. They wanted to know how in the hell we came up with our current non-metric system of weights and measures in the first place. Good question.

Imperial weights and measures (known in modest England as "English weights and measures") range from the feet, gallons and pounds we're all familiar with to hundreds of freakish and forgotten variations that sound like whimsy straight out of Lord of the Rings. The next time somebody asks you for a chalder of coal or wants to know if you can spare a groat, you'll know you've either time-tripped into some medieval hell or else you're at the Renaissance Fair. Either way you're screwed. Likewise if someone offers you a minim of soy sauce or four roods of swampland. And if some wiseacre tells you you're twelve scruples overweight or uglier than a perch of limestone, punch him in the face first and ask questions about his outdated terminology later.

The system of Imperial weights and measures is not one defined by cold logic or mathematical nonsense, rather it's an innately human system based on how one innate human, King Edward I of England, thought things should be measured. Having grown up poor, Edward was the kind of insecure nuevo-rich king that insisted everything be named after him and that potatoes should only be grown in his likeness.

In England, length was originally measured by a unit known as the dork, which corresponded to the king's, uh… royal tackle. Later, more prurient factions within the country pushed to have the measure changed to the more family-friendly foot. Edward relented after being convinced that everybody knew what it really meant, and that nobody thought he had big feet.

The yard was developed as a unit of measurement based on the distance from the door to the backyard fence in the king's boyhood home, which indicated a home run if cleared on the fly by a batted ball. Anyone who pointed out that Edward grew up with a damned small back yard was immediately beheaded and taken off the king's Christmas card list without benefit of legal council.

An acre was originally defined as the area an ox could crap up in one morning, though over time oxen fell into disuse due to the scarcity of uncrapped land in England. In time the acre was known as the smallest area of land you could leave to your heirs without them coming to ox-drop on your grave after you'd passed.

Edward was also obsessed with barley, which at the time was known as "edwardly." The king spent much of his spare time counting grains of the stuff, and was keen on showing off his barley-counting prowess by having the standard measure of weight in England be equal to 7,000 grains. This unit was nicknamed the "pound" because that amount of barley was usually sufficient for bribing the dogcatcher to return your wayward pooch. As is still true today, the English of Edward's times were unusually fond of their dogs, though back then they didn't eat them.

The mile was defined as the longest distance Edward had ever walked without being carried, when as a boy his manservant died suddenly of a heart attack while carrying Edward to the beach and the king-to-be had to walk very far to find some ice cream. Similarly, the hour corresponded with the longest time Edward had ever had to wait in line, from the time when he was at the king store and there was a run on poofy velvet capes.

Naturally, the Imperial system was refined in the years after Edward's passing, the most notable addition coming when London blacksmith Mike Inch's ex-girlfriend Lydia immortalized his unimpressive tackle by lobbying that its length would be a perfect way to divide the foot into twelve segments. Lydia was so unflagging in her badmouthing crusade over the years that the inch eventually became a national standard of measurement, providing a powerful example that hell hath no embarrassment like a woman dumped for a slutty bar maid.

If the history of weights and measures teaches one lesson, it is that terminology and unit sizes will come and go over time, but human pettiness is an undying standard that will always remain universal.

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