M-TV Accidentally Honors 9/11 Hijackers

he 20th Annual M-TV Video Music Awards, held last Thursday night at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, served up its usual yearly helping of toned abs, wild costumes and music playing somewhere in the background, as expected. But viewers and M-TV executives alike were also treated to a surprise that few could have anticipated.

The show’s highlights were many and varied, including Madonna swapping STDs with Britney and Christina, rapper 50 Cent being shot 15 times during the ceremony but still returning for his musical performance, and Johnny Cash pulling a no-show, doing little to dispel most viewers’ assumptions that he died ten years ago. Host Chris Rock kept the show moving along at a rapid clip, and kept it funny by refusing to pretend that any of the nominated acts were any more than marginally talented.

In fact, the show took on such a party atmosphere that few even noticed when a diminutive Arab man named Sheik Omar Bakri accepted the award for Best New Artist for his album “Magnificent 19,� peppering the crowd with epithets during his acceptance speech in an accent so thick it could’ve shrouded an iceberg from an ocean liner. Many assumed Bakri was simply rapper Eminem’s newest protégé, failing to recognize him as the head of the radical Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun.

“That Sheik Omar was ate up,� gushed Smurf-like crooner Justin Timberlake. “Boy was so drunk he was talkin’ in tongues and shit. I can see why his fans is mad for him, that was righteous.�

In actuality, Sheik Bakri’s speech was the culmination of several months of planning by Al-Muhajiroun, whose members had infiltrated M-TV as interns and were able to slip Bakri’s non-existent album in as the Best New Artist winner in a tribute to the 19 hijackers who died on September 11th.

“The word magnificent is to attract if you like really the attention of the people to those particular 19 Muslims who in our eyes we see as Muslims what really they are — they are more than magnificent,� Sheik Bakri said, sort of in English. “In our eyes, they are the people who sacrifice their own life and that’s the most valuable thing and they offer it. It must be for a good reason. It must be for divine reason.�

Bakri may have misinterpreted the Video Music Awards crowd’s reaction to his remarks during the show, saying “the many Muslims present celebrated the comeuppance of the U.S.A.,� when in fact the crowd was cheering because Britney Spears’ cooch was momentarily visible on the big screen.

Bakri also considers his Best New Artist win to be sanctioned by God, explaining “If God did not permit that to happen, it would never happen,� and has thus far refused to return his moon-man statuette. Sheik Omar did, however, express regret that there was no Best Cover Art category, which could have honored the bizarre “Magnificent 19� album cover he had mocked up at great personal expense.

Network executives at M-TV seem alarmingly unphased by the incident, claiming that most of its viewers are too young to remember the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Iraq blah blah blah Suicide blah blah blah Dead

Big Whup: Whale Swims Across the English Channel

Heather Graham’s Career Found Dead in Apartment

Polish Roof Falls in Following “Drinks Are on the House” Debacle

Hello readers, we're going to take a little break from the Fad Wagon this week while I write more of that book to excerpt and you learn a thing or two about daylight-saving time. Sound fun? Tough.

Many common misconceptions survive regarding daylight-saving time, including the belief that we do it for a reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. And don't call it "Daylight-Savings Time," that just proves you're a part of the International Communist Conspiracy.

The idea was originally suggested by Benjamin Franklin, compulsive liar and great American. Franklin was always late to everything, and frequently explained away his lack of punctuality by bragging that he lived in a special personal time zone that everybody else was too stupid to understand. When questioned, he'd rattle off a bunch of bullshit figures about how he saved energy by living his life an hour later than everybody else, allowing him to sleep in, stay up later and avoid traffic by traveling while everybody else had already arrived at wherever they were going. Only his girlfriend believed this, and everyone else came to refer to any ridiculously late events as occurring in "Franklin Time." Whenever anybody needed him there for a meeting they'd tell him it started two hours before it actually did, and then laugh when they got there and he'd been sitting and waiting for an hour.

Franklin's various shenanigans and rocky relationship with the truth earned him the nickname "B.S. Franklin," which he told naïve girls was short for "Balls Franklin." He came to fame after publishing an almanac of bullshit weather predictions and claiming to have "discovered" electricity after being blown off his toilet by a bolt of lightning. For years neighbors had warned that the gigantic kite Franklin had attached to his house, in hopes of sailing to a better neighborhood, would get him blown off the toilet in the middle of the night by a gigantic bolt of lighting, but he'd done little to heed their warnings. A smug Franklin discovered fire later that week when his neighbors burnt his house to the ground, taking offense at the "Father of Electricity" banner he'd begun carrying around town.

In 1776 Franklin was late for a meeting of the Second Continental Congress, and just missed the vote to kick Benjamin Franklin out of the Second Continental Congress. Upset that he missed his opportunity to cast the lone dissenting vote, Franklin demanded that the colony of Pennsylvania adopt "Daylight-Saving Time," a new system of his extremely recent invention that would have made him, in fact, early for the meeting. Thomas Jefferson signed the motion into law as a joke to humor Franklin, signing the form "Upyour Penis," but in a tremendous gaffe the clerk failed to examine the signature and "Daylight-Saving Time" was passed as Pennsylvania colonial law.

Relations between the various colonies were highly bitchy at this point in history, and I mean like drag queens at an Easter buffet. The new time change law really chapped the asses of the neighboring colonies, and before long, each one had passed their own new laws, not about to give smug Pennsylvania the satisfaction of always being early to everything and looking down its nose at all the other colonies as slacking layabouts.

After the Revolutionary War this really got out of hand, with states changing their time zones on an almost weekly basis in an attempt to one-up neighboring states and psych out tourists. At one point when you traveled from Massachusetts to Connecticut, you actually went back in time two days and had to be careful not to step on any butterflies or do anything that might mess things up for your future self back in Massachusetts. Eventually the federal government stepped in and announced that everybody had to get with the same program and stop all the silly horseshit, and from then on there'd only be two wacky nonsensical time changes per calendar year.

States were grumpy about losing their individuality, for sure, but most complied. I say most because Arizona and Hawaii never actually adopted daylight-saving time after becoming states, they only pretended to whenever the feds were around. To this day whenever some government official steps into a bank in Arizona you'll see employees scrambling to set the clocks back and act like they've been saving daylight all along.

The other exception is the state of Indiana, which never got its shit together and still has different time zones for every neighborhood, but after over 200 years of trying the government has given up on that state as a lost cause. Federal employees often refer to any broken or inexplicably errant clocks as being set to "Indiana Time," a joke that's very popular among the employees who aren't from Indiana.

º Last Column: You Look Like An Asshole: The History of Fads Vol. 2
º more columns

You know, Shorty, we've seen some amazing damned things in our day. What with everything being all techmalogicalized and whatnot, it can make your head spin. It seems like just yesterday we was listenin' to Cracker Barnes on the ol' phonograph. Now look at us, Shorty! Now we got Cracker Barnes on the eight-track, and we can listen to it in that pickup that's half-buried in Davey Krupp's front yard, no less. It buggles the mind, Shorty.

Seems like we turn our back for a minute, and they put a man up there on the moon in his jammy-jams. And then they make up some new-fangled gasoline lawn-mower when my push-mower still works fine. Damn. Then the next thing you know, they're inventin' little tiny people to go inside all kinds of things. Remember when Sonny's cousin Jojo visited from the city last year? An I'll be dipped in shit if he didn't have him one of them new-fangled cars with the little small person in the door who tells you when your lights is on or you left the door wide open when you went and passed out drunk in that ditch. Kinda scary, ain't it Shorty? Kinda spooky is what I say.

But I have to admit, out of all of them techmanalogical whoodangs they gone and dreamt up out there, I am quite a stretch appreciative for one of them, and you know without askin' that that's them Chicken in a Biskets. Dang if them ain't some good biskets, even if they is a bit flat and more of a cracker than a bisket proper. But I can forgive them that since those clever boys still did found some way to fit a chicken in there. They must be Missouri boys since you can't leave no Arkansas boys alone with a chicken more than ten minutes if you don't want trouble. And Missouri boys is known far an wide for fittin' chickens in places you didn't think chickens should fit.

And believe you me, Shorty, that there's not one small task. Remember a few years back when the altimenator went out in the Brown Maggot and I couldn't get it to start, and I couldn't get to town for no three weeks and I ran plum out of them Chicken Biskets? Remember how I was schemin' on how to make up my own Chicken in a Biskets here at home for so long? Well give up now, Shorty, 'cause you just ain't gonna do it. I tried everything and the closest I ever came was some real flat chickens and a box of crackers stuffed up a rooster's ass. It was a sorry scene, it was. You know after that I gave up and wasted little time diggin' an altimenator out off old Sonny's Dodge when he was laid up with that bout of gully shingles, and I was back in town buyin' Chicken Biskets before you could say medicated ointment.

How they do it, Shorty? You think they got some kind of machine that goes and minaturesizes them chickens so they can fit them in the little holes in them crackers? Seems like that'd take an awful lot of chickens, which would tend toward the spendy side of town. Maybe they minaturesizes 'em when they're just hatched so they don't got to feed them too much chicken feed before they stuff 'em into those biskets.

Or maybe they just got great big biskets and they stuff them chickens in BEFORE they minaturesize the whole works! Damn, Shorty, I think that might work! Listen here, I'll rustle up some chickens from Sonny's yard and bake up a big ol' bisket, you find us a minaturesize machine. Hot damn, Chicken Biskets here we come! Those clever Nabisco bastards will never know what him 'em.

º Last Column: Radicals and Silverfish
º more columns