ovable loser and one-time fanatical terrorist hopeful Zacarias Moussaoui vowed to fight the death penalty and instant martyrdom for Islam in a Virginia courtroom Friday, as he entered a guilty plea on multiple terror charges.

Moussaoui's al Qaeda comrades were responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the attempted attack on the White House. The attacks resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 people and spurred the War on Terror, as well as fueled the War in Iraq. In Friday's preliminary hearing, however, Moussaoui tried to distance himself from the national tragedies, and claimed he was part of another attempt to fly a plane into the White House that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

"I came to America to be part of attack on White House and use plane as weapon of mass destruction," said Moussaoui in funny broken English. "As you can tell, attack not go so well for me. Moussaoui get picked up at Minnesota flight school paying cash for lessons. Stupid Moussaoui!"

People in attendance laughed themselves silly, with comparisons to Tarzan and the Incredible Hulk going around the room. The terror suspect burst into rage, shaking his hands violently and yelling, "Quit it! Quit laughing at Moussaoui!" until he was tasered by bailiffs.

While medics attempted to revive the suspect, Moussaoui's defense team spoke to the press. They vowed, despite having pledged his life to al Qaeda's plan to martyr themselves destroying America, Moussaoui would fight the death penalty in the case after the prosecution announced they would seek capital punishment.

Moussaoui, a French fanatical Arab, was the first suspect arrested in the probe investigating the 9/11 attacks, arrested in 2001 a month before the attacks when he raised suspicion by paying $7,000 in cash for flight simulator training in Minnesota. Those who knew him in his private life described Moussaoui as a generally nice fellow, but said he did stand out from the other foreign visitors they knew.

"Well, I remember he referred to himself in the third person a lot," said neighbor Rachel Wincett. "He talked a lot about wanting to blow up George W. Bush. But it's Minnesota, you know, you can't swing a dead cat without finding someone who wants to kill the president."

Flight instructor Harold Farmer noticed peculiarities with Moussaoui as well.

"Mostly he asked a lot about parachutes," said Farmer. "He'd ask how the auto-pilot worked… if you could steer the plane for something like, say, the White House, put it on auto-pilot, and then parachute out to safety before the massive explosions ensued. I told him sure, we all dream about it, but auto-pilot technology hasn't come far enough to turn planes into self-guided missiles yet. Maybe one day."

Nathan Ledbetter, a sometime-friend of Moussaoui, recalled: "He did carry a boxcutter with him everywhere we went, and when people stepped too close to him he would whip it out in a pinch, jab it out at everyone, threaten to fly the whole plane into a government building. I'd tell him, 'Yo, Zack, we're not in a plane, man, we're at Brewski's, and it's dollar beer night.' Come to think of it, I guess you can call that 'odd' behavior. Not the oddest with my friends, but odd enough."

In a statement pledging to fight the death penalty, Moussaoui reminded the judge that technically, since he's still alive, it's proof he wasn't involved in the suicide attacks during 9/11. Moussaoui also said that thought he hopes to embrace eternal martyrdom and be blessed in the afterlife with a planeful of virgins and the kindness of Allah, he will be happy to wait a long time, like until he is 97 years old, before he martyrs himself.

Iraq blah blah blah Suicide blah blah blah Dead

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Johan Emmanuel Wiesel was an eccentric Hungarian immigrant who ran a pharmacy in New York in the 1830's. An amiable fellow with an impenetrable accent, Wiesel was fond of saying "Piss on Earth, and God wilt tard men!" which got him a lot of strange looks and the occasional thump on the head. When he wasn't busy "pepping up" the prescriptions he filled with copious amounts of cocaine, Wiesel occupied his spare time by inventing beverages. However, most of his inventions were completely impractical as beverages for actual humans, since they were all heinous in flavor and some ate through the bottle in less than a day's time.

But through some whim of serendipity, in 1845 one of his concoctions actually turned out to be fairly tasty, and only mildly corrosive. Wiesel was pissed, since he took this to mean that his arsenic had gone bad. But when he tested the drink on a young boy who he paid a quarter a year to do all the menial work in his pharmacy, he was surprised to find that the boy loved it. He burped until he threw up and suffered second-degree burns to his sinuses, but he loved it.

Wiesel decided to try selling his new beverage to customers in his pharmacy the very next day. He dusted off an old machine he had invented to dispense mustard into several pairs of shoes simultaneously, and in that moment the soda fountain was porn. Born.

The drink was a huge success, and before long his customers were demanding, sometimes at gunpoint, that Wiesel make his soda available to the wider market. Wiesel responded by buying a gigantic sack of empty beer bottles from a local orphanage, then filling them all with cole slaw. He was almost there. Realizing that this in no way addressed his soda-selling needs, Wiesel dumped out all of the cole slaw and filled the bottles with his sizzling new beverage instead. Despite the objections of absolutely everyone else involved, he insisted on naming his beverage Wiesel Piss, and it accordingly sold like sacks of dead leper babies.

Wiesel eventually went broke trying to sell Wiesel Piss, and died alone in the gutter after being stabbed in the ankle by a drunken orphan. His lone living relation sold the rights to the soda to a flim-flam man named Flannery McIntosh for one dollar. McIntosh renamed the drink Scrud and sold it as both a digestive aid and a carburetor cleaner. His memorable slogan, "Keeps your tummy firing on all cylinders," is still remembered to this day by people who are incredibly old and anal.

McIntosh built a modest empire around Scrud until 1892, when he was sued for being Irish and lost it all. The winners of that lawsuit, Daniel Freebanks and Benneton DuBois, renamed the drink Dope and sold it strictly as a new something called a "soft drink," a term of dubious legality that implied curative properties against erectile dysfunction. Their business grew hand over foot until 1910, when the US government cracked down on Dope since it contained cocaine, strychnine, absinthe, turpentine, a solution of fool's gold and high levels of cootineut, an imaginary ingredient that at the time was thought to quell dark humors in the pancreas.

Freebanks and DuBois went out of business faster than a pregnant hooker, and they were bought out by Farthington McIntosh, the grandson of Flannery. He promptly reformulated the drink in his bathtub, taking out the offending ingredients and replacing them with shitloads of sugar. But he was careful to also slyly rename the soda Coke, so that hipsters and conspiracy theorists would always think it still secretly contained cocaine, promoting sales.

McIntosh built Coke into an empire, branching out across the globe and fending off upstart sodas like Rammit, Jeez, and Wimpo. Though all of the sodas being produced were virtually the same in flavor, McIntosh retained his edge thanks to his uncanny knack for advertising. On top of plastering every vertical surface he could find with the Coke logo, McIntosh's true genius surfaced in his use of radio jingles touting the virtues of Coke. From early gems like…

Buy a Coke,
drink it up,
Buy another coke,
shut up, shut up.

to the legendary…

Buy a coke,
regret you won't,
you had a nickel,
and now you don't!

and finally the immortal…

Buy a Coke, it's nature's drink
Fizzy fizz that helps you think
You probably won't get cancer, too
Coca-Cola is the one for you!

…McIntosh's jingles were on the lips of every boob in the nation. Among other things, McIntosh is remembered for pioneering the practice of marketing frivolous items as if they were essential to the quality of life.

Unfortunately for McIntosh, all of the marketing genius in the world doesn't make you dagger-proof. He was later stabbed in the back by his own son, who sold the company for forty dollars and a magic talking mule.

The new owner of The Coca-Cola Company was Montgomery County shouting champion Eustace Turner, who ruled Coca-Cola with an iron fist for eight months before selling 40% of the company to L.P. Farnsworth, 40% to Jules Mather, 51% to Modest Cinderbrooke, and 117% to a very stupid man named Sty Covington. Turner then skipped town and laughed himself sick, which is more fun than it sounds.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, it's all history, if you want to get technical about it, but the rest of it is the kind of history you don't want to know about since it's is too long and boring to go into. Fear not, you got all the juicy bits. Nothing much else happens until the Cola Wars, and I'm saving that in case my book deal comes through.

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"Once in a while someone will ask me, 'Samuel L. Hartwig, what's your view of life?' I'll usually say the same thing: I'm paying you for the entire hour, doctor, you should be answering my damn questions.

I do have an answer, though: Life is just like a picnic. Everybody shows up expecting a piece of the pie. Some rush the picnic table, some walk to the picnic table. Some trample and pound on your brother Goose and say it's because they worried there wouldn't be enough pie for everyone, but you suspect it's because Goose likes to flash gang signals. Then you finally get to the picnic table yourself—not the fastest, not the slowest, but you get there just the same.

And the damn pie is all eaten up! What's with that? It's a friggin' picnic, mom, you should have known everybody was going to want pie. You were making one, was two pies beyond your pie-making capacity? 'Cause that's a pretty shitty pie-making capacity, if you ask me.

Then mom tells you she did make two pies, and you feel a little sheepish and realize it was all a big fuss for nothing. You step right up and cut into your slice of the pie, that was there all along.

'This is coconut, mom!' you scream at her. What's wrong with coconut? Oh, nothing, only it fucking kills me dead. That might be a slight problem. I'm your own son and you don't know I'm allergic to coconut? Nice. Just great. You couldn't save one piece of blueberry pie that would not kill me but there's a whole untouched killer coconut pie waiting just for me. What a fantastic substitute.

No, I don't want a fruitcup. Do you want a fruitcup? I'll tell you where you can shove a fruitcup. Leave me alone, I'm going to play Frisbee with those kids. Maybe you'll get lucky and some coconut will accidentally blow into my mouth from the death pie over here and you'll finally be rid of me.

Yep. That's kind of how I see life."

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