Senator John Edwards Not the Guy Who Talks to Dead

he country received two unexpected announcements Thursday, when Democrat John Edwards, a freshman Senator from North Carolina, told NBC he would run for president in 2004. Edwards then stunned everyone with the revelation that he was actually not the John Edward from the syndicated Sci-Fi Channel show Crossing Over.

Edward, who claims to be a medium who can talk to dead people, could not be reached for comment. This reporter then asked dead reporter Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown to get a quote from Edward, but Edward did not respond, and only pissed himself.

Meanwhile, Sen. John Edwards was firm in his insistence he was not the John Edward that talks to the dead.

"Of course I don't talk to the dead. I've never even heard of that John Edward. But if he is an American, I will do my best to represent him just as I will represent all other Americans when I am president. I have served North Carolina faithfully during my time in office, and I will serve the country just as well. All I ask is for your vote."

Edwards' political rhetoric continued for at least thirty more minutes, then this reporter left for a sandwich.

Edwards' decision to run for the Democratic nomination for president follows the announcement by former Vice-President Al Gore that he will not run in 2004, citing happiness with his new beard. Edwards enters the race against Jay Leno-lookalike Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, as well as potential candidates Sen. Tom "No, Seriously, I'm Running" Daschle and Sen. Dick "Last Name Never Looks Real" Gephardt.

Sen. Edwards told the press Friday his campaign would address key issues and attempt to overcome the Senator's disadvantages. Edwards campaign buttons were passed out with clarifying statements such as, "He's not the one that talks to dead people" and "The Senator, not the medium," as well as image-focused buttons with the Sci-Fi Channel's John Edward's face crossed out and Sen. John Edwards' face circled. Edwards' campaign manager Charles Manson (not the ritual murderer) unveiled a banner at campaign headquarters reading, "John Edwards for President. No, the other John Edwards."

Manson was optimistic about Edwards' chances, yet acknowledged there would be obstacles.

"Is it an uphill battle?" Manson asked, then answered before anyone else could. "Yes. Is it impossible? Not at all. Senator John Edwards is a dedicated and determined man, and he has set his sights on this and will pursue it as far as possible. I can give you my personal guarantee that, when the Senator is done, everyone in America will be convinced he is not the guy from the Crossing Over show. We have a three-pronged attack: Get his face out there, get his position as Senator in the public mind, and stress that he has never and likely never will communicate with the dead. By the time our campaign is over, the other John Edward will be known as 'the other John Edwards.'"

As for the Senators' hopes for winning a presidential race against George W. Bush?

"Oh," replied Manson. "We hadn't really thought that far ahead. Are you sure Bush can run in 2004? Won't his term limits expire by then or anything?"

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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.

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I don't watch Oprah's show anymore, for quite a while now, ever since she replaced her hookers and lesbians with books. What's the deal there? One day the show is about giving women a forum to curse out they baby's daddy and the next day it's like a friggin' library or something. If I want a library, I'll go some place, like a book store.

Frankly, I've never understood America's fascination with books. Okay, there's a bunch of words. So…? If I want to read words, I can get them in magazines. Have you ever tried reading one of these books? They always start just boring as hell. "John Fancypants was stranded on an island. His food and water was limited and he could die at any minute." Yeah, so? Does he die or what? You want me to read the whole book to find out? I don't have time, pal, I work for a living.

Worse than that are books that start and don't even tell you what you're reading the book for. At least with the guy on the desert island book you know in the first few words where the guy is and what the deal is. Have you ever read one of these books: "Jane Fancypants was a twenty-one year old student at Midwestern College, majoring in Marine Biology." Aw, Christ, now we have to know everything about your stupid "character" before we can find out why we're reading about you. What bullshit. It's like a foreign film or something. If I wanted to read and learn slowly about characters, I'd go to a foreign film. At least I know how long it will last, two or three hours. A book I could be trapped reading for a few days, weeks, or years.

And why are all the characters named Fancypants? That's stupid and obvious. I'm not interested in any character with such a stupid name. On top of that, Fancypants isn't even the stupidest name.

I tried reading books before, really, so it's not like I don't know what I'm talking about. My tutor on the set of Who's Your Daddy? was really big on teaching me a love for books, which is probably why I hate them, it was the worst part of being a star. He assigned me a book called Moby Dick to read once. Wait, before you get all worked up, the shit's about a whale. No kidding. At least there was a picture of a whale on the cover. I got to the first line and was instantly lost. "Call me Ishmael." What the hell is that about? This dude is going to write a book and before he even gets into the story he wants some asshole to call him. A publisher or something? Man, get your shit together before you put it in your dumb book.

You ever heard of this one: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." You're talking about two different times, dickhead. Once again, get your shit together and then send your finished book, hopefully shortened, and maybe I'll try reading it again.

With all that said, I've gotten into the commune's new Book Revolt feature pretty well. It's cool that books can be shortened into magazine-type formats and printed in the commune. Really you're saving trees by doing that and, more importantly, you're saving my time. Just take the best part of your book and put it into a short form I can read and leave me the hell alone. I don't care if your book has 100 tips for beautiful skin or a cure for cancer or whatever, if it's more than a couple pages you're losing me.

Hopefully all of you reading this know what I'm talking about and together we can make a statement to these blabber-typing authors out there who insist on putting nuances and pacing into their stories. Then again, if you're really on my side, you surely didn't get further than the first few sentences without getting bored as hell and going off to search for celebrity pics of Josh Hartnett.

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