Great White Pyrotechnics Implicated in Columbia Disaster

irl, as if it wasn’t bad enough clubbing’s been more dangerous lately than before they invented the AIDS cocktail, now they found the reason Columbia lit up the sky with their name. And it’s a phrase you’ve heard more than once: Cock rock is responsible.

Great White is once bitten, twice shy, and three times an asshole this week. Not only did the gorgeous ladies of ‘80s commercial rock burn down the hottest spot in the Rhode Island night club scene; now NASA is saying crucial video footage of the shuttle shortly before explosion puts the hair band and their infamous pyrotechnics on the scene.

“We have nothing but scratchy de-rezzing video stills,” said NASA blame-thrower Pete Hucksnell, “but we’re reasonably sure that was the ‘80s metal band Great White in the aft part of the cockpit. They were in the midst of a first encore, possibly a second, as the craft was approaching its landing perimeter.”

When asked what Great White was doing aboard the shuttle, wise-ass Hucksnell said NASA believes it was “Rock Me.”

Since the announcement, speculation has been thick as to how Great White got aboard the shuttle, why they were playing a set during landing, and how they successfully escaped the shuttle blast to successfully destroy Rhode Island’s night life more than a week later.

“Great White was playing at my club in Jersey shortly afterwards. They used their dangerous pyrotechnics without knowledge of management or any warning to anyone, despite being informed it was against fire safety laws,” said New Jersey night club owner Gary “I Tol’ Ya So” Maxwell.

NASA insiders say early opinion is the video footage is genuine, though it was being closely studied to see if it was a prank by Internet jokesters or jealous Winger supporters. At press time, Great White fans were being sought to help NASA I.D. the band, particularly to distinguish them from Warrant, Slaughter, Whitesnake, and any other groups often mistaken for the quintet.

Experts were not yet prepared to rule out Mr. Big or Firehouse, though neither band has been seen since the early 1990s.

Shuttle design expert and metalhead Garth Study offered explanations.

“If it were Kiss or Iron Maiden or a metal band with some degree of mystic power, you could easily theorize how they escaped a shuttle disaster to be seen shortly afterward, uninjured and completely intact,” said Study, brushing peroxide-blond hair from his sunglassed eyes. “But Great White’s only known power was the ability to rock the house. And they had a hell of a stage show! But I guess that’s kinda inappropriate to bring up now. I would place money on it being a Great White cover band, but the fault in that theory is there are none. The space shuttle has no escape pods and all blast re-enactment programs can’t pinpoint any scenarios for survival of anyone, especially a Robert Plant-esque vocalist, a twin-guitar assault team, and tight rhythm section. It’s mathematically mind-boggling.”

Estimates are that if Great White can be proven culpable in the shuttle disaster as well, their total body count for 2003 would exceed one hundred. They would officially surpass Black Sabbath as the heavy metal band who killed more people, though Sabbath would still hold the record for encouraged suicides and Satanic sacrifices.

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"No one within shouting distance of the Hartwig home will ever forget the year dad got in trouble with the Olympic Committee for claiming that he invented tennis. It turned out that the game had been around for hundreds of years and bore only a passing resemblance to the game dad had invented at home with a couple of picture frames and a tomato. We went through the whole thing all over again a few years later with table tennis, but the Chinese had dad beat on that one, too. He tried to argue that they'd stolen the tomato part from him, but in the end dad was never able to prove that a tomato had ever been used in a regulation tournament.

The whole tennis debacle soured dad on inventing sports for several years, until Uncle Otto sold him the rights to his idea for a no-holds-barred fighting tournament. Dad worked out the kinks using my brother Goose and I as human guinea pigs, as per our usual role in the family. This lasted until the school counselor suggested to my dad that the ongoing 'Fight for Your Supper' tournament might be affecting Goose's scholastic performance. Few believed that Goose's grades could have possibly sunk below their customary level, so it was widely assumed that Goose had been caught stealing food from the cafeteria. This made sense, since he had gone 0 –for-17 so far in the tournament, even losing to Stephanie on several occasions.

Some in the neighborhood blamed me, and suggested that I could have let him win every once in a while. But until Goose figured out how to cut eyeholes into his mask, there wasn't much I could do to keep him from coldcocking himself on the banister and missing dinner every night.

Eventually dad sold the idea to another entrepreneur who had more resilient kids, and he reluctantly moved on to other pursuits. It was probably for the best, though, since Mom was getting tired of sanding teeth marks out of the banister every year."

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Well well, welcome back to the chaotic worm fart that is my life. I don't know what it is that's out there, call it God, Buddha or the force, whichever stirs your Kool-Aid, but I have discovered that it has a sense of humor.

Over the past couple of months I had worked my life into a pretty boring rut. Don't get me wrong, I still think my life is the shit stuffed between two slices of bitchin', but every once in a while I need some adventure. Now I'm not talking about a road-trip-go-see-stuff kind of adventure, but your bona fide "Indiana Jones-Grand Theft Auto-pull a badass heist like in that movie Heat" kind of adventure. You know the essentials: drugs, hookers, and all kinds of "ill shit."

It took about two seconds to decide that the best setting onto which to unleash my bad self was America's Playground. No, not the multi-colored play area I've been living in at the McDonalds down the street, because last week those bitches took my land and slapped me with a restraining order, just to put the In'jun in injury. Those imperialist dogs got their anus in an Andy just because I went in there pretending to be blind, then demanded loudly that my seeing-eye midget be given twenty Happy Meals for free to make up for my disability.

Leave it to Nevil to fuck up my wet dream.

Everything was going smoothly at first; they even put a toy in every Happy Meal. Booya. But what I hadn't noticed was that Nevil was walking in circles around me the whole time, following a bug or something, and before long his leash was coiled around my body like a goddamned python. Playing it smart, or at least blind, I kept my eyes closed through the con. If there were any witnesses, there'd be no way those rat fucks could scream out "Hey I thought that guy was supposed to be blind! He was all lookin' around and shit!" just to ruin my good time.

Then I heard something that sounded like the dude behind the counter dropping one of the Happy Meal toys on the ground. Either that, or it was an entire Mariachi band stomping on cockroaches, but I considered that possibility less likely given the situation. Either way, Nevil's instincts from his time in the wild took over and he pounced on that toy like Ted Kennedy on spilt booze. Thanks to the leash, that little shit spun me so hard I turned into a blind tornado, devastating everything in my path. My seeing-eye cane smashed against the wall and I accidentally stabbed the day-shift manager in the pills with the sharp end. And the dude did not take it well. I said that I was sorry and shit, what the hell else did he want? The worst part is, I didn't even get my Happy Meals before they chased me out of there with buckets of hot French fry oil.

The wound didn't kill that prick, but apparently it went deep enough that my face and novelty tee-shirt stuck in his memory, and now I'm permanently banned from every McDonalds by old Ronald himself. I can't go within a mile of any of their establishments without risking extradition to the Royal Court of McDonald in Paraguay for a life sentence of breaking rocks and making apple pie pockets. Those fuckers even put up police sketches of me in every restaurant they own. Lousy sketches, too. Who am I, Jesse James? Now what in the hell am I supposed to do for food?

Thanks to the McDonalds incident my whole caper had to be moved to Las Vegas, which is still cool, but can't hold a flame to that play-pen. But since I was planning on letting it all hang out in Vegas, I needed to find someone to watch Nevil for me while I was gone. It's never fun to lose a midget in the city that never sleeps, plus he's far too sensitive to be exposed to 99% of the shit that goes down in that mafia wonderland. Finding a midget sitter was harder than I'd expected, because I really didn't want to pay anyone and I had no idea when I would be coming back. One by one, my neighbors slammed their doors in my face like I was a naked Jehovah's Witness selling used condoms. Man did that bring back memories.

Down but damn sure not out, I dreamt up the perfect solution to my problem: I took Nevil out behind my apartment complex and chained him to a fire hydrant. And I didn't pay the hydrant shit. Who knows, maybe some sympathetic pedestrian stopped and fed him salad croutons or something while I was gone, stranger things have happened. "Good work Mickey, way to kill two birds with one stone," I said out loud. Then I hopped into the back of a pickup truck driven by some Mexican who looked like he was headed to Vegas, and prepared to blow the world's mind.

When I reached the city of sin, I was in high spirits from all the fresh air and a can of boot black I'd found in the pickup's bed. "I'm young, relatively healthy, and ready for what the night will bring," I thought to myself. Thirteen minutes later I was in a strip club, and I didn't come out for two days. Mainly because I spent all my money in that first half hour, after which the mentally unstable-looking bouncers stapled me to the wall in the men's room. They used me as a human spring-loaded billy club dummy for about nine hours, then it was decided that I had repaid my debt.

I could have left sooner than I did, but it took some time for my fractured shins to heal up enough for me to drag myself out through the bathroom window. It was a tight squeeze, but enough of my ribs were broken that I was able to squirm right on through. Just let it be known for the record that I think something is wrong with my spine, because every time I step on my left foot I piss my pants, then barf up dry-roasted peanuts.

I couldn't think too clearly at that time because from all evidence my skull was cracked, and a piece of my brain was dangling carelessly out of one of my ears. While I was trying to remember who I was, what language I spoke and why my feet were covered in dead purple cow-flesh, some homeless crackhead wandered upon my mutilated body and started poking me with what was left of an umbrella. He was eyeing me like I was going to be in his next homemade snuff film, which is why it surprised me when he leaned down and put a crack pipe to my lips, while motioning for me to inhale.

With all the breath I could muster, I forced my torn diaphragm and punctured lung to fill with the thick white smoke. This guy must have been the Yoda of homeless crack addicts, because in minutes I was on my feet, and feeling better than ever. And I do mean ever. After a few more tokes I felt like a million bucks, and all my limbs were working again. But when I looked up to thank my crank-fueled angel of mercy, that little ninja fuck had vanished like a welfare check. Oh well, off to face the city once again.

Feeling rejuvenated, I wandered into the cheapest motel that I could find, which was an empty dumpster behind the Golden Nugget. My trip hadn't started off exactly as I'd expected, but I still had big plans for this monument to man's greed. Mickey Hanes was born to take advantage of a town where the only moral is that if you have enough money, you can do whatever the fuck you want. For the first time in three days, I closed my eyes and rested.

In the morning I awoke to the all-too-familiar sound of a dump truck lifting my dumpster into the crisp morning air. With a quickness I dismounted the dumpster using skills I didn't know I had. I floated through the air almost in slow motion, graceful as a ballet dancer dodging blowdarts. If an angel had seen the grace and elegance of my execution, he would have pissed himself.

The landing, however, was a completely different can of beans. Cirque du Soleil doesn't have shit on me. Caught up completely in my kick-ass performance, I forgot a small but important detail... the landing. I remembered the landing only in retrospect, after the sidewalk tried to shove itself dow

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