he newest pope has been elected and chosen the name Pope Benedict XVI, and already the supreme being of Catholicism has taken a fierce stance against faded fascist groups by renouncing his own brief history with the Hitler Youth. In the world's entire Catholic population, it would seem to be an easy task to find one respectable cardinal who wasn't previously involved with the Nazi party, but apparently Joseph Ratzinger of Germany has some inside dish that landed him in the pope seat.

Responding to accusations of being a fascist, Ratzinger addressed his Nazi history and reassured detractors he was generally against the extermination of non-Catholics. In memoirs, Ratzinger described being "forced" into joining the Hitler Youth against his will as a youngster in Nazi-fied Germany. He left to study for the priesthood, aided by his anti-Nazi family (who kept their anti-Nazism secret), but was drafted into the army in 1943, where he put his hate for fascism to work foiling the Nazi machine from the inside, until he deserted and arranged capture by U.S. troops before moving on in fascism-free Germany to become a priest.

Ratzinger renewed his fight against Nazism Thursday, answering challenges from those who opposed his Popedome.

"I have always been an enemy of fascism in all its forms," said the Pope. "And I look forward to laying down a rigid doctrine of Catholicism, the one true religion, to be obeyed by one and all."

The selection of Pope Benedict came in the wake of the death of Pope John Paul II, who some sources only at the commune claim is still alive and has been taken into hiding by Vatican officials. Why? So a younger, fresh pope of Bel-Air could reinvigorate the stagnating Catholic church.

Pope Benedict has been an advisor of the late/missing Pope John Paul for years, and an opponent of reform within the Vatican. As Ratzinger, his secret pre-Pope identity, he argued against such church-devastating movements as religious pluralism, gay rights, feminism, communism, and liberation theology, which argues that the church should play an active role in politics of change.

Before his election, Ratzinger lectured the selection committee on "relativism" in the Catholic Church, and dedication to principle was unfairly labeled "fundamentalism."

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." Then, the officials still elected him.

As the new pope, Benedict compared efforts to change and reform the church to following whims and fads, and ended his early speeches by extending his arm and shouting a rousing, "Hail the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!" He was then asked by Vatican consultants to not ever do so again.

Theologians believed the selection of Ratzinger a clear attempt to distance the modern Catholic Church from the hedonistic reign of Polish Pope John Paul II.

"The 'anything goes' days of the old pope are gone," said professor of Theology at the Newark University Norm Chauncey, whom this reporter interviewed for strictly vindictive reasons. "The Church was obviously sick of becoming the laughing stock of the world, out of touch with the rigid morality of the modern era and its uncompromising dedication to religion. What better way to bring the wayward back to the fold than to force closer adherence to the guidelines set for Catholics in the 1960s?"

Thanking the professor, this reporter then went home and reaffirmed his commitment to atheism.

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My dearest Deidrebane, it pains me acutely to have to write you this column and expose our personal goings-on to the somewhat wider audience of the world at large, but I can't find any of our personal stationary and I'm not about to go tearing up the entire house when the computer is right here.

Simply put and plainly typed, your new children have become a nuisance.

I can only assume these children were adopted by you on one of your recent humanitarian skylarkings, some time while my attention was turned elsewhere, say to the televised gladiatorial matches or to Bolivian chicken racing, whose season is now thrillingly underway. I know you claim these children to be the fruits of your loom, or loins, whatever it is you have down there nowadays, but needless to say, I find this to be horrifyingly implausible. To the best of my knowledge your plumbing has not been snaked in a generation. And word on the street is that things are drier down there than a jerky stand in the Sahara. For the sake of decorum, I shall fail to go into the gruesome details, though believe me when I say the word is out.

I can only imagine how our first wave of real children feel about this latest batch of imposters, suckling at their mother's dry, unproductive teat. Wherever they are, Deidrebane, out in the world making their fortune or spending ours, it is surely a sad day for them. If I could remember their names, I would send my condolences by post card or fruit basket, whichever we have in stock at the moment.

And no, I will not refer to these new hangers-on as "our" children. I fell for that trick once, many years ago, and shant repeat my folly. I'm quite convinced I never had anything to do with the first batch, and so I'm not about to piss my markings onto these latest home-invaders. These are your children, Deidrebane, and I've had enough of them playing "bakery" with my angel dust collection.

Firstly, there's the matter of your oldest new son, Montpellier, who I recently heard through the grapevine was kicked out of the Hentwistle Correctional Facility for Incorrect Boys. It had been my understanding that Hentwistle was nothing more than a nicely-named prison house, and if they're offering expulsion for misbehavior these days I fear for the message this sends to baddies and goodies alike. Montpellier must truly be a special child.

But the one sycophant I truly cannot abide is your new young son, Cartegney. This one is really the tops. Just last week he got into my gun collection, and you don't need a fertile imagination to discern what happened next. That's right; the child organized my guns by model number, then put them all away neatly in the gun safe! Now what am I supposed to do if I need to shoot something in a hurry?

I shall fail, I fear, not unlike your newest daughter Steenburgen when she tried to bake us an anniversary cake last week. You can say what you want, but if a child doesn't understand the concept of needing to bake the cake before hiding yourself inside, I say she has a valuable lesson to learn from the skin grafts. I know I've kept nothing but fond memories from the summer I spent as the Human Torch at a county fair in my youth, and not just because the unpleasant parts are either blacked out from my memory or masked by a thick curtain of Vicodin.

No my dear, these new children just aren't working out, and I think it's time they were sent back. Dig up your receipt and return them to the adoption cart at the mall or Kids "R" Us or wherever it was that you picked up these wayward moppets in the first place. I would rid our house of them myself, but my plot was already foiled by Cartegney, who informed me that the car I had loaded them all into did not have an adequate safety rating and regardless, he was too young to drive. So do what you must, Deidrebane. I won't have these precocious ragamuffins pointing out the folly of my planning. Now if you need me, I'll be in the den, watching the Crusades on pay-per-view.

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Now that the temporarily complete Star Wars wank saga has been shat onto the public's ever-loving lap, to the thrills of toddlers and fanboys everywhere, viewers are starting to calm down from the whiz-bang video game effects just enough to wonder what in the hell the whole thing was all about. And besides, did they really need to have so many goofy aliens? Ever the thankless public servant, I've decided to take on this unruly bitch of an assignment, for better or worse. I'm thinking worse.

I say "temporarily complete" because we all know it's only a matter of time before Lucas releases a special, spiffed-up Electroshock Edition of the hexology, or reneges on his promise not to make the entire thing a nine-part endurance test as originally planned. Of course, Lucas now says in finest W. Bush fashion that the six-parter is what he'd planned all along, which almost certainly guarantees another three movies in a decade or so. These will inevitably start production after Lucas is done filming the latest Indiana Jones sequel, which will primarily focus on Indy escaping from a retirement home with King Tutankhamen's prescription medication in his fanny pack.

Of course, Lucas now claims he will devote the rest of his career to directing small-budget indie fare like his directorial debut, the techno-bummer THX-1138 in 1971. But since George has had complete creative free reign for virtually his entire career and has still spent the last 30 years making popcorn movies and designing stereos, we'll believe he's going to make My Dinner with Andre when we see it.

Great Dreck, but what about this Star Wars crap? That's you talking, btw. Okay, I'm on it.

The central concept one needs to understand about the Star Wars world is "the force," which is a mystical ability something like a cross between ESP and cheating. The Jedi Knights (not the dance troupe from Brooklyn, the other Jedi Knights) are masters of the force, which allows them to fly around like gay ballerinas or Caucasian Chow Yun-Fats and trick people into kicking their own asses. The force also has a light side and a dark side, and just like chicken meat, the light is more popular. But there are enough freaks who like the dark side to keep everything interesting, again like chicken meat. The darkies are more politically-correctly known as "the Sith" because they were named by a guy with a lisp.

The force also bestows some time-bending abilities, making more recent events in the saga seem like they happened before the older ones, which explains why R2-D2 could fly in Attack of the Clones but only had the functionality of a Roomba vacuum cleaner 20 years later in Empire Strikes Back, when he/it fell into the swamp in Dagobah like a big retard.

The downside of the force is that it makes Jedi generally very forgetful, which explains why Obi Wan Kenobi doesn't recognize C-3PO and R2-D2 in A New Hope even after spending so much time with them in the "first" three movies. The dark side of the force is the same, since Darth Vader doesn't recognize the droids either, even though he built C-3PO as a child and had used R2-D2 as a toy box for years.

For all its downsides, however, the force in highly convenient since it gives the Jedi something to blame whenever they fuck things up, like when Qui-Gon Jinn kidnaps a young hick named Anakin Skywalker from the rough and tumble desert planet Tatooine (known then as the galaxy's largest tattoo parlor), setting off an Amber Alert across the southern half of the galaxy and bringing about the destruction of the Republic and the entire Jedi order. But Qui-Gon believes Anakin will bring "balance" to the force, which only makes sense if you forget that there were like a million Jedis and only two Sith at that time, but then again maybe Qui-Gon knew what was coming and was just really dedicated to the idea of fair play.

Anakin would grow up and knock up a queen, though don't get too excited: it wasn't a drag queen. We're not that far into the future. But eventually all the dirty diapers drove Anakin bonkers and he flips out and kills everybody, like in Carrie, only not as fun. Anakin would then change his name to Darth Vader to fake out the extremely apathetic law enforcement agencies of the day.

So bitchy Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi hides Anakin's son Luke on Tatooine, where Darth Vader would never think to look since that's the planet he was from and where his childless in-laws lived and only an idiot would hide Vader's son from him there.

The central bad guy in the Star Wars universe is the Emperor, a truly smelly character that songsmith John Lennon prophesied in the Beatles hit "Mean Mr. Mustard" almost 40 years ago. When he's not turning Jedi to the dark side or napping in his oversized chair, the Emperor enforces the unfortunate stereotypes about the elderly this country has been suffering from for years, with entire generations believing everyone over 80 is thoroughly corrupt and all-powerful. The Emperor himself doesn't really do much in Star Wars, he just kind of sits around, being evil, and waits for the Jedi to fuck everything up in his favor.

The Emperor's counterpart in the white meat corner is Yoda, a powerful Muppet sewn out of force-heavy non-flammable materials, who looks exactly like an old frog's scrotum and talks like ABBA. Yoda excels at Jedi parlor tricks and making shit float, neither of which turns out to be of any help when the chips are down. But this hardly matters since the Emperor proves pretty useless anyway, getting thrown down a well by a malfunctioning robot gimp and forgetting how to fly at the end. Only then does he see the folly of the Sith's policy of overly-exclusive membership, since even one more Sith, call him a trainee or Sith-Lite or whatever, could have prevented all of this from happening and won the battle for evil forever.

But that kind of thing makes for lousy cinema, unless you're Terry Gilliam.

Let's see, what else? There's a bunch of crap about people having eight different names each, which you'd do better to ignore entirely. Christopher Lee has a turn as the B-movie villain he's been preparing his entire career to play, but in the end he's inconsequential except for the hilarious CGI frontward-flip he does at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith due to the Sith's paralyzing fear of stairs. Oh, also: the Sith can make lightning out of their fingers. This is important to remember if you're ever having a Sith barbeque and you can't get the charcoal to start. That's about it.

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