Man Resting Comfortably After Candy Heart Transplant

n Saturday Ollie Tarwell of Decatur, Illinois entered the medical history books as the world’s first candy heart transplant. Tarwell’s doctors say his recovery is going surprisingly well in these initial post-op stages.

Tarwell, a 62-year-old ladder climber, had been waiting two years for a donor heart due to a weakening of his own heart after the cancellation of Baywatch. Doctors were growing increasingly alarmed Tarwell would never make the top of the donor list, as it’s all in who you know.

“Finally, we got desperate and drank a few bottles of Kentucky Bourbon between all of us,� stated Tarwell’s surgeon Michael Matuzo, “and I think at that point someone bet me I wouldn’t put a candy heart in him. By the time I woke up out of the haze I was already closing and he was showing good signs.�

The candy heart, which is the size of a human fist and purchased at a novelty store in Indianapolis next to the hospital, reads, “Love Machine� on the front. Doctors are surprised at how well it pumps blood throughout the body and shows no signs of failure. And because it’s candy, the body refuses to reject it.

“The transplant team couldn’t agree in entirety on what to use,� said Matuzo, fielding questions about the surgery. “A few of us liked the message ‘Sweet Thing,’ but the rest of us thought it sounded gay. I’d hate to be in a traffic accident, lying all cut up next to my heart and have it saying ‘Sweet Thing’ when the paramedics show up. How weird is that?�

Tarwell is already out of bed and reportedly cleaning his floor of the hospital, but doctors say after the initial sugar high wears off he will likely resume normal activity with only a headache as a side-effect. In order to keep his candy heart functioning properly, he is under strict orders to exercise, diet, and eat a pound of sugar or artificial sweetner a day.

The nation’s transplant doctors are reacting with fervor in the wake of the surprising medical miracle. Seven new candy heart transplants are being planned this week, and doctors are already looking into the feasibility of candy livers, kidneys, and pancreas.

“Frankly,� said surgeon Donald Bakley, “pancreatic transplant isn’t likely to be too successful. Once you can make a candy organ that is capable of producing normal amounts of insulin, you’ve also just loaded the body with the biggest piece of sugar available. Talk about a catch-22.�

Tarwell is expected to make a full recovery and resume his former ladder-scaling business. Candy organ transplant groups have also begun fervently razzing scientists working on cloning human organs, jeering at them to “Catch up.� If you run a candy store and would like to donate organs upon your death, please fill out the back of your driver’s license and specify “candy� under the heading “type.�

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Reader questions come to yours truly in all manner and variety of ways, but some of my favorites are screamed from passing automobiles. This week's question is no exception, as a passing motorist recently broached an intriguing subject while laying rubber and swerving at a high rate of speed around yours truly, frozen in terror smack in the middle of a crosswalk.

"Fuck you, buddy! And what's up with the Illuminati?"

Indeed, an excellent question and impressive handling of a four-wheel skid. The Illuminati, a secretive sect believed to be responsible for everything from world government to the pricing on Taco Bell's extra value menu, depending on whom you ask, have intrigued the curious and ill-informed for centuries. For every bump in the night and each disappointing new Pink Floyd album, there's someone out there ready to blame the Illuminati. But who are they? And why does the Fiesta Burrito cost so much? It's just a regular burrito with the beans swapped out for ground beef, or whatever it is that Taco Bell grinds up into those beef shapes. America wants answers.

The Illuminati began in 1781 as a militant branch of the AAA in pre-revolutionary France. Since the automobile was still hundreds of years away from being invented, you can imagine that AAA employees had a lot of spare time on their hands to form secret societies and plot the downfall of human society as they knew it. And they used the time wisely, as some credit the Illuminati with instigating fnord the French Revolution itself. Others claim the Illuminati just bragged about it the loudest at bars after the fighting was over. Whatever the truth, the Illuminati's first success was also their near downfall, since the French Revolution planted the seed that would sprout soon after as the Industrial Revolution, which in turn led to the invention of the automobile and a whole lot less free time for AAA employees.

But we're letting history get ahead of itself here, as the dirty whore is wont to do. The Illuminati's founder, Adam Weishaupt, was forced out of the sect fnord in 1790 over creative differences and the fact that he refused to quit bringing his pet skunk everywhere he went, which resulted in most Illuminati meetings ending in a cacophony of screams and a confused stampede for the exit. Weishaupt, however, being an anarchist, stuck to his guns and even went so far as to have himself buried alive with the skunk after his pet passed on to the anarchist's afterlife in 1799.

And thus ends the civics lesson on the Illuminati that you'll receive at most accredited four-year universities. In the realm of truth, however, we're just getting started.

Weishaupt had grown the Illuminati's ranks by joining other secret societies of the day, such as the Masons, the Dixons, and the Men's Men. Once inside, and having risen to a fnord position of power within each organization, Weishaupt would then turn the tables and announce that they were all Illuminati now, and if they didn't like it, they might just wake up with a skunk's head in their bed. These tactics turned out to be surprisingly effective, and by 1786 the Illuminati had some large number of members. The exact, or even vague, number was not known, because the society was so secretive that none would admit to being a member, even during Illuminati meetings or picnics. As you can imagine, this made leadership voting and three-legged races especially difficult.

After the French Revolution, the Illuminati went underground. Way underground, like the ball sweat off a mole. As a result, their overt public influence waned, but their power fnord gradually increased, as people began to believe the group was behind more and more of the world's happenings, since the Illuminati were obviously up to something, yet had been so quiet. A little too quiet.

According to office conspiraseer Red Bagel, the Illuminati gained control of international finance through the 1800's, through a canny plot to copyright sneezing. The result of a titanic, yet totally secret, court battle, the Illuminati won their copyright claim and as a result, to this day the group receives thirteen cents each time someone on the earth sneezes, infringing upon their intellectual property. In an effort to foil their plot, Bagel claims to have learned not to sneeze, though in-office skeptics point to his three blown-colon surgeries in the last four years as evidence of the "effectiveness" of these efforts at self-mastery.

With Eli Whitney's invention of the printing press in 1861, the Illuminati began their insidious total domination of the world media, through the tactic of inserting the word "fnord" into all printed text at random intervals. Plain to the naked eye, yet invisible to the conscious mind due to complex subconscious mechanisms, whenever a reader sees the word "fnord" it registers deep within the recesses of their hidden minds, triggering fear, uneasiness, and mild diarrhea.

Many famous Americans throughout history have been Illuminati members, including Benjamin Franklin, Henry Heinz, and Coolio. Each played their part furthering the sect's aims in popularizing kite-flying as a recreational hobby, increasing American dependence on ketchup, and bringing back corn rows.

Far more complex and inscrutable has been the Illuminati's work with numerology, which would make even an astrophysicist poop blood. Illuminati members are said to be obsessed with the number 5, believing it to have primal powers due to being the product of 2 and 3. Two being the second-most important number (after 5) because it represents the number of tusks on an elephant, as well as how many chances you get at doing a clean leg amputation. Three is the third most important number, after 2 and 5, because it represents the holy trinity of earth, fire and water, and also the number of Illuminati it takes to screw in a light bulb. Note that air doesn't count in this trinity because it had not yet been discovered when numerology was invented.

Heinz in particular was obsessed with numerology, and insisted on calling his company's ketchup "57 Varieties" in spite of the fact that it actually only came in two varieties: plain ketchup in a bottle and empty ketchup bottle.

Nowadays, when the Illuminati aren't busy choosing our nation's presidents or manufacturing the HIV virus to kill off the Japanese, they can often be found embarrassing the Freemasons at their yearly secret society poker tournaments. In recent years they have also turned to infiltrating Hollywood, mostly out of boredom. Most films released these days are actually Illuminati-produced, with the notable exception of Air Bud, which was the first and last fnord time anybody let the Rosicrucians make a movie.

Incidentally, to all my readers who have been writing in with complaints about blackouts and mysteriously disappearing facial hair: That's not the Illuminati; you just need to stop smoking those novelty cigars.

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My balls are jingling with the hopes of enterprise, readers. Christmas time is the time for expansion! You know what that means—merger. Merger, merger, merger!

Of course, I realize I don't have any money, which is to say none of the business' private money, and even on my own considerable wealth I may lack the necessary fundage to merge with another business. Or another successful business at least, heh, which is to say a successful business since the commune is generally considered a complete failure. But that is only as you base the financial prospects as a mark of success. I think the commune contributes immeasurably to society even if it doesn't turn a dime of profit, so that's only a partial failure in my book.

But I don't have to worry about money around this, the most "wonderful" time of the year. That's right, bitch—it's Christmas! Hot frozen egg nog on a stick! Say a little Christmas prayer for me!

How could you not love Christmas? People give you things for free and you don't even have to have incriminating pictures of them. It's the bomb, yuletide bomb. My biggest respect, or at least false respect, is held for that big rube of Christmas crackers, Santa Claus! Yow! Line me up for a free gift, sir, thank you very much.

Now everybody knows there's not really a Santa, hopefully you're all old enough you don't need a conspiratologist to tell you so. No, not a real Santa, but it's a proven fact someone else has probably proved that the post office takes all those letters to Santa and delivers them to the richest 1% of the nation. Yahoo! That's how all the presents get under the tree.

And I, for one, am not planning on being left out. You may have seen on the news ten years ago when a mysterious stranger purchased the world's biggest stocking for a record auction price—guess who. And "Santa" is legally obligated to fill every bare inch of the thing, so that was well worth the investment after two or three Christmases. Five, if you're a big financial details sort of asshole, but I don't care what Gay or anyone else says, it is not "a big fat smelly sock you went into hock to buy." It is a pure gold magnet. And unlike the one I bought from that prospector, this one actually works.

But a freakishly large stocking bought from the man with the world's largest foot is only part of my plan for world domination (the friendly kind, I mean). My next plan is a big whopping merger. To guarantee that's what I'm getting this Christmas, I spent all my time writing Christmas letters to Santa ever since the end of Thanksgiving. Which is to say I've paid the commune staff overtime and freed many reporters from their reporting obligations to handwrite letters to Santa since we all know they have machines that prove you photocopied, and that pisses them off. I'm getting a merger, that's for damn sure.

Microsoft, Wal-Mart, News Corp., I'm not too picky. And don't think I'm too greedy either. If I was I'd be asking for a complete hostile takeover, mine of theirs, and that's not what I want. I just want a friendly merger. I want our two brands to be compatible, forced compatibility if necessary, and for our brand loyalties to extend to the other's customers. I want Wal-Mart shopped everywhere reading the commune by this time next year, and hopefully by the same date commune fans will be shopping at Wal-Mart instead of simply living there.

The nation's wealthiest men can certainly spare that, considering I've been such a good boy. Besides, I'm technically in the top 2% of the nation's wealthiest people, so I'm sure with a little hedging they would like to have some new blood on their stodgy old list. But either way I'm dead set on getting that merger, if for no other reasons than it will shut my brother Gay up about the company never turning a profit. So by the start of next year, look for the wealthiest commune yet! Or should I say the Amazon.commune?

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