Sniper Supsects Appear in Court Looking Like Shit

merica's least popular gunslingers since Young Guns 2, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, shocked an unshockable nation Friday, showing up in court looking like a couple of bagboys from an underperforming Food Lion in dumpy orange jumpsuits marked by a palpable lack of panache. Teased by weeks of anticipation and speculation, and frankly expecting more, America scrunched up its nose at the sight of these two decidedly un-dapper Dillingers.

"I have to admit I was a little disappointed," admitted Manassas housewife Thelma Russel. "I thought they might show up in some snazzy three-piece suits with silk handkerchiefs in the pocket, you know. Like Al Capone in that commercial for condoms. Something stylish that suggests they're above it all, you know? The kinds of guys you love to hate, but admire in spite of yourself. But these guys? Sheesh. I wouldn't even leave the house looking like that. Didn't they know they were going to be on TV? I guess it just says something about the state of our criminals these days. Pretty sad."

Muhammad, the supposed mastermind behind the duo's shooting spree, looked like he had failed to master the bathroom mirror that morning, sporting a nappy hairdo to make Kobe Bryant proud. A shaving kit had apparently also eluded him, as well as the fundamental principles of beauty rest. Too many nights spent on the lamb had left his eyes sporting more bags than a Tony Bennett concert, and this reporter suspects the county hoosegow must have been fresh out of cucumber wraps that week.

Muhammad's one "E" for effort came in the posture department, a welcome relief from his partner Malvo's parade of slouches. While Muhammad often looked like he had just sat on a fireplace poker, Malvo had more slouches on display than the 2002 Mets. This reporter had heard it said that Muhammad was able to dominate the young Malvo thanks to the latter's lack of a spine, yet I had no idea they meant it in the strictest clinical sense. This is one boy I wouldn't want to face in the Twister world championships, and not just because he'd probably shoot my ass if I won. I'm surprised they didn't have to cart him into the courtroom in a wheelbarrow.

Malvo's mauve jumpsuit was a welcome contrast to the teeth-clenching Hazmat orange of Muhammad's ensemble, but any chance the teen had of pulling off a courtroom fashion coup ala the lovely Ms. Winona Ryder was dashed by his grotesquely shambolic addition of gigantic white bunny slippers to complete the outfit. I don't know how he managed to sneak those past the prison guards, but they definitely should have put the fear of Mr. Blackwell into that young man, like they're paid to do.

Malvo seems more than happy to provide the much-needed comic relief in this trial, between his footwear choices, hilarious fake Jamaican accent and last month's slapstick falling-through-the-ceiling escape attempt, which was straight out of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Though if this trial is going to be remembered as anything more than yet another case of "Gun-Crazy Loon and His Funny Teenage Sex Slave," they're going to need to dig up another accomplice.

And preferably one who knows that Armani's not a branch of the Italian military.

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Let me be the first to say I have no idea where I met those East Germans. It was one of those things where one minute you're ordering a vodka drink named after a Muppet, the next minute you're one of the founding members of a kraut-rock quartet and then the next thing you know you're smuggling guns into the harbor on an air skiff. Or whatever the hell was going on, I don't even speak East German and those guys sucked at Charades.

Needless to say, it was an interesting weekend. What I can remember of it, which is about an hour total of choppy flashbacks. All I know for sure is that I was blindsided by happy hour Friday night and I woke up this morning in the barrel of a cannon on a Navy ship. In-between it's like cable TV the week after your descrambler crapped out.

There's a slight possibility those guys were just tearing around the harbor on the skiff and trying to run over ducks just for fun, but they were pretty heavily armed for just some general drunken mayhem. Usually a pellet gun or a homemade egg salad cannon is plenty for that kind of action. So that definitely doesn't explain all the assault rifles or typewriter parts or whatever it was strewn all over the hydrofoil. It was dark.

There was definitely a little old guy with wire-rimmed glasses involved, usually a dead give-away as the evil mastermind behind the whole thing. He had some phony cover story about being pissed that I'd honked on his houseboat, but I'm pretty sure it was all a covert passcode, like "the raven barfs at midnight," the kinds of things you hear in the spy movies all the time.

Hands and Balls played along and bare-assed the guy as we were hydrofoiling by, they were definitely hip to what was going on. Come to think of it, I'm starting to doubt those were their real names, they sound kind of fake in retrospect. At the time I was wondering what was up with Fritz and why he didn't get a body part name, like maybe he wasn't really East German. But really, those guys were so hard to understand I might have thought they were saying their names when they were really saying "Pass me the screwdriver" or "I think you peed on the police." German definitely wasn't written to be understandable by English-speakers.

East German or no, these were some clever bastards. I'm pretty sure they were just using yours truly to pin as a scapegoat once everything went down, otherwise I don't know why they would have carried me from the short bus to the hydrofoil. I mentioned the short bus, right? Too late now if I didn't. Yeah, we spent a couple of hours riding around with the Special Olympics hockey team, singing the Chuck Wagon song. I'm not sure how that got started; I think we may have barged onto the wrong bus after the bar ran out of cocktail cherries.

The whole cherry thing happened while Balls was going on about how the Great Wall of China was overrated and how the Berlin Wall could take it any day of the week, and I dumped a whole jar of cherries down his shirt to save his ass since the Chinese guy down at the end of the bar was starting to look like he was going to put his ass-kicking shoes on. We left in a hurry after that since there were at least ten dollars worth of cherries that had gone down Balls' pants, and this burly-looking biker guy at the bar had just ordered a Shirley Temple.

Most everything is a blur after that as the East Germans' plot kicked in and I was along for the ride like a suitcase that barfs and yells out requests for Neil Diamond songs. When the cops finally got wise to the whole scenario the East Germans predictably tried to pin it on yours truly, wheeling out this cock and bull story about how they were tourists who came to see the museums and the next thing they knew they were being dragged around town by the collars by some psychotic drunk who had Fritz's wallet. They had the whole thing sewn up pretty tight until I played the ace up my sleeve and ran like greased hell.

Nice try, East Germans. Next time you'll have to find yourselves a bigger sucker. I'll give you Rok Finger's number, I'm still pissed he gave me that Wild Draw Four for Christmas.

Bricks Out.

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As every high school yearbook from the era can attest, "What the Hell Was That??" was the catchphrase of the year for 1908 in Russia, thanks to the infamous Tunguska Explosion in Siberia earlier that year, which rocked the fallacious common notion that an entire forest wouldn't suddenly just blow up for no apparent reason. Exactly that happened to 2,000 square kilometers (10,000 miles) of forest on a remote central Siberian plateau on June 30th, at 7:14 am. Some historians argue that it was actually at 7:13 am, but researchers have independently verified that every one of them, to a man, is an asshole.

So what the hell was that, exactly? Ask a hundred different people and you'll get seven different answers, and ninety-three people who look at you like you just crawled up out of a manhole naked. In truth, they're all wrong, unless you ask the question while participating in a Gay Pride parade and really are naked on the street. But that's obviously never happened to anyone so let's drop the subject and never bring it up again, regardless of any "Griswald Dreck Gone Wild" photos you might have seen circulating on the Internet.

Let's start with what we know. That morning began like many others, with simple Siberian farmers and herdsmen going about their regular business, planning a communist revolution. Some commented it was strange that they couldn't hear any birds singing that morning, but were quickly reminded that all the birds had been shot for treason. Then suddenly, without warning except for the fact that all the animals and insane people in Russia began digging like mad in unison, a huge fireball brighter than the sun erupted from the earth, incinerating everything within miles of ground zero, including a herd of reindeer who had come into work on their day off. Traders 60 kilometers (14,000 miles) away saw the fireball shoot high into the sky, felt intense heat, and then heard a deafening explosion fifteen minutes later. The noise later turned out to be an unrelated event, when a local herdsman conducting scientific experiments attempted to boil a bathtub full of gasoline. But few could deny it added to the drama.

30 kilometers (9.7 miles) away huts were flattened, pigs were eaten by wolves and Russians were knocked the fuck off their couches. Forest fires burned for weeks afterward in the region until the locals got tired of the rich, soothing campfire aroma and decided to put them out. Unfortunately, the preferred firefighting method of the day was to drop napalm from a plane and run like hell, waiting for the trees and the fire to duke it out in a battle royale of natural forces, so due to this an additional 1,500 square kilometers (6 miles) of forest were lost.

Tremors from the impact were recorded over 5,000 kilometers (87 feet) away at a meeting of tremor enthusiasts in Jena, Germany, and noctilucent "night-shining" clouds were seen all over Europe for weeks after the event. Repeated requests for an encore by excited Europeans annoyed Russia for years, and led indirectly to the start of WWI a few years later.

The Russian government finally got around to investigating the explosion in 1927, after years of complaints that Siberia smelled like burnt reindeer meat. Conventional wisdom said that the Tunguska event was the work of a giant asteroid hitting the earth, so that was obviously wrong. Scientists were unable to find any evidence of an asteroid in the region, except for the fact that everything was flattened like it was hit by a giant asteroid or something. Neither the months of half-hearted looking around nor the posted 1 million ruble ($14) reward for anyone returning the 100,000 ton asteroid believed responsible turned up any tangible evidence.

Since then, numerous theories have been developed by scientists and the bored to explain the Tunguska event. As with any mysterious event, it's much easier to determine what didn't happen than what actually did, and these theories are a wonderful overview of what didn't happen. Just to rankle the scientists who supported the asteroid theory, some others argued that it must have been a comet instead, which would explain the lack of debris since comets rarely stick around and wait for the cops to show up. The first group of scientists countered that it couldn't have been a comet, because comets are gay, and so it had to have been a stony asteroid that disintegrated before reaching the ground, commonly known as a Houdini. The second group of scientists thought that sounded made up.

Scientists who were snubbed for inclusion on either the asteroid or comet teams formed their own club out of spite, centered around the idea that the explosion was actually caused by a chunk of antimatter, or even better, an anti-chunk of matter. Everyone agreed that was definitely made up, but it was ruled admissible as long as the third group of scientists agreed both that Houdinis were real and that comets definitely weren't at all gay. After that, everyone was happy.

That was, until the mysterious superstar astronomer Carl Duck appeared briefly from his Haight-Ashbury lair in 1968 to announce that the "Tunguska thing" was all about a black hole, dig? Most of the other scientists of the day agreed that Duck was a really cool guy and if he said it was a black hole, then 'nuff said.

Unfortunately, more would still be said on the subject. During the 1970's, when restrictions on who could be quoted as a "scientist" were relaxed to help out news organizations, all kinds of new theories came out of the woodwork. One of the more popular ideas was that the nuclear engine of a Martian spaceship had blown up over Siberia that morning, probably one based on Ford Pinto technology. Another competing theory had it that the blast was the effect of a laser shot from extraterrestrial civilization trying to contact Earth, though none could explain how a race sophisticated enough to build a powerful interstellar laser could be that stupid. Scientists hoped that if this theory were true, with any luck the extraterrestrial race would not prove to be too friendly, as a couple more calls on the bomb phone could spell the end of life on Earth.

But enough with the theories, Dreck, you demand, what really happened that day in Siberia?

Two words, faithful readers: Nitroglycerine fertilizer.

Due to a quirk in the Russian alphabet, the words for "nitrogen" and "nitroglycerine" look almost identical, enough to fool a generation of Siberian farmers into turning that region into one giant, growing bomb in the early 1900's. They learned a tough lesson that day in 1908, as much as you can learn anything when you're vaporized into a mist of carbon dust that catches on fire after some asshole drops a lit cigarette out of his blimp. But, as the president says, learning's overrated.

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