he Bornean junk monkey, Stevensons' slug, Malaysian sitting bird and the world's largest species of blind sea trout are in grave danger of extinction, the World Conservation Union warned an assemblage of world leaders on Tuesday to the sound of one tiny violin playing sarcastically. Also among the newly-threatened species nobody has ever heard of are the shovelnosed arctic frog, the smoke weasel, the Andean left-handed dolphin and the three-toed nervous elephant of lower Peru.

All are among 13,279 varieties critically endangered and possibly-imaginary animal, plant and water life precious to bleeding-heart liberals the world over. Many are new to this year's edition of the group's list, a yearly "wake-up call to the world" that unless serious changes are made to environmental policy, the earth's biodiversity might one day shrink to comprehensible levels.

This year's list, like all that came before it, has drawn a collective boo-hoo from the planet's human inhabitants.

"Excuse me, but what has the Columbian rice shrew ever done for me or my family?" questioned an indignant Don Cloyd from Williamsburg, Virginia. "My uncle lost a logging job because of some stupid owl that didn't want to live at a box at the zoo or something, so sorry if that ruined it for all the other creatures out there, but I still say animals that don't taste good can kiss my ass."

Various world leaders questioned about the organization's list issued similar mock-sincere statements, vowing to halt all future economic progress in order to make the world safe for such hilariously improbable creatures as the Chilean trouser trout and the loud Spanish jackass.

Over 762 animals have gone extinct worldwide since various governments and the NRA began keeping records in the 1600's. Among the beautiful creatures the earth will never again know are the Tittleosen snot sloth, the North American windshield sparrow and the sickly cave bear of Nepal.

Perhaps the most stirring symbol for lost species is the majestic dodo, a once-useless bird that wobbled off into the history books in the early 17th century when Dutch sailors visiting islands in the Indian Ocean discovered the birds, whose strange compulsion to hop into cooking pots and offer themselves up for soups and other entrees led quickly to their extinction.

According to the WCU, thousands more creatures will join these ranks shortly if steps are not taken to slow the destruction of their native habitats in industrialized and developing nations. Saddest of all may be the possible fate of the Scottish brownie hound, once numbering in the thousands but now thought to be down to the last one and a half specimens in existence. Even that shocking number is sinking fast as scientists are unsure of how long you can keep half a dog alive in a cooler full of ice.

In delivering the study to world leaders, WCU Director General Achim Steiner also pointed out the success of recent efforts to save formerly endangered species such as Arabian oryx and the white rhino, news which inspired several unimpressed heads of state to mouth the word "super" while mimicking the jerk-off motion with their hands.

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Jimmy Riddle Hoffa. The name itself practically oozes mystery. Goopey, gelatinous mystery. Where did he come from? Where is he now? What happened between him coming here and him being wherever he is now? And what's with the kooky middle name?

James Riddle Hoffa, Sr. was born in Brazil in the nineteen tens. Several years later he was spotted in Indiana wearing a fake mustache. Experts are at a loss to explain how a boy of seven made the trek halfway around the globe, other than to say this: Hoffa was one tough bastard. Rumor has it that he holed up in the pancreas of a longshoreman as an infant, traveling the world over before bursting from the man's chest when he was ripe. This reportedly happened during a poker game, and few in attendance were left untouched by the experience, or the splattering gut juices. Asked to comment on the larval Hoffa, poker player Lefty Sanchez was heard to comment: "Sheeeeyit!"

Hoffa came to prominence as a grade-schooler in Indiana, where he organized a Student Union at the age of eight and brought the elementary school to its knees, effectively bringing an end to book-learnin' in the state of Indiana forever. It was an especially sweet victory for Hoffa, who had been demoralized when the Sibling Union he formed with his brother Tom and sister Nancy was crushed when management brought in scab siblings in the form of his newborn twin brothers Maxwell and Chuckie Hoffa.

Jimmy Hoffa dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen after a violent altercation when strikebreakers attempted to teach the class arithmetic. He went to work as a loading ramp at a local grocery warehouse, and eventually worked his way up to dolly, making thirteen cents a day. These were solid wages during the depression, and few dared complain about the working conditions for fear of losing their jobs. The ownership did as it pleased, and often fired men for parting their hair in the middle or spelling their names with a "D".

Workers toiled in thirteen-hour shifts, but were only paid for three hours a day, since the owners refused to pay for walking time and counted breathing as taking a break. Tensions finally came to a head when the owners fired five men for inhaling too much of the warehouse's oxygen, and the young Hoffa took this opportunity to form a worker's union. He was already well known among the workers for having formed several unions during this first three weeks at the warehouse, including the Left-Handed-Man's Union and the Guys-Waiting-In-Line-For-Gas-401. But this was to be Hoffa's most serious union yet, and he rose to the challenge admirably. Hoffa made the union stick and before long the warehouse owners caved and provided the workers with a coffee can to urinate in, ending years of pissing in each other's pockets. It was a major victory for organized labor and a telling harbinger of things to come.

Before long, Hoffa had convinced workers at several neighboring warehouses and dog tracks to join his union, which he was calling the Teamsters Union because he never learned to write that good. Hoffa spent the next several years traveling around the country, getting anyone and everyone to join his union if they weren't in it already, or to join again under a fake name if they were. Within a decade, the Teamsters had 8.7 billion members, which was impressive both because Hoffa had enlisted everyone himself, and also because that figure was nearly double the world's population at the time. No one was sure how many of those members were deceased, imaginary or canine, but the numbers spoke for themselves and business owners practically shit concern when Hoffa mentioned the word "strike." This was mainly because they also belonged to the union and were tired of getting splinters from carrying around picket signs all the time.

Everything was fantastic for Hoffa until he was arrested in 1967 and charged with trying to unionize the Mafia, and keeping the entire $1.9 billion Teamsters Pension Fund under a mattress in his house. Hoffa was sentenced to ten years in prison, and was forced to defer the Teamsters Presidency to his protégée, Frank Fitzsimmons. In 1971, then-President Richard M. Nixon, a three-time Teamster himself (also under the names Michard N. Rixon and Bobo Freelove) granted Hoffa a pardon, under the condition that he would stop trying to unionize the Nixon family.

Hoffa made a bid to regain control of the Teamsters Union upon his release, running on the platform of needing to double-unionize the union members to protect them from the tyranny and unfair practices of the Teamsters Union itself. One day in 1975, Hoffa was invited to a meeting with a Teamsters official and a local mob boss to explain what the hell he was talking about, and he was never seen again.

Local police and federal investigators were confident they would find Hoffa's body before long, since it was very likely he had unionized his kidnappers during his disappearance and finding them would be a simple matter of searching the records for a Kidnappers 299 Union. Unfortunately these efforts proved to be fruitless, and neither Hoffa's body nor his assailants were located in the next 25 years.

Rumors abounded following Hoffa's disappearance, and over the years several theories have developed explaining Hoffa's whereabouts. Law enforcement agencies believe Hoffa was kidnapped and killed by the Mafia, who were concerned that by regaining control of the Teamsters Union, Hoffa would succeed in unionizing the Mafia and then nobody would ever get killed. But few can agree on where Hoffa's body ended up.

Some believe his body can be found buried under the end zone at Giants Stadium, or they point to the Giants' "Take Home a Chunk-o-Hoffa" promotional give-away from during their 1976 season. Others believe Hoffa's body was cemented into the walls of an L.A. nightclub, or a parking garage that was built in Michigan the year he disappeared. Still others believe his body was shot into space using a gigantic catapult operated by Don Knotts, though law enforcement officials have been reluctant to endorse this theory.

But where, you ask, did Jimmy Hoffa's body really end up?

Ever eat a Slim Jim? Now don't ever let me hear you say that the Mafia doesn't have a sense of humor.

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While most people question from time to time the history of this or the history of that, few ever dislodge their heads from the collective bunghole long enough to ponder the history of history itself. How did we remember the past in the past, and why? The answer may rip your head off and crap down your throat.

The first histories on record were verbal, stories passed down from generation to generation like the one about the time uncle Henry beaned that hooker with a croquet mallet. This system worked fairly well for centuries, in spite of the complete lack of accuracy inherent in passing along history through a gigantic game of "telephone." Stories morphed over time until they bore no resemblance whatsoever to the originals, usually picking up fire-breathing dragons, large-breasted women and leprechauns along the way.

Then came pictographs, first in prehistoric, then in Egyptian times. These didn't help at all, and actually set the cause of history back 500 years because most people drew like shit. The ancient Sumerians actually believed that their ancestors rode around on giant dogs, just because their ancestors were so lousy at drawing horses.

Eventually, history yielded to the forces of progress and drawings were phased out in favor of songs. This ended up being only a marginal improvement, however, when it turned out that most people were lousy at writing songs as well. Most of the recorded history of ancient France has to do with cold-hearted women who up and left their men. In all likelihood, great wars were fought, technologies advanced, and other hard-to-rhyme subjects of note came up during this era, but we'll always have to guess at the details since no one could come up with any catchy songs commemorating these events.

Song-recorded history also posed the problem of popularity, as people often knew a great deal about the history behind songs they liked and wanted to hear again and again, but very little about the lame or sappy songs they thought blew. As a result, children in China in the 18th century B.C. knew everything there was to know about the time Willie Finch nailed his pecker to a tree, but next to nothing about the fall of the Xia dynasty. The dynasty's fall certainly made its way into a fair number of songs, but since the best of these was the bloated, pretentious "Tall Fall," the children never really had a chance.

Of course, similar problems exist today, since most American schoolchildren are at a loss to explain the purpose of the Bill of Rights, but have completely memorized the Meow Mix commercial and are quite familiar with Snoop Dogg's favorite sexual position.

By 1700 B.C. writing had been invented, which helped matters greatly except in areas afflicted by messy handwriting. Most of the history of Persia pre-600 B.C. remains a mystery due to the sloppy, lackadaisical hand of the day. Early writing was merely a streamlined version of pictographs strung together in sentences like "Me you seagulls two dogs fucking house buffalo."

Even after writing-down had become the widely accepted standard for historical recording, there still remained the question of how to store what had been written for the ages. The early practice of tattooing historical texts onto fat people gave way after it was realized that these corpulent canvases were literally taking history with them to their graves, and paper was adopted around 12oo B.C. But this helped matters little as historians discovered that books are heavy, and usually get lost every time you move. Also, paper was considered a delicacy by deer and the undereducated, so keeping starving people and wildlife out of your library became a full-time occupation.

Finally, someone realized you could just write history on a slip of paper, drop it into a bottle, and huck it into the ocean, at which point someone would eventually find it and learn about history. This solved several problems since deer can't operate bottle openers and starving people don't float. This practice exploded soon after the invention of the bottle in China in 12 A.D. The bottle was originally created as a musical instrument, before first being used to hold beverages in 13 A.D., after an extremely drunk man accidentally drank the spit collected at the bottom of a bottle-player's instrument after a particularly spirited performance. In spite of this experience, people somehow still decided to use bottles for drinking.

The first "message in a bottle" was invented after an unnamed Chinese man, who for some reason was carrying his grocery list in his mouth, accidentally dropped it into a half-full bottle of beer and couldn't get it back out. In frustration, he hurled the bottle into the ocean, where it remained until washing up on shore two years later. The man who found it, Yung Si-Bong, took his discovery as a message from God that he should go out into the world and find two-dozen eggs and a quart of goat milk. He told friends and family the story of his message from God, and before the day was done, the entire village was hucking message-filled bottles into the sea, hoping to hilariously fool morons like Yung Si-Bong.

Gradually, historians would migrate back to books, after the entire Pacific Ocean became clogged with bottles around 200 A.D. and swimmers had to wear chain mail to keep from being torn to shreds by all the broken glass, which incidentally contributed to China's 100% drowning rate in those days. But the main driving factor in the move back to book-written history was the development of new inks that didn't smell like a dying frog's balls. China's original inks were made from a blend of soot from pine smoke and fish-egg lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and wolverine musk. Around 230 A.D., the Chinese discovered that you could make ink out of soot alone, and that all the other ingredients had been thrown in originally just to get them out of the house.

Sadly, paper wouldn't make its debut in Europe until the fifteenth century, when Europeans were finally able to end the laborious practice of finger-painting their history on the walls with baked monkey feces. The Europeans were at first resistant to give up their shit-smearing ways, but quickly relented when they discovered that paper is delicious.

In modern days, thanks to the advent of the Internet, we've done away with paper altogether and have returned to the ways of our forefathers with a verbal history tradition, usually carried on something like "I read on the Internet that they've still got Napoleon's dong in a jar inside somebody's freezer in Hoboken." But you know what they say about being doomed to repeat history. I'm just kidding, I know you don't.

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