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November 1, 2004 |
President-Elect Al Gore reacts in good-natured WTF disbelief when informed by Airhead the Good-News Lady and assorted supporters that he will be the next U.S. president sing state of the art poll-tracking technology, the commune has been able to predict this year’s presidential election winner two days early with a probably 98.77439% accuracy, and the result may shock or disinterest you. That’s right; Al Gore will be our nation’s 44th president.
Though Gore has not been a frontrunner in most of the supposedly-reputable national polls heading into the election’s final week, a highly scientific sampling of unregistered voters within a two-block radius of the commune offices has confirmed the reports of future correspondent Future Bob, who recently contacted the commune from the year 2006 with the news that Gore is president and that pop music had gotten really, really shitty. Also: buy stock in flavored condoms now.
Th...
sing state of the art poll-tracking technology, the commune has been able to predict this year’s presidential election winner two days early with a probably 98.77439% accuracy, and the result may shock or disinterest you. That’s right; Al Gore will be our nation’s 44th president.
Though Gore has not been a frontrunner in most of the supposedly-reputable national polls heading into the election’s final week, a highly scientific sampling of unregistered voters within a two-block radius of the commune offices has confirmed the reports of future correspondent Future Bob, who recently contacted the commune from the year 2006 with the news that Gore is president and that pop music had gotten really, really shitty. Also: buy stock in flavored condoms now.
Though it is unclear as of yet whether the Gore win will be the result of an unexpected groundswell of support in the election’s final days, or the emergence of thousands of 2000 absentee ballots from Post Office limbo hell, one thing is unmistakably clear. More on that later.
Perhaps even more surprising than the Gore win was the news that both presidential incumbent George W. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry finished well out of the money in the general election, trailing such surprise write-in candidates as The Rebel Billionaire, J.R. Ewing, and “that black guy from 24.” Also receiving strong shows of support were Candidate Zero from the NetZero Internet Service commercials, baseball commissioner Bud Selig, and the soothing, dignified voice of actor James Earl Jones.
Though the point may be moot due to the tenth-place showing of Jones’ voice, it is unclear whether the entire personage of James Earl Jones would have been inaugurated had the actor’s voice won, or if Jones would have had to stay out of sight while his voice was electronically matched, Wizard of Oz-style, to a projected image of either Darth Vader, the dad lion from The Lion King, or some kind of CGI morph of the two.
The revolutionary new poll, devised by the commune’s in-house expert expert Griswald Dreck using the latest Polish technology, also revealed some surprising news about America’s political affiliations. Long-though to be a nation composed almost equally of Democrats and Republicans, this latest poll shows a surprising 74% of citizens who list their party as “Yes!” Another 10% belong to the hard-line “Fuck Yeah!” Party, with a small but vocal minority standing behind their “Not Since We Had Kids” Party affiliation. Also of concern to the current establishment are the upstart “Where?” and “Can I Bring My Brother Dave?” Parties, which appeared to grow in size exponentially between our 10am and 4pm polls.
The demographic splits were even more surprising, with over 80% of likely white trash voters believing that gun control means using both hands. And in a minor note, a surprising 82% of Americans believe Gore is our current president, and are happy enough with the job he’s done to vote for a second term.
In other political news, 65% of likely voters expressed their strong opinion that commune reporter Lil Duncan belongs in the “Hot” category, while teen correspondent Boner Cunningham led the “Not” voting with a skyscraping 92%. Though disheartened by the news, Cunningham informed the commune that he hopes to do better in the upcoming 2008 election, by which time he expects his mustache to have fully grown in. the commune news has been accused of making premature calls on elections in the past, but we still stand behind our claim that Steve Toner was jobbed out of his rightful place as our student body president in 1989. Lil Duncan is the commune’s White House correspondent, a title we would have defined more specifically if we’d known she was going to buy a white house just so she could telecommute on a bullshit technicality.
 | Zimmerman: "Jesus Christ, you act like this is the first time I've shot a black kid."
Carson story beaten to death in front of millions of witnesses
Elephant tagging in Malaysia: slow elephants always "it"
 New .eu Domains Popular Among Gross-Out, Childbirth Video Websites |
Senator Wins Lottery, Quits "Shitty Job" epublican Senator Judd Gregg finally ran into a big steaming pile of luck Wednesday when he matched 5 of 6 Powerball numbers and won a lottery jackpot of $853,492. Gregg immediately called Vice-President Dick Cheney to let his boss know he would not be coming into work. “It’s about friggin’ time I got some good luck,” Gregg told reporters in front of his home in his home state of New Hampshire. Gregg waved his winning ticket in the air frantically and laughed. “Eat it, taxpayers! I’m gonna be my own boss from now on!” Gregg, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee and spent more than $2 million in his last re-election campaign, did admit to some sour grapes in not winning the $340 million jackpot won by an Oregon player in the same lottery. the commune's Fall Gadget Guide t’s almost the time of year to start pretending you’re Christmas shopping while you look for swanky new shit for yourself, and the commune is there for you with our first-ever annual Fall Gadget Guide. Join commune Tech Correspondent Mitch Kroeger as he guides you through the bewildering wilderness of the new and the shiny. Serial Killer’s Neighbor: “He just wouldn’t shut up about serial killing.” Heather Graham’s Career Found Dead in Apartment |
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 August 4, 2003
Medicine for DummiesThe best part of being a professional Research Editor (and if you don't capitalize that you're shit out of luck if you expect a response email) and knowing shitloads about history is that you get to spend most of your time laughing at how stupid people were in the past. Which is even more fun than it sounds. Not that people are any smarter now, but the true scope of any period's idiocy only becomes vividly clear in retrospect.
Most people don't know, for example, that back when X-rays were invented they weren't used for any breakthrough life-saving medical purposes. They used them to X-ray people's feet in shoe stores to make sure their shoes fit right. I shit you not. And it wasn't until the store employees started growing dicks on their dicks like weird sex-cactus nightmares and other Stephen King nonsense that they put two and two together and figured out that all the store employees should run and hide behind a felt tarp when the Foot-o-Scope was turned on. Years later somebody realized that there was a reason all the regular customers were having their feet turn to chalk, so the shoe stores sold all their Foot-o-Scopes to hospitals, which began using them to X-ray pregnant women daily to make sure their fetuses were turning out okay.
Foot-o-Scopes were outlawed by the 1950's, though some were still found to be in use in West Virginia and other third-world states well into the 1980's. Shocking as this may seem, it is important to remember that...
º Last Column: Whatever Happened to the Test Tube Babies? º more columns
The best part of being a professional Research Editor (and if you don't capitalize that you're shit out of luck if you expect a response email) and knowing shitloads about history is that you get to spend most of your time laughing at how stupid people were in the past. Which is even more fun than it sounds. Not that people are any smarter now, but the true scope of any period's idiocy only becomes vividly clear in retrospect.
Most people don't know, for example, that back when X-rays were invented they weren't used for any breakthrough life-saving medical purposes. They used them to X-ray people's feet in shoe stores to make sure their shoes fit right. I shit you not. And it wasn't until the store employees started growing dicks on their dicks like weird sex-cactus nightmares and other Stephen King nonsense that they put two and two together and figured out that all the store employees should run and hide behind a felt tarp when the Foot-o-Scope was turned on. Years later somebody realized that there was a reason all the regular customers were having their feet turn to chalk, so the shoe stores sold all their Foot-o-Scopes to hospitals, which began using them to X-ray pregnant women daily to make sure their fetuses were turning out okay.
Foot-o-Scopes were outlawed by the 1950's, though some were still found to be in use in West Virginia and other third-world states well into the 1980's. Shocking as this may seem, it is important to remember that the state of West Virginia is officially 100 years behind the times, and is kept that way by the federal government to encourage tourism. It's like a giant state-sized Truman Show. The reason there are so many UFO sightings in West Virginia is that the state's residents have not yet invented the aeroplane, and commercial flights passing over the state scare the bejesus out of everyone on the ground.
However, this is an exciting time to be a West Virginian, since the early 1900's were the golden age of misguided medical innovation. Only now are West Virginians experiencing the joys of phrenology, the science of determining personality by measuring the size of your head. Phrenologists used head-measuring devices that look like what you'd use to measure someone's head if you only had a vegetable colander and an acupuncture set at your disposal. It was thought at the time that different parts of the brain controlled different organs, and it went without saying that each of these organs controlled a personality trait (hence the terms "That guy was a dick," "What an asshole," and "Just tackle the wolf, you pussy!"). So if the subject being measured had a lump on his skull in a certain spot, obviously his brain was so overdeveloped in that area it was pushing his skull out like a baking potato.
This theory was soon followed to its logical conclusion when medical marvel and part-time turkey hunter James "Lumpy" Monroe was named President for Life and God Among Men of the National Phrenology Association for his freakishly cauliflower-like skull. This crowning achievement of the phrenology movement was short-lived, however, and the practice was dealt a crippling blow soon after his election when Lumpy Monroe drown while attempting to quench his thirst by leaving his mouth open in a rainstorm.
Part of the reason phrenology proved so popular in the early 20th century was that people had just figured out that bloodletting was bullshit and were eager to find something new to spend their healthcare dollars on, since back in that day all doctors could really do was take your pulse and give you "pills." I say "pills" because all prescription drugs were the same thing back then, capsules containing a mixture of cocaine, morphine and alcohol that were put into different bottles depending on what your problem was. The pills didn't actually cure anything, but nobody complained since they were drunk and high all the time.
Believe it or not, this was actually a step forward for Western medicine, since previously people had believed that the only way to get well was to get the sick out of your body by whatever means necessary. From the middle ages through the 1800's, doctors starved, bled and beat the shit out of sick people both for the patient's health and for their own personal enjoyment. And though the starving and the ass-kicking were the most fun for the doctors, bloodletting was by far the most popular cure for everything from abdominal cramps to bad luck.
Doctors and barbers both got in on the act, though the latter was more a serendipitous accident involving poorly-trained barbers. The barbers had a leg up on the doctors when it came to marketing, however, and they came up with the barber pole to make blood draining out of an arm look fun, while all the doctors could come up with was a couple of scary-assed snakes humping a light pole, which probably drove away more customers than it attracted.
Doctors coined the term "phlebotomy" for the practice, combining "phlegm," the scientific term for throat snot, with "botomy," the medical term meaning the removal of an important body part for no good reason. Phlebotomy flourished despite the fact that a doctor killed George Washington by leaving the former president draining while he went away for a weekend of golf. The American Civil War marked the height of the craze, when over 500,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were cured of aggressive tendencies through battlefield phlebotomy.
The annals of medical dumbshitery are much thicker than could ever be covered in one column, but rest assured this topic will be revisited the next time I have to go see my idiot doctor. º Last Column: Whatever Happened to the Test Tube Babies?º more columns
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|  September 16, 2002
A Little Bit HungryA midget ate a pigeon
and the pigeon ate a pig.
If that seems odd remember
that the pig was not that big.
He was a bite-sized nugget,
a toy pig as they say,
one that would fit on a keychain
should your inkling lean that way.
The pig had ate an aphid
and the aphid ate a dot
and if you think I mean the candy I assure you I do not.
The dot had ate a nothing since there's nothing there to eat
when you're just a speck of something without appendages or feet.
A speck can't eat a smidgen though a smidgen eats a nit
and a nit can eat a little if he puts his mind to it.
A little eats a sprig which eats a fleck which eats a hint,
and a hint enjoys a mote if it has a hint of mint.
A mote is rather picky, as it eats only a jot,
and a jot can eat a little or a jot can eat a lot.
But not if it is eaten first by an iota or a smitch,
though a smitch prefers a bit of course, if it is not too rich.
And bits are oft predated by a scruple or a whoop,
who would need to quadruple if they were to share a boop.
In which case they would appeal to the brothers snip and snap,
whose appetites are whetted by all things about the size of that.
Though those two mainly spend their time
creeping round in cahoots
and trying not to be gobbled up by dribbets or by hoots.
Though I have to say,...
º Last Column: Scrumpletydumples º more columns
A midget ate a pigeon
and the pigeon ate a pig.
If that seems odd remember
that the pig was not that big.
He was a bite-sized nugget,
a toy pig as they say,
one that would fit on a keychain
should your inkling lean that way.
The pig had ate an aphid
and the aphid ate a dot
and if you think I mean the candy I assure you I do not.
The dot had ate a nothing since there's nothing there to eat
when you're just a speck of something without appendages or feet.
A speck can't eat a smidgen though a smidgen eats a nit
and a nit can eat a little if he puts his mind to it.
A little eats a sprig which eats a fleck which eats a hint,
and a hint enjoys a mote if it has a hint of mint.
A mote is rather picky, as it eats only a jot,
and a jot can eat a little or a jot can eat a lot.
But not if it is eaten first by an iota or a smitch,
though a smitch prefers a bit of course, if it is not too rich.
And bits are oft predated by a scruple or a whoop,
who would need to quadruple if they were to share a boop.
In which case they would appeal to the brothers snip and snap,
whose appetites are whetted by all things about the size of that.
Though those two mainly spend their time
creeping round in cahoots
and trying not to be gobbled up by dribbets or by hoots.
Though I have to say, none of them have seen a tittle or a whit,
for each is too small to see at all, even if you look right at it.
But if you could, with eyes that good, a hundred you could cram
and still have lots of breathing room
on the inside of a dram.
So a midget ate a pigeon and that pigeon ate a pig.
I don't know what ate the midget 'cause it wore a phony wig. º Last Column: Scrumpletydumplesº more columns
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Quote of the Day“The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas! Except near Houston, Dallas or Fort Worth. Talk about your smog. Jesus, this song's gonna need another verse.”
-Clement B. DoogleFortune 500 CookieMama said there'd be days like this, but the bitch lied. The success or failure of this coming week hinges on your proper understanding of the word "gonad," so take our advice and go buy a dictionary now, Skippy. Order lots of Chinese food this week, but don't pick it up. This week's lucky accidents: back-flip off ladder onto hardwood floor, lip caught on drain while bathtub's full, wearing flammable jumpsuit to Great White concert, 15 car pile-up.
Try again later.Top 5 commune Features This Week| 1. | Why the Bangles Hate Mondays So Much | | 2. | The Death of Archie: From the Comic to the Big Screen | | 3. | Uncle Macho's Homemade Horse Chow | | 4. | Get Out of That Tent and Back into Your Fat Pants in 1 Month | | 5. | Critic's Corner: National Treasure—No Nation's Treasure | |
|   North Korea Pissed Their Real-Life Hunger Games Nowhere Near as Popular as Movie BY Roland McShyster 5/17/2004 Hello readers, and welcome to the greatest Entertainment Police ever. Sure, we can't say for certain that this truly will be the best the column's ever been, especially since I just started writing it, but we can hope, can't we? After all, it's a new season and the smell of spring movies is in the air like somebody farted. So let's hope for the best as we peek through the keyhole this week, to see what Hollywood's been doing in there that's been making so much noise and making the house smell kind of like bacon. To the movies!
In Theaters Now:
13 Going on 30
I don't know who the hell was clamoring for a Michael Jackson movie this month, but the sick bastard got what he deserved with this piece of shit. If...
Hello readers, and welcome to the greatest Entertainment Police ever. Sure, we can't say for certain that this truly will be the best the column's ever been, especially since I just started writing it, but we can hope, can't we? After all, it's a new season and the smell of spring movies is in the air like somebody farted. So let's hope for the best as we peek through the keyhole this week, to see what Hollywood's been doing in there that's been making so much noise and making the house smell kind of like bacon. To the movies!
In Theaters Now:
13 Going on 30
I don't know who the hell was clamoring for a Michael Jackson movie this month, but the sick bastard got what he deserved with this piece of shit. If turds could fly, this thing would be a 747. Though the vanity of not calling the movie 9 going on 50 is pretty appalling, that's nothing compared to the film's creepy vision of Jackson sprinkling magic powder on his birthday cake and waking up as a 13-year-old boy. Normally this kind of scenario would be good for some fish-out-of-water comedy, but in this case the results make a lot more sense than Jackson's real everyday life. Because of that, the film is little more than one man's boring-to-watch wish fulfillment, though there is one funny part near the end where Jackson realizes he undershot his mark a little and is still too old for sleepovers, but won't be tall enough to reach the magic-powder shelf for another five or six years. Still though, creepy.
Man on Fire
It's a rare actor who can believably pull of playing both Malcolm X and Richard Pryor (not in the same movie, though that would be kind of cool), but Denzel Washington wins that honor either by virtue of his talent or the fact that he's the only marketable black actor around for a dramatic leading role. Some might question the tasteless title of this Pryor biopic, or the slow-motion trailers that show the comedian running around with his shit all on fire, but few can argue that a film about Pryor wasn't overdue, and this one qualifies since it's got a character in it named Richard Pryor who is sort of vaguely like the real thing. My history may not be rock-solid here, but I'm pretty sure Richard Pryor didn't know karate in real life, if he did I'm nearly certain he would have used it in the movies more, because nothing sells like a funny black man who can kick some ass. Hollywood attempted many times to teach Eddie Murphy Ken-Po for this very purpose, but that went about as well as their attempts to teach Wesley Snipes to do impressions. Regardless of how much ass the real-life Pryor could kick, the Denzelified version boots much of it in Man on Fire, which covers up well for the fact that the filmmakers didn't bother to learn anything about Pryor before making the film. Though in truth the facts might have just got in the way of their desire to make a movie about a troubled CIA comedian who's followed around all the time by a creepy little white girl who sees dead people.
National Lampoon's Van Helsing
Have you ever wondered what you'd get if you crossed Dracula, Dead and Loving It, every monster movie ever, X-Men, Underworld, The Three Stooges and the Monsters of Rock pinball machine? You really have? Weird. I don't know what the chances of that are, but I'd imagine they'd have to be up there with the corpse of Adolph Hitler winning the Miss America swimsuit competition. You either wrote this movie or are totally out of your fucking mind. Anyway, somebody wondered, and then they made National Lampoon's Van Helsing in a desperate attempt to exorcize their demons and get some sleep at night. The results, I have to admit, are pretty fun, in an "I left my brain in my other pants" kind of way. Canadian wrestling legend and Teen Wolf, Too star Huge Ackman suits up as the title character, Venice Beach washout Van "Big Hat" Helsing, who is randomly pressed into service protecting the world from 100 years of movie villains using only open hand slaps, eye pokes, and that thing where you wiggle your hand in front of the guy's eyes up and down and then hit him with a wrench when he's mesmerized. In this role, Ackman proves he's got the range not only to act like he's got really funny hair, but to make you believe he's wearing a big, goofy hat as well.
New York Minute
Wow, an Olsen twins movie based on that crappy Don Henley song? Where do I stick the gun?
Well damn, America, looks like that's it. Looks like we've got so caught up in the viewing and reviewing that another column's passed us by. Don't let the same happen to you, America, be sure to take the time to stop and smell the roses, count the commas, whatever the hell you do when you're appreciating life and reading a movie review at the same time. Ciao.   |