at Robertson, the American founder of the Christian Coalition who in the past has called for the bombing of the state department and the assassinations of Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein, announced this week that the democratically-elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, must be assassinated because of his potential to spread Marxism and Muslim extremism across South America.

"These violent religious fanatics cannot be tolerated," Robertson explained, ducking under a salvo of gunfire from supporters of this point of view. "And so God has told me he must be murdered."

"What the fuck?" responded Chávez, when reached in Cuba for his reaction.

In a later interview Chávez theorized that Robertson must be thinking of a different Hugo Chávez, since it he and his entire country are either Roman Catholic or Protestant, and Chávez is a very common name.

"I know for a man like Robertson, the entire non-white world must be very confusing," offered Chávez charitably.

After a week of being shit on by the press, and nearly killed in daily assassination attempts, Robertson announced that the world must have misunderstood his comments, or taken them out of context or something.

"When I said 'the United States of America should assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez,' some people unfortunately misinterpreted this comment to mean I thought the man should be taken out by American covert-ops assassins or something crazy like that," Robertson explained. "This couldn't be further from the truth. Anyone who was really watching The 700 Club that day knows what I really meant: that Jesus loves everybody. End of story."

When confronted with video of the show, Robertson changed his tune, begrudgingly revealing that the episode in question was filmed on the The 700 Club's annual "opposite day."

"You got me! The cat's out of the bag," admitted Robertson. "We were going to have a big contest for viewers and award all kinds of great faith-based prizes for the viewer who could figure out which of our shows had been on opposite day, but not any more. You blew it! Good job, dingus!"

However, this was not the first time Robertson has denied his own remarks in the face of damning VHS evidence.

Last year Robertson claimed that President Bush told him before the invasion of Iraq that there would be no casualties, but that Jesus thought it was going to be messy. This came a few years after the reverend claimed that God allowed 9/11 to happen because the American government allowed abortion and pornography, and because people stopped buying Pat Boone records.

In 2003 came Robertson's infamous 21-day "prayer offensive," when Robertson took a break from being his normal offensive self to beg God to kill three members of the Supreme Court so they could be replaced with justices who would re-criminalize sodomy, thereby ending homosexuality forever.

At the age of five, Robertson organized a kitchen-table meeting to call for the head of his own mother, for the crime of naming him Marion Gordon Robertson, and thereby necessitating the use of a gender-neutral nickname like "Pat" so as to avoid being traded for cigarettes in elementary school. Robertson would later regret not taking on a more masculine fake name, like Bruce, Lance or Barry.

Venezuela Adds Itself to ‘Axis of Evil’

Orleans Refugees at Home in Disneyland’s French Quarter

Big Ratings Prompts ABC to Seek More Dancing Handicapped Shows

Strychnine Dog Food: Where Can You Buy It?

I don’t even know where to start, bizarrely loyal commune fans.

Much like when you attempt to make a casserole, it’s tempting to try and trace the thread back and discover where exactly you went wrong. Was it when you added the pickles? Was it when you had the idea to make a casserole in the first place? Was it when the NSA kicked your front door down and dragged Ivan Nacutchacokov screaming and flailing out into the night?

Some pundits would surely argue that inviting Crochet! magazine to set up shop in my mother’s attic was asking for trouble. Due to simultaneous downturns in the publishing and Kleenex box cozy industries as well as rising insurance premiums, Crochet had lost their lease on their Assflush, New Jersey offices, which they’d moved to a few years ago without leaving a forwarding address after Omar Bricks somehow burnt down their office in Asslatch. Some mom’s-basement-dwelling conspiracy theorists (I don’t mean that as a dig, I mean they literally live in my mom’s basement and work for the commune) argued that Bricks couldn’t have burnt down the Asslatch offices since he was in jail in Panama at the time.

But all reliable witnesses tell the same story, that Crochet! received an anonymous package in the mail that turned out to be a huge box of annoying glitter that got absolutely everywhere, and that the glitter somehow combined with the seven gallons of elephant shit Bricks had previously mailed to Crochet!, forming some kind of prank napalm. All it took was a spark from the teddy bear Omar had delivered a week later that sang Happy Birthday to You in a loud, high pitched voice over and over nonstop for a week before melting down and catching on fire, igniting the napalm and Crochet!’s huge stash of crocheted shawls, baby hats, coasters and old lady slippers they were holding onto in case of a governmental crackdown or the endtimes. Needless to say, the resulting fire was huge and weird and didn’t smell very good.

As possibly the world’s only commune/Crochet! fandom dual-citizen, I couldn’t pass on the once-in-anyone’s-lifetime-ever chance to rescue both of my favorite publications and quickly dispatched a singing telegram to invite the Crochet! staffers to share space with my mom’s horrific doll collection in the attic. No one was more surprised than I was when they accepted, especially since it violated several restraining orders Crochet! themselves had filed. But the promise of free rent and Raoul Dunkin’s lawn pit BBQ proved to be too much to resist.

Some opinionated commenters have suggested that I upset the natural balance of things by having Crochet! in the attic and the commune in the basement, reversing the long-standing tradition of Crochet! being the commune’s "asshole downstairs neighbors" as the entire commune staff continued to call them even after months of them living and working two floors above. And I was constantly reminded of how this messed up Griswald Dreck’s famous rhyme "Crochet! on bottom and commune on top, fuck you Aesop!" which everyone loved even though nobody was sure which fable he was referencing. But, frankly this arrangement just made more sense since the commune staff were constantly burying their various mistakes in the crawlspace under my basement and I knew if I put the commune in the attic, all of those mail-order brides and dead Pomeranians would just get shoved out the window and end up on my lawn.

And besides, there was always the buffer of the main floor of the house between the two staffs, an air gap full of my mom and Doug having sex that even I hated to cross. I figured that would be enough, but of course it’s obvious now this was like stuffing a wolverine and a Kardashian in a sack and expecting things to work themselves out.

Honestly, things did go pretty smoothly for the first few months, a few driveway knife fights notwithstanding. It took a little while to get the Crochet! folks up to speed on how to deal with Ivana Folger-Balzac since they weren’t used to dealing with psychopaths, but before long they were dropping into the fetal position on the ground like pros the second she pulled into the driveway on one of her frequent visits in hopes of getting someone to slip up and give up Ivan’s whereabouts. They also adjusted well to the conga line of bill collectors and process servers constantly flowing up the front steps all day, and if you ask me in their time here they published some of their strongest special issues on potholders and cat diapers ever.

But then, of course, Omar Bricks found us. Say what you will about him, but that guy’s Crochet!-dar is impeccable. He never actually finished a column while he was here, I think mostly because he was so busy making Crochet!’s life completely miserable, to the glee of the rest of the commune staff. Those few weeks are kind of a blur in my memory, I remember Omar replacing all the fruit roll-ups with fly paper, and replacing their toilet seat with a thin paper replica. At some point he’d got a whole case of tiny walkie talkies at Costco and proceeded to install them in all of my mom’s horrific dolls in the attic. You haven’t been woken up until you’ve been woken up by 57 deeply disturbing porcelain dolls singing Sex Dwarf at 4 in the morning. But the last straw was when Omar asked the Crochet! staffers to watch his dog Foghat while he went to Burning Man. I know that sounds kind of anti-climactic but trust me, that attic was uninhabitable within 48 hours and I had to call FEMA after the hardiest survivors from the Crochet! staff had cleared out.

I must apologize commune readers, but the thought of all those Crochet! staffers flocking to the bus stop with their little crocheted suitcases and beanies is a little too much for one Emil Zender to bear just this moment. Check back in next week, brave friends, and we’ll bring the rest of this tale home.

Zincerely,
Emil Zender

º Last Column: Return to Zender (Week 50)
º more columns

I've been working at the commune for way too long.

Sure, this was true after about day three, but now it's way beyond true. Some office skinflint just reminded me that this week is the fourth anniversary of the commune publishing on a regular basis, which is something like celebrating the day you got bit on the nards by a shark. The scary thing is that Omar Bricks was here even before that, back when we were all working on the much-preferable "When the Fuck Ever" publishing schedule pioneered by High Times.

It was never my plan to stay here for so many years. Actually, my original plan was to pose as an employee for a day so I could drive my dirt bike around inside the office after everyone else had gone home. I also thought I might be able to make off with some fax paper to sell on the black market, since that shit's expensive and employee theft isn't generally considered stealing. It's like a pitcher cheating in baseball, wiping his nose on the ball or shooting the batter with a blowdart or whatever—they consider it showing initiative.

Even the business dudes who get caught with their dick all the way into the cookie jar still get off relatively easy, compared to real criminals. They embezzle millions and end up with a sentence of five months at some white-collar fat camp, with all the quiche you can eat. Whereas if you stole that kind of money from a casino or something, they'd chop your balls off with a lawnmower, or at least track you down and coerce you into pulling off another fantastically unlikely international caper to pay back to dough.

Anyway, in the end that was all a moot point since the commune didn't have a damned thing worth liberating. It was like trying to get blood from a stone, or dogshit from a dead dog. Everything that wasn't bolted down had already been carted off by the commune's longer-tenured employees, or perhaps had never been there in the first place. But who puts together an office with only one chair? Just that first day, the chairfights were like something out of Lord of the Flies. Hell, I didn't get my own chair until I'd been here for two years, and that was only because we raided Crochet!'s offices for supplies and whatever strong-backed temps we could herd into the elevator.

I did get to ride my dirt bike around the office and tear shit up that night though, and that almost made a day's worth of Rok Finger's rants about why nobody makes black toothpaste worth it. I'm still not sure why I came back for Day 2, I guess mostly to see if I could pull it off, but that ended up being a pretty weak challenge. I just acted like I'd always worked here, and nobody'd been paying enough attention to doubt it. I even won "Employee of the Month" my first month here, since I was the one who found the key to the men's room after Sampson L. Hartwig baked it in a cake and tried to use it to get his dad out of jail.

Back then I was still worried about the legality of fraudulently seeking employment in a field in which you have no training or expertise, so my "Employee of the Month" plaque had my fake name on it, Phil Donahue. Actually, that plaque's still up in the break room, and last year we all had to listen to Gay Bagel lecture us all on living up to Phil's example, which was pretty funny since it's my picture on the plaque. But Phil's become something of a legend around the commune offices since he's the perpetual Employee of the Month, due to someone blowing up the plaque-making equipment trying to make an Omar Bricks Bowling Jesus trophy during my second month here.

Incidentally, Ned Nedmiller still calls me Phil, whenever I see him down at the wishing well with his metal detector. Jesus, I've been working at the commune way too long. Bricks out.

º Last Column: Changes
º more columns