ooling a number of coaches, commentators and even full football teams since early September, the senile gang of Geritol-guzzlers known as the Oakland Raiders were finally unmasked and had their walkers pulled out from under them by a lightning-swift squad of relentless assassins that call themselves the Tampa Bay Buccaneers here Sunday in Super Bowl XXXVII.

The hapless Raiders turned off their hearing aids, took out their dentures, curled up and lay down together on the 50-yard line, happily playing Roman-era Christians to the Bucs' roaring lions. When the final gun sounded, the sky was rent, the sun became as sackcloth, and lo, the moon became as Al Davis' pompadoured head. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Raiders' fans, and much cheering and ritual spilling of virgin blood from the fans of the Buccaneers. The final score was 487 to 13, but it wasn't really as close as all that.

Quarterback Brad Johnson, 12 and-a-half-year-old leader of the Tampa Bay eleven, completed over 800 passes, while 9-year-old wunderkicker Martin Gramatica booted so many field goals that the officials simply lost count and awarded the team a collective 212 additional points in the fourth quarter.

Commented 96-year-old wide receiver Jerry Rice, "What did you say? Did I take my medicine today? My granddaughter brings that fool-ass boyfriend of hers—he steals my stuff out of the garage. Huh? Who are you, anyway?"

Rice, who scored the only Raider touchdown on a 48-yard pass in the third quarter, became the oldest man to ever score a touchdown in a football game, let alone a Super Bowl. He was able to get open when two Tampa Bay defensive backs were caught out of position while giving the business to three of the "really cute" cheerleaders in the parking lot outside Qualcomm Stadium. Rice said he would have joined the defensive backs if only he'd seen the cheerleaders as well, but "I didn't have my distance glasses with me today. Besides, at my age, I need to tie a popsicle stick to it to get it to work anyway. Wait—who are you again?"

Wide receiver Tim Brown, a comparative youngster at age 88, and only slightly more lucid, added, "You know, we play them one game at a time. It's all right, we'll win next week." Reminded that the Super Bowl marks the end of football season, Brown responded, "The what? No, no, we play the Baltimore Colts next week, I'm sure of it. That Unitas fella, he's a tough bird. Did I take my medicine today?"

Ninety-three-year-old quarterback Rich Gannon: "We got jobbed by the refs on the coin toss. Did you see it? Everybody hates the Raiders, son. Everybody. Anyway, aren't we playing Sid Gillman's squad next week? We got to start planning for that game soon." Gannon set a record by having 37 passes intercepted and run back for touchdowns, 26 in the first half alone, and 16 other passes intercepted and mailed directly to various Tampa players' homes to be auctioned off for top dollar on eBay sometime in the next month.

"Huh? Maybe I'll bid on one of those," said Gannon, before he walked off the field aimlessly and was finally picked up in a bad neighborhood in Chula Vista, where he had been asking residents if they had seen his pajamas and whether or not he had taken his medicine that morning.

Defensive lineman Warren Sapp, a grizzled Buccaneer veteran at 16, had an amazing 73 sacks, 326 tackles and two hurries. He is known to his Tampa Bay teammates as "that raging fucking lunatic, watch out he doesn't get too close to you, he'll break both your legs and shatter a kneecap just as soon as look at you." When asked for a post-game comment, he began screaming gutturally and waving his helmet around him in a wide circle for close to twenty minutes, his eyes nearly bugging out of his head the whole time.

"Agga-ragga-wompona-wooo-hooo-haaa!! Whooo-ooo-eeeee sumbitch mothafuckin' sheeee-it bitch and a bastard god-DAYUM fuckin' ay!" he finally concluded. Asked for his assessment of the defensive plan, Sapp just muttered, "Fuck that, man, I'm dizzy," then said something completely unintelligible and threw up on NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue's tassled loafers.

Teammate Ronde Barber, a defensive back who will turn 14 next month, just shook his head at Sapp's antics and murmured, "At least he ain't got the rattlesnakes in his hands and his mouth this time. That's when he's really scary."

Asked if he could sum up the Bucs' strategy going into the game, Barber concurred with 11-year-old linebacker Derrick Brooks and head coach Jon Gruden, 20, that "The main thing was knees in the nuts from the word go, man, then slappin' them on they liver spots and talkin' shit about they grandchildren."

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Don't even start with the nonsense about this all being Omar Bricks' fault. Because I won't stand, sit, or recline for it.

In case you've been living on Planet Asshole in the Out-of-Touch Nebula for the last month, you probably noticed that the commune's been running third-string filler for the last month. And maybe you're the curious kind of son of a bitch who wondered why. Good for you, kissass.

First, the facts: No one is sure how all those weasels got into the commune's offices, where they came from, or what they were eating in there for a month, besides Ivana Folger-Balzac's expired birth control pills and possibly Gay Bagel. But whatever the reason, the last month at the commune has been like some insane cross between War of the Worlds and Gremlins. I also want to throw Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke into the mix, for no other reason than that I really like that movie.

Having 1,200 weasels suddenly descend upon the office at 7:15 one morning did surprisingly little to interrupt business at usual at the commune for the first few days. We just had to turn up the talk radio a little louder to hear over the sounds of all those weasels fucking and killing each other. But then the rapidly-reproducing weasel population spread to our downstairs neighbors Crochet! magazine through the heating ducts and those candyasses had to learn how to use a flamethrower, which threatened to throw off the balance of the commune-Crochet! arms race, so Bagel decided to call in an exterminator, a safari guide and an exorcist to handle the problem.

This somehow gave the exterminator the wrong idea, since he joined forces with the weasels and killed both the safari guide and the exorcist before being double-crossed by those devious weasels, who were then all the more dangerous for being armed with chemicals and mousetraps.

Naturally, once the shit had completely hit the fan, they called on Omar Bricks to solve the problem. Or, more accurately, we all got locked out of the building after the weasels declared it an independent state and I had to call home for Foghat to come bail us all out, because I had left my car keys in my pants pocket up in my office and there was no fuckin' way I was walking all the way home.

Twenty minutes later Foghat showed up wearing his favorite trucker hat, went upstairs, and took a shit so nasty the weasels cleared out like an afterbar party when Truman Capote shows up, or at least the ones did that didn't turn to stone instantly upon contact with that toxic dog-funk.

But then it turned out we'd only traded one problem for another, since after Foghat dropped the ass fantastic nobody could figure out how to get that Chernobyl crap out of the office without sacrificing anyone smart enough to operate the elevator. Finally Bagel called the police, but the bomb squad refused to go in, so they had to send in their remote-controlled bomb robot, which kept rebooting every time it got within twelve feet of that epic turd.

Eventually they just decided to set the building on fire, or else that may have been the result of one of the flaming arrows I'd been shooting in the windows in hopes of taking out Ramrod Hurley or some other weasel, I'm not sure which it was. But the building definitely caught on fire and through some weird alchemy Foghat's ass-baby turned into a gnarly, turd-shaped cubic zirconium, which I'm now using as a paperweight on my desk.

commune fans or PETA freaks might remember a similar incident three years ago, when the commune offices were overrun by a staff of monkeys hired by Red Bagel to help the commune appeal to a more upscale readership. Similarities to that incident aside, this was definitely the worst time the commune has been overrun by small animals. Except of course for the great bass attack of 2003, but that goes without saying. Bricks out.

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Few popular hand gestures have as varied a meaning around the globe as the ubiquitous "thumbs-up" gesture, a poorly-named motion since it rarely, except in the case of huge assholes, is performed with both thumbs. But while the dual thumbs-up means "I'm a cock" in nearly every corner of the globe, the single-thumbed variety can mean anything from "I've recovered from my head injury" to "I think this would fit up your ass." Knowing the differences in local translation can save one not only from social embarrassment, but massive anal trauma as well.

Most modern historians place the gesture's origin in Roman times, when coliseum crowds would determine a fallen gladiator's fate by giving either a thumbs-up ("Fuck 'em!") or a thumbs-down ("Kill the shit out of him!"). The gladiator would die either way, but people in those days liked to feel like they had some say in things, whether they actually did or not. The only way the gladiator could actually be spared would be if the Caesar gave the dreaded "He's kind of cute!" hand-waggle, in which case the gladiator's wounds would be treated and he'd be dressed in a muscle shirt for the pleasure of the Caesar.

Art historians and the strange souls who have dedicated their academic lives to the study of hand gestures often argue and get into bar brawls over the meaning of the Roman thumbs–up/down gestures, some believing that thumbs-down meant "swords down" and others arguing that it meant "you're a dick." Confusing the matter further are the various gladiatorial paintings from the era, which depict Caesars sparing injured gladiators via both the thumbs-up and the thumbs-down, and one rare instance of a Caesar giving the coliseum crowd the finger. Historians say this incident was triggered by the Caesar's chariot being dinged in the coliseum parking lot the day before. Most believe that a gladiator was commonly spared with the thumbs-down gesture, and the one outstanding painting indicating the opposite was the result of a lazy French painter who just couldn't paint the thumbs-down without it looking weird.

All of this is hardly relevant, however, since the thumbs-up had already been in use for centuries, dating back to prehistoric times, when those cavemen who were slight of build used the gesture instinctively in an attempt to hitch a ride on the backs of larger cavemen. Modern hitchhiking has changed little, though due to advances in transportation technology, modern man has less time to yell insults after being turned down for a ride.

During Medieval times, Europeans would seal transactions by licking thumbs and pressing them together, fist-to-fist, a tradition they learned from Oriental traders who were only fucking with them. Nevertheless, this bogus Oriental custom survived for hundred of years in Europe, until people began to realize it was greatly facilitating the spread of the plague, and nobody could come up with a way to make thumb condoms that didn't unpleasantly reduce sensation.

Eventually, the thumbs-up gesture came to be used by American pilots in WWII to communicate with the ground crew since they were covered in so much Darth Vader bullshit that their thumb was about the only body part that could still move. This was in stark contrast to WWI pilots, who didn't even wear helmets, and were only issued two pieces of safety equipment: a book on birds and a bible.

The WWII pilots would give the thumbs-up to the ground crew when they were ready to take off, meaning "Everything's cool." This is what the ground crew chumps thought anyway, the inside joke among the pilots was that the gesture actually meant "I stuck this thumb up your girlfriend's ass last night." Thankfully for inter-Air Force harmony, none of the ground crew guys ever found out about this or the "You're an a-s-s-hole/OK" dual-purpose hand gesture either.

The ground crew guys, however, were about the only ones not in on the joke, and as the gesture spread around the globe wherever the pilots traveled, coming to mean "Up your ass" all around the world. Thanks to the uptight 1950's, Americans never caught on to the double-meaning, and continued to use the gesture to mean "Super." One notable exception was actor Henry Winkler, whose father had been a WWII pilot and who used his inside knowledge to give a counterculture edge to his character of Fonzie on the 70's sitcom Happy Days. Whenever Fonzie would give someone the thumbs-up and sneer "Heeeey, sit on it!" Air Force pilots and stoners everywhere had a good laugh at the expense of mainstream America.

Today the gesture is as popular as ever among Americans and foreigners wanting to secretly insult Americans. Though in all likelihood having your thumb stuck up someone else's ass would be even more unpleasant for you than it was for them, the thumbs-up gesture goes down next to "Go fuck yourself!" in the annals of nonsensical insults that still pack a punch.

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