Over 200 Heretics Arrested in New York City Protest

arring factions in the corporeal world clashed Thursday as police arrested 215 blasphemers expressing anti-American sentiments. More than 150 were hosting a "die-in" where they laid down in the street and did a poor impression of dead Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops, while the mathematical remainder of those 215 were melodramatically hosting a funeral procession. All of it was quite a disgusting site to those who like their country, as well as those who found their caricature of the dead highly offensive.

The incident was one of many that seemed to accelerate since the start of the war, the whateverth of March, 2003. Despite support of biblical proportions from the American public that accompanies the inception of every war, small cells of protestors have continued heresy in cities around the country. Over 200,000 deviants have been arrested everywhere from San Francisco to New York City, though primarily San Francisco, for their refusal to accept the edicts handed down by the administration.

"Protesting before the war was one thing. But now that it has started, it's important to get behind our president and give up their own opinions for the sake of showing the world a unified front," said this reporter. "Back in my day, it was more important to believe your president was doing the right thing than to risk possibly thinking he might not have a clue what he was doing."

Across the country, other groups of pro-Bush protestors protested the protestors protesting the Iraq War. As obligatorily mentioned in every article on anti-war sentiment, protestors of administration actions have been met with equally vehement gatherings rallying to support U.S. involvement in Iraq.

"I just think that the president wouldn't go to war if there wasn't a good reason," said stay-at-home mom twelve-year-old Becky Surrey of Burkutt, Missouri. "That's the kind of thing Saddam Hussein would do. You've heard he gasses his own people, right?"

Demonstrators holding signs saying, "Iraq needs a regime change!" and "Support the troops!" as well as other Bush administration sound bytes, have turned out in, let's just say, record numbers to counter the sacrilege.

"If they love Iraq so much, why don't they move over there and live there and protest?" said Hoyt, Arizona truck loader Darryl Gavin. "Because they'd get killed there. They're lucky to live in a country where they can say whatever they want. So they should shut-up and support the war like the rest of us."

The White House, rather than allowing war efforts to be distracted with arguments, has wisely chosen to ignore protestors in the U.S. and the millions worldwide. Others, however, are quick to step up to the administration's defense.

"The Bush administration has strong evidence Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, and it's a shame that so many Americans are so mistrustful that they demand to see such evidence," said White House publicist Fox News in a released statement. "Everyone is allowed the right to their opinion, but they're wrong."

"Independent" news agency CNN expressed a different view.

"The main thing the United States needs right now is a clear, objective report on the war's impact, both here and abroad," said a broad, some pretty anchor thing. "There are two sides to every story, and it's CNN's responsibility to report that. Are people still protesting the war because they're radicals who hate everything the United States does, or are they simply uninformed? It's important to maintain that balanced perspective."

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Ever since we heard Eddie Albert scream out "Dutch Whores!" at the beginning of TV's Green Acres, we've all been curious about hidden messages in popular songs. From the suburban teen getting a much needed self-esteem boost from Ozzy Ozborne's Suicide Solution to the congressman who desperately needs to figure out the lyrics to Louie, Louie before a press conference, nobody wants to be the last kid on the block to know what a song really means. But it's not always easy, between forgetful vocalists garbling their lyrics and clever rockers mixing backward paeans to Satan into their love songs.

The first known instance of a backwards message in a pop song is widely agreed to be Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' 1960 hit Shakin' All Over, which contained the phrase "Listen you tit, the tape's gone in backways" playing in reverse during the chorus.

But it was the Beatles who were the King Tut of hidden backwards lyrics, and they pulled off their ultimate coup in 1968, when they released The White Album, which was actually an entire Laurence Welk album played backwards. The world might never have been the wiser if it weren't for some meddling acid casualties who somehow managed to play the record backwards after dropping the record player into their bathtub in an attempt to hear what the album would sound like to fish.

But regardless, the word got out and before long drug people with serious welfare connections were rigging up elaborate backwards-playing record players by mounting one record player upside-down above another normal record player, then using the second player's needle to listen to a record spinning upside-down on the first.

For reasons unknown this led to a brief resurgence of popularity for the Dave Clark Five, but the main effect was that years of backwards-recording shenanigans were finally exposed. An evangelist from Ohio discovered that when he played the theme song from the TV show Mr. Ed backwards, the lyrics sang as "The source is Satan," and the theme song from the children's cartoon Scoobie Doo hid the back-masked message "Give your dog a doobie too." That same evangelist later discovered that when you play disco music backwards, nobody ever comes to your parties again, and backwards Slim Whitman is more than enough to get you evicted from your apartment building. He was later arrested during an album-burning ceremony when his supporters shot a horse wearing a baseball cap that said Mr. Ed.

Scandal raged for the next twenty years as religious figures from terminally boring states discovered further examples of back-masking tomfoolery. Sales of Queen's dance hit Another One Bites the Dust more than tripled after word got out that the chorus played as "It's fun to smoke marijuana" when run backwards, and there was a brief national shortage of chocolate chip cookies. Religious leaders single-handedly fueled sales of several Pink Floyd albums in the seventies, and were thanked individually in the liner notes for most of Judas Priest's 1980's releases. By the mid-eighties, it became tough to sell a heavy metal album without help from some kind of back-masking scandal, and some innovative groups had their records pressed backwards to minimize damage to their fans' turntables. By the late 80's, record companies were major campaign contributors for all representatives from southern states who advocated boycotts of their satanic recording artists.

The holy grail of all backwards Satan-possessed pop songs, however, has always been Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. Fans have known for years that the song only really makes sense when you play it backwards, at which point the lyrics come together as:

A horse is a horse
Of course of course
And no one can talk to a horse
Of course
That is, of course
Unless the horse
Is the famous Mister Ed!

Go right to the source
And ask the horse
He'll give you the answer that you'll endorse
He's always on a steady course
Talk to Mister Ed!

People yakkity-yak a streak
And waste your time of day
But Mister Ed will never speak
Unless he has something to say!

Oh, a horse is a horse
Of course, of course
And this one'll talk 'til his voice is hoarse
You never heard of a talking horse?


Well, listen to this:
". . . I am Mister Ed!"

So you can all stop sending me emails asking what the hell a wuzzle is doing in a hedgerow, okay?

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It's a question that has boggled the bungs of humanity for well over sixty years, and that routinely keeps schoolchildren up on sleepless nights, dooming them to academic lousiness. You may have even blown a couple grand on a research grant yourself, who can remember? It's a question that's stealthy like a porcupine yet insidious as a Mylar toupee: Just what on God's green earth is nougat, anyway?

Sure, it makes candy bars delicious, but where does it come from? Alien DNA? Idaho? Jimmy Hoffa? Who milked it from the space mother's ample tit?

Few will be surprised to discover that nougat is a French word. However, anyone who isn't currently in the process of throwing up will likely be shocked to learn that it's French for "cat's nuts." Can this be correct? Choke back your half-digested Milky Way bar my friends, it's true.

I called the main Hershey's plant in Hershey, PA to confront the chocolatiers with this awful truth, but the representative I spoke too steadfastly denied my allegations, shouting "You are sick, sir! The Hershey's Corporation would never condone such disgusting behavior!" Or at least that's what I think he said, it was hard to make out over the cacophony of cat noises in the background.

Looks like the French have had us again. First it was Speedos for men, and now this nougat. Actually, the nougat joke goes back much further, but to our credit we figured out that they weren't serious about Speedos fairly quickly. Except for our Olympic athletes, but we've always known they were a little fruity themselves.

As with most mysteries, once the main question is answered, it only leaves one with a cluster, or at least a clod, of related questions that spring up from knowing the truth and having the truth be really icky. For those of you who are still reading this after discovering the answer to "WHAT is nougat?" it's time to delve into the sticky conundrum of "HOW is nougat?" For the record, we're not going to get into "WHICH is nougat?" because that phrase has been optioned as a gameshow title by CBS and I don't want to get into any legal trouble here.

Candy bar manufacture is a delicate and fascinating process that dates back to the early 1990's. Some may argue that candy bars were manufactured before then but I assure you that's your memory playing tricks on you. We all like to fondly remember the candy bars of our youth, and few want to confront the fact that our parents just gave us dates and figs and told us they were candy. It's okay, we were naïve then but it's time to move on. Most of our parents have had strokes by now and I'm sure they've learned their lessons. Let's stay strong and discuss candy bar manufacture like adults.

The first step in making any candy bar (and I'm not talking about Almond Joys here, I said "candy bar") is preparing the chocolate. In the early days of candy bar manufacture this was accomplished by having armies of third-graders chew up chocolate Easter bunnies and spit them back out onto a conveyer belt. Things have come a long way since those days and now the process is much more automated, now that we have machines to take the Easter bunnies out of their wrappers and insert them into the third-graders' mouths. Once the third-graders have made the chocolate soft and malleable, it is conveyed to a storage tank to await the preparation of the other candy bar ingredients.

On the other side of the factory you have two rooms: the peanut room and the nougat room. Inside the peanut room, scores of workers in white hairnets toil endlessly, picking peanuts out of chunky peanut butter and tossing them down the peanut chute. Across the isle in the nougat room men with goggles and wooden mallets go in one end, bushels of live cats go in the other, and the only thing that comes out is nougat. Perhaps one day Oliver Stone will make a film about the mayhem that takes place inside, but until then I say we leave it alone.

The nougat center is first formed into very large slabs, which are cut to size after being strafed by the peanut gun. After the centers are formed they are coated with thick, rich milk chocolate, through a process called "enrobing." The actual enrobing process begins when the centers pass through an explosive shitstorm of liquid chocolate, which coats the top and sides of the bar. At the same time, a rotating chocolate-covered collie beneath the mesh belt coats the base of the bar. To ensure an attractive, glossy, smooth coating, the bars are continuously licked by Swedish children throughout the entire process. The fully enrobed bar is then cooled and prepared for the wind tunnel.

So the next time you're strolling past a vending machine, stop for a minute and think of all of the hard work that's gone into the candy bars you see displayed before you. Not that you'd actually eat the nasty things, but you could at least observe a moment of silence for the cats, and the Swedish children destined to die of "Black Tongue" just so we can have our Snickers.

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