ulshitzkizu, the Eastern European principality best known for its unjust laws and shoddy exports, shocked no one this week by taking home a record twelve gold medals, despite never having even been visited by a black person in the nation's entire 314-year history.

The 2006 Whiter Olympics continued as expected all week, par for the course for an event designed expressly to reward behaviors no self- respecting black person would be caught dead engaging in, like running your fool ass around out in the cold as if you haven't got any sense at all.

"The Winter Olympics were invented in 1964 as a way for whites to make up for losing all their medals to black athletes in the summer games," explained Olympic racism expert Tyrone Blackula. "They had to make up a bunch of sports black people had never heard of, like hockey, and other events where, by the very color of their skin, black athletes would be at a disadvantage, like Naked Snow Hiding."

The thinly-disguised ruse came to a head in 1988, when pressure from the 2/3rds of the world that isn't even invited to the Whiter Olympics forced the token inclusion of the Jamaican bobsled team during the Calgary games. Predictably, the Jamaican team was unfairly penalized for attempting to push their bobsled up the run in record time, a perfectly reasonable misunderstanding of the event's rules for anyone not born in Norway.

Bulshitzkizu neighbor Upper Scamistan also took gold medals this week in curling and other white man cold-weather hobbies too silly to name. Experts on white people agree that U.S. is likewise heavily favored in the upcoming ice farming competitions and the always popular 400-meter skin bleach.

Network executives for NBC have been bitching and moaning all week about the poor ratings for their cherished little white sports love-in, which has rated even lower than reruns of old black-and-white television shows like Leave it to Beaver. Or, as they would be more accurately known, old white-and-white television shows. The Olympic ratings have suffered due in no small part to the network's staunch refusal to dye any of their preciously white Olympic snow brown to make audiences of color more comfortable with the proceedings.

Though it hardly qualifies as news, no black athletes have yet been spotted in Torino, the closest being American downhill skier Bode Miller, who once accidentally kissed a black chick in the dark at a party. Though event organizers are said to have been divided over the decision to invite the racially-mixed United States to the Olympic Games, arrangements were made to ensure that the only American entrants would be from the black-free states of Minnesota and Vermont.

In a desperate last-ditch effort to boost ratings, NBC has begun to refer to Australians as the "honorary black people" of the 2006 Olympics, due to their poor showing and the arid climate of their home land. But word on the street is that the network originally wanted to save that designation for Chechnya, had the embattled Russian province been able to take a break from getting screwed over long enough to field their own Olympic team.

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Dear commune:

Ed Phillips here again. Just had to let you know you guys were on the right track again with that teenage pregnancy issue. It's an unbelievable epidemic. I've gotten four teenage girls pregnant in the last six months. The problem is uncontrollable.

Back in my high school days, nearly 20 years ago, the girls were properly shamed for straying from society's moral compass. Three of the teenage girls I impregnated as a young man left town quickly to see abortions in states where they were easily obtainable.

Who's to blame? Call me old-fashioned, but I say it's the parent's fault. When parents finally stop blaming schools and T.V. violence and guys like me, then they can focus their attention on being better parents.

Ed Phillips
Hackensack, NJ

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Dear commune:

You guys should do something about Omar Bricks. That son of a bitch is seriously close to crossing the line. He has no right to lecture anyone on the dangers of smoking. I have been smoking for ten years and with the exception of one collapsed lung I have had no problems.

My dog has been smoking for 2 years now. Is he unhealthy? Hell no! Sure, he isn't as fast as he used to be but that's because he is an old dog and only has one leg left. Do you think that is funny? You are heartless bastards. And you should definitely do something about that Omar Bricks.

My dad is a tobacco man from way back. He used to raise tobacco, before the tractor accident robbed him of his own head. But if he could dad would be here smoking alongside me and Rags.

I usually enjoy Omar Bricks' "My Friend Polio," but not anymore! I'm starting to wonder if someone's at the wheel of the commune, if you know what I mean.

This is not in response to a specific article, but I can tell by the way Omar Bricks stares at me while I'm reading "My Friend Polio" with a cigarette in hand that he is one of those non-smoking bastards who would lecture me and my dog if given half a chance. I will not stand for this!

Also, tell Bricks to stay the hell away from my sister. Again, just a preventative measure.

No longer a happy reader,
Ira M. Bumquist
Fayetteville, NC

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Dear commune:

My T.V. is once again on the blink. Is this what you call quality service?

Angry customer,
Bridgette Hardy
Montpelier, VT


Dear Bridgitte:

We are sorry you're unhappy with your commune service. Our aim is customer satisfaction; when we fall short, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Our only desire is to keep our customers happy. We appreciate your alerting us to lacking service, and we shall do our best to remedy it. Quality is the only word one should associate with the commune. We are working to make the commune better and your comments are crucial to that, and important for us to hear.

Also, we do not manufacture T.V.s. We are a website. You must have purchased your television elsewhere.

We are express-shipping to you a clue.

the commune

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Editor's Note: the commune is not responsible for the content of letters or the opinions expressed therein. The opinions and content arrive to us sealed in the envelopes tightly and there's no way we can get inside except to open them. Believe us, we've tried alternative methods and it never works out.º more columns

No decade since the 1950's has so boldly established itself as a fad juggernaut as did the 1980's. In comparison, the 1990's were a sad decade for fads indeed, making one wonder where the will for conspicuous time wasting had gone. Probably the best explanation can be found in looking at each decade's drug of choice, and the resultant effect this had on American culture.

In the 1960's, Americans were dropping acid and grooving to the beautiful swirling colors of the traffic accident they'd just caused. The fads of the 60's were accordingly colorful and bizarre. The 70's were all about stinking up your jeans jacket with reefer smoke in the back of some sociopath's panel van, leading to fads as ugly and alienating as the decade itself. In the 80's, the hip and squares alike were pulling lines of expensive coke and joking about the five or six dead South Americans who had made their high possible. Ambitious and overeager, if not megalomaniacal, were the keywords in 80's faddom as well. America spent the 90's slouched over between the sofa and the bathroom door with a heroin needle dangling from its arm, and as a result not a whole lot of fadding, nor much else, got done in that decade.

The 80's, however, were another story entirely. The story of neon-colored spandex encrusted with hair gel, and the story of a nation kissing its own ass. In keeping with the 80's own hyper-incongruent vibe, the most fun fad from the decade didn't even originate in the 80's. Exploiting the poor had been around for eons, but not since pirate times had it been as cool to openly flaunt this practice or write songs about it. If the pendulum had swung any further in the opposite direction from the 60's, it might have knocked America's dick right out of the anus of the disenfranchised.

This isn't to say that all of the 80's fads were mean-spirited. Sure, Cabbage Patch Kids were pretty disgusting, but there was a certain poetic justice in watching deranged materialist parents fighting each other tooth and nail for the right to give their kids some shitty cloth doll.

On the contrary, many of the 80's best fads were quite fun. Well, not the Smurfs, those little communist bastards were pretty creepy. Nobody ever really explained if they were supposed to be aliens or some kind of apocalyptic cult or what. Personally, I've always leaned in the "cult" direction, since questions of "What's a Smurf?" and "Why do they all wear the same color pants?" were always answered with the cultish doublespeak "They're Smurfs" from the bigwigs at Hanna Barbera.

But surely, not every aspect of the 80's was overrun by creepy materialistic crap. Who could forget the Rubik's Cube? Inventor and Belgian weirdo Erno Rubik created his famous cube in 1974 as a way to drive his dog insane. Though the toy failed in its intended use (the dog just tried to eat the cube), it eventually found millions of fans among Americans who thought solving some kind of chintzy plastic puzzle proved they were smart. The truly smart soon learned that you could just "solve" the puzzle by peeling all the colored stickers off the squares and putting them back on in the right order. Less-inventive children soon developed a pastime known as "Rubik's Baseball," a one-time game where the cube was hit with a bat and exploded into a million plastic pieces that went everywhere.

So maybe the Rubik's Cube was a piece of shit, too. But no one could muster such harsh words for the most expressive of 80's fads, breakdancing. Originating as a way for especially cowardly street gangs to mediate their differences through dance battles rather than actual fighting, breakdancing first came to national attention in 1975 when two Harlem street gangs, the Soft Touches and the Big Pussies, danced the shit out of each other in a bloodless gangland melee that left dozens thoroughly exhausted. By the early 80's, breakin' had become a national obsession, with white kids everywhere flopping around on the floor like they had any idea what they were doing. Despite an utter lack of coordination or soul whatsoever, Caucasian interest in breakdancing kept the fad alive for several years, eventually cementing it as the most fun source of self-inflicted spinal injuries since the invention of the skateboard.

Concerned parents who didn't want kids hurting themselves breakdancing did their children no favors by sending them to school to play tetherball instead, perhaps one of the cruelest 80's fads since it was condoned by the school board. Like dodge ball without the principle of safety in numbers, tetherball involved chaining a rock-hard leather "ball" to a pole and mandating that children use it to pummel each other into submission. Tetherball was eventually banned in 1989 after President Bush attempted the game for a photo op at a Washington elementary school, which ended in the president being escorted away by the Secret Service after a shameful episode of crying and broken glasses.

Perhaps the true salvation of 80's fads was the rise of video games, which rarely resulted in injury or public humiliation. Though as a metaphor for the 80's themselves, early videogames could hardly be more apt: gobbling up quarters while presenting basically the same rip-off level over and over again, only more hopelessly difficult each time. Perhaps video games did more to prepare children for the real world than parents realized at the time, filling kids with nervous dread while cleaning out their allowances. Personally I wouldn't know, since I never had any money and just had to stand there pretending I was controlling the little guy in the demo.

On second thought, maybe the 80's did suck a big nut.

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