ondering why your life was thrown into total disarray last Monday? Wonder no more, because you’ve been hit by a "Day Without Amy Grant," an attempt by dedicated Amy Grant fans nationwide to show an ungrateful world what life would really be like without Amy Grant’s upbeat Christian-Pop music.

"Amy didn’t play any concerts, and none of us played any Amy Grant in our homes, in our cars, or even on our personal Walkman devices," explained Darlene McCullogh, an Amy Grant fan and apparently the last human being on earth still using a Walkman.

As an additional part of the demonstration, nobody watched Amy Grant’s NBC show "Three Wishes" in reruns on Monday. Nobody had watched the previous Monday either, though sources were unclear if this was a coincidence or a mix-up over when exactly the "Day Without Amy Grant" was scheduled. Network executives point out this may have been the problem with the show’s ratings dating back to its 2005 debut.

Grant originally came to fame as a teenager in the 1970’s, drawing attention to the then-tiny "inspirational" genre of gospel music by white people, for white people. Grant’s success would bring gospel music to a whiter audience, though this fact was often misheard as "a wider audience" when reported in the music press.

Grant’s crossover success in the 80’s and 90’s came largely from her skill at writing Christian Contemporary music that only Christians realized was Christian Contemporary, with lyrics vague enough to be mistaken for normal vacuous pop by heathen audiences. Likewise, Grant’s videos and concerts mimicked popular non-saved artists of the day, allowing her to sell more than fifteen albums at a time, unlike her CCM contemporaries like Bible Bill Steadfast and The Christian Biscuits.

A mainstay in the Grammy’s "Best Gospel Performance, White or Asian" category throughout the 80’s and 90’s, Grant was frequently rewarded by an organization too busy to find other performers to nominate in the category.

But it was the 1991 hit "Baby Baby" that made Grant a household name and answer to the question "Who wrote that fucking song they keep playing down at the Frogurt stand?"

Last Monday’s demonstration served as further proof of the power of the public to draw attention to underappreciated issues by not doing something. Following hot on the heels of the equally-successful "Day Without Fussy Gay Neighbors" and the "Day Without Fat Chicks," some pundits fear the trend may lead to days without other unheralded items, like seatbelts or underarm deodorant. Many of the same pundits, however, confided to us privately that they liked the "Day Without Fat Chicks" alright, but don’t tell anyone they said that because it’s a real dick thing to say.

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As my readers know, I believe strongly in charity—one look at my wife will tell you that. She holds the demeanor and loving look of a woman who's weathered many a charity event at her husband's side. So most Rokophiles are well aware of "Rok Finger's Kids," a charity that helps out comatose orphans or bed-bound sons and daughters of parents who just don't give a damn.

These are some of the sweetest kids you'll ever meet, the ones who are awake. Many act like nothing's wrong and are just glad to be alive, truly they wouldn't even know they were miserable recipients of God's wrath if Rok wasn't there to tell them.

And Rok isn't in this for the trendiness or ego-trip, though both are very nice; Rokwell T. Finger is here to help. In the past I've tried Labor Day and Memorial Day Telethons, but I really don't stay up past 6 p.m. that often, so those haven't been very successful. But every New Year's Eve I hold a telethon in their honor down at the Wild Pussy Cat Club and, though it's untelevised, all donations go to the kids, bless their bedsored little hearts.

But all that money is not enough, the kids still need new things. Like sheets, pillows, some need medicine or something, not sure of the details, I just know they're needy. So that's why Rok is introducing these high-grade cookies, the sale of which will benefit the kids immensely. Though Lord knows they could never eat any of them, they'd start choking or something, bless their little reclined souls.

Each box is $20, but for that price, kids will get new socks and reading lights or something. The comatose kids will get something, not sure what, but I'm willing to bet those nurses who wipe them and role them over and empty their piss jugs, they don't work for free, you know? Twenty dollars will go a long way to help with that. If I ever find a place to buy everything cheaper than Target, maybe some corporations join in with the charity (wink, wink) we'll be helping more and more kids faster than you can say "huge tax write-off and free publicity" (wink, wink).

But it won't feel like charity, no sir. These are high-grade cookies, I assure you. With names like "Super Chunkolate Chip," "Strips O' Chocolate Heaven," "Chocolotta Paradise," "Pecandides," "Raisin Canes," "Stupendos," "Mintos," "Peanut Butter Jesuses," and "ButtCookiers," how can you think of NOT enjoying the hell out of them? They're so scrumptious and good these bastards melt in your mouth before you open the box. I'm not kidding you, I've tried them, they're good. One Pecandide nearly put me in a sugar coma, they're rich and packed with deliciousosity.

I guarantee you one taste of any of those cookies, the next Girl Scout who comes to your door, you'll dry heave in her face. They're that damn good. You'll get so addicted you'd kill your mother for a box. And it all goes to help the kids, so how can you refuse? You can't! Don't try it! Just give into temptation and buy a bunch!

I must stress these cookies are sold in BOXES, I cannot sell cookies individually. I suggest all you moochers out there who are too cheap to spring for a whole box all go into together and pool your money or something.

Also, if you'd like to help sell these cookies on behalf of "Rok Finger's Kids," I'd love your help. I'm pretty much left to sell them alone, the kids aren't out chasing down leads or anything, I can guarantee you that. So please, come out and overindulge for charity.

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Last installment we ended with the great video game crash of 1982, which treated the world to visions of programmers heading west across the dust bowl in Calistoga wagons, embarrassing holes worn through their one-dollar pants. Entire landfills had to be created to accommodate the vast influx of unplayed games and unused gaming consoles manufactured in the early 80's. The town of E.T., Maine, was founded around a massive landfill that Atari created to hide the shame of the millions of unsold E.T. game cartridges produced before the company realized that not even stamping the name of a hit movie on the cartridge could save one of the shittiest games ever produced.

From this smoking hole in the ground Nintendo would emerge with the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Hujitsu Homanama had formed the company to sell his sexy playing cards in 1889, naming it "Nintendo," a Japanese word meaning "eat the children." Over time the company would evolve into other areas of gaming, scoring hits in the early 80's with arcade hits Donkey Kong and Stick Dick in Hole for Blow. But total world domination would have to wait until 1985, when the company's first home console grabbed the world by its balls and mopped the floor with it, like some kind of weird ball-handled mop.

The driving force behind the success of the NES was its megahit pack-in game, Super Mario Bros. Offering gamers a glimpse of what happened to those bickering, deranged Italians after they finally climbed out of the sewer at the end of the original Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. delighted children the world over with its colorful, drug-induced imagery and perhaps the most cruelly addictive theme song of any video game ever. Years later, respected American composer George Crumb would be shamed in the international community when he realized he had inadvertently written the Super Mario Bros. theme into one of the movements of his grand fifth symphony. Regardless, anyone who had grown up with a NES controller fused to their mitts and that maddening little song in their ear was quick to forgive.

And the hits kept coming for Nintendo, thanks in part to the system's forward-looking peripherals. The NES light gun and Duck Hunt made the fun of unprovoked attacks on animals possible without the horrors of spending time outdoors. And thanks to the Robotic Operating Buddy peripheral and the game Gyromite, millions of kids developed critical thinking skills trying to figure out why in the hell Nintendo had put out a complicated robot controller that only worked with one lousy game.

Nintendo even branched out into 3-D games with the inimitable Rad Racer in 1987, a driving simulation title that perfectly captured the powerful nausea someone would experience trying to drive a race car while wearing red and blue glasses.

Though certainly a milestone in the racing game genre, Rad Racer was hardly the first, or the radest. Most rader. The first arcade racing game was actually 1979's Chicken Run, a bizarre title unrelated to the later claymation movie. The game revolved around how many chickens a player could run over with a Datsun in three minutes, based on one of the game creator's DUI convictions from college. Though undeniably fun, Chicken Run would soon be pushed to the back pages of history by 1982's legendary Pole Position. Pole Position remains to this day the most accurate driving simulation ever created, marveling gamers with its realistic physics, and is still the program that the Army uses to train its formula-one drivers.

Pole Position was followed by Sega's Outrun in 1986. In Outrun, the gamer took on the role of a red convertible piloted by a couple of Californian genetic freaks capable of surviving repeated rollover wrecks that would have decapitated a Samoan. A hit cartoon of the game had to be pulled from the air in 1987 because parents' groups thought it was giving young children the message that rollover fatalities are fun.

And thus we're backwardly introduced to Nintendo's only real competition, if you could call it that, in the era of 8-bit home gaming, an American company called Sega. Sega was started by a Korean War veteran named David Rosen as a front company called Service Games, which Rosen used to sell chintzy Japanese pinball machines to American families as a magnetic homeopathic therapy for kids with cancer. Rosen claimed the machines would cure a variety of fatal illnesses, as well as play a fun little song if your wellness score topped 100,000. Later he shortened the name to Sega because he was a very lazy and uncreative man.

Sega scored early hits with the frog abuse fantasy Frogger and the Dr. Seuss-inspired Zaxxon, which grew enough hair on Sega's balls that they thought competing with Nintendo sounded like a good idea. Thusly in 1986 came the release of the Sega Master System, which was actually Sega's fifth console, but the first that didn't have the added functionality and electrocution risk of a built-in juicer.

The only problem was that Sega forgot to make a Super Mario Bros. for its own system, opting instead to put out a whole line of crap. Later, the Turbo Grafx 16, Neo-Geo, Atari's Jaguar and 3DO would all attempt to compete with the NES and lose, because they all sucked a giant dong. The Sega Master system was relegated to "little bitch" role, having to settle for finding a home in households that somehow couldn't find a NES or weren't sure how to buy one.

Sega would later turn the tables on Nintendo with their 16-bit Genesis console, which outsold the Super Nintendo due to confusion about what a hedgehog was, and the surprisingly large number of dumb kids who didn't want to have to choose between "soup or Nintendo." Nintendo would have the last laugh, however, with the release of the Game Boy in 1989, an extremely crappy portable gaming system and technological leap backward which would go on to become the best-selling gaming machine ever. Since the Game Boy was cobbled together inexpensively from components of Russian consumer electronics leftover from the early 1950's, Nintendo's profit margins were enormous and executives spent the entire decade of the 1990's laughing.

Later, even more shit would happen. Stay tuned.

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