isaster and certain robot servitude were averted earlier this week when a summit between U.S. President Bush and our soon-to-be robot overlords ended in an embarrassing technical glitch, with all seven of the gigantic city-destroying machines freezing in place simultaneously, each displaying a perplexing message of “LOAD PLAIN LETTER” on their ominously glowing LCD display panels.

According to confidential information from our office copier Xero, these robot invaders come to us from the planet Shmoob, orbiting a distant star in the left-hand part of the sky. After landing in a huge crater that flattened the entire state of Wyoming, the robots apparently were disappointed that their arrival garnered no attention whatsoever and proceeded to destroy major American cities outside Wyoming as a means of getting the nation’s attention.

The first of the robots was spotted Saturday in Illinois, devouring railroad tracks and downing entire rivers like they were rivers of cola. Another was spotted bathing in Lake Mead later that day, and yet another reportedly took a dump in the Nelson Aquifer.

By day’s end all seven robots had made their presence known in various humorously destructive ways. After our robot guests completely razed Chicago, destroyed Miami, and in a strange twist, took time out of their busy schedules to stomp the small town of Hurkle, Iowa into the dust, they made their way en masse to Washington D.C. to demand the immediate surrender of our tiny, flesh-based government.

At first, Bush administration officials believed they could fool the robots by turning out all the lights in the White House and hiding behind couches and other furniture, believing the robots would take the bait and assume that no one was home. Unfortunately for the White House strategists, however, these weren’t your run-of-the-mill stupid killer robots, and their highly advanced neural mesh quad-processors made short work of the administration’s subterfuge. After the robots had torn the roof off of the Oval Office, and one of the invaders began wearing it comically as a hat, it became clear that our leaders would have to address this crisis in a more adult fashion.

But first, President Bush reportedly resorted to his time-honored “What in the hell is THAT!” running away ploy, which ended quickly when the president ate shit into a ditch and cracked his safety helmet.

Early hopes that the robots just wanted to use the White House john were dashed when the machines issued their ultimatum on weird stock-market ticker tape that issued forth from the smallest robot’s crotch. Regardless of the hilarious means by which they issued their demands, the robots earned the respect of all present after engaging in a rousing game of hacky sack with the corpse of the late Vice President, Dickson Cheney.

Following the unexpected freezing of the robot invaders, President Bush and what remained of his top administration officials sat in silence for several minutes, until Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took the cue to approach one of the robots and start jiggering with various hatches and levers, trying to find the source of the error.

In the days since, the White House has had technicians working on the downed bots day and night to correct this strange malfunction, a circumstance that many have complained is anticlimactic, to say the least.

“We’ll get these gigantic, thundering beasts back on their feet in no time,” promised a confident Rice. “And then we’ll finally answer the mystery of where they came from and what they did with Ed Begley Jr. I for one am dying to find out what their deal is.”

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Dear commune:

Thanks for standing up for me back at the bar, dickcheese. I thought we were friends.

Sincerely,

Randy Moate
Riverview, KS


Dear Randy:

Though we appreciate your mail, we must stress the fact that the commune is a news organization made up of numerous individuals, office equipment, free-roaming egos and a Ford Fiesta we use for beer runs and other official business. We’re flattered by the feeling of closeness you have for our organization, however it is a logical impossibility for the commune as a whole to be considered your "friend" in any conventional sense. That having been said, we might stand up for you more often if you didn’t get in a dick-waving contest every time you get half a drink in you, asshole.

the commune

---

Editor’s Note: the commune is not responsible for Barry Switzer of Elk Plain, MO. What’s with that guy, anyway? Talk about an Olympic-caliber jerk. Man. the commune would love to know what makes that guy tick. Some kind of high-octane asshole fuel, we think.

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History has not been kind to the Trojans, inventors of the condom and quite possibly the stupidest people ever. Though they had an advanced culture that thrived for many thousands of years, the Trojans will always and forever be remembered as the people who were suckered by a gang of mercenary nutjobs hiding in a giant wooden horse.

Scam artists and traveling salesmen the world over knew of Troy, a town full of people so gullible that the best conmen stopped going there, as there was really no sport in it. The people of Troy had purchased several bridges in the lands of Mesopotassia and Outer Bulganium, neither of which actually existed. They bought into every diet and exercise fad that blew in on the wind, and most of the town was involved in a mutli-level marketing scam that involved paying people to wipe their own asses. Cedric the Stooped had sold the entire town invisible trousers that were cooler in the summertime, and most of the women in the town had purchased fat-burning crystals from Amaldine the Untrustworthy. The place was like a Scam artists' Disneyland, and many of them planned yearly vacations to Troy.

But the people of Troy were content to live their gullible little lives, and all was well for them until they screwed the pooch by inviting the Gods to a wedding between the king of Pthia, Peleus and Thetis, this crazy chick he knocked up at his brother's wake. History has shown us time and time again that when you bring the Gods into a situation, it always gets royally screwed up faster than you can say "man-eating serpents."

Anyway, somebody dropped the ball mailing out the invitations, and the goddess of promotional discounts, Eris, didn't get invited. Eris was about as high-strung as goddesses came in those days, and she shit a brick. Nobody was surprised, and they all rolled their eyes when Eris said some ominous shit and threw a golden apple on the table.

Nobody knew what in the world that was supposed to be about, and most of them ignored it, but Athena was drunk as a skunk and she grabbed the apple, declaring that it meant she was the hottest skank at the banquet. Aphrodite didn't believe in any of that voodoo, but she hated to see Athena happy, so she declared that she had seen the apple first. Zeus told everybody he wasn't going to touch that debate with a ten-foot finger of God, so he told the Trojan prince Paris to straighten the whole thing out while he went off to purge out the monster stack of flapjacks he'd put away at the banquet.

Right away Athena and Aphrodite were all over Paris, offering up everything they could think of, including every kind of nasty goddess sexual favor in the book. In the end he chose Aphrodite, who offered him the most beautiful mortal woman in the world. Right away, Athena was wishing she had bid higher than "my cousin Showanda." Aphrodite then gave Paris the hook-up with Helen of Troy, who Aphrodite knew from beauty school.

Paris traveled to Sparta and wooed Helen away from her husband, the Spartan king Menopause. She returned with Paris to Troy, which pissed off all of the Trojan girls who had sketches of Paris pinned up on their walls. Naturally, Menopause was pissed as well, since Paris had made off with both his wife and his best set of flatware. He got a hold of his brother Agamemnon, who had the much more intimidating name between the two of them, and sent Agamemnon with 1,000 ships filled with all his cousins and whatnot to go get Helen back and to stomp the fear of Greece into that wiseass Paris.

Though he had a pretty badass name, Agamemnon was still an idiot, and the Greek army spent ten years trying to get through the walls surrounding Troy. When their amazingly prolonged effort proved fruitless, finally the Greek soldier Sinon, who was tired of trying to run up the walls of Troy for ten years, suggested that they use the Trojans' weakness against them by building a giant wooden horse, hiding soldiers inside of it, and then leaving. Nobody knew what he was talking about, but it sounded like a good excuse to get the hell out of there and they could always blame Sinon if anyone asked them why they deserted.

The horse was built, and Agamemnon's best men hid inside while the rest of the army left town, leaving only Sinon behind to put on his puppy dog eyes. When the Trojans came out to find Sinon and the horse, he claimed to have been deserted by the army, who built the horse as an offering to Hobby, the God of big wooden horses. The Trojans walked around the horse and whistled to show their appreciation, kicking the wheels and standing around for a few hours. When they decided to bring it inside the city, the Trojan prophet Laocoon warned that it was a Greek subterfuge and banged on the side of the horse with his cane to illustrate that it was hollow. Instantly, giant sea serpents shot up out of the sea and devoured Laocoon and his sons, no fooling.

Deciding the matter settled, the Trojans wheeled the giant wooden horse through the gates of Troy, despite the occasional sneezing noises heard coming from inside and the guy who hopped out of the horse's ass while they were inspecting it and ran off into the woods to take a leak.

Like idiots, the Trojans partied all night to celebrate their victory and their cherry new wooden horse, and when they fell asleep the Greek soldiers hopped out of the horse, opened the gates of Troy and let in the Greek army, which had been hiding in the bushes the whole time. The people of Troy were screwed, figuratively and literally, as the Greeks had sex with everybody and took the most desirable women as their concubines, kind of like when AT&T bought out TCI a few years back.

Troy was destroyed, but the Trojans got the last laugh as the Greeks had been there so long they forgot the way back to Greece, and ended up wandering around in their ships until they ran out of food and were eaten by sea serpents. That is, the Trojans would have had the last laughs if they hadn't all been either killed in battle or stuck as sex slaves in bondage on the Greek ships when the sea serpents showed up. But you get the feeling like they appreciated that there was at least some sort of payback at the end.

These were pretty rough-and-tumble times, remember. It didn't really pay to be anything but a God or a sea serpent back then.

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