Rover Finds Ted Kennedy’s Face on Martian Surface

ASA scientists were stunned and slightly nauseous this week to find the face of US Senator Ted Kennedy unexpectedly present in the most recent feeds from their Spirit rover, one of NASA’s two remote-controlled toys currently canvassing the Martian surface. Once they’d recovered from the pain and confusion of seeing the senator’s visage cruelly larger-than-life on the big screen, however, speculation erupted among engineers as to what this means about the red planet’s mysterious history.

“This is huge,� explained mission commander Emeril Welch. “Bigger than Ted Kennedy even, if you can imagine that. This is incontrovertible evidence of life on Mars, and booze.�

Once only a controversial theory, this latest evidence all but proves that Mars once contained enough booze and loose women to support the Massachusetts senator. The news is sweet vindication for the few fringe scientists who have argued for years that the red planet once played host to representative democracy, and floozies.

“Ted Kennedy might have been able to get by on Mars without water, but no way is this a dry planet in the alcohol sense,� stated Welch. “We think it’s only a matter of time before one of the rovers uncovers evidence of shot glasses and used condoms.�

The discovery is a boon for scientists of all stripes, who had previously been embarrassingly excited about finding trace evidence of long-gone water inside rocks on the Martian surface. This latest finding confirms that Mars once contained not only various forms of water and club soda, but also a virtual minibar of alcoholic concoctions.

Preliminary drilling in Kennedy’s face has uncovered evidence of whiskey, vodka and scotch, with various crags in the face showing evidence of large quantities of rum once existing on the Martian surface. Such discoveries represent a quantum leap for NASA scientists, who have gone from scouring the Martian surface for faint evidence of microbes to speculating about the Martian bar scene in mere days.

How Kennedy got to Mars, or perhaps came to Earth from Mars, is another question entirely, and one scientists will explore after they’ve answered the burning question of whether or not a Martian could get drunk off the dust from Kennedy’s face. Conspiracy theories have already surfaced suggesting some kind of drunken shuttle mishap, covered up jointly by NASA and the Massachusetts senator. These theories have put a new spin on the original controversial “face� on Mars, first spotted by the Viking Orbiter 1 in 1976 and now thought to possibly be the visage of Kennedy’s female shuttle companion, presumably killed in the crash and later denied by the Kennedy family and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

These latest discoveries have put on hold cash-strapped NASA’s plans to charge $5 a minute for web surfers to drive the Mars rover from their home computers, using keyboard commands or supported peripheral joysticks. This would seemingly put an end to heated online debate over whether the rover would accept quarters or would require special tokens. Early indications are that the online community is “pretty bummed� at the prospect of missing out on killer games of “Tank Battle� between the rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

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To kick things off with a bang, and also give you a taste of my own personal pain, I'd like to start off this column with a slice of reader email I received recently.

"Yo yo yo Griswaaaaaaaasssup Dreck my man! Shit baby! Anyway, dude, the Internet? Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Whatup wit dat?"

Now that I have your sympathy and perhaps your piqued interest, let's dig the morsel of inquiry from the verbal turd above.

Nearly everyone, and at least half of the commune staff, knows what the Internet is. But how many really know how it works? Is it all techno mumbo-jumbo too daunting to penetrate, or just wicked voodoo best left alone? Thankfully for curious minds and Internet columnists who've already spent ten minutes on this column, it's neither.

The Internet was started in 1961 when a teenager named Frank Shultz in Flatbush, NY covertly connected his homemade computer to his neighbor Darcy Stanley's homemade computer in order to send the world's first Internet virus, which consisted of the following code:

10 PRINT "DARCY ISA SLUT"
20 GOTO 10


In response, Stanley sent Shultz the world's first spam, a message detailing the modern miracle of penis enlargement through the revolutionary technique of shooting yourself in the head. From these humble beginnings the Internet grew into several larger computers in Shultz's bedroom, which were connected to the homemade computers of several of Shultz's friends for the purpose of downloading brief text descriptions of pornography.

At this point the scientific community took an interest in Shultz's network, and appropriated the technology for their own purposes, namely sending science geek jokes and chain letters back and forth to each other. Thanks to a particularly popular joke about an amino acid, a Mexican and a Polack, the network eventually grew to include thousands of computers nationwide.

Things stayed about like this for a very long time, until the 90's, when computer manufacturers were maligning the fact that people stopped buying home computers just because they were only good for playing solitaire and pretending to balance your checkbook with Quicken. Some genius realized that people would buy more computers if there were some way they could be beamed faux-inspirational quotes and other heartwarming Chicken Soup for the Soul bullshit on a daily basis, so they developed the modem. A modem is a device that translates computer information into teenage slang so it can be sent over phone lines. Thanks to this breakthrough, five new computers were sold.

But before long retailers and scam artists everywhere discovered that Americans would pay to get kicked in the face as long as it had a .com attached and they got a box in the mail, and the real Internet was born. The thrill of getting a box in the mail has fueled economic growth in America since the beginning of time, and the online age was to be no different.

As for the nitty gritty of how it all works, the concept behind the Internet is that your computer is connected to your neighbor's computer, which is connected to his neighbor's computer, and so on and so forth until you get to the local computer geek's house, where there are big computers connected to the homes of larger and larger geeks until you get to central command. This is why the Internet is often slow and crappy, if one of your neighbors is playing Quake or running an analysis of where his life went wrong it can bog down your shit for real.

At central command there are a bunch of guys who sit around and monitor everything, laugh at your poor email grammar and the fact that you visit spankspock.com thirty times a day, distribute Xerox copies of really embarrassing stuff and generally just make sure everything keeps on truckin'. This is where the string of computers is actually connected to the Internet, which is a big metal thing that looks like the ghost containment unit thing from Ghostbusters. Nobody's sure what exactly goes on inside that thing.

Today the Internet is an indispensable part of modern life, providing us with news, sports scores, bad blind dates and solutions to modern problems like what does the girl from One Hour Photo look like naked. Some wonder how we lived before the Internet, and the answer is we didn't. We thought we did, but what the hell did we know? Back then we had to get all our information from books, which is a little like getting your news from popular music. And you had to jog down to the library every time you found unlabeled prescription medication under the couch or wanted to know what happened to the cast of Goonies. You may call that living, but it sounds an awful lot like Cast Away to me.

Who played Tom Hanks' fiancée in that movie? I bet she looks good naked.

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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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