n an unprecedented display of brazen honesty, during a recent press junket for Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots referred to three-time director Michael Bay as "the universe’s most incompetent filmmaker" and co-star Shia LaBeouf as "the world destroyer of beloved 80’s icons".

"My strongest belief above all is that freedom is the right of all sentient beings," the 12-foot commander began, "but Mike should be thrown into a kangaroo court of Quinetessons, found guilty without a shred of proof, and dumped unceremoniously into a pit of Sharkticons."

When asked why he felt so strongly, Optimus’s eyes, normally a cool florescent blue suddenly changed to a sunflower yellow. "Have you seen Pearl Harbor? This is a man who earned his directing chops on Bad Boys. I’m beyond shocked Sean Connery didn’t go into early retirement after The Rock."

When asked to compare Bay with fellow director Uwe Boll, notorious for cinematic turns on little-known video game franchises such as Bloodrayne, Postal and Alone in the Dark, Prime had a bit more respect. "At least Boll was a prizefighter, and he’d kick anyone’s keester who dared criticize his work. Frankly, that’s one tough cookie I’d rather not speak out against. Mike just cowers behind his lawyers about criticism when he’s not clinging to the turned-out pockets of Stephen" (Spielberg, the film’s executive producer).

As for his costar LaBeouf, he seemed thrilled the young star had announced he wouldn’t be back for a fourth installment. "Having to listen to his incessant nasally voice screaming every single line nearly blew out my audio receptors. By the second film I realized he was actually causing some minor damage to occur in my memory banks. Fortunately I have the ability to turn them off and scanned his mouth to lip-read instead when it came to doing a line. This isn’t Othello we’re performing here after all—hell, it’s not even BioDome."

When asked to elaborate on his comments about Shia destroying a generation’s worth of entertainment icons, he had this to say: "Think about it. First it was Indiana Jones. The one you call ’Harrison Ford’ called him a ’fucking idiot’, which I assume is some sort of derogatory label in your language—either that or he’s quite promiscuous, and very bad at it. Then you have our films—enough said there—and then he even got into a sequel of Wall Street. As if anyone could believe he could take on Gordon Gecko! I’ll have to check my files, but was Mike behind that film too?"

Asked if there was anything he would change about the films, he did have a few ideas: "Maybe introducing a Decepticon that transforms into a bus that runs over Shia’s character Sam in the first five minutes. That’d be a start. Getting rid of Megan Fox was about the only thing we did right—she was fun to look at—and how many guys can say they had Fox inside of them?—in the end she was like a set of dub tires—sure, they make your rims look sweet, but they’re goddamn useless for everyday use."

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Few things in life are more annoying than sports fans who think they're cursed. That is unless they think they're individually cursed, which can be hilarious. If all their breakfast cereal turns into locusts or they gain weight no matter what they eat, I can listen to that stuff all day. But nobody can stand listening to some sorry loser complaining that the Curse of Cheops kept his sad-sack team from winning the big one, and how the gimpy harem of mama's boys deserved better. In ancient times, men were killed for less, usually by fans of more-successful teams.

Baseball fans in Chicago and Boston have gone to great lengths to lament and preserve their teams' curses, and the commune staff has not been spared their pain. This very column is an effort to try and end the "Curse of the commune," which involves having to hear commune reporter and former Cubs pitcher Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown explain the Curse of the Cubs every time somebody makes a comment about baseball, goats, mummies, bears or Chicago-style deep dish pizza.

The Curse of the Cubs, also known at "The Billy Goat Curse" and "Loser's Excuse #42" dates back to the World Series of 1945. Local Chicago tavern owner William "Billy Goat" Sianis wanted to take his goat to see World Series game four, ostensibly because he couldn't find a babysitter. His real reasons were thankfully kept private.

Sianas had been the owner of the Lincoln Tavern for years, and one day a goat fell off the back of a passing truck and wandered into his bar, looking for a place to drop off a batch of road apples. Sianas had the annoying habit of taking nearly everything that happened to him as a sign from God, and in keeping with this quirk he promptly grew a goatee, renamed his bar the Billy Goat Tavern, and began taking the goat along with him wherever he went, to promote his now disagreeably-themed establishment.

Sianas managed to get through the turnstiles at Wrigley Field that day in 1945, after telling the ticket-taker that the goat was his adopted Malaysian son. Thanks to Chicago's admittedly small Malaysian population at the time, the ruse was successful. The goat probably would have been left to enjoy the game in peace if not for the fact that it had just eaten twenty-seven caramel apples during the half-hour immediately preceding the game, and the panicked look in the goat's eyes made all the fans seated nearby extremely nervous. Sianas and his goat were soon ejected, after which the goat promptly ruined a convertible parked outside the stadium.

While he was searching around for a fire hose to clean up after his goat, Sianas cursed the Cubs to eternal postseason futility by announcing "Never again will World Series be played in Wrigley Field!" His pronouncement was met with raucous laughter from Cubs fans, who noticed that the goat had eaten Sianas's pants while he was cursing. Upon discovering his pantsless state, Sianas began to curse in doubletime, most of which was not suitable for historical documentation. It was noted, however, that during his tirade Sianas did pronounce that a goat would never win the Kentucky Derby, a curse that has remained eerily true to this day.

The Cubs went on to lose that World Series, and have never been back because they suck. They did make it back to the playoffs in 1984, 1989, 1998 and 2003, but each year Lady Luck stepped on the Cubs' balls in the most humiliating way possible. Baseballs were dropped, pooches were screwed and somebody ate a cat. Cubs fans love to blame the goat curse for their team's lack of success, but this holds little water for fans in other cities also cursed with teams that suck but are short on rank barnyard animals to blame.

The Boston Red Sox have their own curse, "The Curse of the Bambino," which is just as famous as Chicago's curse but told in a different funny accent. It has also been known as "The Curse of the Big Fat Hot Dog Eating Machine," but is usually shortened to "The Curse of the Bambino." In 1920, Red Sox accountants discovered that team profits were down for the third straight year because star outfielder Babe Ruth was eating the team out of house and hot dogs. The accountants took their plight to tight-fisted owner Harry Frazee, who promptly traded Ruth to the Yankees for a case of beer and a St. Bernard named Lucky. The Yankees went on to win 26 World Championships, while for the Red Sox the trade was a wash because Lucky loved hot dogs almost as much as Ruth.

What lesson is there to be learned from these two infamous baseball curses? In a nutshell, the universal lesson here is this: Don't hire the long-dead pitcher from a team that hasn't won the World Series since he played for it in 1908 to be a reporter for your Internet news site, unless you want to hear a lot of long, boring baseball stories. Amen.

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If anybody tells you that the longest word in the English language is Antidisestablishmentarianism, you know right away that they're full of the brown stuff. Though that's certainly a pretty long word, anyone in the know knows that this famous example was just the first thing Noah Webster could pull out of his ass when a reporter asked him the question, since he didn't want to look like an idiot and lose his title as "Mr. Word." In reality, there's no such thing as the longest word, since whatever word somebody suggests, you can just add "-ish" on the end and totally blow their minds. That's the kind of thing they teach you in college.

It's like trying to think of the biggest number. Some smartass can always come along and say "Oh yeah? What about that number… plus one?" Try it, it works in both cases. Just when you think you've got a real contender for world's longest word, say something like Postantefornicatetopiatacosushilumpfistgrapefruitdingdongery, right when your head starts to swell up big some joker will pop out of the woodwork and say "Not bad, but what about Postantefornicatetopiatacosushilumpfistgrapefruitdingdongerish?" And no matter how you kill them, you're still going to jail.

But just because there isn't actually a longest word in the world, doesn't mean that people haven't given their lives over the centuries to the insane quest to find it.

In 1096 A.D., the William the Conqueror, King of England, ordered a crusade to the Holy Land to find the longest word in the world. Nobody had any idea where the longest word actually might be, but the Middle East seemed like as good a place as any to start looking, since people over there were naming their kids things like Ptolenamonemy and Dodecazoroaster. It obviously wasn't in the Orient, since everyone over there was named Hin and Xi, so they clearly had no taste for long words. And even if they had, opinions were split over whether it would have counted or not, since a bunch of drawings of houses and cranes in a row just didn't make a word look all that impressively long.

Granted, the William the Conqueror didn't go to the Middle East himself, since that place was crawling with crazy religious fucks just drooling to chop off a white man's head with a dull bread knife, so he sent his son Dave instead. Dave the Conqueror was joined by Marcus Bonehound of Italy, and a Frenchman whose name nobody could remember, but everybody was pretty well certain he had been there. They were accompanied by a ragtag gang of zealots who had a lot of time on their hands and strong opinions about word length.

The Crusades lasted for over 250 years and resulted in the deaths of millions, but the longest word any of them could come up with was the Icelandic hæstaréttarmálaflutningsmaður, a 29-letter word which means "the sweat off a barrister's balls." How in the world they discovered an obscure Icelandic word in Jerusalem is anyone's guess, though most historians explain that Marcus Bonehound thought Icelandic chicks were red hot, and just leave it at that.

A second set of Crusades by the doggedly thorough English led to the discovery of the Turkish word çekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz, 43 letters of drivel meaning "Aren't you one of those ding-dongs from Czechoslovakia?" This satisfied westerners for a few hundred years, until the Queen of Spain got a bee up her ass in 1500 A.D. and demanded that Columbus go find her the world's longest word, for the goddamed glory of Spain.

Columbus came back after the seventh year of his heavily-funded quest with the news that the longest word in the world was "smiles," because there's a mile between the first and last letters. After the court realized he wasn't joking, a private investigation discovered that Columbus had taken the court's money and spent the last seven years drunk and basking naked on the beach in Jamaica. The great explorer was promptly beheaded and had his cheeks glued to his teeth in a permanent smile, his head then displayed in a jar in the royal chambers for the better part of two decades as a reminder to the lazy and humorous.

Join us next time when we continue the thrilling story of the longest word in the world. Until then, I'm Griswald Dreck.

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