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Arafat Leaves Compound with New Suit, $100 BillMay 13, 2002 |
The West Bank, Palestine Junior Bacon Arafat flashes gang sign picked up in "the joint"
Arafat spent more than a month in confinement by the Israelis, what he calls "the hole," trapped in his office like every American middle manager's nightmare. It had been called "the hole" since three years previous, actually. Arafat, held trapped by the Israelis for his alleged connection to terrorism throughout Israel, became a martyr for his people's cause while inside, much like Nelson Mandela, had Mandela previously been the leader of a terrorist organization.
"They accuse me of terrorism?" said Arafat from within his compound a month ago, while under siege. "I spit on their donkeys and slap their turtles' ...
rison—the school of hard knocks and hard anal penetration. They say once you go in, you never come back the same. And Yasser Arafat knows that's true.
Arafat spent more than a month in confinement by the Israelis, what he calls "the hole," trapped in his office like every American middle manager's nightmare. It had been called "the hole" since three years previous, actually. Arafat, held trapped by the Israelis for his alleged connection to terrorism throughout Israel, became a martyr for his people's cause while inside, much like Nelson Mandela, had Mandela previously been the leader of a terrorist organization.
"They accuse me of terrorism?" said Arafat from within his compound a month ago, while under siege. "I spit on their donkeys and slap their turtles' asses with shame. They are the terrorists. Tormenters, monsters… Nazis, fascists! Okay, maybe Nazis didn't make much sense. I just want to be hurtful."
But once you're on the inside, your political ideologies only get you so far. Arafat had to find a way to keep from going crazy on the inside. Crazier. He turned to the library and the weight room.
"It was important to expand my mind, to change myself while I'm in there so I would not make the same mistakes when I get out," said the buff, newly re-educated political figure. "I built up my biceps and triceps, I put on ten pounds of nothing but muscle and finally lost this accursed neck waddle. What? Oh. It's still there?
"While inside I worked out my mind as well, doing squats with my cerebellum and clean-and-jerking my grey matter. I studied my case exhaustively and taught myself law. I was going to represent myself, if needed be, and I was going to be a free man again."
Under the political boos of the rest of the world, and an overwhelming scarceness of actual evidence, Israel reversed its decision against Arafat little more than a month later and declared him a free man. He was given a new pressed suit, a $100 bill for his work in the laundryroom, and emerged from his compound a free man. He then turned and went back inside since that's where he lives.
It was more than a little frightening doing hard time for Arafat, he said upon his release. The violence of prison keeps you from ever really letting your guard down. He had been sexually assaulted three times and brutally beaten twice before he started fraternizing with certain anti-Semitic groups on the inside, just for survival. As soon as he was a free man again, and returned to his compound, he fired all those responsible for the beating and raping.
But the Palestinian leader promised not to let the experience change him.
"In some ways you can never be the same," he said, bench pressing 200 lbs. in his office Saturday. "But you try to remember who you were and pursue that once you lose your stripes. I'm dedicated to a Palestinian free state and that's what I went up the river for. I'll continue to fight for that. I may be different, but I'm only hardened in my resolve. And possibly more violent. The blood will run like chocolate in Willy Wonka's factory." the commune news is Tom - vocals/guitar, Chris - guitar/vocals, P-Fart - drums, and Steve - bass. Ivan Nacutchacokov is the commune's foreign correspondent, meaning he's both foreign and a correspondent, at least that's what we assume.
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Several Newscasters Fired for Reporting Death of Don Ho 5 Million White House E-Mails Missing, All About Low-Cost Cialis Sanjaya Unites Indian Fans, People Who Hate American Idol IRS: Excessively Needy Girlfriends Can’t Be Declared “Dependents” |
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 July 21, 2003
Whatever Happened to the Test Tube Babies?If you're like me, you're starting to wonder if they're ever going to come out with a pill that makes everybody beautiful, or if that was just the Twilight Zone blowing smoke up our asses. You also thought that by now the world would be overrun by test-tube baby freaks, babies with super powers or at least alarmingly rounded skulls like built-in helmets from gestating in a big glass tube. Isn't that some scary shit? You bet your cold sweat nightmares it is! I'd probably be the president by now if I hadn't lost so much precious sleep to the threat of a test tube baby creeping up out of my toilet tank with piano wire in hand, yikes.
But, unless you're living on the set of a Korean horror flick or you're the late Howard Hughes, that's a future that never came true. Why?
Finding an answer to that question involves a lot of legwork spent freak hunting, which is sort of like freak dancing except you don't get to rub your crotch on a girl. The reason this freak hunting is necessary is because you can't answer the question of why there aren't any test tube baby freaks running around until you've made sure there actually aren't any. After all, for all you know your neighbors could all be test tube babies grown up, and while you're at work they have meetings in each other's living rooms about how creepy it is to live next door to the freak who got squeezed out of a vagina thirty years ago. No wonder they never invite you to their BBQs, that's a...
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If you're like me, you're starting to wonder if they're ever going to come out with a pill that makes everybody beautiful, or if that was just the Twilight Zone blowing smoke up our asses. You also thought that by now the world would be overrun by test-tube baby freaks, babies with super powers or at least alarmingly rounded skulls like built-in helmets from gestating in a big glass tube. Isn't that some scary shit? You bet your cold sweat nightmares it is! I'd probably be the president by now if I hadn't lost so much precious sleep to the threat of a test tube baby creeping up out of my toilet tank with piano wire in hand, yikes.
But, unless you're living on the set of a Korean horror flick or you're the late Howard Hughes, that's a future that never came true. Why?
Finding an answer to that question involves a lot of legwork spent freak hunting, which is sort of like freak dancing except you don't get to rub your crotch on a girl. The reason this freak hunting is necessary is because you can't answer the question of why there aren't any test tube baby freaks running around until you've made sure there actually aren't any. After all, for all you know your neighbors could all be test tube babies grown up, and while you're at work they have meetings in each other's living rooms about how creepy it is to live next door to the freak who got squeezed out of a vagina thirty years ago. No wonder they never invite you to their BBQs, that's a disgusting image.
After a quick poll of everyone who happened to be in the commune offices this afternoon, I determined with statistical certainty that there aren't any grownup test tube baby freaks out running around. Nobody in the office was a test tube baby, anyway, though editor Red Bagel recently appeared on television eating babyback ribs and Lil Duncan once was allowed to skip a roadside sobriety test because she was wearing a tube top. Granted, the commune staff constitutes a limited (in more ways that one) sample size, but it's hot outside. Also, there was a Fed-Ex guy here who was on the wrong floor and he wasn't a test tube baby either, so I say that seals the deal pretty convincingly.
So what happened to all of them? Were they rounded up as infants and processed into lunchmeat? Or did they grow up together as a bizarre clan in a cloistered and secretive governmental environment, like Utah?
While this would explain an awful lot about Utah, there's no way the government would ever leave evidence of such an Orwellian conspiracy in plain sight of any random Olympics spectator or people who got lost looking for Colorado. The government likes to save that "in plain sight" hiding trick for when aliens crash land right at the same time SNL needs a new batch of writers for the season.
Long story short, it turns out all the test tube babies are now working at McDonald's. Well, not all of them, some work at Arby's and the other fast-food chains, but they're not allowed to run the giant meat slicer so they have to have at least one normal human on the staff there to make sure nobody gets very gradually decapitated. But nine out of ten test tube babies are now plugged in behind the counter at fast food restaurants; the tenth is making sure the salad bar at Old Country Buffet has twice as many olives as anything else.
How did this come about? In recent years, all the recent immigrants with poor English skills have been opting for higher-paying customer service jobs, leaving the fast food industry in need a cheap and unreliable workforce that could be made into McNuggets if the freezer ever crapped out unexpectedly. The first test tube babies began to come of age in the late 90's, but were generally useless since it turns out the mother's umbilical cord transmits some kind of nutrients that are important for fetal brain development. So the test tube kids were basically permanently stoned all the time.
What had been a frustrating problem for the government and their caretakers was a gold-shitting goose for the fast food industry, since they'd been looking for replaceable bands of idiots to run their restaurants for years. A few small changes had to be made to accommodate the new workforce, as the tubers' domed noggins required the addition of embarrassing foam mesh baseball caps to the standard fast food uniform to keep customers from flipping out and screaming uncontrollably mid-meal. But in the end the fast food chains got their wish: workers with no will to break who were willing to scrub Horsey sauce out of booster seats for eleven cents an hour and no benefits.
And really, terrible as the jobs might be, it was a step up for the tube babies, who'd lived most of their lives in lockers like the cast of You Can't Do That on Television. The only real losers were consumers, who haven't got a fast food meal right since 1997. You ever try to order something without pickles at one of these places? I rest my case. You'd have better luck getting them to notarize your living will. One time the guy just handed me a big bag of pickles that was stapled shut, it's like dealing with the rejects from a mannequin factory. Come to think of it, I think that was in a Twilight Zone episode, too. Eerie. º Last Column: Why is Everybody Else So Fat?º more columns
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|  June 9, 2003
Ape Skills"It takes a nation of millions just to keep a shitty sitcom on the air."
My dad once told me, "Boy, it takes a smart man to get a job these days. But it takes a good man to…" At that point the dog had gotten firm hold of his throat and I couldn't understand what he was saying anymore, but it was probably something about a good man knowing when to admit he's wrong or something. That dog came out of nowhere, now that I think about it.
Dad was a grease monkey, but he preferred the term "motor-fixin' ape." That was as good as he could talk everyone into calling him anyway. He worked at the garage down the street, fixing in any broken cars they would bring in. Or not fixing them, if they were difficult or took a long time or something. He wasn't crazy. But my dad always used to say, "Son, a man with skills is a man who can…" Something. I don't remember the rest of it. I only heard the full version once or twice, usually some birds would crash into his head or a marmot would leap out of a garbage can and latch onto his goodies like a vise.
It doesn't really matter, because a man with skills is probably a good thing, is what he was meaning, and I don't have any. It's not a big downer to me at all. Some people are good at certain things, while I'm good at not being good at anything. It bothered me when I was little, then I started spending a lot of time in unventilated rooms that were just painted. Now I don't worry about anything....
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"It takes a nation of millions just to keep a shitty sitcom on the air."
My dad once told me, "Boy, it takes a smart man to get a job these days. But it takes a good man to…" At that point the dog had gotten firm hold of his throat and I couldn't understand what he was saying anymore, but it was probably something about a good man knowing when to admit he's wrong or something. That dog came out of nowhere, now that I think about it.
Dad was a grease monkey, but he preferred the term "motor-fixin' ape." That was as good as he could talk everyone into calling him anyway. He worked at the garage down the street, fixing in any broken cars they would bring in. Or not fixing them, if they were difficult or took a long time or something. He wasn't crazy. But my dad always used to say, "Son, a man with skills is a man who can…" Something. I don't remember the rest of it. I only heard the full version once or twice, usually some birds would crash into his head or a marmot would leap out of a garbage can and latch onto his goodies like a vise.
It doesn't really matter, because a man with skills is probably a good thing, is what he was meaning, and I don't have any. It's not a big downer to me at all. Some people are good at certain things, while I'm good at not being good at anything. It bothered me when I was little, then I started spending a lot of time in unventilated rooms that were just painted. Now I don't worry about anything. Maybe age makes you wiser. Budweiser. Sure, I could go for one about now.
The best thing about not being able to do anything is that nobody calls on you to do them a favor. No one gets pissed if you can't remember who called while they were out because they know your memory is shitty. No one asks to help you move once they know you drop stuff like it's chili pepper hot and their furniture is all expensive. No one asks you to cover for them if the boss shows up because they know you're not even good at lying. So if you see the bright side, it's better not being able to do anything.
I guess that's one thing I do well, see the bright side of everything. Like when life gives you lemons and you make lemonade, then you taste and realize someone pissed in your lemonade. I'm the kind of guy who says, "Well, now I know what piss tastes like so I'll never have to wonder." Then the kids tell me I spoiled all their fun and they won't sell me anymore lemonade, even with piss in it. But that's just more money I can spend on mouthwash. Always a bright side, dudes.
But if that's one thing I do well, now I gotta worry about people bothering me to do that. "Hey, Loser—I just woke up with a hobo's dick in my mouth. What's the bright side of that?" I've created a whole new avenue of work for just me.
Sometimes I really am a dumbass. º Last Column: Genuine Draftº more columns
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Milestones1983: Night Ranger releases seminal hit Sister Christian, inspiring the unfortunate tone-deaf singalong by Ivan Nacutchacokov that resulted in his lifetime Greyhound bus ban.Now HiringCowboy Bebop. Not really sure what this is, to be honest, but Red Bagel telegrammed to demand we hire one. Two if they come in a matched set. So there you go.Top 5 Reasons You Won't Have to Kick Around the commune For Anymore| 1. | It’s expensive to run state of the art website and Dippin’ Dots franchise at the same time | | 2. | You assholes simply refused to spell our name appropriately in lowercase letters | | 3. | All of this was for date with girl at Blockbuster; she don’t work there no more | | 4. | Less writing and online publishing leaves more time to hang out at coffee shop writing thinly veiled autobiographic novel | | 5. | You never loved us | |
|   North Korea Pissed Their Real-Life Hunger Games Nowhere Near as Popular as Movie BY Roland McShyster 6/24/2002 Well hey, America! Who'd have thought you'd be back for part two of our entertainmentalicious Summer Preview? I mean, what are the chances of that? I'm not a gambling man, but if I were I'd have to bet the odds were close to 100-7-245-9. Needless to say, I'm damned impressed. I looks like you've held up your end of the bargain, so I'm going to do my best to make this EP the policiest yet. This month we're taking a gander at the ass-half of the summer movie releases and asking the age-old question: where's the manager with those ticket refunds?
In Theaters
Austin Powers in Goldmember
Everybody knows Mike Meyers is a sharp guy, but does anyone really think he can make a spoof of Jerry...
Well hey, America! Who'd have thought you'd be back for part two of our entertainmentalicious Summer Preview? I mean, what are the chances of that? I'm not a gambling man, but if I were I'd have to bet the odds were close to 100-7-245-9. Needless to say, I'm damned impressed. I looks like you've held up your end of the bargain, so I'm going to do my best to make this EP the policiest yet. This month we're taking a gander at the ass-half of the summer movie releases and asking the age-old question: where's the manager with those ticket refunds?
In Theaters
Austin Powers in Goldmember
Everybody knows Mike Meyers is a sharp guy, but does anyone really think he can make a spoof of Jerry Seinfeld's American Express commercials work for 90 minutes? Sure, there's a lot of Superman material to be mined there, but once you get past the "Invisible Man boinking Wonder Woman" joke I think it's going to get old fast.
The Crocodile Hunter: The Main Course
Now here's a concept we can all get behind: that inbred Aussie redneck finally gets his ass eaten by alligators. Or crocodiles, whatever. I don't think anyone's going to argue about snout shape when they're being thrashed around in the water with their nuts in a croc's vice-like grip. This is a film idea that was about as overdue as Britney Does the Bad News Bears. Not to mention it's got a great soundtrack that includes Men at Work's cover of Crocodile Rock and that hilarious parody song Who Let the Ducks Out? that you've been hearing about on the net.
K-19: The Widowmaker
I hate to be the bearer of shitty news, but it looks like James Belushi and that fuckin' dog are back again. This time the twist on the franchise is that the dog's got some kind of hyper space-rabies and has acquired a taste for blood, so Belushi's got to track him down (surely stepping in shit along the way) and cut the dog's heart out with a pen knife before burning it in a crematorium, blah blah blah. This trend-aping is supposed to scare us, but I'm about as scared as I was when I first saw the cover for M.C. Hammer's The Funky Headhunter album. Which is to say, pretty scared, but not for the right reasons.
Like Mike
Kidflick that probably sounded like a better deal before Tyson started head-butting people's fists and getting his ass handed to him on a regular basis. Regardless, bedwetting rap sensation Little Misogynist displays some charisma in his acting debut as a pint-size boxer who learns he can suddenly hang with the big boys when he discovers that all of his punches fall at crotch-level.
Men in Black Tubes
Hey, it worked as a Madonna video, so why not drag it out onto the silver screen and let the general non-MTV-watching public poke it with a stick, eh? That's what I'm imagining the producers thought to themselves as they sat around a martini breakfast at some swanky Hollywood gyp joint and tossed around ideas like midgets at an Arkansas bowling alley. Apparently this is one of the ideas that stuck, probably only because the rest of the producers were afraid to admit they'd never seen the video. Anyway, the final product turned out pretty arty, and no one can doubt that the Maternal Girl looks good in a wetsuit made out of plastic six-pack holder rings, but the plot lost me when they were whipping the little Chicano guy out in the rain.
Milo & Stitch
Lovers of all-animal films like Woofers the Cross-Country Dog and Barnyard Porno Volume 3 have been waiting thirteen long years for a sequel to the dark coming-of-age tale Milo & Otis, the undisputed king of the kitten-chucking genre of films. If any of them were betting that 2002 would be their year, then somebody owes them a handjob because Milo the cat is coming out of string-batting retirement for one more turn on the merry-go-round called Hollywood. Diehard fans will be happy to hear that wooden-acting little dog Otis isn't back for the sequel, thanks to his being eaten by a hippo on the set of a shampoo commercial back in the original film's heyday. He's been replaced by a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig named Stitch, who starts out the movie cute, in an ugly-little-pig kind of way, but by the end of the movie has eaten himself into some kind of belly-dragging nightmare destined to be left behind on a family camping trip. Surely the DeNiro of animal actors, Stitch goes all the way for this thinly-veiled Elvis bio-parable, with Milo lending a purring dignity as Stitch's backwoods huckster of a personal manager.
Minority Depot
Bad as it was, NBC's liberal-pleasing sitcom at least served a purpose when it was on TV. With a cast representing every racial group on the planet, plus one ignorant, backwoods, racist, sexist and certifiably ugly white dude, the show at least managed to clam up the social critics who argue that there aren't enough Korean weightlifting champion women on network sitcoms. But there is such a thing as throwing a dog too many bones, as will be evidenced when this turkey sucks its way over to the silver screen this summer. And a note to the Hollywood bigwigs in charge of this one: if you think you can pass off Tom Cruise as ugly, you've obviously never been to Pennsylvania.
The Powerpuff Girls
A trio of New Jersey High School broads discover that a whole new world opens up to them when they spend their Sweet 16 birthday loot on breast enlargement surgery. Teaches the powerful lesson to young girls everywhere that money can't buy you love, but it can buy you a nice rack and a lifetime of popularity and marriage proposals, not to mention a sweet gig as a trophy wife. I tell you, chicks have the life.
Rain of Fire
Jesus Christ, somebody want to tell me who pissed off Prince so bad? Last time I checked he was a soft-spoken boogie machine with a flair for offensive asswear, now I turn around and he's some kind of Hollywood angel of death? I thought I was going to get some hot, half-naked dancing mulattos, not Nine Inch Nails, The Movie. I don't want to start any rumors, but I think somebody must have keyed his little red corvette something awful.
Road to Perdition
There are about three people on the planet who think you can make a Road… picture without Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and apparently Tom Hanks is one of them. And whoever thought the snore-inducing berg of Perdition, Florida was an exotic locale on par with Bali, Hong Kong and Zanzibar needs to have his dentures rinsed off. Hanks and Paul Newman do their best to keep the laughs coming as a couple of numb-nutted mafia hitmen, but this series was old back when Bob Hope still had that "new guy" smell.
Stuart Little 2
Talk about timing. Everybody's been waiting since they were five for that lying little duck to get what's coming to him, and it looks like the sky's about to fall on Stuart Little. We all love to see a little comeuppance dished out to some hothead who never learned the lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolverine, but I'll personally be in line just to see how far the technology of duck-bashing has come since the Daffy-blasting days of my youth.
Whew, America, I think that's about that. I hope your summer is full of big-screen thrills and painless sprints to the restrooms during the dull scenes. Check back in a month and who knows what you'll find in this spot? I'm serious, I'm not even sure myself. But if I know Hollywood, they'll keep churning out the review fodder and we should get along fine. One more thing America: I don't know if Jennifer Connelly is going to get naked in The Hulk, so you can stop emailing me about it any time now. What am I supposed to be, her girlfriend slash confidant or something? Just because you roll with the commune doesn't always mean everybody takes your calls all the time, or even if you're a commune writer pretending to be from E! Online. See you next time!   |
