rand spanking-new pope Benedict XVI has surprised traditionalists this week not only by having the traditional pope throne in the Vatican replaced with an overstuffed Lay-Z-Boy recliner, but more significantly by calling for "Santo Subito," or "Immediate Sainthood" for his predecessor, the reportedly-deceased John Paul II.

Such a move would be a radical break from the Vatican's traditional 5-year waiting period between a pope's death and first chance at beatification, which is not as painful as it sounds. The waiting period has traditionally served as a time for the deceased pope's life and accomplishments to be put in perspective, to prevent voters from being swayed by the media circus surrounding the pope's death and the emotions of guilty voters who owed the pope money.

"Your Holiness, though I respect your desire to honor—could someone kindly shake the pope awake, please?" argued Cardinal Vincenzo Palati to snores of disagreement from a reclined pope.

Pope John Paul II himself bent the rules by sponsoring Mother Teresa for sainthood a mere two years after her death, with the explanation that he was tired of waiting to get his hands on the collectable "Saint Mother Teresa" bobblehead doll.

Some have questioned Benedict's motives, pointing out the possibility that he hopes to accelerate the trend, eventually allowing the pope to declare himself a saint before he even dies, getting around the ever-present problem of being a saint but being too dead to enjoy it. Critics point out the many powerful incentives for pulling off such a coup, including the generous saint discount available at buffets worldwide, and the ability to commandeer civilian vehicles on demand for saintly business.

For John Paul II to be beatified, supporters will have to provide evidence of saint-like miracles performed by his former eminence during his popehood. So far, this looks to be a large hurdle.

"The pope made meatballs one time, using grade D beef," reminisced cardinal and pope friend Arturo Bennini. "It was a miracle they turned out so good."

"Well, the pope blew his nose on my shirt once," explained an awed Victor Minelli. "And the stain looked kind of like cookie monster. You know the cookie monster? So that was kind of weird. A weird miracle."

"That man was a saint," claimed a rambling Cardinal Eustace Beeter, in a 45-minute speech that none could claim had a definable point. "Just good people, that pope."

Catholic statisticians, however, question the logic behind John Paul II being inducted to the Pope Hall of Fame at all, citing the former pope's poor career stats. 4,000 conversions are traditionally considered to be the benchmark for sainthood, though John Paul II supporters argue that the former pope's 2,805 were an artificially suppressed number due to injuries and the years that the pope served in the army.

"The three most similar popes to John Paul II, according to their statistics, are Hermes the Mauve, Jonas Ricardo Popino, and 'Steamboat' McGill," explained pious nerd Walter Bumrose. "Not exactly a stellar assemblage of popehood, to be honest. Those are some real bummer popes, most of them from the dark period in the church's history when they had cash flow problems and would let anyone be pope for a day as long as they kicked in enough cash and brought their own hat."

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The president took an honest and sincere step toward covering up the recent questions of intelligence (the CIA's, not his) with his creation of a bipartisan (emphasis on the "partisan") commission this week. But the question remains: Are we supposed to buy this bullshit?

That question aside, and the answer is obviously a resounding "yes," issues still remain about the quality of intelligence the administration is receiving about terrorism. If the CIA thinks there are large deposits of chemical or biological weapons in an underdeveloped nation like Iraq, based, I might add, on some barbershop rumor floating around Nigeria, what does this mean for the safety of the country? Are we pretty much left at the mercy of the incompetence of terrorists? Much like they are left at the mercy of our own incompetence.

It might be easier for the American public if they knew exactly how intelligence is gathered for the purposes of national security. First and foremost, we buy it. Any episode of Starsky & Hutch should display this adequately. Foreign equivalents of Huggy Bears come nosing around our embassies, and back alley deals galore abound.

The second way is the kind we think of it most often: large, burly American national security agents wearing fake beards and dressed in swami hats and Lawrence of Arabia robes. These are the real heroes, the deceitful, backstabbing undercover agents who get the secretest information straight from the horse's mouth by putting their lives on the line in barely plausible disguises. There is no more dangerous job in the world, except for being an employee of Phil Spector. Many is the time some jihad-crazy Muslim terrorist flips out and frisks you to yell out, "Abdul's wearing a wire!" It's all over then, sir.

There is also what the government calls "option three": Kicking in doors of suspected terrorists, arresting them on suspicion and searching their base of operations without warrant. Right now this is still hard to do overseas, with their difficult laws preventing illegal search and seizure, at least in the more Westernized countries and some of the third world, but rollback in constitutionally-guaranteed rights in the states has made it a lot easier to fight terrorism on our own turf. We might have to annex the world before they agree.

So whose balls were dropped on this particular outing? Democrats suggest the administration manipulated intelligence to manufacture consent for an unjustifiable war with Iraq. Plausible, yes, and even the most likely case, which makes it a poor choice to discuss in this column. So I point the blame squarely at the acting schools in this country.

What kinds of intelligence operatives are we turning out? Nervous, jittery young rubes who make poor choices in their acting and offer only an overbaked performance any first-year Hamas fanatic could see through. Our guys show up on their doorsteps, spewing anti-American rhetoric in a British accent because it's all they can do, and the terrorist masterminds of the world are laughing at us. They tell our guys six or seven times a month they're ready to launch a major attack on our soil, when in fact their biggest effort is not to giggle while they discuss fake plans to use dirty bombs and chemical agents.

Hopefully this nine-person distraction Bush is calling a bipartisan commission will get right to the heart of our off-off-Broadway operatives. We're the richest nation on the planet, and our security is something we should not be paying half-price for. I say, shell out the $20 million for Pacino. De Niro, Hoffman, any of these guys. We should at least be able to afford Billy Dee Williams. He was fantastic in Mahogany.

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Apparently some construction crew Einstein had a brainstorm watching E.T. the other night, since I woke up Saturday morning to find my neighbor's construction site completely enclosed in some kind of gigantic biohazard flea tent. Thank God I'd ditched out on the idea of camping there overnight, since I'd likely have been trapped inside and I bet everything stinks like malathion in there now.

Cruelly denied access to my neighbor's basement-in-making, I decided to do the next best thing and find out what's in my own basement, since I hadn't been down there in about eight years and my memory wipes clean like a credit report after seven. I couldn't even find the key to go down there until I checked in Foghat's party ball, the strange, amorphous blob of unidentified household detritus he pushes around like a bag lady raised by owls.

After I de-balled the basement key and broke the seal on the basement door that had been keeping everything inside in a permanent state of 1997, I took my last, deep breath of fresh air before voyaging down into whatever mummy farts and radon leaks had been lurking in the air under my house since back when Hanson was on the radio.

At first I was a little apprehensive heading down those stairs, not knowing quite what could be down there in the dark, waiting to jack up my Jill. I had a bad experience once in Canada, getting locked in some stranger's cabin in the middle of the night and having to shimmy up out of the basement coal chute after a misunderstanding about bathroom etiquette. I wasn't looking forward to reliving that again, plus I'm pretty sure I don't have a coal chute.

But then I realized that any kind of creepy naked chainsaw killer down there would likely be way off his game after the eight-year vacation, and probably would have grown some hilarious deep-sea fish adaptations after spending nearly a decade in the dark, too. And I'd pay to see that shit. Then I remembered about the halogen floodlights I had installed in the basement, after Foghat lost his lucky tooth down there and I got sick of blowing through candles for my miner's helmet looking for the damned thing.

After finding the switch and flooding the basement with enough light to incinerate any hiding mutated chainsaw freaks, I took the plunge into a land of mystery and wonder.

Or at least a lot of shit I forgot I had. Hula hoops, an airplane wing, and a gun that shoots billiards balls. And some sick bastard had painted a life-sized portrait of Nancy Reagan using real meat. Then there was the huge refrigerator with a normal fridge inside, and a mini-fridge inside that one like a giant refrigerator Matrioshka doll, I guess at some point I had shit that needed to be kept really cold.

A voting machine? Jesus, did I get elected? And I have no idea where those tricked-out dirt bikes came from.

But the most interesting thing I found down there was the giant crate of off-brand NyQuil I spied behind a wax statue of Evander Holyfield over in the corner. What's the story behind this stuff? Anybody who's got more than FM radio between their ears knows that cough medicine is only good for two things: methamphetamines and hilarious gag ice cubes. But a case? Man, that's a lot of ice cubes.

I'm not sure why I would have bought an entire case. Actually, I'm not sure how I bought an entire case, I don't think they sell it that way outside of New Mexico. Either they get a lot of colds down there or tweakers run the government. Maybe I was on a road trip and just didn't want to pass up the opportunity.

Then again, it was a knock-off brand called NiteWipe, so maybe they had to sell it by the case to get people to buy the stuff. Well, it worked at least once.

So now you know the story behind how that weird blue-green igloo ended up on my lawn, and how I distracted the construction shmoes long enough to make a kamikaze run on the biodome to make sure they didn't really have an E.T. trapped in there. Incidentally, I also added a concrete mixer to my carnival of basement thrills downstairs, which should make for some interesting speculation in another eight or nine years.

Bricks out.

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