U.N. Weapons Inspectors Want to Come Home

short letter received by the U.N. in the mail Friday stated briefly and succinctly that U.N. weapons inspectors were tired of "dumb-ass Iraq" and wanted "to go home."

The letter surprised most everybody at the U.N., who believed the weapons inspectors were all very happy in their duties in the Middle East. Weapons inspectors had been in Iraq in years previous to prove Saddam Hussein has kept the country free of nuclear material and other weapons outlawed by their post-Gulf War agreement. Just months ago, before their return, the weapons inspectors were practically "hitting the roof to go back," according to Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

"You know how weapons inspectors are," said Annan. "When they're here, they want to be there. When they're there, they want to be here."

Trouble started approximately three weeks ago, when weapons inspectors team leader Hans Blix called Annan at midnight and asked how long they expected the search to last. Annan said he couldn't be sure, and Blix suggested that they should return home and discuss the length of the trip to Iraq. After Annan refused, Blix called back four hours later and stated the whole team had agreed they were 100% sure Iraq didn't have any weapons anymore, even though they had only searched a handful of places.

Weapons inspector psychologist Danni Jersey said the behavior was not unusual.

"Most people expect this sort of reaction during the first weapons search," said Dr. Jersey, "but the truth is that the first trip contains more exploration, the discovery of new places, hopefully without weapons, and new friends. Although it's somewhat frightening for weapons inspectors, it is still exciting and keeps them involved.

"By the time a second trip comes around, expectations are raised, to unreasonable expectations sometimes. It is impossible to experience the same level of enjoyment and mystery all over again, and there's naturally some disappointment from the second search. Finding some weapons might make it more exciting, but if not, it's a matter of reconciling expectations and reality. No wonder they want to come home."

In the rest of Friday's letter, weapons inspectors told the U.N. that they had looked everywhere and found no weapons, everyone in Iraq hated them, and they found living conditions were "for shit." As part of the agreement with the U.N., a "host family" allows one weapons inspector to stay with them in a room they have set up. There have been no formal complaints on either side, but there has been much speculation about tension between host families and inspectors.

"I have nothing against the U.N., or the agreement Iraq has made after the conflict," said Iraqi Army corporal and host family patriarch Amani El-Abib. "But our weapons inspector, Terry, is quite a disagreeable boy. He never lifts a finger to clean up, he complains about the food, and sometimes I wake up in the morning and find he is searching our kitchen for weapons-grade plutonium. It's just bad manners to do so without asking permission."

Terry Gröfberg, a Swedish weapons inspector staying with the El-Abibs, felt similar antagonism for his hosts.

"They're nice and all, but old man El-Abib is always flying off the handle. He says I'm corrupting his children with my techno music, that I'm acting like an infidel when I ask if there's any electricity in the house, and that I keep looking at his wife when her veil is off. Dude, his wife's nice, but not my type at all. Just chill, muslim dude. Not everybody wants your stuff."

Secretary-General Kofi Annan had expectations that a little tough love would help the weapons inspectors stay focused on their mission.

"It's not the time for coddling now," said Annan. "I know they want to come home, but it will be better for them in the long run if they stay. They will fulfill their obligation, possibly help prevent more death from military conflict, and it will build character."

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Try this on for size, commune followers: Inexplicably, I am sitting in a chair reading or, more likely, watching old stock footage of World War II to find proof Hitler escaped disguised as a Von Trapp, when I get up to do something. The next moment, I find myself in a room I did not intend to go into and have no idea how I got there or why I would have entered the room. What's up there?

No doubt you've figured out, as I immediately surmised, aliens are clearly using advanced teleportation devices to break down my molecular structure, turn me into a mass of unformed atoms, then reassemble me in exact working detail in another room of my house. That much is obvious. But why?

In all my years of studying the vast underlying conspiracies that affect us all on every level, I've never encountered one both so brazen and yet so curiously without motive.

My first thought was I'm likely being studied by said aliens, they beam me up to their ship, poke and prod me in every place, then return me, though they're always off by a few feet when they drop me off back in a different room. However, that falls through on several levels. For one, first and foremost, I show no other signs of alien abduction. There is no loss of time, and it would take quite a while to study this superb specimen, let me tell you. Plus, I have no feeling of being anally probed when I recover my senses, and after the commune's Christmas party a couple years ago I would certainly know if I'd been probed while unconscious. Also, speaking frankly, aliens would certainly not be so dumb as to return me without leaving me in the exact same spot, at least not anything but an extremely disappointing race of aliens.

No doubt about it, aliens are involved, but they are most certainly not taking me aboard their ship, at least not to study me. So what is their purpose if they're not adding to their vast knowledge of the human physique?

I asked Corey P. Myler, a physics professor, astronomer, conspiracy buff, and A-Team trivia master, a good friend who I sometimes catch in the laundry room of our building without explanation. Myler considered the facts I gave him and smoked three of my cigars while we were waiting for my whites to dry, then reminded me that recent crop circles outside Edinburgh appeared to resemble the giant footprints of an enormous alien who had pegs for feet instead of regular feet. This was of virtually no use in my query, though Myler said the evidence was too thin to speculate further.

On the other hand, I can speculate until the cows come home. I often do. I speculate day and night, sometimes without much to start me off. I've made a career, at least a column, entirely out of speculation, and I'm currently writing a sitcom about speculators. It's my favorite past-time, next to punching pigeons, so I figured it's up to me to speculate alone on this one.

My first explanation, and the easiest, is that I'm merely part of an alien psychological experiment. But that's boring! That's just off the top of my head. I have not yet begun to wildly speculate.

My next guess is that aliens are indeed taking me aboard their ship, forcing me to masturbate until ejaculation with nude pics of that top-heavy girl who used to play Punky Brewster before she grew up and out. They then take the "deposit" back to their world and use it to propagate their species since years of space travel have left the males flaccid and sterile. They then erase my memory and travel back in time to drop me off in my house where they found me, though because they are jealous I am able to provide healthy sperm when they are not, they exact revenge by putting me in another room. It confuses me, but I'll live on unchanged.

Or, and this may sound a little silly, but I am being observed with observing rays from the computers of the alien race, in an attempt to graph a precise robot duplicate of me to set up an alternate world of robot humanoids, or possibly even a robot world of Red Bagels that can form conspiracy theories to save the world. Perhaps just for worship on their homeworld. But the observing rays can only observe for very short moments before I am totally disintegrated. Using what they have learned, once I am disintegrated, they reconstruct me short seconds later. They cannot put me back in the same spot otherwise I would see the stain where my previous incarnation used to be standing.

Whew! That was damn fine speculating. I'm tired. I'm going to grab a Shasta.

Now… what was I talking about? Who wrote all this nonsense on my computer?

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That's right, you read the title. Health food is one of the three biggest scams foisted on this country since World War II. The other two were communism and World War II. Communism? Never existed. I mean, give me a break people. An entire nation of folks deciding to give up their personal stuff for the common good? What did they do next; sing a song and all fly up to heaven on wings sprouted out of their asses? I'll believe in communism when you point out to me the first guy standing on a street corner handing out ten-dollar bills who isn't a politician or a guy who believes in the wide-net method of finding a hooker. Not going to happen.

And World War II? Even less plausible. So the entire world went to war after some mousey little German who looked like Moe from the Three Stooges decided he wanted to run the show? Right. Sorry folks, I just don't see it. Maybe if they'd thrown in some charismatic Eurotrash bad guy or George Clooney, I might have put a bid in on that bridge. But not they way they paint the story. So let me get this straight, the Japanese bombed us? The JAPANESE? At least get your facts straight, guys, the Japanese don't use bombs. They use karate. You tell me a story about a bunch of ninjas swimming to Pearl Harbor and chop-sockying some ass, maybe then we can talk. As it is, I give your history a thumbs-down.

Now the latest thing is this health food noise. Since when is there unhealthy food? Food is food, get over it. I'm sure there are some unhealthy things you could possibly eat, but I'd hardly call them food. Rocks, uranium. Maybe light bulbs or little bits of metal, that probably doesn't go down so hot. But you show me a guy calling that stuff food and I'll show you a glory hound gunning for a spot in the Guinness Book. If you can eat it without shitting blood, I say it's fair game.

I mean, think about it. If God didn't want us to eat chickens, why did he make them run so slow? And cows? What in the world else are you supposed to do with a cow? They sure as hell can't catch a Frisbee. If we didn't eat cows, getting anywhere would be impossible, since there would always be a big, stupid cow standing in the way, refusing to move or acknowledge any understanding of basic English. Eating cows was a fact of life in the old days; sometimes you had to eat three cows just to get down the road to check your mail. Eating cows is our natural survival reflex.

And what about dogs? You don't eat dogs? Neither do I. Never mind.

But all this noise about fat being bad for you is the biggest crock of them all. Eskimos eat nothing but fat and they live to be hundreds of years old. Either that or they all look the same and I've been offending Eskimos for years by calling them all by the same three names. I'll look into that and get back to you, it may explain all these dead fish I've been getting in the mail lately. I thought my nephew had signed me up for that Fish-of-the-Month club again. Now I may need to take back what I said about his mother.

A funny related story: A few years ago, one of the food giants created an ingredient named Lofat to fool health-conscious yet lazy and gullible consumers. The ultimate irony was that Lofat was actually high in fat itself, since it was made from the sweat glands of a North Atlantic Fat Whale. But those health nuts never knew the difference: it tasted horrible, so they all figured it had to be good for them.

Not that I want people to stop eating health food. Keep it up, kids, that leaves more real food for people like me to have an evolutionary advantage. I'll see you in the mutated future, fruitcakes.

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