hursday night’s presidential debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush had a strong ratings showing, and allowed the candidates to outline their future platforms, especially regarding foreign policy and Iraq. However, no candidate clearly fumbled the ball and shot himself in the foot with his big mouth, meaning the disappointing debate ended without a clear loser.

With a month left to go before the election, the debate provided one of the most visible opportunities for either of the two leading candidates to piss the election down his leg, whether through a verbal slip-up, a glaring faux pas, or farting directly into the microphone. Some election-watchers speculate the senior Bush performed just such a metaphorical gas outburst in 1992, when during a debate with future president Bill Clinton, he resignedly checked his watch to see if it was over. In Thursday’s debate, though he made some gas-appropriate faces, the second Bush, nor his opponent, did anything to completely obliterate their chances of election.

Most watchers generally felt the debate favored Kerry, who went on the offensive early and avoided appearing dead through much of it. The president, though being on the offensive, even managed to show a passing familiarity with the language long enough to fend off Kerry’s attacks and reiterated his platform that Iraq is safer today, unless you’re an Iraqi, since his administration got rid of Saddam Hussein. The word "beheading" somehow managed to stay out of the conversation.

While Kerry did not outline an escape plan for Iraq, he guaranteed he would bring in more European countries who hate Bush to help shoulder the responsibility for rebuilding the country and setting up its new puppet government. Not stated, but implied, was Kerry’s continuing the Democratic plan to not invade countries just for their resources. At least not overtly.

Recent polls exhibit Kerry’s apparent dominance in the debate. The numbers have again turned for the Democrat, showing he now holds a smidgen of a lead over the president among those polled, whoever the hell they are, showing 49% of them were more likely t vote for Kerry in a two-way race, versus 46% for Bush; in a three-way race with Ralph Nader, 47% favored Kerry, 45% favoring Bush, and whatever’s left over going for Nader or some weird-ass third-party candidate. In a three-way race with a well-dressed monkey, the president fared much worse, with 49% holding for Kerry, 40% preferring Bush, and 11% wanting to hear the monkey’s plans for improving the economy.

The same polls endorsed Kerry’s debate showing, as 61% feeling Kerry had won the debate, as opposed to a deluded 19% who believed the president had dominated. The remaining 20% thought C.S.I. really went to shit this week.

Still, the lack of a clear loser means, according to some, we’re still in the midst of one of the tightest presidential races in history, and time is running out for a candidate to win over the confidence of a large majority of the public.

"On one hand," said Professor Norm Chauncey of Newark University, some guy who watched the debate at the bus station with this reporter, "President Bush has failed to credibly justify his overextended military actions in the Middle East, as well as an economy that doesn’t seem to be improving. And on the other side of the table, you have John Kerry—a guy somehow failing to convince the entire nation he would not be a worse president than George W. Bush. We’re looking at a couple of real losers here."

The professor outlined his plan for America, if he were to become president, as we awaited the arrival of the 11:05 to Flatbush.

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OH MY GOD SNOW

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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I do not wish to set a precedent for presenting unfounded conspiracy theories to the American public. I have stringent guidelines for material I accept and in turn present to you, and if I have no evidence I deem concrete, say pictures, documents, or someone has mentioned it to me at a night club, I file it away upstairs (in the attic) until something solid presents itself. However, my fears cannot stay quieted. I have begun to theorize the Olsen Twins are space pilgrims.

The cuddly Olsen Twins from ABC's Full House and countless straight-to-video productions? The same, conspiracy buffs.

The wide-eyed, thin-smiled pre-pubescent clones may seem innocent enough, especially to the young or retarded. But the more innocent the doily the more insidious the teapot lurking underneath, or so my mad grandmother used to say.

It is my theory that the Olsen Twins in fact started out as one baby, born to an American woman impregnated with alien DNA during an abduction—this is not news, of course, the whole alien abduction/impregnated with alien DNA is so old school conspiracy theory it's fairly boring. The interesting aspect here, and I've been looking into this, is that the baby quickly acclimated superhuman intelligence and formed a scheme with its mother where she profits from its salary while the alien baby infiltrated American consciousness at its most cultish level—television. Of course, the trend is to hire twins to play one character on television, mostly for children but this also works well for any show starring Pamela Anderson. At that point the baby split itself into two separate beings, which explains why no one can tell them apart.

The story from there is an easy and predictable one. Aliens grow up, aliens work inhuman hours producing sub-par CDs, movies, and dolls. Aliens develop a loyal following of kids too young to comprehend the danger they pose.

I label this "phase one." It only gets worse from here.

I will gather evidence and shatter the blockade that holds the conspiracy in. I have nothing to go on right now but sheer gusto and a distrust of the creepy aliens, but I've had feelings like this before and trusted them, the most notable when I uncovered the downfall of laserdiscs.

What's next on the agenda of these twisted aliens, if unhindered? Colonization, that's what. Duh, that's always what aliens come to other planets for. In fact, I would say as soon as the hideous space pilgrims achieve a higher popularity they will initiate "phase two." The only thing that has delayed phase two thus far is poor production values and flimsy plotlines.

"Phase two" will find the alien organic matter splitting and multiplying once again, this time into millions if not thousands, or billions, and might take up to three months. But by the time we have realized the abuse of nature going on, we will be trapped in the claw of alien pilgrims.

Then begins "phase three," which is kind of iffy, I'm not really sure which way that could go. They'll surely suck our planet dry of resources, that's a given. Whether it's slave labor or food for us I'm not sure, I'm sort of hopeful for the food angle, at least you assume it'll be quicker. But there's no real way to tell until phase two starts rolling. It's even possible alien technology has a way of turning carbon-based lifeforms into fuel for their space craft, that would be awesome.

Which is to say, I hope it doesn't get that far. But we must be wary. This battle is far from over. It hasn't even yet begun. Most people don't even believe there's a battle. I'll have to look into it more.

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