he fat-walleted president George W. Bush embarked on a two-day road trip with his staff and advisors to promote a major revamp of the Social Security system, with stops in many western states to gather Republican and Democrat support for his latest plan: Solving the future Social Security problems with magic. With magic, Bush tells us, the problem of supporting a large non-working retired community with a small workforce paying taxes can be fixed, as a small amount of tax money is inexplicably transformed into "bunches."

The plan, first outlined in the State of the Union address, involves heavy investing in magic research, most specifically, figuring out how stage magicians can make a quarter become a dollar coin. Ideally, according to the president, the basic "science" of magic can be expanded until larger sums, such as billions of dollars, are doubled into money to preserve future Social Security benefits. The president's latest proposal replaces less feasible plans, such as just printing more money until we have all we need, or investing in "reliable" stocks and bonds.

"I'm not sure if magic really can be a viable solution to supporting Social Security benefits," said White House critic Rep. Hud Coker (D-Arkansas), "but at least he's not talking that 'privatization' bullshit anymore."

Bush took the lead in the Social Security argument by describing the system as being "in crisis" during his State of the Union speech, and then pushed the agenda further by loading into a van with his staff Friday for a support-building "road trip" to key states. On Friday, the president made stops at auditoriums and town halls, as well as "piss breaks" at gas stations and fast food restaurants, to speak on his hopes for magic as a resolution to the Social Security dilemma future generations will likely face.

"When the workforce is smaller than the community of retirees it supports, it's a big math problem," said the president, while eating from a small bag of Cheetos as he stood by the gas pump. "I'm not very good at math problems, but I know what it means when you need more money than you have. Then I remembered a birthday party I had a couple of years ago, where a magician made twenty-five cents into a dollar. That's what we need, I thought to myself. If this works—and let's face it, it's my best plan yet—it could solve more problems than just Social Security. Funding for perverted paintings and crap? Don't worry, we'll magicize it! And maybe you'll finally let us build missile defense systems and bombers without all the bellyachin'." Then an advisor reminded the president about his campaign promise to quit using the word "bellyachin'" to describe political opposition.

Many critics of the president, those knowledgeable in science and the laws of nature, bemoaned the difficulties of reproducing money through magic, but a few Democrats rallied behind the president's plan as a bipartisan solution to a hot-button old people issue. Ken "Amazing Kenny" Rublett, an unaccredited professor at Ithaca, New York's University of Magic & Illusion, spoke positively of the president's plan.

"I've been lobbying for the government to use magic and prestidigitation to solve national problems ever since Nixon's been president," said Professor Amazing Kenny. "Finally, someone is listening. I don't agree with the Iraq War and I've disagreed with the president's implementation of the Patriot Act, but magic can help us in ways not yet imagined. Have someone like Impresso the Clown put on a show at Guantanamo Bay, and ask for volunteers. When he does the Mystery Box, he can make any potential terrorists disappear—he doesn't have to bring them back. There. We've solved problem of due process without endangering the Constitution! Magic can solve anything!"

The cracker magician then made a ball of fire burst from his hands, at which point this reporter's aggressive instincts kicked in and unleashed a furious ass-whipping on the man.

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Never again will Rok Finger get drunk off his sorry short-stack ass and wake up smack-dab in the middle of Utah, I can tell you that much.

For those who need the long story, I'm sending this column via the Infanet or whatever that commune clerk called it because I have yet to make it back from the big weekend Lee and I started last Wednesday. I had been a little down lately, as you can imagine—what with the recent divorce, being kicked out of that all-black neighborhood, finding out I was being stalked by a pro-wrestler, Camembert failing to walk despite my attempts at faith healing, and the world not coming to an end and all as I predicted. But Lee, ever the trooper, suggested we go out and have a boys' night out, no Camembert, no women, no underpants, and just let the whim and station wagon take us wherever it dared.

I would say Utah is where it dared, wherever the hell Utah is. I'm not sure of the name of the town so I have been referring to it as Mormonville, laughing my ass off and making the guilt-ridden townspeople blush a very peculiar shade of red.

Most of the weekend is forever lost in the cobwebs of my already-hobbled memory. Lee made mention of a girl in a wheelchair showing him a good time, but I suggested we more than likely went home, dressed Camembert up and made inappropriate advances toward him. Which sounds like a lot of fun, I hope one of us or a nosey neighbor taped it for us to enjoy when we get back. Until then, we're stuck in Mormonville and trying to fix the station wagon, nicknamed by Lee the Shagwagon, for our triumphant return home.

I suppose Mormonville is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here. Truthfully I was just being kind to say it was a nice place to visit, it stinks like Satan's crotch to visit. There is nothing to do here—nothing! I've got three suggestions for you, Mormonville: Gambling; prostitution; radical unlicensed cosmetic surgery. Any one of these might liven up this place a little more, but until then I suggest you change the name to Dullsville.

Oh. It appears the town is actually named Dullsville. One of the local residents informed me of that fact as I was dictating this column to the telegraph lady. I somehow managed to stay awake long enough to hear him out. Goody.

Suffice to say, if you get the chance to come out to Dullsville, kindly turn it down and then sting with a salty barb the nimrod who suggested it—I find, "No, thank you, you limp ballsack," to be particularly biting, at least when it's been directed at me.

Dullsville is even more boring than it's name. The town is in such a sub-catatonic state that crashing through the wall of the church at 8:35 a.m. on a Sunday morning doesn't even bring the police out. One old lady even passed the collection plate to Lee, who was asleep on the airbag. I did contribute a dollar though, and after that we all enjoyed some handsome potato salad and baked beans at the church outing.

The people are the friendliest people in the world, and when you've spent six hours driving west with a carful of drag queens, that's saying something. Even so, I don't plan on staying a minute longer than necessary in this above-ground tomb. Maybe the old Rok Finger would have found it nice here, but I'm the newly-liberated bachelor Rok Finger, and I like living high and fast, in the high and fast lane. I think me and Lee might make it a five-day weekend every weekend from now on.

Of course, I'll have to wait for Lee to wake up first. I would try to wake him, but he looks so comfortable, despite the imbedded windshield glass in his forehead.

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The year was 1976, and communist cold war spies had infiltrated the U.S. government. Their mission? To convert America's God-fearing system of Imperial weights and measures to a devious red contraption known at the metric system. Did they succeed? What the fuck's the metric system? Think for a second and I believe you'll realize those two questions cancel each other out.

The metric system failed because the American people spoke in one voice, clear and proud, when they said "Wha? Hey, fuck the metric system!"

The system was developed in the late 1500's, after writer Simon Stevin skylarked that it would be trippy if you could divide everything by ten. Thomas Jefferson read Stevin's book while in college and the author's stoned musings inspired him to propose a decimal currency system for the U.S. in 1792, the first of its kind. France then converted to the metric system in 1795, which effectively ended the U.S. conversion to metric units. After the French started doing it, metric just didn't seem cool any more.

In 1812 Napoleon suspended use of the metric system in France, because he didn't like the thought of only being a meter and a half tall. It was reinstated in 1840 after Napoleon fell from power and his enemies loved the idea of him being remembered as that short.

Over the years the definition of the meter has changed several times. Jefferson thought it should be one ten millionth the length from the earth's equator to the North Pole, which made everybody nod and say that sounded like a good idea. Several years later they thought about it and realized they had absolutely no way of knowing how long that was, and that Jefferson must have been fucking with them. And sure enough he had already split town with his secretary and all of the money from their metric-conversion coffers.

France had been working from the assumption that Jefferson knew what he was talking about, so when they got word of his jape France had to redefine the meter. Somebody found a stick he liked while walking in the woods that afternoon and this became the new definition of the meter, which stood for over a hundred years. In 1960, the meter was redefined by scientists as "1 650 763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the krypton 86 atom," a gag definition proposed by one of Jefferson's descendants and taken as gospel truth by lazy scientists who didn't want to figure that crap out. Finally in 1980 the current definition was set, where you hold your arms about yea far apart and that's a meter. Except in Canada, where it's the length traveled by light in a vacuum during one 299,792,458th of a second. Canadian scientists are always hot-dogging like that.

Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 a year late in 1976, which stipulated that it would probably be a good idea to switch to the metric system some time. No target dates were set, and over the next seven years America made a half-assed effort at going metric, changing roadsides haphazardly and scaring schoolchildren into thinking they'd have to relearn all the stuff they'd just learned about footstools and midgets being called "pint-sized." This continued until 1982, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Fuck the Metric System bill into law, which disbanded the U.S. Metric Board and ran its members out of town on a rail.

In the twenty-one years since, the metric system has slowly crept up on Americans, seeping into our daily lives like the smell of your next-door neighbor's Jacuzzi, sneaking ludicrous numbers and little symbols onto cereal boxes and shampoo bottles in the dead of night. The American people have steadfastly refused its advances, wary of falling victim to the metric conspiracy the way every other country on the face of the earth has, excepting those strongholds of enlightenment, Liberia and Myanmar. Some mock Americans for our slavish dedication to a system of weights and measures few understand or can calculate, blinded by their own anal need to know things like how many feet are in a mile or cups in a gallon.

But if they want to go all metric and live someplace where it's only 32 degrees in the summer, let 'em freeze their metric asses off. 30 degrees in July? Fuck that, that's cold. You can have your Celsius scale.

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