oodbye, 2004. Thanks so much for biting the dong and hanging around for at least eleven months too long, until it finally took a forty-story tall wall of hauling ass saltwater to wash your taste out of our mouths. Thanks for finally dragging your skanky, broken ass off our calendar at last, and don’t think we won’t be calling the Goodwill in the morning to come pick up what’s left of your shit. The new year is here, and it doesn’t stink quite so strongly of Jovan Musk.

2004 dazzled us like strange, incomprehensible kabuki theater, in which a talking gonad was somehow re-elected president and the biggest group of losers this side of Color Me Badd accidentally won the World Series. Martha Stewart went to jail and Kobe Bryant didn’t, teaching America’s children a valuable lesson about the horrors of overly tasteful home décor. The country had to grow up fast with the revelation that Janet Jackson has breasts, while her brother Michael strangely has no interest in the same. Americans everywhere were up in arms about an unjustified war in Iraq… no wait, sorry. Americans everywhere were up in arms about a fertilizer salesman who snuffed his wife, vigilantly demanding to see justice done before more Modesto singles could be put in harm’s way.

Meanwhile, on the bright side of political news, Ronald Reagan and Yasser Arafat both died in “unrelated� incidents, leaving more Ben Gay for the rest of us.

There were also the usual run of celebrity mercy killings, though 2004 couldn’t even get those right, as nobody was especially eager to see Ray Charles, Marlon Brando, Rodney Dangerfield or Christopher Reeve go. Though the thought of the four of them all on the same bus to the afterlife offers many amusing possibilities, which isn’t a half-bad idea for a sitcom or at least a winning bar joke. Note to self: write down this million-dollar idea!

2004 was the year gays started getting married, Britney Spears couldn’t stay married, and somebody accidentally married J-Lo. Though thanks to a timely UN intervention, Ben Affleck remained single at year’s end.

But mostly, 2004 felt like a dead hooker rolled up in a carpet, which shrinks mercifully in the rearview mirror by the minute as we peel out bravely into the future. Both of the top grossing films of the year were sequels, which seems like a golden treat when you realize the third-place film was about Jesus getting the holy shit beaten out of him. And the top-selling album of the year was by some kind of disgruntled movie theater employee, likely having had to sit through one too many screenings of The Passion of the Christ or, even worse, Catwoman.

However, movies couldn’t sate our thirst for horribleness in 2004, so the real world had to oblige us with the Madrid train attacks, ethnic cleansing in Sudan, and the tragic first-ever meeting of the Russian PTA. By the time the south Asian tsunami rinsed what was left of 2004 down the crapper, few were sad to see it go. Unless they were wealthy, horny Republican NBA stars with points on The Passion.

We’ll miss you, 2004. Like we miss polyester underwear. Don’t let history hit you in the ass on your way out.

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OH MY GOD SNOW

Once again, sir, I am confounded by a mystery by which I've already been confounded. For I have returned to the place of my last great defeat—Brunsley, Idaho, well known to all its inhabitants and supernatural buffs as the Bermuda Shorts Triangle.

Before you foul-mouthed skeptics can say, "Fuck this bullshit" and return to searching for more Internet info about that movie with the Dakota Fanning rape scene, I urge you to think about this: What would you do if there were a 12-block radius in a moderate-sized town where your finest undergarments mysteriously disappeared? That's right, such a place really exists, and it's in Brunsley, Idaho. Seldom can a man, or especially an attractive woman, walk from the Bed, Bath and Beyond to the Citgo gas station with their underpants untouched. Even the most conservative among you will find you go from securely hammocked to freeballing in record time, with no answer as to where your Fruit of the Looms have gone.

I first stumbled across this mystery in 1998, just before I founded the commune. In fact, all of my first columns were about this puzzler, though I decided to withhold my claims before I had any solid proof because I wanted to write a kick-ass bestseller about the phenomenon, and didn't want any competition drawn to my big moneyhole by an ill-timed commune column. If only I had known how few people read the commune, despites its being available for free on the Internet, I would have thrown caution to the wind, as well as my columns, and published them as a warning to all underwear-lovers who might wander into the area.

I discovered it quite by accident, when I attended Brunsley's annual Halloween Dunk-the-Witch contest. I'll save all the anticipation by saying it turned out to be a woman in a costume; but while my search for proof of horrible Wiccans ended up a dead-end, when I went to buy a drink at a local café they call Starbucks here, I found my BVD's didn't make it across the street with me. I went searching for pocket change for my $3.50 cup of coffee and found the fabric between my digits and my goodies a lot thinner than expected—only pocket stood between my finger and my boys.

I knew I hadn't taken them off, so of course, I looked to the simplest answer—an underpants pickpocket. But the locals told me of the Bermuda Shorts Triangle, a 12-block perfect circle in which all manner of undergarments mysteriously disappear. Or as my colleague Dennis at the Wendy's in that area summarized, "Yeah, people end up losing their skivvies all the time around here." Of course, the name is something of a misnomer, since it's not a triangle-shaped area, and if you're wearing Bermuda Shorts they actually make it through the area without being stolen—underwear only appear fair game. But you have to admit, it's damn catchier than "The Circle of Panty Theft."

The first time I passed that way, I was close to launching the commune, and had to return to attend to that business after losing over $400 in underwear in my attempt to solve the riddle. But now the commune is successful, by my own narrow definitions, and I can at last return to figuring out where these shorts are going, maybe even why. Thanks to my painstaking statistics as of last time, I can tell you panties are taken more frequently than male briefs, and boxers are taken least frequently while thongs seem to disappear more than anything else. Expensive underwear and cheap underwear tend to be taken indiscriminately. I only really tested this underthing-theft on myself, but my survey of victims revealed women were targeted more frequently than men, even men wearing thongs, but it seemed to happen across gender and age lines. You've got to admit, outside of discovering where these undershorts are disappearing to, why they are being taken, and how to prevent it, I've practically got this case fully answered.

Like many people that work here, I'm starting to wish I had never founded the commune. Sure, disseminating the truth to the masses is an important job, maybe the most important of them all next to the man who maintains erections on pornographic movie sets. But still, it keeps me up at nights knowing the great mysteries—like who's stealing the underwear in Brunsley, Idaho by the Bennigan's—are going unsolved because I chose this different path.

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Editor's Note: For the first time ever, we received no column from Rok Finger this week. We thought we'd instead run this news piece that came over the wire, hoping perhaps his missed deadline might be more explainable.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — A boatload of approximately 200 Haitian refugees were intercepted off the Florida Keys in a boat registered to an American, Kevin McCale, of Richmond, Virginia. McCale and associates have been missing for more than a week following an incident witnessed just off Haitian shores.

According to relatives of McCale, he and his crew of five friends were believed held hostage for more than a month at the hands of a diminutive old man with delusions he was a pirate. The man had been observed by witnesses in Singapore wearing a Napoleon hat and bearing a dead starling on his shoulder. His face was described as "horrible" by those who saw him.

The boat fell into the hands of Haitian refugees, witnesses tell, when half a mile off the coast of Port-Au-Prince, under the guidance of the mischievous dwarf figure, the boat approached a makeshift raft carrying the refugees, possibly in an attempt to rob the natives. Events turned as the raft inhabitants took to the water and leapt aboard the cruise boat, piling onto it in numbers enough to nearly capsize it, and wrested control from its crew. The Americans aboard the boat were thrown into the water, including a dog wearing an eyepatch who was addressed using a profane name.

The Americans swam for Port-Au-Prince, where upon reaching the shores they were abducted at gunpoint by a mob expressing anti-Aristide dissent and anti-U.S. sentiment. Witnesses, including international reporters, describe the events following as the prisoners were bound, lifted into the air, and carried through the city by the angry mob shouting "Down with tyrants!"

Following the incident, a bizarre, jarbled message from an anti-Aristide group described by other dissidents as not affiliated with official Aristide opposition was received by the U.S. embassy:

"We have your king and several of his henchmen. We also have their dog. The free people of Haiti demand an end to American meddling in the politics of our nation. The United States must end its corrupt fleecing of the Haitian people and allow fair trade so our countrymen will at last be free. Long live Haitian independence!"

U.S. representatives say they believe the off-shoot group is holding the small contingent of Americans hostage in exchange for political demands, and they are attempting to negotiate their release through non-violent means. References to a "foul, odorous midget" in the original message are believed to indicate the mysterious small man previously seen in control of McCale's vessel.

Administration officials are also seeking information about an alleged boatwreck survivor found yesterday off the coast of Florida, believing he may be involved in the incident in some way. The man, identified as Camembert Morgen of New Jersey, was picked up by the Coast Guard clinging to his wheelchair to stay afloat. Inexplicably, he was also dressed as an 18th century British woman.

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