ine Florida teens were trapped in a St. Petersburg dollar theater Sunday after local hooligans wedged numerous pennies between the theater doors and doorframe, theater officials said. Pounding noises and loud complaining from inside the theater indicated at least some were alive as theater employees wandered around and stared at the ceiling in a vague attempt to rescue them.

The pounding and cries of “What the fuck, man?� created “a glimmer of hope� that the teens, who had paid $1.75 each to see the disappointing 2000 Samuel L. Jackson vehicle Shaft Sunday afternoon, were safe, said Betsy Mulroony, a spokeswoman for Gulf Coast Cinema.

“It is a race against time because the movie is still playing in there,� she said. “The last thing we want is for these kids to have to sit through the film’s gratuitously violent, unsatisfying finale. We’re doing everything we can to get those doors open.�

Theater employee Jared Wenham first realized that something was not right when he walked by the theater doors at around 3:30 p.m. and heard a loud pounding noise. Jared attempted unsuccessfully to open the doors, then brought the problem to the attention of his supervisor, Dickie Nelson. Nelson recalled hearing the pounding upon passing the theater doors minutes earlier, but had assumed the noises were part of the film’s THX soundtrack. “Like I’ve seen fucking Shaft,� Nelson explained, obviously annoyed by the implication.

Nelson pounded a tentative “shave and a haircut� on the theater door, and when the answering knock came back “two bits,� his worst fears were confirmed. Nelson went outside for a smoke break, then came back inside fifteen minutes later to begin coordinating the rescue efforts.

The theater’s three employees proceeded to work in shifts to free the teens, alternately tugging at the door handles and putting their weight into trying to push the doors open, as no one could recall whether the doors swung in or out. While one employee worked on the doors, the other two stood nearby to shout encouragement and tactical advice such as “lefty loosey, righty tighty,� that was of little practical value.

After twenty minutes of concentrated rescue efforts, the theater employees were taking a hard-earned Icee break when approached by local teen Brandon McFie, who told a harrowing tale made even more chilling by the theater’s overzealous air conditioning system and the freshly squeezed Icees. McFie explained that he had been one of the nine teens trapped inside the theater, but he had managed to escape after noticing the lighted exit signs to the left and the right of the screen, which indicated doors leading to the theater’s parking lot.

Theater employees raced against time to relay this new information through the jammed doors to the teens still trapped inside, but their task was made nearly impossible by the film’s pounding soundtrack and frequent gun battles. Morse Code was suggested as an ideal solution, but was then scrapped when minutes later it was discovered that “S.O.S.� was the only message the on-hand personnel knew how to signal, and this wasn’t especially useful given the situation. Workers resorted to old-fashioned yelling and eventually succeeded in conveying the news.

The eight remaining teens emerged from the dark theater to the scattered ironic applause of theater employees and derisive comments from a topless man wearing jogging shorts in the parking lot.

“I thought we’d never get out of there, yo,� said 16 year-old Ricky Niebolt of their 80-minute ordeal. “I had to piss like a racecar.�

“Man, I wasn’t even here to see a movie,� insisted acne-scarred Chad Runion of Brooksville. “Especially not this Shaft bullshit. I was on my way over to knock up some little 15 year-old slut or some shit, you know? Gettin’ my thang on, ba-bang. I just came up in here cuz I thought it was a condom store. Yeah. Not like I use the things though.�

Though the teens all escaped the theater unharmed, authorities are looking at suspects in the theater door penny-jamming, and are investigating Gulf Coast Cinemas for taking advantage of the poorly informed and suicidally bored by charging admission to see two year-old movies that are readily available on cable and as gas station rentals.

Observers site the incident as the worst movie theater mishap since dozens of people were extremely bored during a screening of Gremlins 2: The New Batch in New York in 1990, when theater employees thoughtlessly left several large trash bins in front of the exit doors.

Magna Doodle drawing determined to have been done by Michelangelo himself may be worth between $12 million and a kajillion dollars, according to students at Art Lowenstein's School of Art Appraisal in Hoboken, NJ. The doodle was unearthed among assorted art-related toys from the Renaissance period in what used to be a child's rumpus room, according to officials at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. The unsigned doodle is of a half-man, half-bear — some call it a Manimal — standing on a three-dimensional see-through box, beneath a sky filled with different-sized eyes and concentric triangles, according to officials. The Manimal has a river of snakes flowing somehow magically out of his armpit, and the single word "Gwyneth" is scrawled mysteriously near the border between several squiggles. Experts place the time of the doodling in the mid-1500s, making it one of the oldest Magna Doodlings on record.

The Magna Doodle was plucked from a chest of toys in the museum's coatroom, formerly a child's rumpus room when the museum was home to a family of Austrian squatters in the late 1800's. Such a discovery is considered to be "a fucking mind-blower," Cooper-Hewitt Director Paul Thompson said in a telephone interview. "I didn't even know they made those things back then."

The Magna Doodle was found in a chest of toys that also included a Magnetic Wonder Whiskers toy that may have belonged to Michelangelo, and an unidentified drawing toy that involved using a solid plastic pencil to draw on a sheet of static cling film that was erased when you peeled the sheet away from the backing, Thompson said.

The museum, part of the Washington-based Smithsonian Institution, purchased the Magna Doodle within a group of five magnetic art toys in 1842, for $1. The purchase was ridiculed by some at the time, but honored as it fulfilled the wishes of then-Director Hyram McWinter, who often said "If it's artsy, I want it." By often we mean like every five minutes, it drove people crazy.

Museum scholars guessed the work might have been done by a 16th century magnetic artist Benny del Bacon, who often fobbed off his doodles on the art community of that day as "pre-surrealist deconstructionalism." Somehow it got into the wrong box and was almost sold at a museum garage sale, only to be saved by a demanding child who lived in the Cooper-Hewitt at the time.

"It's the old cliche: Renaissance master doodles a masterpiece on a child's magnetic toy, museum buys it on accident and almost sells it for nothing before snotty little Austrian kid steals it off the nickel table and hides it in his toy chest for 100 years," Thompson said.

It was first identified as a Michelangelo in April by Sir Clifford Buford, director of the National Galleries of Scotland or something, during an unauthorized surprise inspection of the Cooper-Hewitt. Buford, an Italian Renaissance scholar and air hockey freak, was rummaging around the coatroom of the design museum looking for a nice umbrella when he came across a toy chest simply labeled "Piss Off." One particular toy inside the chest caught his eye. 'My Crap, this is a Michelangelo!"' he exclaimed, not anticipating being quoted later.

While the experts agree on the artist, there is no agreement on how the doodle fits into the larger body of Michelangelo's work.

The Manimal's genitalia is only inferred, but the doodle clearly shows where they should go, said Sarah Lawrence, the museum's expert on the Italian Renaissance magnet-based arts. However, a cat doodled in the background features an alarmingly oversized penis, raising questions about Michelangelo's state of mind at the time of the doodling.

"You recognize a Michelangelo as you recognize a friend," Buford said by courier fox from Florence. "If you're familiar with a friend, and you're walking down the street, you wave to them. They may wave back, or they may duck into a shop to avoid being seen with you on the street. I rather think Michelangelo's doodle waved back. Either that, or these things here are ass cheeks; probably this Gwyneth person's. Though I'd always heard he was gay."

The Magna Doodle will go on display at the Cooper-Hewitt museum in about a year, next to a wild scratch-paper doodle Picasso did while on the phone with his mother, Thompson said.

Hello readers, we're going to take a little break from the Fad Wagon this week while I write more of that book to excerpt and you learn a thing or two about daylight-saving time. Sound fun? Tough.

Many common misconceptions survive regarding daylight-saving time, including the belief that we do it for a reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. And don't call it "Daylight-Savings Time," that just proves you're a part of the International Communist Conspiracy.

The idea was originally suggested by Benjamin Franklin, compulsive liar and great American. Franklin was always late to everything, and frequently explained away his lack of punctuality by bragging that he lived in a special personal time zone that everybody else was too stupid to understand. When questioned, he'd rattle off a bunch of bullshit figures about how he saved energy by living his life an hour later than everybody else, allowing him to sleep in, stay up later and avoid traffic by traveling while everybody else had already arrived at wherever they were going. Only his girlfriend believed this, and everyone else came to refer to any ridiculously late events as occurring in "Franklin Time." Whenever anybody needed him there for a meeting they'd tell him it started two hours before it actually did, and then laugh when they got there and he'd been sitting and waiting for an hour.

Franklin's various shenanigans and rocky relationship with the truth earned him the nickname "B.S. Franklin," which he told naïve girls was short for "Balls Franklin." He came to fame after publishing an almanac of bullshit weather predictions and claiming to have "discovered" electricity after being blown off his toilet by a bolt of lightning. For years neighbors had warned that the gigantic kite Franklin had attached to his house, in hopes of sailing to a better neighborhood, would get him blown off the toilet in the middle of the night by a gigantic bolt of lighting, but he'd done little to heed their warnings. A smug Franklin discovered fire later that week when his neighbors burnt his house to the ground, taking offense at the "Father of Electricity" banner he'd begun carrying around town.

In 1776 Franklin was late for a meeting of the Second Continental Congress, and just missed the vote to kick Benjamin Franklin out of the Second Continental Congress. Upset that he missed his opportunity to cast the lone dissenting vote, Franklin demanded that the colony of Pennsylvania adopt "Daylight-Saving Time," a new system of his extremely recent invention that would have made him, in fact, early for the meeting. Thomas Jefferson signed the motion into law as a joke to humor Franklin, signing the form "Upyour Penis," but in a tremendous gaffe the clerk failed to examine the signature and "Daylight-Saving Time" was passed as Pennsylvania colonial law.

Relations between the various colonies were highly bitchy at this point in history, and I mean like drag queens at an Easter buffet. The new time change law really chapped the asses of the neighboring colonies, and before long, each one had passed their own new laws, not about to give smug Pennsylvania the satisfaction of always being early to everything and looking down its nose at all the other colonies as slacking layabouts.

After the Revolutionary War this really got out of hand, with states changing their time zones on an almost weekly basis in an attempt to one-up neighboring states and psych out tourists. At one point when you traveled from Massachusetts to Connecticut, you actually went back in time two days and had to be careful not to step on any butterflies or do anything that might mess things up for your future self back in Massachusetts. Eventually the federal government stepped in and announced that everybody had to get with the same program and stop all the silly horseshit, and from then on there'd only be two wacky nonsensical time changes per calendar year.

States were grumpy about losing their individuality, for sure, but most complied. I say most because Arizona and Hawaii never actually adopted daylight-saving time after becoming states, they only pretended to whenever the feds were around. To this day whenever some government official steps into a bank in Arizona you'll see employees scrambling to set the clocks back and act like they've been saving daylight all along.

The other exception is the state of Indiana, which never got its shit together and still has different time zones for every neighborhood, but after over 200 years of trying the government has given up on that state as a lost cause. Federal employees often refer to any broken or inexplicably errant clocks as being set to "Indiana Time," a joke that's very popular among the employees who aren't from Indiana.

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