ortals fled in terror from the Gulf Coast, fearing the rising wrath of Hurricane Dennis. The dangerous storm had already inflicted severe damage on Cuba, then grew in strength to a category 4 storm, which is apparently a meaner storm than what it had been before. But the real threat may lie in a small garden in New Jersey, where corporeal being Mr. Wilson assured reporters the "menace" was after nothing else but his rose garden.

"He's back," stammered the fearful, doddering old fool. "He's back and he's come to finish off the job he started on my flower bed! And then I'm next!"

Old George Wilson, a Ketcham, New Jersey resident of 60+ years, claims the storm to be the reincarnation of a dead neighbor boy who has carried a talent for mischief into his reincarnated hurricane form. Wilson warned the local media, but when they failed to listen, brought his story to the commune, the world's most gullible news source.

"That Dennis has only one goal in mind," warned Wilson. "He wants to destroy my roses and drive me out of my mind!" When it was pointed out that those were actually two goals, old man Wilson pulled out a chunk of his own hair and screeched.

Indeed the hurricane has destroyed several gardens and virtually everything else it touched in Cuba, and has turned to engage the Gulf Coast of the United States. Though the New Jersey rose garden in question is several hundred miles out of the hurricane's current direction, Wilson assures all it is the hurricane's ultimate target.

Some of Wilson's story was easily verified, including the existence of a young boy named Dennis Mitchell who lived next door to Wilson in the 1950s. Though the boy mysteriously disappeared several years ago and his body was never found, Wilson claims the hurricane now bombarding the United States and terrorizing himself out of a feud the ghost carried into his new existence.

"That little monster says he just wants to play," groaned the old man, "then he makes noise and sets off fireworks and wreaks havoc on everything. He had to go, don't you understand? He had to! I just… I needed peace and quiet. That's all I wanted… a little peace and quiet!"

Though there didn't seem to be any doubt to the possibility of a young troublemaker being reincarnated as a category 4 hurricane, some further explanation seemed necessary: Why trash Cuba as he did? Why not simply come back as a tornado in New Jersey, or a gopher, or any number of creatures cable of destroying a garden quickly and efficiently?

"I'm not sure why he came back as a hurricane," admitted Wilson. "But I can guess why he attacked Cuba. That Mitchell boy always hated the Commies. He planned on growing up to fight them in World War III. He… he always made me be the Reds. He forced me to play soldiers with him," sobbed the old man.

Contacted for further comment, Wilson's wife contradicted the man's version of the story, painting a picture of an old fussbucket and a charming young man who just wanted to be friends.

"Oh, I thought he was a perfect little gentleman," said Mrs. Wilson. "The problem with my George is, he's just grumpy. He's half out of his mind sometimes, you know. And if that hurricane does destroy that rose garden of ours… oh, well. Tropical winds will be tropical winds."

fter weeks of suggesting that patients who had gone blind while using the company’s best-selling erectile dysfunction drug were pussies, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has assumed a new tack this week, as explained in the recent publication of the company’s informational packet entitled “Viagra Doesn’t Cause Blindness, Yanking Your Wank for Five Hours Causes Blindness.�

“Not only does Viagra work, sometimes it works all too well,� Pfizer spokesperson Dennis Baylor chuckled knowingly in explanation. “And sometimes it takes a little ‘self control’ to get that horse back in the corral, you know?�

Baylor continued to speak in baffling euphemisms for several minutes.

“Like if a business meeting’s about to start, or your wife’s pulling up in the driveway and you’ve still got your pants off and the Ken dolls and Candyland pieces strewn around the bedroom, well then it might be time to take matters into your own hands, if you know what I mean,� Baylor inferred, possibly speaking from personal experience.

“But too much of a good thing can be a bad thing,� Baylor continued. “And the old wives’ tales might be right about how being a little too friendly with your member might just lead to a little condition we like to call the blind man’s buff.�

Doctors like to call the condition non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), or in English, the sudden, permanent loss of vision due to swelling of the optic disc. Pfizer argues for a coincidental association, given that the NAION condition is most common in the sadly overweight and the diabetic, both prime markets for the company’s dick pills.

Pfizer’s Viagra has been for years the leader in the lucrative Erectile Dysfunction market, known as “ED� to everyone but guys named Ed. A serious health side-effect like blindness could torpedo the company’s profits, since being blind is nearly as much of an obstacle to scoring chicks as is not being able to get it up. Add the two together, and you’re in some serious deep shit.

Baylor was evasive when asked to clarify, in simple terms, what exactly the company was blaming for the incidents of blindness.

“What, are you daft?� Baylor balked. “Choking the chicken, slamming the ham, paying a visit to Peter O. Johnson, tree-hugging, the friendly fist!�

“Uh… spanking it, giving a slap-down to the little man, torquing your tuna, performing the holy handshake!� continued Baylor, growing frustrated and less nice by the minute. “You know, kid, dong massage!�

Unable to get a clear answer from Pfizer, this reporter turned to men’s men on the street for answers.

“Yeah, my mom always told me that would happen,� explained disco-ball installer Trent Yardbird. “Going blind because of, you know, taking your little buddy out for a skipper. Pulling the pud, slapping the salmon. The man’s crank handshake. You know what I’m talking about.�

This reporter’s further requests for clarification were all met with a withering “Man, you stupid.�

However, this reporter will not rest until he finds the truth, commune readers. At the suggestion of commune editor Red Bagel, I’ve scheduled an interview with my high school health teacher, Mr. Thorpe, as I continue my dig for the truth. Apparently Bagel believes he may have inside information relevant to this investigation.

If you see someone crying on the street today, you'll know why: The pencil is dead. After serving as the writing implement of choice for hundreds of years, the noble pencil is now relegated to the bottom of the drawer, falling behind more popular instruments such as the keyboard, the ball point pen, the fountain pen, the crayon and the bloody stump. Rest in peace, lead brother. You have served humanity sort of well.

But what happened to this once-proud utensil?

By most all accounts, the simple, elegant pencil fell victim over the years to the fact that it sucked completely. Messy, impermanent, and hard-to-read, the pencil was all the things you'd avoid in a search for the perfect writing tool.

Before the invention of the pencil, early man would often write with a carrot, which was mostly useless, but tasted good. Other good-tasting writing implements, from cucumbers to elk penises, would pass in and out of fashion over the years.

In more modernly times, people wrote using one of two implements: either a sharpened feather dipped in mouse blood, or a stray piece of chalk, coal or random feces. In 1321, Crowburton Finley of England developed a tube of owl shit that could be squeezed to form a writing implement, which was a lot like trying to write a letter with a tube of foul toothpaste. The resultant text smelled even more like dead mice than the popular mouse-blood ink of the day, and was highly popular for writing hate mail and resignation letters. Finley's company would eventually fold, however, when it was revealed that he was stooping to unethical means to obtain the owl shit.

The pencil itself evolved from the stylus, which was a thin metal rod the ancient Romans used to control their PDAs. Before the invention of the PDA, Romans used the stylus to "write" on papyrus, which was only really good for looking busy since metal rods don't tend to make any marks on paper. Eventually someone got busted over this and the Romans had to move on to lead styluses which actually wrote, and this quickly made the Romans slow and stupid because of the highly toxic nature of lead. This development necessitated the invention of the PDA, but unfortunately by then the Romans were too dull and lead-poisoned to get the software installed and they soon went back to living in caves and throwing rocks at fish and squirrels.

Lead's eventual replacement, graphite, was discovered in a big hole in the ground in England in 1564, and people immediately began building houses out of it. Soft and brittle, graphite proved to be an exceedingly poor home-building material, but the people who lived in graphite homes were quickly recognized as excellent writing utensils because of the dark graphite coating all over their bodies. Eventually, a businessman in Sweden named Marvin Johansson become fed up with the high cost of hiring "bodywriters" and decided to cut out the middleman, literally, by inventing the first "pencil" made by wrapping a piece of graphite in bologna. Unfortunately, his first several prototypes were eaten by his son Marcus, who later came down with a little-known coal mining ailment known as "black bung."

Other, smarter, inventors did Johansson one better by wrapping graphite in things like kite string and Kevlar, creating less perishable and more bulletproof early pencils. Pencils of any kind didn't really take off until 1839, however, the year that the eraser was invented. Previous to that, people used breadcrumbs to erase their pencil writing, which was only marginally effective but passed the all-important deliciousness test.

The pencil as we know it today was invented by some Japanese guy in 1860, then stolen in 1861 by a German inventor named Eberhard Faber. Faber compensated for his unfortunately convoluted name by inventing things with every breath he took on this earth. As a baby he invented the diaper stick, which instantly converted any used diaper into a proud, shit-laden flag. Then as a small child, Faber invented the chalk hammer, which pulverized chalk into small, edible chunks perfect for inappropriate snacking.

As a young man, Faber would craft his proudest invention: the mechanical pussy. This was an enormous hit until Eberhard indignantly ceased production in 1855 after learning that thanks to a language misunderstanding, Eberhard's customers were all screwing his beloved clockwork cats.

Faber named his pencil the #2; banking on the psychological fact that people believe the first version of anything can't be that good. Faber also wanted to advertise the fact that his pencils were made with high-quality Chinese graphite, the best in the world, so he painted all the pencils he sold yellow, assuring his buyers that they were made by the proud yellow people of China. Hence the modern pencil was born.

The pencil enjoyed a long heyday of popularity, and remains today the implement of choice for any writing that is almost certainly going to be erased, such as math equations, crossword puzzles, and letters to your boss demanding a raise. However, the enduring popularity of the pencil can be attributed less to its merits as a functional writing tool than to the difficulty in finding a suitable replacement that doesn't suck just as lustily.

Early attempts to replace the pencil included the much-hyped erasable ball point pen, which consisted of a regular ball point pen fitted with hard rubber nub on the cap for tearing through the paper to obliterate the words you had written with the pen. These flopped, however, because due to the tiny erasure windows torn into the paper, schoolteachers would often end up reading assignments with words from the paper underneath interspersed randomly throughout the text, leading to the rise of the Dadaist movement, which annoyed everyone universally.

Today, most adults use either ball point pens or finger-paints, depending on whether or not they've had any nearly-fatal traumatic head injuries. Modern children do all of their communicating through cell phone text messaging. This development has also led to the grisly death of proper punctuation, but dat mi frens isa colum 4 anothr dai.

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