n less than a week, 330,000 soccer fans from around the world will descend upon Japan for the biggest melee of apeshit social chaos since Cats: World Cup 2002. Japan is hoping the tournament will provide a boost for its belly-floating economy, and also hopes that soccer fans will leave enough of the country intact that it might be made livable again some time in the next 20 years.

Ever since Japan was selected along with South Korea to co-sponsor the games in 1996, Japanese and South Korean officials have been calling around, trying to figure out who nominated their countries and where they should mail the horse heads. Both China and North Korea are among the leading candidates.

The tournament will sprawl across Japan starting May 31st, destroying everything in sight and most likely leveling all 10 cities from northern Hokkaido to southern Kyushu, as well as virtually everything in neighboring South Korea.

"Oh yeah, there's no doubt about it. These crazy assholes are gonna soccer Japan and South Korea back into the stone age," noted Norio Kamijo, a senior researcher at Dentsu Institute for Human Studies.

Kamijo said the World Cup could generate some 3 trillion yen ($23.6 billion) for Japan — which should be more than enough to rebuild the Japanese cities that will need to be bulldozed into the Pacific and built up again from scratch after the tournament is over.

South Korea has offered to allow Japan to host the first several high-profile matches in the tournament, which some observers see as a sign of the warming of once-strained relations between the countries. Sources close to the events, however, suggest that South Korean officials merely hope that fans will be tired of smashing everything to shit by the time they get to South Korea.

"Hooligan experts" from Britain and Argentina have been invited to give tips and suggestions on how to spot and handle violent lawbreaking fans, inviting derisive giggles from the governments of previous World Cup host nations and forehead-smacking from British and Argentinean con-men who never thought of fobbing themselves off as "hooligan experts." British expert Sidney Bockle comments: "Jesus Christ in a sushi bar. Did you see what those animals did at the Gold Cup last year? They're gonna eat Japan alive. You don't need to hunt down an expert to guess what happens when you let loose 80,000 berserk Argentinean soccer fans in a country where all of the buildings are made out of paper. This is gonna make WWII look like Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws. They should hide the whole country under leaf clippings and hope the World Cup thinks it moved away."

In the city of Sapporo, where the much-anticipated match between Britain and Argentina is to be played at the Sapporo brewery to save on beer transportation costs, city officials have set up machine-gun turrets in strategic placements around the building. They also plan to have several dozen coked-up bulls ready to be set loose into the streets at a moment's notice, with hopes that confused Spanish fans will lead the rioting crowd in racing the bulls out of the city.

Japanese newspapers and TV feature a daily "Countdown to Armageddon," describing scenarios of possible hooligan attacks and featuring scary backlit profiles of black-listed uberhooligans thought to be hiding in Thailand. Police in Niigata city have even staged an exercise on a ferry boat to counter the hypothetical event of crazed fans tearing up the Pacific ocean and crippling the Japanese fishing industry.

The National Police Agency announced that for every major game, particularly the matches with the British national team, they plan to mobilize more than 7,000 riot police with the instructions to shoot at the first sign of a crowd. When asked if this approach might be considered overkill, NPA head Usaki Shinjo answered "No," speaking like a ventriloquist without moving a muscle in his controlled, icy stare.

ourth and eighth-graders tested nationwide really screwed the pooch on a recent history exam, while 12th-graders were about as dumb as expected, the Education Department announced Thursday. The Bush administration was not impressed, calling the results "a shocking wake-up call of historicalistical proportions." More than 29,000 students took the history test that's part of the National Assessment of Educational Ineptitude, known informally as "Operation: Dumbo Drop."

Among fourth-graders, 67 percent had at least a basic understanding of the concept of history itself, though few could name any specific events. 13 percent showed no sense of events happening in the past at all, beyond a vague concept of everything happening "yesterday." That was three percentage points higher than in 1994, the last time the test was given.

Some 29,600 students, 87 percent of them apparently high on drugs at the time, took the test in 2001. The randomly selected test-takers answered multiple-choice, short-answer and essay questions with only a slightly higher success rate than a control group of lab mice trying to play "Axel-F" on a small Casio keyboard during the exam. Students were alarmingly befuddled by questions like these for fourth-graders:

Pilgrims came to North American in the 1700's fleeing what in Europe?
(a) the bubonic plague.
(b) religious persecution.
(c) Napoleon's army.
(d) Godzilla.


Only 45 percent answered correctly with (b).

What was a major cause of the Civil War?
(a) East Coast rap calling out West Coast rap.
(b) People in the North and in the South disagreed over slavery.
(c) Montel Williams.
(d) The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.


Correct answer: (b); 57 percent answered correctly.

The answers to the multiple-choice questions, however, looked like the minutes from a meeting of MENSA when compared to the short-answer section of the test. Asked to write in their own answer to the question "Who led Germany during World War II?" 57 percent of the students wrote "Arnold Schwarzenegger." The second and third most-frequent responses were no less alarming: "Tupac!" and "banana."

Deanna Norvich, an education historian and NAEI board member, called the students' answers "fuckin' hilarious" and said the seniors' scores were "about what you'd expect from a bunch of Taco Bell trainees."

"Since the seniors are very close to voting age or already have reached it, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see more professional wrestlers elected to public office in the near future. I'd be frightened if I weren't looking at the bright side: No way in hell someone younger than me is going to come and take my job in the next millennia. These kids couldn't operate a salad shooter."

She added: "Clearly, our high schools are failing to teach U.S. history well to these paste-eating morons. And by the time they're seniors there's no way you're going to get them to stop fucking and doing blow long enough to learn about Benjamin Franklin. It's just not happening."

According to the National Assessment Governing Board, the independent group that develops the NAEI for the Education Department, only 17 percent of fourth-graders scored above the "vegetable" level. Of those, 11 percent scored at the "head injury" level and another 3 percent fell into the higher "slow country cousin" grouping. Alarmingly, only 2 percent scored in the "can handle plastic silverware" group, the highest level attained in the test this year.

To be sure, many questions were tough, especially those asked of older students. An example:

There were many significant factors that led American colonists to form the First Continental Congress in 1774. Among them were colonial frustrations with laws passed by the British Parliament. What is your name?

Thirty-nine percent got that one right.

The NAEI is given in different subjects periodically, though always to predictably pathetic results that make adults feel smart again after their bank account has been drained by a ten year-old hacker. The 2001 national history test was the first given since 1994, when it was designed to test the effects of crop dusting on the nation's youth.

NAEI scores in geography are scheduled to be released this summer, with Vermont crossing its fingers that the state will be recognized for the first time ever on an NAEI exam.

I have to admit, when you fell off the top of that double-decker bus the other day, I couldn't help but laugh. Laugh and point. Then I laughed so hard I had to sit down. As a matter of fact, I haven't laughed that hard since mom shot dad in the head with that crossbow when we were kids.

Remember that? I'll never forget the look on dad's face, before he slouched forward, face-first, into his soup at the dinner table. Remember how the ass-end of the crossbow bolt that was sticking out of dad's head stabbed into a dinner roll, and then that roll was stuck to dad's head when his body flopped out of the chair and onto the floor? Holy shit! I peed myself, I really did. I'll never forget that. Dad was such a card.

And mom! Remember the look on the judge's face when mom gave him the finger during the trial? I've been held in contempt of court a couple of times, but that's the only time I've been arrested for laughing too loud. My stomach hurt for two days after that.

It reminds me of the first time I took you to a dance club, back when we were teenagers. You had your eye on that cute girl over at the bar and I talked you into going over to talk to her, remember that? I remember it like it was yesterday. You were so eager to meet her that you didn't watch where you were walking and somehow managed to step into the back of some girl's sandal who was walking in front of you. God knows you went down fast after that, but the best part was when you opened your mouth to scream on the way down and accidentally bit the girl you wanted to talk to on the arm. I couldn't believe my eyes! I was laughing so hard I cried. Boy, did you cock that up! I didn't even think it was possible to make a first impression like that. I swear I would have come to help you sooner but I fell down laughing while her boyfriend was kicking you in the head.

We've had some good times, you and me. We've shared a lot of laughs. Others haven't always understood our sense of humor, like the time when auntie Sue farted while she was choking on that marshmallow. I thought uncle Bill was going to smother you with a pillow when you started to hyperventilate from laughing so hard. But I understood. I would have been laughing harder myself except it was the last marshmallow and that meant no s'mores for me.

It figures that we'd get placed with a foster family that had no sense of humor at all. Life was totally wasted on those people. But hey, if they couldn't see the humor in the family dog being eaten by a lion at the zoo, then fuck 'em. Their loss. I swear, with all of their carrying on about who threw the dog over the fence I almost missed it when the lion coughed up his collar. Priceless.

I'll miss you buddy. You always knew how to make me laugh. Just like dad. I'll remember that every time I see some joker get run over by a bus, or think of those tire tracks we had carved into your headstone. Whenever I hear your laugh echoing down from heaven, I'll know somebody dropped a harp on their foot. And I'll be pissed that I missed it.

º Last Column: You and Me are Turkeys
º more columns