he U.S. Government is maintaining its winning streak of leaking disturbing information to the public over decades, as this week two extreme dealbreakers came to public attention and the public once again answered with a resounding "enh."

First the American public was allowed to learn a memo circulating through the White House may have been an early alert to president Bush about the Sept. 11th disasters. A grumbling American public pretended to be surprised and outraged, lining themselves up for the seemingly superfluous revelation later in the week that populated U.S. Navy ships were the subjects of germ warfare testing in the 1960s.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer responded Friday with a firm, "Yeah. So?"

The covert operation, called SHAD (or Shipboard Hazard and Defense) among the hip Pentagon insiders, involved spraying toxic chemicals onto U.S. Navy ships to test the effects of germ warfare combat on troops in battle. Chemicals used included sarin, VX, and staphylococcal enterotoxin Type B, a viral strain guaranteed to "totally fuck up any soldier's weekend," according to one foul-mouthed Washington source.

Once again, the SHAD operation took place from 1964-1968, during the peak of the Vietnam war, not during the Gulf War of the early 1990s. Those chemical tests and their long-term damages are still classified information and aren't due to be released for at least another twenty years.

The revelation continues the U.S. government policy of allowing four or more White House administrations to pass before alarming truths about military and government experiments on people are told to the public. Particularly conducive to the release of alarming information is the mood of the country towards the current administration and how slow a news week it is. Information in danger of distracting the public from real issues, like Congressional sex scandals or anti-terrorist rhetoric, is often sat upon until a later release is available.

"We apologize to the American people, the soldiers, and the families that experienced any pain or damages due to the… well, you know where this is going," said Pentagon spokesman Gnute Harmschell, letting the press release fall against the carpet. "I will now take any pertinent questions about Chandra Leavy's remains, the Pakistan-India troubles, the War on Terror—trademark that—or the Catholic priests scandal. Hell, how about Star Wars or Spider-Man? Box office records are busting left and right, people."

On a sad, related note, The X-Files ended its 9-year run on Fox Sunday. During its time on the air the show entertained millions, made stars of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, started a film franchise guaranteed to make Fox money in the future, and softened America's reaction to the shadowy operations of its own government. Nerve gas testing and ignored terrorist intelligence information are welcome substitutes as long as there's no hard proof of extra-terrestrial bodies in Hangar 18.

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.

I have a question for my loyal readers, or even the disloyal ones, anyone who traipses over the column on their way to reading Entertainment Police or Pickle Barrel or maybe some guys stumble on the page by accident thinking commune is French for pussy or something, I don't know, the French probably have 50 words for it.

My question is: What's a cornhole?

Please don't laugh now, I've just never heard the term before. I grew up in California and we had no real experience with corn out there. I mean, we'd eat it, but it's not like in Iowa or nothing, we didn't go out and plant it and grow it and sit and watch it for hours and burn it for fun or nothing. We had television and yoga where I grew up, not ways to waste your time.

I tried asking my mom and she passed out on the phone, which might be unusual except for the fact she does it all the time. My dad just went into a spiel about how back in his days the homosexuals didn't rub it in your face. I'm not sure what that has to do with corn or why the homosexuals would rub corn in your face, or what exactly it is that they rub in my dad's face that gets him so riled up, but it wasn't worth talking to him for another hour to figure it out.

I asked everybody at the commune and they just break out laughing, like when I ask who's supposed to edit my columns. Nobody would tell me at all, though Ramon Nootles offered to show me. I don't even want to talk to him after the last time he offered to show me something. Stu Umbrage actually did offer an explanation, but he would only speak in palindromes, so after an hour of him uttering only four words, three of which weren't even palindromes, I gave up. No answer at the commune.

I've heard "cornhole" plenty of times, usually in movies or reading through Omar Bricks' hate mail, but I'm never sure what it's supposed to mean by the context I find it in. It didn't bother me until I picked up a script over the weekend for a part I'm auditioning for next week. The movie is titled Cornhole but I couldn't really grasp the meaning of the word from reading my six-line part. You might guess, I don't like to read entire scripts because I don't want my character to know about things going on that my character wasn't there for, and I also hate to read.

Would you believe "cornhole" isn't in the Webster's dictionary? That's the assumption I'm going on. If anyone finds it in there, let me know. It will definitely be a surprise.

I guess it could be a Spanish word or something, maybe some kind of dip. Sometimes really artsy movies are titled after foreign words because that makes them smarter. If you called a movie Fartknocker you're not getting the same kind of audience as if you called it Le Knocquer de Flatulénte. As far as field research on the term and everything, I've never seen holes in corn. I suppose if you rip a corntree out of the ground the hole left could be called a cornhole, but what's the point of calling somebody that or referring to that in a prison?

So anyway, I hate to take up a whole column with this question, but I've got to find out, it's driving me nuts. Hurry up and let me know, if you can. Nothing would be worse than showing up at an audition for a movie called Cornhole and not knowing what it means. They'd think I'm an asshole or something.

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