onday's People Magazine contained the usual fare of stories and photographs about celebrities, as well as an added attraction that fans of fashion look forward to annually—the list of People's Best and Worst Dressed of the year.

Hollywood favorites Julia Roberts and Halle Berry headed the Best Dressed List, along with up-and-coming stars like Kate Hudson, Kate Beckinsdale, and Reese Witherspoon. Also included was popular actress Nicole Kidman, Ally McBeal's Callista Flockhart, Will & Grace's Debra Messing, and Felicity's Keri Russell.

The upset this year was People's Worst Dressed List, unusually topped by star of yesteryear musician Ray Charles, and followed by Washuka, Wisconsin Wal-Mart associate Edna Applebaum.

Charles, labeled a "fashion disaster" by People Magazine editors, was accused of having no sense of color and wearing suits "from Liberace's garbage can." Among the harshest-critiqued outfits from Charles' closet was a gold lamé jacket worn on a Tonight Show appearance and a red velvet suit Charles wore to a charity event to benefit the homeless.

"You know you're in trouble when you show up to a benefit for the homeless and people are giving the money directly to you," said People editors. "The charity recipients must have been offering to donate their outfits to Ray."

Runner-up to Worst Dressed was Wisconsin housewife Edna Applebaum, breaking the long tradition of choosing listmakers from the celebrity pool.

"Sometimes you just can't let someone slide just because they're not famous at all," People Magazine editors explained. "And Mrs. Applebaum has gotten away with fashion crimes for way too long. With her greeting the shoppers at the Washuka Wal-Mart, you can bet there's one town where K-Mart's clothing sales are through the roof."

Nor are the editors excusing Mrs. Applebaum's age in their evaluation of her fashion.

"Even at 65 Mrs. Applebaum should know better than a pink chiffon babushka for church—God sees all, and it makes Him nauseous. And no matter what generation she lived through, flower-print spandex pants were never in fashion. The Depression must have been all the more depressing when Mrs. Applebaum showed up."

The surprise additions to this year's Worst-Dressed List are part of People's new "take no prisoners" policy toward fashion offenders, and they promise even more merciless criticism next year.

"Let the warning go out to everyone: We see the black socks and red jogging shorts of a certain unemployed 7-11 shopper in Fresno, California, and we'll be making our list and checking you twice. And a note to Stephen Hawking: If you really want to look smart, dump the cardigans and add a couple of Armanis to the closet."

wo hours after being promised a liver from a recently-deceased organ donor, terminal liver patient Marcy Quelode refused to accept the liver, declaring that it did not meet her standards.

"I don't think it's out of line to say this liver is unsatisfactory," Quelode told her doctors and EMTs who had brought the liver in an emergency helicopter from Illinois.

"See?" Quelode said, pointing out thin, veiny fissures in the organ as they presented it to her, per her request. "Not a top of the line model, to say the least. It's not bite marks or anything, but as far as I'm concerned it's not far from it. I'll pass."

Quelode's doctors assured the woman the surface scarring or blemishes were just cosmetic defects, but Quelode said if they didn't bother the doctors then they could have it, but she wanted a better one.

"I know you're trying to save my life, and I appreciate it and all," the ill patient told transplant surgeons, "but if I let you talk me into it right now, I'm just going to wake up and regret it tomorrow. I've been through this before—well, not this. I was never happy with my breast augmentation surgery, though."

Earlier this year Quelode was diagnosed with Primary Biliary Cirrhosis, some kind of liver disease. Without a liver transplant, it is highly probable the disease will continue to shut down her liver until she dies from liver failure. However, the immediacy of the situation, according to Quelode, is no reason to accept substandard donor organs.

"Despite the warnings of doctors and the rolling of eyes while saying, 'Oh-kay!' I believe that I can do better. All my life I have taken 'good enough' when I deserved much better. This liver is surely 'good enough'—the donation was a kind gesture by a man with a wonderful heart. Unfortunately, I need a liver and he apparently kept shoddy maintenance on that."

Her condition worsening, Quelode was put back on the waiting list for a new liver, with the hand-penciled footnote "Grade B or Better Only." Doctors, exasperated and annoyed, tossed the refused liver back in the medical cooler bowing and adding, "Certainly, your majesty. Watch us jump to it. Jesus."

Immediately the doctors and EMTs left the room and waited a couple of minutes just outside, then went back in, but Quelode recognized the cooler and told them she wanted a brand new liver, no more shenanigans. More frustrated, doctors exited again and had Quelode returned to the list.

"We gave the liver to some guy in Iowa," said transplant surgeon Yurgen Pose. "He was doing fine with it for hours, then some big-mouth on the operating team mentioned the lady rejecting it, now he's all on the phone with us everyday asking what's wrong with it. What a pain in the ass. Why did I become a doctor? I could have been a NASCAR driver. I guarantee you Jeff Gordon doesn't have to listen to shit like this all day."

As Quelode's serum bilirubin levels continue to rise, edging her closer to the end, she asks to be included in everyone's prayers and hopes that everyone will fill out their organ donor cards, especially non-drinkers who exercise but infrequently engaged in rough contact sports.

Johan Emmanuel Wiesel was an eccentric Hungarian immigrant who ran a pharmacy in New York in the 1830's. An amiable fellow with an impenetrable accent, Wiesel was fond of saying "Piss on Earth, and God wilt tard men!" which got him a lot of strange looks and the occasional thump on the head. When he wasn't busy "pepping up" the prescriptions he filled with copious amounts of cocaine, Wiesel occupied his spare time by inventing beverages. However, most of his inventions were completely impractical as beverages for actual humans, since they were all heinous in flavor and some ate through the bottle in less than a day's time.

But through some whim of serendipity, in 1845 one of his concoctions actually turned out to be fairly tasty, and only mildly corrosive. Wiesel was pissed, since he took this to mean that his arsenic had gone bad. But when he tested the drink on a young boy who he paid a quarter a year to do all the menial work in his pharmacy, he was surprised to find that the boy loved it. He burped until he threw up and suffered second-degree burns to his sinuses, but he loved it.

Wiesel decided to try selling his new beverage to customers in his pharmacy the very next day. He dusted off an old machine he had invented to dispense mustard into several pairs of shoes simultaneously, and in that moment the soda fountain was porn. Born.

The drink was a huge success, and before long his customers were demanding, sometimes at gunpoint, that Wiesel make his soda available to the wider market. Wiesel responded by buying a gigantic sack of empty beer bottles from a local orphanage, then filling them all with cole slaw. He was almost there. Realizing that this in no way addressed his soda-selling needs, Wiesel dumped out all of the cole slaw and filled the bottles with his sizzling new beverage instead. Despite the objections of absolutely everyone else involved, he insisted on naming his beverage Wiesel Piss, and it accordingly sold like sacks of dead leper babies.

Wiesel eventually went broke trying to sell Wiesel Piss, and died alone in the gutter after being stabbed in the ankle by a drunken orphan. His lone living relation sold the rights to the soda to a flim-flam man named Flannery McIntosh for one dollar. McIntosh renamed the drink Scrud and sold it as both a digestive aid and a carburetor cleaner. His memorable slogan, "Keeps your tummy firing on all cylinders," is still remembered to this day by people who are incredibly old and anal.

McIntosh built a modest empire around Scrud until 1892, when he was sued for being Irish and lost it all. The winners of that lawsuit, Daniel Freebanks and Benneton DuBois, renamed the drink Dope and sold it strictly as a new something called a "soft drink," a term of dubious legality that implied curative properties against erectile dysfunction. Their business grew hand over foot until 1910, when the US government cracked down on Dope since it contained cocaine, strychnine, absinthe, turpentine, a solution of fool's gold and high levels of cootineut, an imaginary ingredient that at the time was thought to quell dark humors in the pancreas.

Freebanks and DuBois went out of business faster than a pregnant hooker, and they were bought out by Farthington McIntosh, the grandson of Flannery. He promptly reformulated the drink in his bathtub, taking out the offending ingredients and replacing them with shitloads of sugar. But he was careful to also slyly rename the soda Coke, so that hipsters and conspiracy theorists would always think it still secretly contained cocaine, promoting sales.

McIntosh built Coke into an empire, branching out across the globe and fending off upstart sodas like Rammit, Jeez, and Wimpo. Though all of the sodas being produced were virtually the same in flavor, McIntosh retained his edge thanks to his uncanny knack for advertising. On top of plastering every vertical surface he could find with the Coke logo, McIntosh's true genius surfaced in his use of radio jingles touting the virtues of Coke. From early gems like…

Buy a Coke,
drink it up,
Buy another coke,
shut up, shut up.

to the legendary…

Buy a coke,
regret you won't,
you had a nickel,
and now you don't!

and finally the immortal…

Buy a Coke, it's nature's drink
Fizzy fizz that helps you think
You probably won't get cancer, too
Coca-Cola is the one for you!

…McIntosh's jingles were on the lips of every boob in the nation. Among other things, McIntosh is remembered for pioneering the practice of marketing frivolous items as if they were essential to the quality of life.

Unfortunately for McIntosh, all of the marketing genius in the world doesn't make you dagger-proof. He was later stabbed in the back by his own son, who sold the company for forty dollars and a magic talking mule.

The new owner of The Coca-Cola Company was Montgomery County shouting champion Eustace Turner, who ruled Coca-Cola with an iron fist for eight months before selling 40% of the company to L.P. Farnsworth, 40% to Jules Mather, 51% to Modest Cinderbrooke, and 117% to a very stupid man named Sty Covington. Turner then skipped town and laughed himself sick, which is more fun than it sounds.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, it's all history, if you want to get technical about it, but the rest of it is the kind of history you don't want to know about since it's is too long and boring to go into. Fear not, you got all the juicy bits. Nothing much else happens until the Cola Wars, and I'm saving that in case my book deal comes through.

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