hat police officials are calling a "cruel hoax" perpetuated by a "big fat bitch" from "some Podunk town out in BFE" came to an end last Thursday with the arrest of Donna Lynette Walker, a 35-year-old Kansas woman. Walker had contacted the parents of missing Indiana girl Shannon Sherrill only days before, claiming to be the missing girl and renewing hope for the family after 17 years of grief.

Six-year-old Shannon disappeared in October of 1986 while playing hide-and-seek outside the family home in Indianapolis. Authorities had all but given up hope over the years, as leads failed to materialize and it became less and less likely that Shannon simply took hide-and-seek very seriously. Walker's call last week seemed to the family to be a miracle, but quickly turned out to be the shitty kind of miracle that people usually aren't referring to when they speak of miracles.

With the arrest came disturbing-yet-hilarious details about Walker's past. According to several poor bastards who identified themselves as her friends, Walker has frequently made crank phone calls in disguised cartoon voices ever since childhood, and as an adult her talent for being incredibly and flamboyantly full of shit has led to police records in California, Kansas, Virginia and Nebraska for making bizarre threatening calls, forging checks, reporting false fire alarms, placing bomb threats and using stolen credit cards to pay her telephone bill. Few involved can take even these charges seriously, however, since Walker often disguises her telephone voice in a spot-on stuttering impersonation of Porky Pig.

Friends of Donna Walker are at a loss to explain her motivation in contacting Shannon Sherrill's parents, or how they could possibly be this hard up for friends. All agree, however, that the Sherrills probably should have taken Walker's claims of "What's up Doc? I'm your kidnapped daughter!" with a grain of salt.

"I'm not surprised," said friend Kelli Wauch, who wasn't surprised. "I met Donna through a group where you go for support or if you're happy you go there and Donna is somebody who thrives off of other people's pain so it didn't surprise me that she did these things because she told me about a girl missing in Indiana and it being her parents and saying something along the lines about that and I just kind of blew it off because it didn't make any sense," rambled Wauch, prompting this reporter to slap her across the mouth in hopes of coercing a coherent quote.

That rambling narrative, coupled with the fact that Wauch has had to change her telephone number twice during the month she has known Walker to stop the tirade of threatening phone calls made in cartoon voices, begs the question of why Wauch still identifies herself as Walker's friend. Rather than sift through another verbal train wreck of a response, however, this reporter is satisfied to chalk it up as some kind of weird Kansas thing we're not meant to understand.

In Indiana, Walker faces a felony charge of identity deception and a misdemeanor charge of false reporting, as well as a life-long series of disappointed looks from the entire human race. In addition to contacting the missing girl's parents, she also repeatedly contacted the police regarding this case, posing alternately as two different women, the missing girl's husband, and a diminutive hunter with a speech impediment.

Attorney Billy Rork insisted that Donna Walker did not feel she'd done anything wrong, despite the fact that she is twelve years older than Shannon Sherrill would be today in addition to the minor details that Walker was never kidnapped and is in no way related to the Sherrills. Rork also communicated that Walker didn't feel like going to prison or being held in any way accountable for her actions. Additionally, she didn't feel like Italian or Thai food, though those details seemed less important in the big picture.

orrowing a page from every cautionary future tale ever written and 60% of all science fiction films to date, the Frito-Lay Corporation today unveiled Trakos, a new line of Doritos brand “human tracking chips� designed to thwart kidnappings and various other ugly crimes in four delicious varieties.

The new chips, offered in Ranch Attack, Hellapeño, Nacho Bacon, and Four Course Meal flavors, use cutting edge technology to embed edible microchips into the snack food. These microchips can then be tracked by satellite and hand-held scanning devices worldwide, providing a huge aid in missing-persons cases involving recent snack chip consumption. The high-tech snacks are being offered in response to recent public demands for improved homeland security and a snack food that tastes like nacho-flavored bacon.

“The public has been resistant to this tracking technology for years, but now we’ve made it delicious,� explained Doritos head Ken Abenly.

“People may balk at the idea of being implanted with a tracking device, but we think the time has come to put those outmoded fears to rest,� said Abenly. “The threat of an embarrassing public death at the hands of some crazed terrorist or your cheating husband is just too great these days. Criminals may still resist the concept of being tracked through microchips floating around in their bile, but we’re confident we’ve made these chips delicious enough to overcome any objections.�

Chip-hating privacy advocates have protested the trend, citing fears of a Big Brotherly government agency using the American public’s weakness for tasty snack foods to create a vast surveillance network, leading inevitably to political oppression and embarrassing high-water jumpsuits for all.

“The rest of our chips have been known for years to be major contributors to obesity, heart disease and stroke, yet that hasn’t stopped anyone from pounding the things like they were going out of style,� continued Abenly. “So we don’t foresee privacy concerns being a major deterrent. After all, which would you rather have: A tiny, painless microtransmitter in your gullet, or a spaghetti tangle of gross heart tubes coming out of your chest? Yuck. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Plus we made sure they taste like nacho-flavored bacon, which the people seem to love.�

Despite protests, the technology appears to be a likely hit. Plans are already in the works for several other tracking foods, including Grandma Come Home pitted prunes from Sunkist and Ralson Purina’s upcoming Trackin’ Wagon dog food to aid in the search for missing pets.

Sadly, the technology has not yet advanced to the point of aiding in the search for pets or loved ones who are already missing, though unsubstantiated reports have Hershey Foods working on a time-traveling chocolate bar that might allow consumers to go back in time and feed tracking foods to their currently missing pets before they disappear. Dim-witted focus groups have also drawn attention to the need for intelligence regarding what kinds of snack foods car keys might enjoy, so that they can be fed tracking snacks and never be lost again.

I'm going to let you all in on a secret that will save our federal government billions of Saddam-hunting dollars and will end this whole Iraq misadventure once and for all. It may take slightly longer than our current approach, but it's cheap and we won't have any more GIs shot in the ass while they're playing beach volleyball. It's simple: All we have to do is open a couple of Pizza Huts over there. They may not have that kind of hut-building technology over in Iraq yet, but we can import it. And within 30 years, all those bomb-happy assholes will have more fat pulsing through their veins than blood and they'll be dropping like lethargic, weak-hearted flies. Advantage: America.

It's a scientific fact that terrorism never originates in countries that get more than 40% of their calories from fat. Constructing a pair of tennis shoes out of plastic explosives or hucking hand grenades at an army patrol sounds like an awful lot of work when rolling over in bed is enough to raise your pulse. But you start feeding these guys rice, beans, and couscous and before you know it you've got some asshole hiding a time bomb in your birthday cake. Bad scene.

Now I'm a realist, so I realize this plan won't work quickly enough for those individuals who want Saddam Hussein's gonads in a Ball jar like, yesterday. But for those impatient folk I believe a slight modification to my Mideast peace plan may suffice.

Let's say you turn those fast food franchising dogs loose on Iraq, to quell the general populace. But while you're at it you save one location for a very special KFC. You might even put this special KFC in Saddam's hometown, couldn't hurt. But the most important thing is to make sure this restaurant is really the cream of the KFC crop, no chicken fingers petrifying under heat lamps for two weeks while the crew chief does lines of coke back in the walk-in freezer. That won't do. What we need here is a real tightly run ship that's cranking out some damned delicious chicken. And once the joint's become established and you've saturated the region with fried chicken fat, one random day you close up shop very unexpectedly. Blame it on to "technical difficulties" or a chicken rampage or what have you.

But before you board up the windows, you sell one last bucket of chicken. The last ever, and it goes to the highest bidder. Doesn't matter who it is. Wherever he's hiding, some of that chicken will find it's way back to Saddam Hussein, guaranteed. Maybe a thigh, maybe a wing. Doesn't matter. But the kicker is that you've saturated that one bucket of chicken with enough fat to kill the three tenors. Silver bullet heart attack variety, extra tasty deadly. Let's see the Iraqi public claim we faked a picture of Saddam Hussein, dead on a toilet with a drumstick hanging out of his mouth. Even those cynical bastards will be shocked into acknowledging the disgusting truth.

It's a sad state of affairs when all this administration wants for Christmas is Saddam Hussein dead on a toilet, but there you go. Merry Christmas.

Escalating the plan further couldn't help but solve the bigger Mideast asshole problem, as all those hard-ons will go soft for stuffed-crust cholesterol bombs and gorgeable Gorditas. And it wouldn't cost the Western superpowers a thing, just cut the fast food chains loose and they'd lick each other's brainpans clean for the chance to do America's dirty work for us. But for God's sake, please leave Subway out of this. The last thing I need to see on television is some big fat Arab guy talking about how he used to be even more big and fat before he started mainlining veggie subs.

If that happens I'm just going to keep my ideas to myself in the future, the common good be damned.

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