hipping clerk Charles McKinley mailed himself from New York to Dallas in a shipping crate last week, as was reported by every major news outlet on Tuesday in the face of an apparent total lack of actual news.

Authorities believe McKinley had help from at least one co-worker at the New York warehouse where he is employed, since it is extremely difficult to nail yourself into a shipping crate from the inside. The homesick McKinley, too broke to afford an airline ticket, came up with the idea after a friend complimented him on his ability to avoid buying a car by stowing away in other drivers’ trunks in order to get around town. McKinley also remembered a similar idea working in a humorous MC 900 Ft. Jesus video he’d seen years before.

McKinley took neither food nor water along with him for the 15-hour journey, only a broken cell-phone and a Game Boy Advance for which he soon lamented not buying a backlight.

“I brought my cell phone, even though that piece of shit’s been broken for two weeks, just in case we got up in space and all of a sudden I had service again,� explained McKinley. “That’dve been sweet, because I could call up Charles and be like ‘Yo whatup dog, I’m calling you from a box in space and shit!’ There’s no way Charles would believe that, man, he’d think I was drunk or something. But he’dve been wrong. I wish I was drunk, that probably would’ve made the fifteen hours in the dark with knees all crammed up in my face go faster now that I think about it. But yeah, I brought my cell phone because I think it’s the battery that’s all jacked from the time I dropped it in that toilet at the bar, and I figure it might not have enough juice to pull down the phone calls from the satellites all the way to the ground, you know? But maybe it’ll work on the plane ‘cuz we’re closer to the satellites and all that. But no dice, piece of shit was still busted.�

Embarrassed federal officials are still trying to determine how McKinley made it through airport security, which presumably has some kind of dogs or something that check to make sure crates being shipped don’t smell like sweaty morons. Officials refused to speculate what security measures might be in place to prevent this kind of occurrence, though they neither confirmed nor denied that a funny way to test would be to drop all packages from a height of several feet to see if any of them screamed.

Upon arriving at his parents’ suburban Dallas home, McKinley busted out of the crate with a crowbar, scaring the holy shit out of a deliveryman who thought he was dropping off a huge shipment of Triscuits.

“I thought it was funny that the thing smelled like a big box of snack crackers and B.O., but I still didn’t expect some weirdo to bust out like a jackass-in the-box,� explained deliveryman Billy Ray Thomas. “And yeah, the rumors are true, I may have screamed kind of like a girl when he popped out. And then I called the cops on my cell phone because, hey man, fuck you!�

When the police arrived they arrested McKinley on an unrelated charge of passing bad checks and sneaking onto a train in a large duffel bag. Federal officials are also considering charges of “stowing away on a plane,� the violation of a law created in the 1940’s to give police characters more to do in Warner Bros. cartoons.

Asked how much he saved by traveling in the cargo hold, McKinley made it clear that his employer had unwittingly footed the bill for his low-budget odyssey. “Oh shit man, I couldn’t afford to mail a box that heavy. You have any idea what that must cost? Damn. I just traveled cross-country in a crate, Jack, do I look like I’m made of money?�

he White House, home of the White, faced a major embarrassment this week when a release by the president's private probe into the power failures of two weeks ago pointed to a most uncomfortable source—Dick. Indeed, Vice President Dick Cheney was singled out as the leading cause of the energy problem that left multiple states in periods of blackout.

It ended a troubling week for the Vice President, whose office was accused of holding out information on an energy probe Monday by refusing to turn over documents vital to the investigation. The General Accounting Office reported the administration met with a succession of energy lobbyists, to the complete and total surprise of Americans everywhere, but the extent of corporate involvement in energy policymaking could not be verified without the documents withheld by the Vice President.

The latest revelation of Cheney's involvement in energy problems could adversely affect his position on the 2004 Republican ticket. The president's probe, inserted deep inside the problem, made note of several private excesses that may have led to the undue strain on the northeastern power grids. Cheney officials confirmed Friday that the Vice President's quarters in the White House is the only one plugged into the northeastern power grid, pointing out that the Vice President's power needs "cannot be satisfied by the piddlin'-ass power grid currently supplying the D.C. area."

One of the power offenses Cheney is accused of includes the employ of an industrial-grade air conditioner used solely for the Vice President's bedroom. Some say the personal air conditioner is the only 90-million BTU unit made for personal use. Vice Presidential spokesperson Canton Canby only responded to the allegation by claiming, "The VP likes to walk around naked."

Close investigation by the probe, under the guidance of Neilson "Soft Crust" Reilly, revealed that virtually nothing in the Vice President's White House quarters were not temperature-regulated. His personal pool and hot tub were heated, and his private work-out room, never used, we can guess, was cooled. Documentation also proves the VP had his sauna air conditioned and his refrigerator heated, as the best way to keep balanced temperatures to all things. Personal assistant Canby did not find the temperature regulation obsession strange.

"Well, maybe to the working man that sounds like an odd thing, but I know if I were doing work as important as the Vice President, I certainly wouldn't want to be worried about how hot or cold my fridge needed to be to enjoy a frosty beverage when I got home from the Middle East or wherever he's gone off to."

Among the more alarming findings of the probe were hospital-grade shock paddles. Canby, now sweating and in need of an industrial-strength air conditioner himself, found nothing odd about the frequently-used paddles, employed by the VP sometimes up to six times a day.

"What? So you got to be dead to want a charge from those things? There's no law says you got to be dead. The Vice President got used to the jump start you get from absorbing electricity straight into the body. There's no law against it and at the time we weren't under orders to conserve energy. Get off the guy's back. Sometimes his heart needs a little warning blast to know to keep doing its job, if it knows what's good for it."

Canby refused to answer further questions on the probe's accusations, waiting to receive the results from a probe conducted by the Vice President's wife, Lynn Cheney, under the objective to find out who left all these lights on in here.

Hello readers, we're going to take a little break from the Fad Wagon this week while I write more of that book to excerpt and you learn a thing or two about daylight-saving time. Sound fun? Tough.

Many common misconceptions survive regarding daylight-saving time, including the belief that we do it for a reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. And don't call it "Daylight-Savings Time," that just proves you're a part of the International Communist Conspiracy.

The idea was originally suggested by Benjamin Franklin, compulsive liar and great American. Franklin was always late to everything, and frequently explained away his lack of punctuality by bragging that he lived in a special personal time zone that everybody else was too stupid to understand. When questioned, he'd rattle off a bunch of bullshit figures about how he saved energy by living his life an hour later than everybody else, allowing him to sleep in, stay up later and avoid traffic by traveling while everybody else had already arrived at wherever they were going. Only his girlfriend believed this, and everyone else came to refer to any ridiculously late events as occurring in "Franklin Time." Whenever anybody needed him there for a meeting they'd tell him it started two hours before it actually did, and then laugh when they got there and he'd been sitting and waiting for an hour.

Franklin's various shenanigans and rocky relationship with the truth earned him the nickname "B.S. Franklin," which he told naïve girls was short for "Balls Franklin." He came to fame after publishing an almanac of bullshit weather predictions and claiming to have "discovered" electricity after being blown off his toilet by a bolt of lightning. For years neighbors had warned that the gigantic kite Franklin had attached to his house, in hopes of sailing to a better neighborhood, would get him blown off the toilet in the middle of the night by a gigantic bolt of lighting, but he'd done little to heed their warnings. A smug Franklin discovered fire later that week when his neighbors burnt his house to the ground, taking offense at the "Father of Electricity" banner he'd begun carrying around town.

In 1776 Franklin was late for a meeting of the Second Continental Congress, and just missed the vote to kick Benjamin Franklin out of the Second Continental Congress. Upset that he missed his opportunity to cast the lone dissenting vote, Franklin demanded that the colony of Pennsylvania adopt "Daylight-Saving Time," a new system of his extremely recent invention that would have made him, in fact, early for the meeting. Thomas Jefferson signed the motion into law as a joke to humor Franklin, signing the form "Upyour Penis," but in a tremendous gaffe the clerk failed to examine the signature and "Daylight-Saving Time" was passed as Pennsylvania colonial law.

Relations between the various colonies were highly bitchy at this point in history, and I mean like drag queens at an Easter buffet. The new time change law really chapped the asses of the neighboring colonies, and before long, each one had passed their own new laws, not about to give smug Pennsylvania the satisfaction of always being early to everything and looking down its nose at all the other colonies as slacking layabouts.

After the Revolutionary War this really got out of hand, with states changing their time zones on an almost weekly basis in an attempt to one-up neighboring states and psych out tourists. At one point when you traveled from Massachusetts to Connecticut, you actually went back in time two days and had to be careful not to step on any butterflies or do anything that might mess things up for your future self back in Massachusetts. Eventually the federal government stepped in and announced that everybody had to get with the same program and stop all the silly horseshit, and from then on there'd only be two wacky nonsensical time changes per calendar year.

States were grumpy about losing their individuality, for sure, but most complied. I say most because Arizona and Hawaii never actually adopted daylight-saving time after becoming states, they only pretended to whenever the feds were around. To this day whenever some government official steps into a bank in Arizona you'll see employees scrambling to set the clocks back and act like they've been saving daylight all along.

The other exception is the state of Indiana, which never got its shit together and still has different time zones for every neighborhood, but after over 200 years of trying the government has given up on that state as a lost cause. Federal employees often refer to any broken or inexplicably errant clocks as being set to "Indiana Time," a joke that's very popular among the employees who aren't from Indiana.

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