mboldened by the recent broad-daylight swiping of legendary Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s famous paintings The Scream and Madonnas from Oslo, Norway’s Munch Museum (which is a terrible place to wander into stoned, but a hilarious name for a museum regardless of whether you pronounce it “Munch� or “Munk�), thieves in New York this week made off with The Turd, a controversial piece of conceptual art that was until very recently housed in the Museum of Modern Art in downtown Manhattan.

Upon hearing that there had been a daring daylight heist at the MoMA, terrified museum officials initially feared the worst.

“I almost shit my pants,� admitted curator Vaughn Cammels. “They could have made off with a Van Gogh, Monet or Picasso, priceless artworks which never could have been replaced. Those first few seconds were like a mini-nightmare.�

The missing piece, valued by museum officials as “impossible to sell,� consisted of a white porcelain turd on a dinner plate. Some museum employees were relieved to find out that R.H. Hiddelstein’s obscure piece of protest art from 1982 had been stolen, rather than one of the museum’s many easier-to-appreciate masterworks. Though understandably distraught over the theft, many have been looking at the bright side, pointing out that they can finally clean that spot on the wall. For years, few had dared to move The Turd, because none could tell if it was really porcelain or just a real turd painted white.

When asked what police were doing to catch the crooks, police chief Harold Almney insisted that the case had been given appropriate priority and that the police would start at nothing to bring these crooks to justice.

“The Turd is a crucial piece in understanding the development of modern sculpture,� explained art historian Checky Brazelton. “Without it, we would never have been blessed with any of the several related masterpieces that followed, including Bradnell’s Lung Chunk or Dolenski’s Snot on Toast. This is a major loss for the art community.�

“The what?� queried a surprised Lindsay Sommers, an intern at the MoMA. “Somebody stole that thing? I was using it as an ashtray on my breaks.�

Irregardless of the opinion of some part-time art critics, the artist Hiddelstein has been distraught since learning of the theft, vowing not to rest and planning to leave work on his latest sculpture-in-progress, the man-sized Shithead, on hiatus until the bandits can be brought to justice.

“You cannot understand my pain unless you have ever lost a child,� explained Hiddelstein after this reporter suggested he could knock out another piece comparable to The Turd if given twenty minutes and a plate of bran muffins. When asked if he wasn’t just being pretentious, Hiddelstein answered with a piece of interpretive dance that was way over the commune’s head.

When asked why the thieves left numerous priceless works of art hanging on the walls while making off with Hiddelstein’s obscure piece, authorities speculate that the thieves may have been either huge Hiddelstein fans, complete art novices, or just absolute morons. Others have speculated that the thieves came for a Van Gogh or Monet, but panicked when the non-silent alarms went off and grabbed The Turd in a hurry on their way out the door, so as not to leave empty-handed. However, a thorough inspection of the dumpsters outside surrounding buildings failed to lend credence to this theory.

“This is the new face of modern art theft,� explained face of modern art theft expert Carson Faulkner. “It’s brash, in-your-face, and usually pretty stupid. No longer are we living in the days of your father’s art thief, a suave motherfucker squeezing in through some high window with suction cups sewn into his gloves, limboing his way through a maze of laser tripwires and slipping a priceless masterpiece out if its frame using a high-tech black-market silica spray. Now it’s just a couple of retards barging in with a shotgun and making off with whatever’s easiest to carry, even if it’s a worthless piece of modern shwag or the trashcan over by the men’s room. It’s sad, really.�

Until new leads materialize, local authorities are scanning art auction listings for mention of the sculpture, and keeping an eye on eBay in case the thieves get really desperate. While there are several turds currently for sale on the auction site, and liberal examples of bad modern art, none yet appear to be the missing piece.

m-mmm! Sweet thing, the ratings turned upside down on the Olympic Games from Athens this week, when the IOC voted on new rules allowing contenders to compete nude. It bolstered a flabby start to the Olympics for NBC, and turned the games into a ratings giant as the week went on.

Upon seeing the dry audience response to the Athens games, NBC petitioned the committee for nude competition, anything to pull the crashing Olympics out of the fire. IOC President Jimmy Goldstein approved the decision right away.

"Now it's just like olden times," said Goldstein, straightening his thin tie. "Way back when, the Greeks used to do it nude. Hell, they did everything nude. Which is why I like the Greeks. But now the Olympics is finally the way it was always meant to be. Bare-ass naked."

Some Olympians were quick to reproach the decision, especially the chubby Eastern European weightlifters, but most came around for a shot at winning the much-sought Olympic gold. NBC has continued showing the Games, much to the chargin of the FCC, with the charge that the human body is a beautiful thing. Still, the Games have been shown on a five-minute delay, so that censors can blur or edit out anything that really, really isn't a beautiful thing. The network has already taken the liberty with such events as Olympic wrestling, when hairy German Gustav Werner pinned oily Italian Antonio DiScuza around his sweaty lower body.

"Sure, you get a little bored watching something like archery or sailing," said Pinewood, Minnesota Olympic viewer Sally Nedhurst, "and the shot put made me laugh until I was sick. But if you think I'm going to miss one minute of the swimming or gymnastics, you're out of your mind!"

Indeed the gymnastics, always a highlight of the games, were a ratings powerhouse for NBC. The network received record ratings as American Paul Gilbert executed a beautiful dismount to take the gold, and uneven parallel bars favorite on the Chinese team Hong-Chu Xy eliminated himself with a misfire that resulted in severe testicular damage when he banged the bar unexpectedly. Slow-motion clips of the tragedy were available, but no men at the network could bring themselves to air it.

It hasn't been all gold for the Americans, though, as 100-meter runner Isaac "Chubby" Walker was disqualified for living up to his namesake during the track and field event. It's also been a disappointing year for the American basketball "Dream Team," who seem particularly impressive every time they take the court, but find themselves limited in their dunking ability without the use of protective cups.

Conversely, it was a good year for the Brazilian women's softball team, who came from behind to bounce, bob, and claw their way up to the top ranks in the sport. In addition to winning the gold in the event, they've all also been romantically linked to Colin Farrell following their rise to stardom.

The IOC will benefit from America's favorable response to the nude Olympics as well, since the network has promised in advance to split revenue from a DVD release of the Olympic games, as well as a separate release, tentatively titled: "The Olympics: Too Hot for Primetime."

I would like to take this opportunity to express to the world my view about Yuppies. I hate them. Bottom line. Thanks for listening.

Yuppies would be our idea of cool if we lived in a world Bill Gates had farted out of his ass. That's what he dreams about at night, a bizarre-o world where he has a chance with chicks, and the hideous byproducts of his eugenics experiments roam through mini-malls across the land. Holy shit, it happened already? Wake me up when the screaming gets too loud for you.

No real human being actually thinks they're being hip when dressed like one of these faggoty, middle-aged losers. You know what I'm talking about. All those forty-ish, peppered gray, khaki wearing, polo shirted, overweight, laptop carrying, SUV driving, laugh out loud at jokes they read in Dilbert wussy bitches! These are the kind of people who thanked their lucky fuckin' stars when computers were invented, because if it weren't for computers, natural selection would have had its way with these gimps like a 350 pound inmate named "Tiny."

Yuppies make my scrotum shrivel up like a raisin in the microwave. Just the sight of one is enough to send me into an incoherent, Yuppie-beating rage, as the security guys at CompUSA can attest.

I had the acute displeasure of sitting next to one of these zombie clones on a three-hour flight last week, after a long night of tweaking. Thank God I had stashed Nevil in my carry-on baggage, giving me the option of releasing him on that fucking swine at a moment's notice. Damned if they aren't a lot of maintenance, but owning a midget can be the difference between mirth and madness when the chips are down. They should put that on an inspirational calendar somewhere.

As soon as that Yuppie sat down next to me I could feel the bile in the back of my throat start to bubble. Watching him squeeze his fat ass into that narrow coach seat, as the perspiration built up inside his precious little round glasses and he started to sweat through his Banana Republic Yuppie fatigues, I could feel my hands twitching at the drawstring of my midget satchel, ready to unleash this poor fucker's tiny, apeshit doom.

Since I already knew you can't throw a fire extinguisher on a plane without hitting a Yuppie, I made sure Nevil was prepared for the flight through a strict regiment of starvation and randomly lighting my lighter underneath him to fuel his fire. If you're going to go to the trouble and social embarrassment of flinging a midget onto a grown man in public, you have to at least make sure that midget's in a particularly foul mood, so you get your money's worth.

But just when I was about to open the bag and take cover behind the Chinese woman sitting to my left, something infinitely more entertaining than siccing a starved and half-crazed midget on this unsuspecting fucker suddenly dawned on me. Holy shit, this Yuppie was scared of flying! I had no choice but to use this to my advantage.

While we were sitting on the runway, I took the liberty of calling the flight attendant over several times to point out the window and ask if they were completely sure that cardboard patch on the wing was really going to hold after takeoff. Then when the time for takeoff finally came, I unbuckled my seatbelt and screamed at the top of my lungs that I was feeling a breeze coming from the emergency exit door. Have you ever seen a man reflexively suck sweat back into his pores? Awesome. Then to polish the poor bastard off, periodically throughout the rest of the flight I would open my window blind just enough to look outside, then start crying. When he tried to sneak a peek I would slam it shut and moan in a trembling voice "Just ignore it! Maybe it will be OK if we pretend we don't know anything!"

By the time we landed, tons of fun had worked himself into a big puddle of sweaty hysterics. And when the flight attendants brought out the restraints to cart his ass off the plane and into that rubber van, nobody acted more surprised than me. Did you see how that guy started freaking out when we landed? Jesus. He thought my stewardess-call button was an emergency ignition switch for the plane's engines! Crazy, crazy shit.

"That's what you get, you fucking clone," I thought to myself.

No question that piece of work blew a microchip or two, either during the flight or while the orderlies were beating him silly with rubber bitch-sticks on the way to the booby barn. And I got his laptop, which makes for a bitchin' dartboard. These are the small, quiet victories I ponder in spare moments, when reminiscing about my war with the Yuppies.

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