urprise abounded following the January 9 election in the West Bank, when it was forecast Swedish pop supergroup ABBA had a landslide victory and would be declared president(s) of the Arabic state. ABBA, who could not be more white, and had not been aware they were even nominated, were more surprised than anyone else.

ABBA, a musical group who reigned during the age of disco, is comprised of members Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, and Bjorn Ulvaeus. The Swedish sensations held 60% of the vote over the nearest competitor, Mustafa Barghouti, in the nation's first U.S.-approved free election. Upon conceding the race, Barghouti told a crowd of followers, "I can't believe I lost to ABBA."

A third contender protested the election, Palestinian politician Mahmoud Abbas, who claimed the victory more rightly belonged to him. Mahmoud Abbas had spent a great deal of money and time campaigning, claiming the Swedish supergroup had not even entered the Palestinian state at any time during the election process, or possibly at all, ever. Election officials said they would look into it, though the way they shook their heads made it seem more like an effort to pacify the sore loser.

Spokespeople for ABBA, who disbanded in 1982, thought we were messing with them. Being spokespeople for ABBA, they said, they get that all the time.

Results came Sunday night, as Election officials tallied votes as they came into the office. The election was problematic, given recent economic constraints necessitated write-in ballots for candidates in many areas, but officials felt sure enough of the results to give the blue-eyed Swedish pop group an early victory. After Barghouti's concession speech, Palestine waited patiently for ABBA to declare victory. After Mahmoud Abbas tried to assert his right to the presidency, Election officials rejected his claim, based on the strict literal nature of Palestinian law.

"It says ABBA here," said one official in a snooty tone, holding up a few slips of handwritten papers that constituted votes.

Despite the apparent reluctance of the "Waterloo" superstars to accept their new role in international politics, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel "The Little Mermaid" Sharon called Stockholm, Sweden to congratulate any members of ABBA he could find. Eventually, Bjorn Ulvaeus accepted the charges, but reportedly told Sharon it had all been some sort of misunderstanding. Sharon would have none of it, he later told the press.

"We believe ABBA may find politics a tougher game than the music business, but not by much." All the reporters in the press corps politely laughed at the Prime Minister's joke. "Israel is eager to outline a plan of peace with ABBA for the future of Palestine. We are already working out a number of proposals, including disbanding the government and repatriating Arabic nationalities in the occupied territory in exchange for a weekly variety special on Arabic television, and a five-record deal with Yzbeki Records, a premiere label. I see a brighter future for these dancing queens, and for Israel."

Election officials were still holding to their decision as of a week following, but did say they would review all appropriate records and laws to determine whether four people could hold a position formerly held by one Arabic man. If a challenge arose, a run-off election could come up for ABBA, Barghouti, and Mahmoud Abbas, or a three-way race-around-the-world to decide the people's choice to lead Palestine.

all Street, the place (not the Oliver Stone movie) known to confused New York tourists as "Tin Pan Alley," was rocked by erratic stock prices last week following the market-shaking news that Hollywood supercouple Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were separating after four and a half years of marriage. NASDAQ closed down over 400 points Monday as skittish investors struggled to find their place in a cold and confusing new world, and the other market thing also went number two.

"This decision is the result of much thoughtful consideration," explained Pitt to People magazine, "and is not the result of any of the speculation reported by the tabloid media. Thank you for your interest and please respect our privacy in this matter."

Despite the actor's modest response, numerous foreign heads of state jammed the telephone lines after the news broke, desperate for information about the breakup and eager to console the ailing ex-lovers. President Bush was not taking calls on Monday, and according to reports close to the president, Bush spent most of the day sobbing into a large glass of eggnog.

"They were Hollywood's golden couple," cried Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan. "Who didn't want to be Brad Pitt? Or even Jennifer Aniston? That might even be better. Now, I don't know. Maybe we need to slash interest rates again. I'll be in my room if anybody needs me."

TWA cancelled all flights on Saturday in wake of the news, not wanting to take any chances with distraught pilots who might understandably steer their airliners into mountainsides or other points of scenic interest, due to difficulty in processing this dark news.

"Best to give our people a few days off to let this sink in," explained TWA spokesperson Alan Grover, "to get their sense of perspective back and prepare to go on with their lives." Other major airlines were quick to follow suit.

Pitt, widely considered to be one of the most attractive men alive, and Aniston, widely considered to be married to one of the most attractive men alive, were both married in an extravagant ceremony in 2000. Jealous, bitchy tabloids dubbed the coupling "Bradley and the Beast," immediately accusing Pitt of upstaging Aniston in photos, and predicting the marriage would last only five years. Pitt and Aniston had the last laugh however, making the tabloids look foolish by separating a full six months ahead of schedule.

The news fell hard throughout all walks of American life Saturday, from the proverbial man sleeping on the street to the very pinnacles of power, where business titans fretted over the breakup's effect on the already weak dollar.

"Oh shit," despaired Chevron CEO David O'Reilly. "This changes everything."

"Sell! Sell!" screamed day trader Jacob Lerner into a telephone that didn't appear to be plugged in.

Despite the accepted tradition of a national week of mourning following all significant celebrity breakups, the NFL decided to continue with playoff games Saturday, honoring the couple instead with fighter jet fly-overs above all playoff stadiums.

"America needs to feel hope for the future in this dark hour," explained NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. "And if the Patriots putting the smack-down on the Colts is what provides that hope for people, well, then it is the NFL's solemn duty to dish out the hope."

"For the love of God, please respect our privacy as human beings," pleaded Pitt graciously on Tuesday, clearly flattered by all the attention after climbing over the throng of reporters blocking the entrance to the couple's Hollywood Hills home.

A hastily-arranged tribute concert for the couple went off without a hitch Saturday night, with consoling acts such as Norah Jones, Korn, Seal, and Hootie and the Blowfish all paying tribute to the beautiful couple in a tear-filled salute at Madison Square Garden, shared with the world via Pay per View.

Celebrity singer Whitney Houston, though not involved in the concert nor a friend of the couple, consoled both Brad and Jennifer with a spontaneous telephone rendition of her soaring ballad "I Will Always Love You" on Saturday night. Aniston was reportedly stunned into silence by the call, while Pitt was not home at the time and will reportedly hear the song on his answering machine later.

"Jesus, can't you people leave us the fuck alone?" gasped an exasperated Pitt, cornered by news crews in a toilet stall of a Hollywood restaurant's men's room on Sunday.

Flattered into embarrassment by all the attention, Pitt meanwhile has refused to speak to the American media further about the breakup, speaking only to Japanese reporters who, due to cultural differences, don't understand the concept of romance.

News of the breakup comes amidst rumors of Pitt's celebrainfadelity with fellow hot person Angelina Jolie on the set of their upcoming film Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with tabloids speculating that Jolie can better relate to Pitt's ultragorgeous status, unlike the merely attractive Aniston.

Similar rumors spread during the filming of last year's Ocean's Twelve, when the hunk-like Pitt was paired romantically on-screen with the similarly unattainable Catherine Zeta-Jones, despite Jones' icky marriage to ancient crypt-keeper Michael Douglas.

Financial analysts are banking their hopes for a U.S. economic recovery on either a Pitt-Aniston reconciliation early in 2005, or a quick remarriage between Pitt and Jolie, Zeta-Jones, or other suitable ultrahottie.

Last installment we ended with the great video game crash of 1982, which treated the world to visions of programmers heading west across the dust bowl in Calistoga wagons, embarrassing holes worn through their one-dollar pants. Entire landfills had to be created to accommodate the vast influx of unplayed games and unused gaming consoles manufactured in the early 80's. The town of E.T., Maine, was founded around a massive landfill that Atari created to hide the shame of the millions of unsold E.T. game cartridges produced before the company realized that not even stamping the name of a hit movie on the cartridge could save one of the shittiest games ever produced.

From this smoking hole in the ground Nintendo would emerge with the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Hujitsu Homanama had formed the company to sell his sexy playing cards in 1889, naming it "Nintendo," a Japanese word meaning "eat the children." Over time the company would evolve into other areas of gaming, scoring hits in the early 80's with arcade hits Donkey Kong and Stick Dick in Hole for Blow. But total world domination would have to wait until 1985, when the company's first home console grabbed the world by its balls and mopped the floor with it, like some kind of weird ball-handled mop.

The driving force behind the success of the NES was its megahit pack-in game, Super Mario Bros. Offering gamers a glimpse of what happened to those bickering, deranged Italians after they finally climbed out of the sewer at the end of the original Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. delighted children the world over with its colorful, drug-induced imagery and perhaps the most cruelly addictive theme song of any video game ever. Years later, respected American composer George Crumb would be shamed in the international community when he realized he had inadvertently written the Super Mario Bros. theme into one of the movements of his grand fifth symphony. Regardless, anyone who had grown up with a NES controller fused to their mitts and that maddening little song in their ear was quick to forgive.

And the hits kept coming for Nintendo, thanks in part to the system's forward-looking peripherals. The NES light gun and Duck Hunt made the fun of unprovoked attacks on animals possible without the horrors of spending time outdoors. And thanks to the Robotic Operating Buddy peripheral and the game Gyromite, millions of kids developed critical thinking skills trying to figure out why in the hell Nintendo had put out a complicated robot controller that only worked with one lousy game.

Nintendo even branched out into 3-D games with the inimitable Rad Racer in 1987, a driving simulation title that perfectly captured the powerful nausea someone would experience trying to drive a race car while wearing red and blue glasses.

Though certainly a milestone in the racing game genre, Rad Racer was hardly the first, or the radest. Most rader. The first arcade racing game was actually 1979's Chicken Run, a bizarre title unrelated to the later claymation movie. The game revolved around how many chickens a player could run over with a Datsun in three minutes, based on one of the game creator's DUI convictions from college. Though undeniably fun, Chicken Run would soon be pushed to the back pages of history by 1982's legendary Pole Position. Pole Position remains to this day the most accurate driving simulation ever created, marveling gamers with its realistic physics, and is still the program that the Army uses to train its formula-one drivers.

Pole Position was followed by Sega's Outrun in 1986. In Outrun, the gamer took on the role of a red convertible piloted by a couple of Californian genetic freaks capable of surviving repeated rollover wrecks that would have decapitated a Samoan. A hit cartoon of the game had to be pulled from the air in 1987 because parents' groups thought it was giving young children the message that rollover fatalities are fun.

And thus we're backwardly introduced to Nintendo's only real competition, if you could call it that, in the era of 8-bit home gaming, an American company called Sega. Sega was started by a Korean War veteran named David Rosen as a front company called Service Games, which Rosen used to sell chintzy Japanese pinball machines to American families as a magnetic homeopathic therapy for kids with cancer. Rosen claimed the machines would cure a variety of fatal illnesses, as well as play a fun little song if your wellness score topped 100,000. Later he shortened the name to Sega because he was a very lazy and uncreative man.

Sega scored early hits with the frog abuse fantasy Frogger and the Dr. Seuss-inspired Zaxxon, which grew enough hair on Sega's balls that they thought competing with Nintendo sounded like a good idea. Thusly in 1986 came the release of the Sega Master System, which was actually Sega's fifth console, but the first that didn't have the added functionality and electrocution risk of a built-in juicer.

The only problem was that Sega forgot to make a Super Mario Bros. for its own system, opting instead to put out a whole line of crap. Later, the Turbo Grafx 16, Neo-Geo, Atari's Jaguar and 3DO would all attempt to compete with the NES and lose, because they all sucked a giant dong. The Sega Master system was relegated to "little bitch" role, having to settle for finding a home in households that somehow couldn't find a NES or weren't sure how to buy one.

Sega would later turn the tables on Nintendo with their 16-bit Genesis console, which outsold the Super Nintendo due to confusion about what a hedgehog was, and the surprisingly large number of dumb kids who didn't want to have to choose between "soup or Nintendo." Nintendo would have the last laugh, however, with the release of the Game Boy in 1989, an extremely crappy portable gaming system and technological leap backward which would go on to become the best-selling gaming machine ever. Since the Game Boy was cobbled together inexpensively from components of Russian consumer electronics leftover from the early 1950's, Nintendo's profit margins were enormous and executives spent the entire decade of the 1990's laughing.

Later, even more shit would happen. Stay tuned.

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