arents' groups across the country are up in arms this week following the publication of "Hitler: Flower of Hate," Maxwell Haus' stunning new biography of the late Nazi leader, which according to the dust jacket exposes the former fuehrer's deep fondness for waltz music. Citing evidence in personal diaries and correspondence between the two historical madmen, Haus' book suggests that waltz music may also have been a personal inspiration for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, also mad.

This shockingly belated news has caused a rethinking of national attitudes toward the mostly-forgotten musical form of waltz and the senior citizens who claim to enjoy it. First developed in the Austrian alps in the 17th century as a form of social protest against the stuffy polonaises of the day, waltz was considered an exciting and dangerous music for almost four years until the Polka rocked Europe in 1834.

Concerned mobs throughout America have responded to the latest news with waltz record burnings all week long, in many cases raiding the record cabinets of their elderly and infirm parents to unearth the darkly influential albums before they can do further damage. Asked if her hysterical mob might be going too far, mob spokesperson and daughter of two Andrea Collins disagreed.

"Are you even listening, people?" gushed an exasperated Collins. "This is HITLER music! We've got to do this for the chil- the old! Do it for the olderly!"

Though evidence remains sketchy, sensationalistic media outlets have tied waltz music to the rash of shootings at seniors' dances which may have occurred across the country in recent months.

According to those same disreputable media outlets, a new strain of "hard core" waltz has been gaining in popularity among the nation's seniors in recent years, a trend that their grown children find troubling.

"This isn't your parents' waltz music," explained University of Pussy Lake musicologist Stans Frenton. "Or actually it is. I'm sorry, it's just a figure of speech that isn't terribly useful in this situation. Waltz music hasn't changed in 400 years; it's pretty much always been as offensive as it is right now."

Though the chances of waltz music spreading to our nation's youth have been estimated by experts to be "fuckin' remote, like Alaskan outback underground deaf hermit remote," concerned parents remain concerned about the effect this sedate, docile music may be having on their own elderly parents.

"First they start listening to waltz music," blathering idiot Josephine Matthews explained to the commune. "Then they don't want to take their pills any more, and they want to stay out all evening, slow dancing and sitting quietly in chairs."
Matthews shuddered at the thought, or possibly because it was cold.

"Well, at least our kids aren't listening to this waltz shit," sighed resigned parent Philip Dillinger of Oak Caverns, IL, poking around for something else to get upset about. "They don't look up to their grandparents at all, not much danger of there being a bad influence there. As a matter of fact, if I could convince my parents to start taking drugs and freak dancing, I'm pretty sure my kids would stop doing those things too. Hold on, I've got to make a call."

ome groups (Christians and liberals) have called foul when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced their nominations for the 2005 Oscars earlier this week, and their favorite agenda films The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 were nowhere to be found. The greater mystery, if you ask any film fan in the know, is how the Academy could criminally overlook the short film masterpiece "Unmapped Island," released in 2004 just in time for the Oscars by film auteur and commune employee Ted Ted.

"Unmapped Island," released to poisonous reviews in early December 2004 by the independent film company Ted Ted Pictures, has been targeted for non-targeting by Hollywood elite, despite being completely original and elevating the film forum beyond the usual candy-ass picture Tinsel Town has been churning out for years. Meanwhile, tired biopics like The Aviator and Ray, and foxy boxing pictures like Million Dollar Baby steal the thunder from original films about one man pitted against nature and Nazis after surviving a shipwrecking.

Many were curious and highly pissed-off as to why a formidable new talent, perhaps even a genius(?), was completely passed over for the more traditional kind of slick-produced crap and prettyboy film star nonsense. Most notably, the director and writer himself, Ted Ted, called the move, "The same old Hollywood horseshit."

Though troubled by bad reviews from critics who either simply didn't get it or were too high-faluting to enjoy a movie that was great fun, "Unmapped Island," starring non-Oscar-nominee for Best Actor Ted Ted and also non-Oscar-nominee for Best Supporting Actor Ramrod Hurley, sold out both of its showings in Flatbush, New Jersey, and looked "quite professional," according to the theater owner and projectionist Randall Howard. The praise and audience approval falls on deaf ears in Hollywood, though, as letters go unanswered and phone calls unreturned by simple reporters trying to find out the facts for a story. Still, one has to wonder: Is Hollywood completely oblivious to identifying new talent these days, or do they hold some deep-seated perverse prejudice against filmmaker Ted Ted?

It's not the first time Hollywood has faced the Ted Ted controversy, and refused to answer perfectly reasonable questions about it. In 1999, Ted Ted's first short film Monolog was roundly ignored by critics, on the preposterous grounds that no one in the academy had seen it and it broke minor technical regulations by not being quite finished, though director Ted Ted promised the money for being nominated for an Oscar would be enough to get it finished in time.

Most disappointing, according to director Ted Ted, since he can't win an Oscar now by these ever-tightening Academy standards, he will never have the chance to respond to allegations by movie reviewer for the commune Orson Welch, who attacked the film as, "The most obvious attempt to rip-off both the television series 'Lost' and the movie The Great Escape ever to make it to any screen, even a local theater."

"It's a shame," said Ted Ted, in a carefully-prepared press conference attended by this commune reporter. "If I had the opportunity, I would have liked to reply to Welch, and other critics, by telling them: 'If you're so goddamned brilliant, why don't you go write your own movie and cast it and make it yourself with your hard-earned money? Oh, that's right, I remember now why—you can't. You're all hacks and all your stuff comes out looking retarded. Retards.'"

No one in Hollywood returned any of this reporter's calls, except for one press secretary representing Clint Eastwood, who asked us to please stop wasting her time.

The fourth era of video games marked the downfall of Nintendo, Atari, Sega, and the British Empire. Ineptitude and folly finally came to roost as video games became a multi-boobjillion dollar industry and the jokers who'd been running it up until that point were rightfully eaten alive like a clown-meat gyro. And thus we enter the cruel endgame of this rainbow-colored saga.

After forming a partnership with Sony to develop a CD-drive add-on for the Super Nintendo, Nintendo ultimately decided it would be a better idea to pull out at the last minute and piss-off the powerful and insanely proud Sony, a slumbering consumer electronics giant that needed only a perceived dishonor as an excuse to enter the video game market and kick an extra poophole out Nintendo's backside. Rolling in the good ideas like a pig in cologne, Nintendo opted to work with Dutch nice guys Philips instead, on a CD add-on drive that never came to fruition. Sony, in a scene likely moodily backlit and scored to weird Japanese gourd instruments, vowed to develop their own 32-bit system with which to crush Nintendo into sugar-coated boot grease. Hence the PlayStation was born.

Despite the gay-sounding name, the PlayStation took the world by storm in 1995. Considering that the only 32-bit competition on the market at the time was the Jaguar, which Atari claimed was a 64-bit console only because they had printed "64!" on the case, the PlayStation's success seems less than surprising. Panasonic released the technologically superior 3DO that same year, but the console's sales were limited by the system's embarrassing pack-in game, SmartFartz.

In response, Sega released the Saturn, a CD-based system which sucked like a circus seal in a popsicle factory. So completely misguided was the development of the Saturn that the system's surprise launch in 1995 was kept a secret even from game developers, and as a result the system's only software was an old Commodore64 Mah-Jongg game that came built into the motherboard. Sega had succeeded in surprising the crap out of the industry with the stealth Saturn release, but ultimately this proved to be a poor business strategy.

Around this time Atari went down in flames, announcing that their poor-selling Jaguar console was actually a magic flying dream machine that could make you big like in that Tom Hanks movie. Jaguar sales actually went down after the announcement, due to the bitter lesson about adulthood that audiences had learned from the Tom Hanks movie years before.

Rather than release their own 32-bit console to compete with Sony, Nintendo decided to throw the industry a curve in 1995 by releasing their VirtualBoy portable system instead, a weird goggle-based gaming system that induced nausea three times faster than trying to read a novel on a roller-coaster. After six months of terrible sales and numerous in-store vomitings, Nintendo announced that they were just kidding about the VirtualBoy.

Nintendo finally released their next home console, the Nintendo 64, in 1996. Despite the fact that only seven games were ever made for the system, the console sold quite well thanks to rampant rumors that the system's controllers tasted like strawberries. Nintendo's usual practice of succeeding despite doing everything wrong continued with the Nintendo 64, which kept second place warm behind the PlayStation despite a reliance on expensive, antiquated game cartridges, and the cannibalistic practice of shoehorning Mario into every game released for the system, including such unlikely titles as Star Wars: Battle for Naboo and Foxy Chix Strip Poker.

By 1998, Sega had sufficiently recovered from falling face-first in shit with the Saturn to release the Dreamcast, a 128-bit system so awesome gamers decided to wait until Sony put out something, anything, new instead of spending their money on Sega. Sony did not disappoint, releasing a poster with a picture of the upcoming PlayStation 2 later that year. Sony's poster outsold the Dreamcast 3-to-1 in America and Japan.

The PlayStation 2 was finally released in 2000, wowing gamers who already thought it was going to be awesome. Sega's Dreamcast faded quickly from near-obscurity into nearby total obscurity, and Nintendo's new GameCube console slid comfortably into the company's familiar spot in the back seat behind Sony, eagerly wondering if they were going to stop for ice cream. Once the king of a very inept hill, Nintendo was reduced to catering to small children and gamers with a thing for fat Italians.

Software giant Microsoft released their Xbox in 2001, a mammoth console roughly the size of a suitcase, which featured controllers larger than most other entire gaming systems. Giants and the obscenely-handed were pleased, making Microsoft a real competitor for Sony, and relegating Nintendo to the role of cute little pretend toy console maker.

Unbeknownst to the computer-illiterate, parallel to these home console wars, computer games were gathering steam as a way for adults to avoid doing their taxes and to kill time until the Internet was invented. Even adults who didn't know a Super Nintendo from a poop-covered shoe were playing Doom on their home PCs by 1993, making the gory first-person shooter a giant hit. While console gamers were farting around with Sonic the Hedgehog and Donkey Kong Country Music Seminar, bored accountants everywhere were blowing the shit out of Satan's housepets inside the labyrinths of Doom. That same year saw the release of Myst, a gorgeous first-person puzzler about losing your keys on a deserted island. Myst was a huge hit, finding an audience among millions of computer geeks who resonated with the game's storyline about wandering around alone with no friends.

Later, even more PC hits would follow, allowing PC gamers to enjoy superior graphics and sound for only thousands of dollars more than their console-gaming brethren. Whether it was ogling ass cheeks in Tomb Raider, blowing up Republicans in Quake, or gleefully ruining lives in The Sims, PC gaming was where it was at in the 90's.

The 2000's find video games more popular than ever, with new technology breathing life into console gaming, even as the list of competing consoles is mercilessly stomped into shortness. Computer games hang on to market share as the line between PCs, consoles, DVD players and cordless phones is blurred beyond recognition.

But where does the future of video games lie? What am I, Kreskin? You see a column around here titled "The Future of Video Games"? If you do, I sure as hell didn't write it, and I'd take whatever Rok Finger has to say on the subject with a grain of salt the size of Cincinnati. I've brought you up to date on video games, which is more than I set out to do, ingrates.

Ten years from now? We'll probably be hunting each other in the streets like deer, how's that for the future of gaming? Enjoy your first-person shooters while you've got 'em, Bambi.

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