n the wake of the pope’s alleged death last week, the Vatican has released John Paul II’s will and personal diary to the media. Among the juicy tidbits revealed with the publication of the papal diary was the 84-year-old man’s dying wish that the bloodthirsty media would please, please, please keep their grubby mitts off his motherloving diary.

Published in newspapers, and on websites and Happy Meal boxes around the globe in over 90 languages, Catholics and heathens alike thrilled to the pope’s private inner thoughts and the great man’s eloquent musings this week, drinking in the pope’s thoughts on the nature of privacy and his joy at having this one small respite from a life lived on such a public stage.

Hounded all his life by an overzealous media desperate to know what made the pope tick, John Paul II poured his thoughts into the small, leather-bound volume in a scrawl that some have called “Pope-script.� Among the nuggets revealed with the diary’s publication are the details of the pope’s third-grade crush on Margo Holzarian from the Ukraine, and his strange, life-long fascination with American actress Mariel Hemmingway.

“Thank God no one is ever going to read this diary,� the Pope wrote in one of his last entries, dated March 2005. “It is only through this precious cove of privacy that I cling to my very humanity.� According to various sources, the pope misspelled “humanity� in the original text, but newspaper editors have universally agreed that it is highly unlikely the pope was clinging to a humanatee.

Many readers have been especially touched by the earliest entries in the diary, which date back to the pope’s youth.

“Dear diary: Man, being the pope is hard. I miss my mom and dad, and sometimes I just want to go home. Everybody says I’ll get over it though, once I make some new friends. Well, gotta go. Love, The Pope.�

Some less-scholarly Catholics have been equally surprised to learn that John Paul II was referred to as “the pope� even as a small boy, which made for several humorous anecdotes about grade school roll-call.

Garnering somewhat less attention has been the publication of John Paul II’s last will and testament, which some Catholics awaited with great suspense over who would inherit the pope’s collection of pointy hats. In the end, however, it turned out that the pope’s will was written in Polish, so the Vatican instead handed out his belongings on a “first come, first serve� basis to the assembled masses.

“This is fucking awesome,� raved German tourist Himmel Blaus. “I got the pope’s toenail clippers and a pair of boxers with the dude’s initials on them!�

“I got the pope’s soap! The pope’s soap on a rope is dope!� shouted another ecstatic inheritor, dashing out of the room, apparently in a hurry to bathe.

Publishers worldwide are currently in negotiations for the hardcover publishing rights to the pope’s diary, though as of yet, none have thought to tap the gold mine that is the commune’s recent “Pope’s Diary Mad Libs� feature.

nventive sports in Madrid, Spain have made extremely trivial history by performing the tiniest writing ever done, copying the first paragraph of Cervantes' Don Quixote onto a silicon chip. The physicists, apparently fighting their own windmills in the effort, wrote the letters so small they claim the entire novel could be copied onto the tips of six human hairs, though they didn't name anyone who volunteered to do so. Whether the hair would belong to Grace Jones or David Lee Roth, they didn't offer—surely they realize hair is quite relative.

"What a fantastic feat!" exclaimed book critic and hair enthusiast Alameda Ramirez, also of Madrid. "It's an amazing step forward for people who like to copy things really small onto objects not paper."

The physicists performed the chip-writing as part of a 400th anniversary celebration of Cervantes' classic work, and those involved are very insistent no beer was involved. The group used a very expensive atomic force microscope for their frivolity. While some stuffy scientist-types were enthusiastic about the possible use of the microscope for writing more information on smaller chips and revolutionizing the computer industry, intellectual literary-types were more excited about the possibility for easier-to-store books.

"If you could fit all of Don Quixote onto six hairs, imagine how much you could write on someone's entire head?" librarian Marcos Gally thought out loud. "Assuming you didn't kill them in the process, of course. I could carry the entire annotated works of Shakespeare and all the great plays of the twentieth century, in all languages, in my hairbrush. I wouldn't necessarily be able to read them. Which is my second point—we need to get to work on microscopic bifocals right away."

His colleague, bookstacker Londo, agreed. "Yes, but sad that intellectuals like John Malkovich and Michael Stipe would get no books at all. While Pamela Anderson would have them in abundance."

Both then agreed the complete conversion from paper books to hair books should wait at least until better transplant options became available.

Most appealing about the tiny writing possibilities, according to literary historian Bernadette Fopps, is making the wealth of the world's literature available in the least expensive format ever.

"A library of every piece of printed material ever, from the Bible in Esperanto to the latest issue of Ultimate Spider-Man, could easily fit into most modern handbags. That is, if you didn't mind a purse full of hair. But of course, not everyone is going to want a copy of everything. Personally, as a fan of early twentieth century British psychological literature, I would relish the opportunity to have a complete catalogue of George Orwell's fiction on a single pubic hair. Though, maybe that's more appropriate for the work of Henry Miller—I'm not the one to make those kinds of decisions."

A few detractors weren't ready to get on board the small hair writing train just yet. Such as author Tom Clancy.

"I'm as prone to mistakes as the next guy," said the Hunt for Red October author. "If I get to page 435 and Jack Ryan is about to knock out the bad guy, and I have a few type-O's, is my editor going to be able to correct those mistakes? 'Cause I'm not going to pluck a new hair and start over. I love my craft, but there are limits, you know?"

Also reluctant to embrace the idea was Denny's waiter Christian Meams: "The last added frustration I need on my job is someone's reading a copy of the latest Michael Chabon book, they forget about it, and I get blamed for bringing them the burger with the novel in it."

It's been a rocky road since last year's election. Some would say we live in a different world now, even though we've agreed to keep calling it the same name. It's common knowledge the country has been split in half since the election—and I've, for once, been on the winning side. Eat that, elections of '92, '96, and 2000! But the time for gloating is over, or at least should be in another couple of weeks. The time for healing has begun.

Saying this as delicately as possible, you know who has the healing to do—yep, our liberal cousins. After all, the right's won the election, fair and square, at least as far as all the legitimate courts claim. It's time for the left and the right to come together, come together over where the right is. It's only fair. They got behind the Clinton administration when he won his victory in the '90s.

I don't think the reactionaries on the left have really considered the possibilities of an extreme-right government. Sure, they talk on and on about how many wars we're going to start, how the U.N. is falling apart and our old alliances becoming impedances on our path. You may have to put up with a lot of religious extremism, and moral watchdogs making life damn near intolerable on a daily basis—no enjoyable TV or radio, everything gone from 50 Cent to Spongebob. But look on the bright side. Or, if you're a religious fanatic, Mel Gibson-style, I guess that is the bright side.

Embrace the right side. At the very least, you won't feel guilty for being part of the richest nation in the world anymore. Hundreds of years of oppression, the genocide of the indigenous people, and lest we not forget all the crap we have to put up with about treating women as second-class citizens, and we didn't even start that. Our liberal consciousness, as instituted and maintained by the television set and virtually every other media source, can lay off already—we're right again.

No more feeling bad. It's time to feel good about being American again. Who cares if they hate us when we step on foreign soil? We don't need to go anywhere, really. The soldiers do—by the plane, truck, and boatload. Boy, do we need more soldiers, and quick. But us just normal folks, who have enough money where we don't have to join the military, we can stay safe and happy in our beds for the rest of our life without being exposed to the malice of the non-United States world. We've got everything we want here in the states. What do they have we don't have more of, and made better? History? We've got history. We don't even want what they got. Castles? We got White Castles. The only good thing they had that we didn't was The Office, so boo-yah! Now we've got everything.

I remind you liberals, you had 8 years with Clinton. It's only fair the right have its own 8 years to set everything back to zero. Personally, I think it's kind of fun. We move things a little to the left, then a little back to the right, and therefore keep ourselves in the exact same place for centuries. Which is what we all secretly want anyway, correct? Change is scary. All any of us want is for everything to stay the same from day to day, while we still have it figured out. You've never seen a normal person out in the street yelling for change, have you? It's always the leather-clad homosexual with his face painted and wearing the cornrows. If those kinds of people had their way we'd welcome just about anything people want to do as perfectly acceptable behavior. Next thing, we'd all be dressing like freaks.

I believe that's what happened in ancient Rome. One minute, someone makes an impassioned plea for letting people wear togas with no underpants. Next thing you know, the whole empire's crumbling.

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