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."

If anybody tells you that the longest word in the English language is Antidisestablishmentarianism, you know right away that they're full of the brown stuff. Though that's certainly a pretty long word, anyone in the know knows that this famous example was just the first thing Noah Webster could pull out of his ass when a reporter asked him the question, since he didn't want to look like an idiot and lose his title as "Mr. Word." In reality, there's no such thing as the longest word, since whatever word somebody suggests, you can just add "-ish" on the end and totally blow their minds. That's the kind of thing they teach you in college.

It's like trying to think of the biggest number. Some smartass can always come along and say "Oh yeah? What about that number… plus one?" Try it, it works in both cases. Just when you think you've got a real contender for world's longest word, say something like Postantefornicatetopiatacosushilumpfistgrapefruitdingdongery, right when your head starts to swell up big some joker will pop out of the woodwork and say "Not bad, but what about Postantefornicatetopiatacosushilumpfistgrapefruitdingdongerish?" And no matter how you kill them, you're still going to jail.

But just because there isn't actually a longest word in the world, doesn't mean that people haven't given their lives over the centuries to the insane quest to find it.

In 1096 A.D., the William the Conqueror, King of England, ordered a crusade to the Holy Land to find the longest word in the world. Nobody had any idea where the longest word actually might be, but the Middle East seemed like as good a place as any to start looking, since people over there were naming their kids things like Ptolenamonemy and Dodecazoroaster. It obviously wasn't in the Orient, since everyone over there was named Hin and Xi, so they clearly had no taste for long words. And even if they had, opinions were split over whether it would have counted or not, since a bunch of drawings of houses and cranes in a row just didn't make a word look all that impressively long.

Granted, the William the Conqueror didn't go to the Middle East himself, since that place was crawling with crazy religious fucks just drooling to chop off a white man's head with a dull bread knife, so he sent his son Dave instead. Dave the Conqueror was joined by Marcus Bonehound of Italy, and a Frenchman whose name nobody could remember, but everybody was pretty well certain he had been there. They were accompanied by a ragtag gang of zealots who had a lot of time on their hands and strong opinions about word length.

The Crusades lasted for over 250 years and resulted in the deaths of millions, but the longest word any of them could come up with was the Icelandic hæstaréttarmálaflutningsmaður, a 29-letter word which means "the sweat off a barrister's balls." How in the world they discovered an obscure Icelandic word in Jerusalem is anyone's guess, though most historians explain that Marcus Bonehound thought Icelandic chicks were red hot, and just leave it at that.

A second set of Crusades by the doggedly thorough English led to the discovery of the Turkish word çekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz, 43 letters of drivel meaning "Aren't you one of those ding-dongs from Czechoslovakia?" This satisfied westerners for a few hundred years, until the Queen of Spain got a bee up her ass in 1500 A.D. and demanded that Columbus go find her the world's longest word, for the goddamed glory of Spain.

Columbus came back after the seventh year of his heavily-funded quest with the news that the longest word in the world was "smiles," because there's a mile between the first and last letters. After the court realized he wasn't joking, a private investigation discovered that Columbus had taken the court's money and spent the last seven years drunk and basking naked on the beach in Jamaica. The great explorer was promptly beheaded and had his cheeks glued to his teeth in a permanent smile, his head then displayed in a jar in the royal chambers for the better part of two decades as a reminder to the lazy and humorous.

Join us next time when we continue the thrilling story of the longest word in the world. Until then, I'm Griswald Dreck.

º Last Column: Beware Fnord the Illuminati
º more columns