he newest pope has been elected and chosen the name Pope Benedict XVI, and already the supreme being of Catholicism has taken a fierce stance against faded fascist groups by renouncing his own brief history with the Hitler Youth. In the world's entire Catholic population, it would seem to be an easy task to find one respectable cardinal who wasn't previously involved with the Nazi party, but apparently Joseph Ratzinger of Germany has some inside dish that landed him in the pope seat.

Responding to accusations of being a fascist, Ratzinger addressed his Nazi history and reassured detractors he was generally against the extermination of non-Catholics. In memoirs, Ratzinger described being "forced" into joining the Hitler Youth against his will as a youngster in Nazi-fied Germany. He left to study for the priesthood, aided by his anti-Nazi family (who kept their anti-Nazism secret), but was drafted into the army in 1943, where he put his hate for fascism to work foiling the Nazi machine from the inside, until he deserted and arranged capture by U.S. troops before moving on in fascism-free Germany to become a priest.

Ratzinger renewed his fight against Nazism Thursday, answering challenges from those who opposed his Popedome.

"I have always been an enemy of fascism in all its forms," said the Pope. "And I look forward to laying down a rigid doctrine of Catholicism, the one true religion, to be obeyed by one and all."

The selection of Pope Benedict came in the wake of the death of Pope John Paul II, who some sources only at the commune claim is still alive and has been taken into hiding by Vatican officials. Why? So a younger, fresh pope of Bel-Air could reinvigorate the stagnating Catholic church.

Pope Benedict has been an advisor of the late/missing Pope John Paul for years, and an opponent of reform within the Vatican. As Ratzinger, his secret pre-Pope identity, he argued against such church-devastating movements as religious pluralism, gay rights, feminism, communism, and liberation theology, which argues that the church should play an active role in politics of change.

Before his election, Ratzinger lectured the selection committee on "relativism" in the Catholic Church, and dedication to principle was unfairly labeled "fundamentalism."

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." Then, the officials still elected him.

As the new pope, Benedict compared efforts to change and reform the church to following whims and fads, and ended his early speeches by extending his arm and shouting a rousing, "Hail the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!" He was then asked by Vatican consultants to not ever do so again.

Theologians believed the selection of Ratzinger a clear attempt to distance the modern Catholic Church from the hedonistic reign of Polish Pope John Paul II.

"The 'anything goes' days of the old pope are gone," said professor of Theology at the Newark University Norm Chauncey, whom this reporter interviewed for strictly vindictive reasons. "The Church was obviously sick of becoming the laughing stock of the world, out of touch with the rigid morality of the modern era and its uncompromising dedication to religion. What better way to bring the wayward back to the fold than to force closer adherence to the guidelines set for Catholics in the 1960s?"

Thanking the professor, this reporter then went home and reaffirmed his commitment to atheism.

rian Nichols, the world's most rightfully-imprisoned black man, appeared Friday in the same courthouse where he killed three people on March 11 in Fulton County, Georgia. Asked to enter his plea by a very timid judge, surrounded by trigger-happy bailiffs and police, Nichols pleaded "déjà vu" in his case.

While his attorneys very politely reminded him he could only plead "guilty" or "not guilty," though "not guilty" seemed an extremely unlikely choice, Nichols laughed off his odd feeling of having been through it all before.

"Sorry," the very large former linebacker told the court, as they listened with wide eyes and trembling lips. "It's just like, wow, I feel like I've been here before in some way. I have this whole memory of struggles with officers and gunfire and—anyway… guess we should get to trial and stuff. So, who's the misguided people who are going to testify against me?"

The judge, who asked not to be identified or even revealed to the suspect, addressed the court from inside a large crate he or she had hauled up behind the bench, and suggested they put off the proceedings and gave the prosecutors a chance to build up a rock-solid case against the defendant—who, the judge acknowledged, certainly may very well not be guilty, for all we know.

A little more than a month ago, the gigantic nasty African-American Hannibal Lecter wrestled out of custody of court officers, secured a gun, and shot three people, including a judge, before making his way outside for a spree of carjackings and hostage-taking that eventually ended in his arrest. Numerous charges were added to Nichols' already long list, which included rape, aggravated sodomy, and false imprisonment, the charges of the previous trial where the convicted badass attacked the court. It was the second trial on the charges for Nichols, after the first trial ended when the jury couldn't come to a decisive verdict.

"Boy, I feel like quite the ass now," admitted one of the holdout jurors from the first trial, who asked to remain anonymous out of embarrassment and fear of possibly being killed. "I owe a few of my fellow jurors some apologies now, that's for sure. Back then I sure didn't think him capable of rape and kidnapping, but now that I think about it, I was worried about him leaping into the jury box and bludgeoning me to death. I just assumed the two were mutually exclusive."

Court officials took no chances with Nichols this time, bringing the besuited behemoth into court in leg irons, shackles, and wearing a global positioning device on his ankle that would self-destruct upon walking out of the courthouse area. For extra safety measures, the gray suit Nichols wore was also packed with gunpowder by deputies and a twenty-foot fuse trailed behind him, just in case he tried to make another break for it.

Bailiff Vigo Metzel was in charge of Nichols' secure transportation to and from the courthouse.

"Some of us wanted to give him one of those half-hockey masks to keep him from eating people, but we thought that just made him look even more terrifying. No one would want to be on the security detail then. Besides, no one would volunteer to put the mask on him."

When questioned as to why anyone would want to defend a client with so much stacked against them, including verifiable security footage from the very court where he's going to be tried, Nichols' attorneys, who also asked not to be identified, said that even though it was unlikely Nichols would go free, they wanted Nichols to know definitively whose side they had been on in the event he ever breaks out again.

In the meanwhile, Nichols has privately told his attorneys and the prosecution that he only made his escape attempt from the courthouse in March so he could find the real perpetrators of the crimes of which he was accused. If he had found them, Nichols said, he certainly would have killed them, too.

By 1550, the Spanish, British and French were engaged in a linguistic arms race to secure for their countries the truly longest word in the world. Over the next several decades the crown of word longness was passed back and forth between the three nations, as each discovered more and more excessively long verbiage.

First, Spain took the lead with their discovery of the 49-letter Dutch word kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereiding- swerkzaamheden in 1551, meaning "I banged the holy shit out of Helen at the children's carnival." This word held the title for some time and was considered invincible by a generation of Spaniards. The Dutch were particularly pleased with their fame, since they previously had only been known as the punchline of a joke about fire fighters wearing wooden shoes.

Then around 1579, the English pulled a rabbit out of their asses with the discovery of the slightly longer Mohawk word tkanuhstasrihsanuhwe'tsraaksahsrakaratattsrayeri, which means "the inside of the evil of the housing for the having of the taking of the talking of the meat."

Their glory was short-lived, however, when the French discovered a Welch village in England's own back yard named Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, 58 letters of Wales-speak that meant "Saint Mary's Church in the hollow of the ground near trees with a rapid whirlpool to the left of the red cave and down the street from the Church of Saint Steuben." This was particularly embarrassing to the English, who tried briefly to claim the Welch town's name didn't count, since its namer had died at the typewriter, resulting in an overlong mash of key-strikes that created the unbelievably long name.

The English didn't have long to argue, however, since a year later the Spanish topped them again with another Welch town, this one called Gorsafawddachaidraigodanheddogleddolonpenrhynareurd- raethceredigion, a 66-letter way of saying "The Mawddach station that looks like dragon teeth if you stand on your head facing from the Northern Penrhyn Road on the nice sunny beach by that beautiful place called Cardigan bay."

Thoroughly demoralized, the English fired their word-searching officials and passed a decree that the Welch couldn't name any more of their towns without English supervision.

Eager to piss another quart onto England's etymological grave, Spain took their turn in 1600 with the discovery of the incredible German word donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitaetenhauptbetrieb- swerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, meaning "a club for men."

Though certainly impressive at 80 letters and clearly representative of the German sickness for excessive word-lengths, England got their revenge and topped them all with the discovery of a hill in New Zealand called Tetaumatawhakatangihangakoauaota- mateaurehaeaturipukapihimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuaakitana- rahu. Though some accused the English of naming the hill this just to win the competition, the English insisted it was a real aborigine name meaning "This is the top of the hill where bony-kneed Tammy, that land-eating bitch, sat down, slid on her ass, climbed back up, swallowed some mountains and clouds, then played her nose flute until everyone was annoyed."

But just when England was getting their air of dry superiority back, Sweden came out of nowhere with their own longest word, the 130-letter behemoth nordöstersjökustartilleriflygspaningssimulatoran- läggningsmaterielunderhållsuppföljningssystemdiskussionsinläggs- förberedelsearbeten, which according to the Swedes meant "the longest word in the whole goddamned world."

Shortly after England declared war on Sweden, the Thai snuck in the back door and laid their proudest redundant verbiage on the table, the true motherfucker of a word Krungthepmahanakorna- mornratanakosinmahintarayutthayamahadilokphopnopparatraja- thaniburiromudomrajaniwesmahasatharnamornphimarnavatarn- sathitsakkattiyavisanukamprasit. One-hundred and sixty-three letters, and Thai as the night is long.

Though it was claimed at the time that the word was the name of a city in Thailand, all of the westerners present that day came away with the distinct impression that the word actually meant "Eat shit and die, England." Whatever the word's true meaning, its revelation plunged the world into chaos and strife for several hundred years as England attempted to make the whole world its bitch out of a deep insecurity over its word-length prowess.

American comedian Red Skelton entered the fray in 1946, re-opening the debate with his observation that the longest word is the word that follows the announcement, "And now a word from our sponsor!" Skelton was killed by an English assassin minutes after making the comment, so it remains unclear whether he was working for the Spanish or French at the time.

All of it proved moot, however, when modern technology allowed for the creation of new words beyond the wildest dreams of even the Germans. In 1961, an asshole epidemiologist named Theo Dingley from Vermont coined the name Acetylseryltyrosylseryliso- leucylthreonylserylprolylserylglutaminylphenylalanylvalylpheny- lalanylleucylserylserylvalyltryptophylalanylaspartylprolyliso- leucylglutamylleucylleucylasparaginylvalylcysteinylthreonylsery- lserylleucylglycylasparaginylglutaminylphenylalanylglutaminyl- threonylglutaminylglutaminylalanylarginylthreonylthreonylgluta- minylvalylglutaminylglutaminylphenylalanylserylglutaminylvalyl- tryptophyllysylprolylphenylalanylprolylglutaminylserylthreonyl- valylarginylphenylalanylprolylglycylaspartylvalyltyrosyllysylva- lyltyrosylarginyltyrosylasparaginylalanylvalylleucylaspartyl- prolylleucylisoleucylthreonylalanylleucylleucylglycylthreonyl- phenylalanylaspartylthreonylarginylasparaginylarginylisoleucy- lisoleucylglutamylvalylglutamylasparaginylglutaminylglutaminy- lserylprolylthreonylthreonylalanylglutamylthreonylleucylasparty- lalanylthreonylarginylarginylvalylaspartylaspartylalanylthre- onylvalylalanylisoleucylarginylserylalanylasparaginylisoleu- cylasparaginylleucylvalylasparaginylglutamylleucylvalylarginyl- glycylthreonylglycylleucyltyrosylasparaginylglutaminylaspara- ginylthreonylphenylalanylglutamylserylmethionylserylglycylleu- cylvalyltryptophylthreonylserylalanylprolylalanylserine for the Dahlemense Strain of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus, because he hated his research assistant and knew she would have to write the 1,185 letter name out several times a day by hand. Dingley also refused to accept any abbreviations when referring to his virus in conversations, which eventually led to him being beaten to death with bars of soap rolled up in hand towels during the International Epidemiologists convention in 1971.

So the next time some wise-ass tells you he knows the longest word in the world, or he's just a moron who takes the song "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" too seriously, you can kick him in the balls with the confidence that you're doing the right thing. Until next time, I'm Griswald Dreck.

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