’m serious, what the hell happened last year? Did we mix up our multivitamins and roofies again? Because if anything at all of note happened in 2006, we missed it here at the commune. Best to check the tape.

Ah, right. Who could forget the midterm elections, when even Republican candidates were voting to toss their own corrupt asses out of office? Never before has the term “midterm� meant anything near this good, usually it’s just a sign that the time has come to stop having sex with that pregnant girl at the office.

The Iraq War trundled on, if you can call it a war when we stand by and watch while a country tears itself to shreds like that one Superman where he tried to rip his Clark Kent suit off, but forgot he had already done so and ended up pulling off all his skin like a Halloween costume and got a superinfection. That’s basically what has happened in Iraq; only the country is infected with assholes.

Speaking of assholes, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was hung like a horse, only not in the good sense of the phrase. It turns out Iraq doesn’t hang many people, preferring execution by forcible blowupification, and so Hussein had to be put down in the capital punishment wing of a veterinary hospital. Tack-y, Iraqis.

Paul McCartney’s pirate wife, Heather Mills McCartney, filed for divorce on the grounds of emotional cruelty, on account of McCartney’s habit of singing her Wings songs during their tender moments. McCartney took the news in stride, citing the fact that he’d run out of good “one leg� jokes months ago anyhow. This, moments before he launched into an a cappella rendition of ZZ Top’s “She’s Got Leg,� bringing the room to an uncomfortable silence.

Ariel Sharon had a stroke, and millions of children cried. Until adults explained that this was not the Ariel from The Little Mermaid. And so, millions of children went back to playing with their food.

It was the year of K-FED, some kind of sexually transmitted disease the young people were going nuts about this year. And it says here they finally caught the guy who killed JonBenet… I can’t be reading that right. Anyway, a bunch of Amish kids got shot, if that surprises anyone after all the crap they’ve pulled.

A bunch of yabbos tried to bring down airliners with Gatorade, resulting in a ban on anything wetter than Tony Danza’s back going through airport security and spiking sales of $5 bottles of tap water in airport gift shops.

And how could we have forgotten the Foley sex scandal? Republicans proved yet again that they do everything better than Democrats, including falling flat on their faces in public after quizzing underage boys about their boner etiquette. Thankfully for all involved, Foley quickly entered alcohol rehab, the only known surefire cure for rampant pedophilia.

Oh shit! Cheney shot some dude. Yeah, that was pretty memorable. Anyway, it was a year, end of story. Unless you died or got laid, in which case it was the most important year in the history of mankind. Congratulations.

fter years of staunch, stiff-jawed and clenched-buttocksed opposition to human cloning research, President Bush issued a startling reversal to his January "Pig Men" State of the Union address this week, and now is apparently in favor of the controversial scientific pursuit.

A tearful Bush, admittedly "a little behind" on his TV viewing due to "the usual work b.s.," finally got around to viewing the fifth and final season of HBO's acclaimed drama Six Feet Under on DVD this week, an event that seems to have had a profound effect on the president.

"Just being reminded that everyone you know will die one day, that really makes you think," explained the president, not previously known as a fan of thought.

"Keith!" Bush suddenly shouted, mid-sob. "Why'd he have to go so young?"

Those in the terrifying position of being close to the president's thought processes claim that a recent twelve-hour DVD marathon viewing of the show left Bush in a deep near-thoughtful funk, a condition aides hadn't seen the president in since the cancellation of Timecop in 1997.

"Seeing that documentary really got me thinking about the people close to me, and how to keep them from ever dying, ever," explained Bush. This reporter chose not to take this opportunity to explain the difference between drama and documentary, or the inevitability of death, to the president.

"At first I was thinking about time travel," continued Bush. "But that never worked out so hot in those Michael J. Fox movies. Plus, it gets all confusing and hard to follow the story. Then I thought about the fountain of youth, but I couldn't think of any movies where that really worked either. I just kept thinking of the end of Gremlins where that scary thing melts in the fountain—yuck. Anyway, then I turned on the SciFi Channel and that got me thinking about human cloning."

Reports indicate this is not the first time the president's opinions and policies have been changed by popular entertainment, including Bush's proposed tax breaks for hot rod owners last year after viewing The Dukes of Hazzard, and the president's call for storm windows to be installed in the White House after finally getting around to seeing Twister in 2001.

Critics have long suggested that most of Bush's policy moves and public statements over the course of his two terms have been inspired by old Clint Eastwood movies and various Chuck Norris action vehicles. Debate rages concerning the timing of Bush's 2002 statements about clamping down on whistleblowers, coming as they did days after the president reportedly attended a screening of the environmentally-themed Steven Soderbergh film Erin Brockovich.

"I guess it's easy to feel one way about a subject, until it potentially affects someone you care about," Bush explained about his change of heart in the cloning debate. Asked if he would then be sending his daughters to Iraq to help with the nation-building efforts, Bush ignored the question and asked if this reporter had time to stick around for a spontaneous viewing of Top Gun on DVD.

As you can tell, sir, the commune is back and better than nothing. Also, better than we previously were. I for one am quite chagrinned at our long absence from the Internet, and anyone who knows me can tell you it's very difficult for me to be chagrinned because of how much I hate using the word "grin" in a sentence. And now I've used it three times. I won't need to use it again until 2010, and I make that pledge to myself now.

Many of you are undoubtedly wondering what happened. Or, speaking completely honestly, most of you are wondering how you got here from your friend's blog, just because you clicked on the underlined words "cheap imitation" or the like. I know, though, that commune fan Emil Zender and his many followers are asking what the hell happened to us last year, and I haven't been sleeping on the job in finding out either. Honestly, I haven't slept since maybe November, and then it was only a quick nap. You'll all be happy to know, those who care, that my thousands of dollars invested in discovering the problem have discovered the problem. It's a fine feeling, like when you go looking for your car keys and you find them in the last place you look—usually for me the bathtub, where they were playing stand-in for the sailboat.

I had the good fortune to hire renowned private investigator Pierre Banjo. If you haven't heard of him, I'm not surprised, he's not that kind of renowned. He's only renowned with the people he tells about his illustrious career, and I was fortunate enough to meet him in a bar and ply him with alcohol until he revealed his fame to me. This was circa June, which happens about a month after regular June, and I was well in the throes of panic about the many emails I received regarding the missing updates of the commune. All from Emil Zender. If we didn't get issues of the commune up and running again, we would have to return all our sponsor money to our sponsors. Assuming they ever found the website and realized we weren't updating.

It was an expensive quest, let me tell you that, but no problem is too big for me to throw money at. Finally, just before Christmas, Dr. Banjo called to inform me he had discovered the problem in our missing new editions. He had actually uncovered the source of the problem during a visit to my home office several months earlier, circa July proper, but did several months worth of follow-up investigation at my expense just to be sure he found the right problem.

You see, as part of my investment into the 2006 commune improvements, I bought myself a laptop. I forewent the expensive iMacs I had heard so much about and bought a iRoc. I thought it would help support the poor Iraq terrorist cells our government has had on the run for long months, but it turns out they're called iRocs because they're all using the licensed image of actor Charles S. Dutton. But all this is only column filler. While the iRoc laptop helped me work from home and connect to the internet, I still didn't have the expertise to put it all on the Internet the hard way—not much of a web-designer, doesn't run in the Bagel blood. And driving to the office once a week seemed like a complete waste. Fortunately, the man who sold me the iRoc also sold me a Magic Internet Scanner—you plug it in and scan the printed columns in and they automatically go onto the Internet! In retrospect I probably should have checked out the website to make sure they were updating when I used the machine, but thatseemed like a lot of extra time, and I've had trouble finding the commune on the Net. Like all our readers.

So as you may have guessed, the Magic Internet Scanner didn't work right. It was instead shredding our columns into confetti each time I ran one through. The word "shredder" on the top turned out not to be an affectionate nickname for the machine. I'm also starting to doubt I had it hooked up correctly and thinking maybe Tony Z. sold me a terrible bit of goods.

But even the best of us—me—can fall for a conman occasionally. Now that we've crossed that dark period for the commune, I look forward to spearheading the best year yet for the little news site that could. Expect the best in 2007. I even met a guy in a bar yesterday who swears he can get our White House press room credentials back for only $5,000. How can you not put your faith in a man named Smitty?

º Last Column: Alito Supreme
º more columns