he gonzo box office success of Lions Gate Entertainment’s new film The Hunger Games has drawn criticism from North Korea’s beloved madman Kim Jong-un this week, as the diminutive leader called bullshit on the killing of teenagers in ritualized sport suddenly becoming cool after his country had been doing it for decades.

"Once again a Hollywood movie has made a mockery of the glorious North Korean lifestyle," griped Kim. "Same thing happen in Dark City and Mad Max."

Kim Jong-un, back in power after the nation’s failed experiment with Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was rapidly abandoned due to Dotcom being jailed for paying to see The Smurfs, violating North Korea’s longstanding policy regarding the mandatory pirating of Hollywood films, added that The Hunger Games was "popcorn bullshit" and that unlike Westerners, the fortunate citizens of North Korea don’t have to pay exorbitant movie theater prices to see that kind of thing every day.

The insular nation, which subjects its citizens to harrowing games of life and death on a daily basis, is no stranger to televised competitions that would probably be called The Hunger Games if they’d thought of that first. These include the capital city’s weekly "Fight For Your Food Fun Fight" events, which critics have condemned as a natural result of the state’s failed economy and collapsed chain of food production disguised as a trumped-up game show where regular citizens punch each other to death over the last canned ham in the entire city. Regardless, the North Korean tourism board has been quick to capitalize on the success of the Hunger Games film, already advertising tourism packages where Hunger Games fans can tour the Pyongyang Deathdrome and kill an actual North Korean teenager with their bare hands for less than the average New Yorker spends on "Whoops, I ran over another homeless person" insurance.

The Hunger Games opened to a gangbusters $155 million in its first weekend in theaters, a figure described by Hollywood pundits as "fucking bananas" and "bigger than $154 million," and representing the biggest box-office opening in history for a non-sequel film. Critics dispute the importance of this claim, however, since it was also the first non-sequel film to be released since 2007.

Based on the first of a berserkly popular series of young adult novels by writer Suzanne Collins, the books and film alike have been criticized for being heavily derivative of previous source materials, such as the Japanese film Battle Royale, the American films The Running Man, Series 7, The Condemned, The Most Dangerous Game, Lord of the Files, The Truman Show, Spartacus and Death Race 2000, the Italian film The 10th Victim, the Stephen King story The Long Walk and the Shirley Jackson novel The Lottery. In honor of this long chain of shit being ripped off, the CW has already begun filming the pilot for their own Hunger Games knock-off television series, The Selection, which involves a cast of lesser-known actors rehashing the plot of The Hunger Games on a weekly basis.

When asked recently if she thought her novels were derivative of these previous works, Collins responded "What? I can’t hear you because of the noise from all the money I’m drowning in over here," before literally drowning in an avalanche of hundred dollar bills. Funeral services will be held Tuesday at the cash landfill in North Hollywood where rich people are buried.

In spite of the author’s death, the white-hot success of the first film all but guarantees that Lions Gate will return to Collins’ grave at least twice more to adapt the other two books in the series, 2009’s Catching Fire and 2010’s Oxycute ’em! in hopes of sating the bloodlust of twelve-year-old American girls. Stars Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson have reportedly already signed on for three sequels, with a uniquely ironic clause in their contracts stating that if they back out of the sequels for any reason, they’ll be hunted by hordes of teenaged fans out for blood.

Meanwhile, North Korea’s Jong-un has demanded that Hollywood filmmakers stop ripping off ideas from his country for their dystopian sci-fi visions.

"You get your own ideas," the beloved "Supreme Tall Sunshine Man" spat into a microphone shaped like a hamburger. "I don’t want to see any more movie with robots that look like humans but are spies for government, or people with clocks stuck in their arms ticking down to time when they die, or genetic-engineered battle giraffes, or desalination plant that run on dead babies."

"In closing," Jong-un decreed, while eating a roll of Fruit-by-the-Foot, "I also downloaded bittorrent of The Smurfs, and there’s not goddamned thing you people can do about it."

iscount quasi-airline JetBlue has announced that in-flight movies will be cancelled for all future flights and replaced with a live variety show put on by the flight crew, in response to the glowing praise the airline received for an improvised show put on by the crew of JetBlue flight 191 from New York to Las Vegas this morning.

"We had to do something," explained stewardess Theresa Bower. "The scheduled movie for the flight was supposed to be Ides of March but I accidentally sent that disc back to Netflix instead of the Bumfights DVD I was supposed to put in the envelope, and the only other DVD we had on the plane was Space Jam. And nobody wanted to subject people to that. Thankfully Captain Dave came through when the chips were down. We had no idea he was such an electric performer."

The show began with Captain Dave Westman "accidentally" locking himself out of the cockpit after getting up and wandering around the plane for several minutes, at one point standing in the middle of the aisle and eating the lunch meat out of several sandwiches from the stewardess’ service cart and loudly complaining that they didn’t have any bologna. The captain was later seen trying to insert his car keys into the doorknob of one of the plane’s unoccupied lavatories, then arguing with a pregnant woman in coach that she was sitting in his seat. Upon returning to the cockpit and finding the door locked, the uproarious comedy began.

"It was like the best Flintstones episode ever," raved passenger Laura Styles of Brooklyn. "The way he was whining in that sing-songy voice about being let back into the cockpit, I pulled a Bush and totally almost choked on a pretzel."

"It was Laurel and Hardy with air marshals," agreed Styles’ seatmate, Sandra Pullium. "Nobody expected him to drop his pants like that. I was laughing so hard when he tried to knock down the cockpit door with his dick that I didn’t even know what was going on."

"We gotta pull the throttle back, we’re gonna fucking die!" screamed the captain, while furiously pounding on the cockpit door. According to witnesses, the co-pilot responded "Dave’s not here, man," to a raucous round of applause and wolf-whistles from the flight’s passengers.

A hilarious slapstick routine followed, with flight attendants attempting to wrap the irate captain in a comically clichéd straight-jacket, then ending up accidentally whipping off their tops instead and dancing atop the first row of seats to the theme song from Austin Powers.

While the stewardesses were dancing, the captain screamed "There is a bomb on this plane and all you motherless fucks will die in the cleansing fire if we don’t land in downtown Chicago right fucking now! Say your fucking prayers!" before unleashing a fearsomely awkward karate kick to the cockpit door.

"Oh my God," reminisced passenger Todd Franklin of Carson City, Nevada. "When he did that karate thing I almost shit my pants. I had to stick my face in the air sickness bag because I was hyperventilating from laughing so hard."

The flight suddenly plummeted 10,000 feet after the captain bashed down the cockpit door with a fire extinguisher and began comically wrestling the co-pilot for the plane’s controls, resulting in a sissy slap fight that had all the children on the plane calling out for more.

The show proved so popular the flight had to be diverted to Rick Husband International Airport in Amarillo, Texas, so more passengers could be let on for the sold-out evening show.

"When those strippers dressed as cops led the captain off the plane in fake handcuffs, we just all stood up and applauded," explained passenger Lisa Redgraves. "We all wanted an encore but they never came back."

"I hope JetBlue realizes what they have here," mused passenger Roger Trenton of Nardswallow, Nevada. "This show could run for years. I guarantee you the other airlines are going to have copycat shows before the month is out. I only hope they do it right. I could see room for a hilarious inept terrorist character or something like that being worked into other airlines’ shows, but you’ve got to do it right and not just play the smoking bomb underwear for cheap laughs."

I don’t even know where to start, bizarrely loyal commune fans.

Much like when you attempt to make a casserole, it’s tempting to try and trace the thread back and discover where exactly you went wrong. Was it when you added the pickles? Was it when you had the idea to make a casserole in the first place? Was it when the NSA kicked your front door down and dragged Ivan Nacutchacokov screaming and flailing out into the night?

Some pundits would surely argue that inviting Crochet! magazine to set up shop in my mother’s attic was asking for trouble. Due to simultaneous downturns in the publishing and Kleenex box cozy industries as well as rising insurance premiums, Crochet had lost their lease on their Assflush, New Jersey offices, which they’d moved to a few years ago without leaving a forwarding address after Omar Bricks somehow burnt down their office in Asslatch. Some mom’s-basement-dwelling conspiracy theorists (I don’t mean that as a dig, I mean they literally live in my mom’s basement and work for the commune) argued that Bricks couldn’t have burnt down the Asslatch offices since he was in jail in Panama at the time.

But all reliable witnesses tell the same story, that Crochet! received an anonymous package in the mail that turned out to be a huge box of annoying glitter that got absolutely everywhere, and that the glitter somehow combined with the seven gallons of elephant shit Bricks had previously mailed to Crochet!, forming some kind of prank napalm. All it took was a spark from the teddy bear Omar had delivered a week later that sang Happy Birthday to You in a loud, high pitched voice over and over nonstop for a week before melting down and catching on fire, igniting the napalm and Crochet!’s huge stash of crocheted shawls, baby hats, coasters and old lady slippers they were holding onto in case of a governmental crackdown or the endtimes. Needless to say, the resulting fire was huge and weird and didn’t smell very good.

As possibly the world’s only commune/Crochet! fandom dual-citizen, I couldn’t pass on the once-in-anyone’s-lifetime-ever chance to rescue both of my favorite publications and quickly dispatched a singing telegram to invite the Crochet! staffers to share space with my mom’s horrific doll collection in the attic. No one was more surprised than I was when they accepted, especially since it violated several restraining orders Crochet! themselves had filed. But the promise of free rent and Raoul Dunkin’s lawn pit BBQ proved to be too much to resist.

Some opinionated commenters have suggested that I upset the natural balance of things by having Crochet! in the attic and the commune in the basement, reversing the long-standing tradition of Crochet! being the commune’s "asshole downstairs neighbors" as the entire commune staff continued to call them even after months of them living and working two floors above. And I was constantly reminded of how this messed up Griswald Dreck’s famous rhyme "Crochet! on bottom and commune on top, fuck you Aesop!" which everyone loved even though nobody was sure which fable he was referencing. But, frankly this arrangement just made more sense since the commune staff were constantly burying their various mistakes in the crawlspace under my basement and I knew if I put the commune in the attic, all of those mail-order brides and dead Pomeranians would just get shoved out the window and end up on my lawn.

And besides, there was always the buffer of the main floor of the house between the two staffs, an air gap full of my mom and Doug having sex that even I hated to cross. I figured that would be enough, but of course it’s obvious now this was like stuffing a wolverine and a Kardashian in a sack and expecting things to work themselves out.

Honestly, things did go pretty smoothly for the first few months, a few driveway knife fights notwithstanding. It took a little while to get the Crochet! folks up to speed on how to deal with Ivana Folger-Balzac since they weren’t used to dealing with psychopaths, but before long they were dropping into the fetal position on the ground like pros the second she pulled into the driveway on one of her frequent visits in hopes of getting someone to slip up and give up Ivan’s whereabouts. They also adjusted well to the conga line of bill collectors and process servers constantly flowing up the front steps all day, and if you ask me in their time here they published some of their strongest special issues on potholders and cat diapers ever.

But then, of course, Omar Bricks found us. Say what you will about him, but that guy’s Crochet!-dar is impeccable. He never actually finished a column while he was here, I think mostly because he was so busy making Crochet!’s life completely miserable, to the glee of the rest of the commune staff. Those few weeks are kind of a blur in my memory, I remember Omar replacing all the fruit roll-ups with fly paper, and replacing their toilet seat with a thin paper replica. At some point he’d got a whole case of tiny walkie talkies at Costco and proceeded to install them in all of my mom’s horrific dolls in the attic. You haven’t been woken up until you’ve been woken up by 57 deeply disturbing porcelain dolls singing Sex Dwarf at 4 in the morning. But the last straw was when Omar asked the Crochet! staffers to watch his dog Foghat while he went to Burning Man. I know that sounds kind of anti-climactic but trust me, that attic was uninhabitable within 48 hours and I had to call FEMA after the hardiest survivors from the Crochet! staff had cleared out.

I must apologize commune readers, but the thought of all those Crochet! staffers flocking to the bus stop with their little crocheted suitcases and beanies is a little too much for one Emil Zender to bear just this moment. Check back in next week, brave friends, and we’ll bring the rest of this tale home.

Zincerely,
Emil Zender

º Last Column: Return to Zender (Week 50)
º more columns