HOLLYWOOD, CA - Nell Carter, star of Gimme a Break and not much else, wooed fans and naysayers alike last month, when she announced her new guaranteed weight loss program, \"Death\".
In the first week alone, Carter lost a whopping 137 pounds, and does not plan on stopping anytime soon.

My mom wasn\'t a very good mom. I\'m not mad anymore; or at least, I\'m not as mad as I used to be. She married my dad the day after she turned 16, and squeezed me out shortly after. She didn\'t finish high school or even care about it. In the next four years, while her marriage was falling apart at the seams, she managed to have two more babies. The year after my parents divorced, they decided they didn\'t want us anymore. My dad drove us all night to my grandma\'s house, and told her that if she didn\'t take us, they were giving us up to the state.

Sean stood idly by the baggage claim, scanning the flood of new arrivals for a familiar face. It occurred to him that this was the first time in his entire academic life that he was looking forward to the beginning of the new school year. After one summer in Spaulding, his sleepy Midwestern hometown, he couldn\'t help but miss the lack of a curfew, the round-the-clock activity of campus life, or even the bi-weekly all-nighters with his roommates which had comprised his freshman year. He had especially been looking forward to seeing all the friends he had made at college.

Clouds dominate the landscape, unfriendly, detached. Traffic is running medium-light, with no major delays, no serious accidents. No severe weather is expected through the weekend. The radio says, “Experience a new kind of clean.” Someone’s starting their day with deep knee-bends and controlled breathing. A foreign government shuttles military personnel in covered trucks. The television mentions escalating tensions, then goes into an explanation of the Chinese New Year. An old woman in a flower-print dress surveys her winter lawn, unconvinced the tulips will ever come up again.

3:00AM - I walk the street unable to sleep. I duck into an alley for personal inspiration. The snapping ring of my Zippo, and the remaining inch of my Top Secret botany project crackling in the silence attract no attention but my own. Crosswise the boulevard and two blocks down, a police helicopter circles like a buzzard overhead, waiting for something new to expire; the spotlight prying brightly into random moments of anonymous human existence, like some giant peeping beast with a phallus engorged with garish white light.

Sadly, Mark was born without a heart. Doctors x-rayed that poor kid more times than Lois Lane’s pretty pink panties were scanned by Superman’s lustful eyes. And every x-ray showed there was not a heart to be found in his entire body.

From where I live I cannot catch sight of the sky. The power and phone lines hold me back and tie me down from the grainy, gray smudge that steadily leaks poison onto the ground. I pass by more people in a day than the entire population of my hometown. But no one looks at each other. No one makes contact. No one even knows my name. As we walk past one another I cannot even focus on their features. They are jumbled, fuzzy, and blurred-- no emotions-- just empty husks shuffling through life. Hiding behind masks, their clothing emblazoned with the names of people they will never know.

TODAY\'S LESSON: ROMANCE
In the eternal pursuit of knowledge, scholars have dredged the depths of every known text to find the answers to man’s greatest questions. Little did they know that the solution to all of philosophy’s pondering could be found at their local video store.
1. The female friend that has been helping you get the girl of your dreams will show up at your prom/dance/party looking hot, and admit that she\'s always loved you.
2. The person you fight with the most is in love with you. Slip them a roofie and get it over with.

In olden days, when a president wanted to bomb the bejesus out of another country, we stood by him. So what if that country was ill-equipped to counter our brutal attacks? We saw the murderous air strikes for what they were: a bolster to our economy.
And look at us now. Gas prices are high, unemployment is high, and WE must be HIGH NOT TO SUPPORT WAR!!!
But perhaps you don’t support war because you don’t understand all the reasons we NEED to go to war. So I’ll outline them for you:

My fellow Americhristians,
The world right now is a very scary place. Heads of State are in a heady state. Missles are being pointed in innocent people’s general directions. Military presences are growing. Even here, in the greatest country east of the Mississippi, we are under a state of alert, looking over our shoulders for crazy, bearded terrorists. The realness of our own human mortality is being emphasized to us in great detail on a daily basis.
And it has to stop.