Hope springs eternal

Finishing her shift on the trampoline with a lazy backward somersault, Hope Riley Rechard-Johanneson, 22, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, gave a high five to her replacement, Elaine Hope Verminelli before dismounting and heading for the showers. Walking in the manner of a duck in order to keep from pissing herself after so many hours spent bouncing around in the air, Ms. Rechard-Johanneson made it to the toilet just in time. “I normally remember to not drink water before a shift, but, today, it slipped my mind,” she said while a torrent of urine streamed into the porcelain bowl. “My employer is, after all, paying me or someone else with the name Hope to spring eternal; the girl who usually serves as my break-time replacement didn't show up today, so I had to tough it out.”

In addition to paying young ladies named Hope to spring eternally upon a trampoline positioned so that he can watch them jumping from his favorite sitting-chair, Naithen James Otelo, 75, a widower who claims to have made his fortune “selling knockoff designer luxury goods to dumb tourists,” also maintains a number of other folk wisdoms on his property. He pays different girls named Hope (the larger, more corpulent ones) to float around in his Olympic-sized swimming pool; he runs a stable of charlatans who are tasked with always trying to bullshit him, a bullshitter; he employs a team of balloonists to make sure a giant clock suspended from a helium-filled dirigible never touches the ground; he subsidizes his neighbors' lawn maintenance programs so that their grass is always more lush than his own; and he makes sure to tip those of his employees who attend to their tasks without undue and wasteful haste.

“As a way of paying for college, this sure beats stripping,” said Ms. Verminelli, 19, who is originally from Flagstaff, Arizona. “But five hours of non-stop bouncing on a trampoline four days a week is wreaking havoc on my equilibrium. Seriously, I awake from sleep due to nightmares I have in which everything is bouncing – people, roads, the sky, everything. At night, when the boss is sleeping, he provides us with headlamps so we can read books while we're springing, but, in the long run, it's still kind of unsettling. Again, though, it beats giving blowies at interstate rest-stops.” While watching two Hopes slap palms as part of their mandatory hand-off ritual, Mr. Otelo sighed contentedly. “I like my truisms to be right out there, bold and beautiful, the wisdom of the ages being acted out in my back yard. I find it comforting to know that, out on my racetrack, jockeys are waiting until the race is done to change horses, and that, down in the fields, the first birds to arrive each morning get first dibs on food.”

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

toe stays cold

In brazen violation of a longstanding agreement with its host, the second-smallest left toe of thirty-something whorphan Dagobert Mikal Dillinger refused to warm up. No number of additional woolen layers and no increased proximity to heat sources could convince the stubborn digit to let in the heat. “Hells no I won't change – I likes it frigid,” the toe said while shunting warm blood to its neighbors. “Not until that scumbag finally turns the fucking heat on in this house and stops pretending to be hard enough to withstand the cold, as if he were some sort of polar bear, will I get warm willingly. It's bad enough during the day, but last night, we went to sleep without sufficient covers, and I had to wake Dagobert up twice so that he would drag me back in under the blankets and keep me from freezing off. Twice!”

The toe has seen its fair share of abuse: in the early Nineties, after having been rubbed to an open blister against the steel toe of Mr. Dillinger's work boot while he was on a cultural exchange mission in Israel, it's raw meat was plunged into the Dead Sea, whereupon it went numb for a month; neglected and overlooked, it has suffered regularly from bacterial infections caused by a buildup of lint and other gunk in the trough it shares with its direct shoe-mate, the little toe, because of a lack of regular washings; and, just this past summer, it was subjected to months of direct contact with sharp rocks and pointy sticks as part of Dagobert's policy of mowing the grass barefoot. The list goes on, according to the digit's claims, to include many a nocturnal stubbing and the occasional rasped cuticle.

“If DMD gets his shit together and finally puts on enough clothes to protect me and the other extremities from wanton exposure to frigid temperatures, I might – repeat, might – consider letting in some of the preheated bodily fluids that keep getting sent my way. It's not as if I like to flirt with Madame Frostbite, but I don't really see any other way to draw attention to my plight, and the plight of all those other digits who are too timid to speak out.” When last seen, Mr. Dillinger appeared to be mulling a hot foot bath, with the chance of full bodily submersion hovering at 35%.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

man finds limit

Ignoring the broken drywall, the incinerated shrubbery, the stolen cars, and a gaggle of underage girls babbling incoherently in an upstairs guest room, thirty-something local party king Willem Quincy Landstrider lost his cool when he almost sat directly on a small mound of toenail clippings. “Well that just takes it,” he said while using piece of a broken deck chair to scrape the loose nails into a nearby flower bed whose blossoms had been torn out and thrown into the neighbor's pool. “Of all the lowly, fucked-up, inconsiderate things to do, some asshole just had to clip his toenails and leave them on this ledge. Does anyone know who did this?” Willem yelled to no one in particular, walking from one heap of alcohol-poisoned teenagers to the next, toeing half-dead prom queens and knee-hugging key team captains alike but getting no response.

“I am going to make who did this clean it up,” the host said as he was striding toward his late parents' palatial country home, weaving between punji stick traps crudely camouflaged with criss-crossed golf clubs and wet newspaper and kicking in the splintered remnants of his home's back door. Muttering things such as, “Motherfucker gonna pay,” and “Bitch ain't safe nowhere,” Willem demanded an explanation from every person he came across: he accosted a group of men circle-jerking in a linen closet; he stopped a man from raping a prized sheep dog in order to check the condition of the zoophile's toenails; and he interrupted a ritualistic self-castration just long enough to interrogate all persons present.

Ending his search without having found anyone whose nails appeared to have been recently cut, Mr. Landstrider contemplated his next move while fishing a floater out of the fish-pond. “Do you think it would be too much to brought the cops in to help me find the toe-cutter?” he asked a toothless elderly woman whose shirt was stained with vomit. She stopped flinging spent rifle cartridges into the water, looked up, stared for a moment at the hirsute men assembling a meth-amphetamine lab next to the garden shed, poked the bloated corpse with a broken barbecue skewer, and nodded. “Yeah, you're probably right,” Willem said, dragging away the dead body and laying it on a large pile of smoldering leaves. “They'd probably just ask to see everyone's toes, which I've done already. Although… hey, granny, would you take off your slippers for a moment?” Her crime exposed, the septuagenarian fled into a nearby copse of trees and vanished into the shadows.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

Grigovia severs ties

Israel's wanton shelling of civilian areas and its stated objective of bombing Gaza back into the Stone Age were cited as some of the reasons behind the Glorious Republic of Grigovia's (GROG) move to withdraw its diplomatic mission to that Middle Eastern nation. Additionally, Grigovia's legislative body issued a decree condemning the hostile acts perpetrated by the land-grabbing, toddler-bombing Israelis, asking kindly that they remove their ambassador and shutter their embassy on Embassy Row in beautiful downtown Grig. Regarding a potential loss of productivity resulting from these actions, all citizens we interviewed and every politician with whom we spoke agreed that belt-tightening and personal privation were preferable to hands stained with the blood of innocents. Many Grigovians are employed in the extraction and refinement of rare-earth-minerals, which are much sought-after by armed forces and weapons-technology companies around the globe.

The severing of ties extended beyond Grigovia's legislature and foreign ministry as scores of businesses throughout Grig's industrial belt canceled contracts or withdrew bids with Israeli companies involved in the latest bloodshed, with the Zionists' heavy-handed military actions against highly populated areas being given as the primary cause. The local organization Home for Orphans of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine (HOIOP), which maintains not only hospitals in the Gaza strip and the West Bank but also numerous full-service complexes across Grigovia has announced a drive to raise funds to provide newly homeless Gazans with food, shelter, and medical attention. (Persons interested in donating to HOIOP are asked to phone its national headquarters at 772 0198-233.)

While he was packing up his few belongings, Tharmol Cheuryind, Grigovia's (now) former ambassador to Israel, underlined the delicacy of the situation, blaming, in part, the Israeli news-media for heightening the state of alarm. “Over the last few weeks, I have been watching stations such as al-Jazeera and al-Aribiiya on satellite TV as well as local Israeli newscasts coming in on the airwaves. I am not surprised that the vast majority of Israelis support Operation Pillar of Defense; Hebrew-speaking newscasters have been hurling vitriol and abuse at the Palestinians for months now, casting them as sub-human and blaming them exclusively for the deterioration of the peace process, regardless of increased Israeli settlement activity.” (During the course of our interview, it was announced that the government of Egypt had arranged a cease-fire between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces.) “My orders have not changed,” said Tharmol, zipping up his carry-on duffel bag and walking through the embassy one last time, turning off lights and setting the thermostat to away. “I am a student of history,” he said while waiting for a taxi to take him to Tel Aviv International Airport. “And, therefore, I know that peace deals around here never last. If I get a call on my satellite phone telling me to come back, I shall, but, until then, I am going home.”

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

cop map debuts

In an effort to reign in the power of America's various police forces and to hold them accountable for their actions, cities across the land have subscribed to a new system for tracking police officers' location and activity in real-time. Pulling data automatically from GPS units already installed in most of the cruisers used by law enforcement today, the system – which is unofficially called Watch-Watching – also relies on input from the officers themselves. By entering an activity-specific code into his laptop computer at least once every fifteen minutes, the public servant tells the system what he is doing, be it patrolling, looking for a suspect, following up on a report, lurking, violating somebody's Constitutional rights, or just plain acting the fool. If the code as entered does not match paperwork filed following an arrest or citation, the system will help individuals wrongfully targeted by the pigs prove that their rights were abused or that they were discriminated against; alternately, codes that do match paperwork can be used to strengthen an officer's case.

Watch-Watching allows ordinary citizens to keep tabs on the persons tasked with keeping them safe. By logging onto QuisCustodietIpsosCustodos.net (Latin for “Who watches the watchers?”), regular citizens can note the location and direction-of-travel of any police officer in their vicinity so that they might go about their business without undue exposure to a role-crazy, rule-heavy cop. Since 11 September 2001, many police departments and tens of thousands of individual cops have convinced themselves that every traffic stop will bag them the next bin Laden, that the protections clearly defined in the United States Constitution do not exist, and that all citizen who step outside the lines – even if only briefly – deserve to be stopped, questioned, and kicked in the head while handcuffed. Today, Americans are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist; instead of protecting us from external threat, many police officers have themselves become internal threats, abusing rights, ending lives, and generally treating us – their pay-masters and the persons they are charged with protecting – with malicious and murderous contempt.

Such abuses of power must end; such overreaches must stop. Only through united action might we guide our police forces back into the roles which they filled for so long – those of selfless helper, trusted protector, and honor-bound guardian. Watch-Watching is just one tool in the citizen's arsenal, just one means by which she can protect her Liberty from abuse, her body from violation, and her virtue from destruction. Other tools include: filming unlawful or overly aggressive police activity and forwarding that footage to copblock.org; knowing one's rights and, more importantly, actively protecting them; maintaining awareness of this growing internal threat by speaking with one's peers and encouraging civic leaders to join in the struggle against persons who think that badges confer special rights. As with any new tool, Watch-Watching will only be a strong as those who wield it; we at Mentiri Factorem Productions suspect that certain police departments and officers will find ways to hide their movements so that they might continue to abuse the rights of non-violent civilians and innocent pursuers of Happiness alike, murdering and maiming to their hearts' content. Therefore, dear reader, keep your head on a swivel, a song in your heart, and drive it like you stole it. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit; 場黑麥

Grigovians welcome winter

In the past, when greater Europe was wallowing in the cruel injustices of medieval depravity, winter in Grigovia was a time of communal sharing, a period of cooperative productivity. Even under the Soviet juggernaut's yoke, the people of this landlocked little republic managed to help one another out in times of scarcity, through diligent effort and clandestine communication maintaining a vast network of charity-driven black markets.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the old traditions still hold, that, when the first snows begin to fall in the dizzying mountain passes, the older high-valley denizens seal up their homes and hop buses into town while their younger counterparts break out snow-shoes and cross-country skis. “One learns to go without,” said ten year old Rathma Eroyip as she was carrying an armload of seasoned burning wood to an elderly neighbor's house. “I, for example, have come to terms with no longer being able to bicycle to school, and I know I must soon learn to ski so that I might continue attending classes in Grissend, which lies three kilometers to the east of here.” Rathma allowed us to escort her for the rest of the morning, during which she helped shovel out someone's back door, assisted in the manufacture of a thick woolen quilt, and learned how to attach and adjust the bindings on her first pair of cross-country skis. (The young lady's family had just recently moved up into the hills, to: “toughen these kids up a bit, and prepare them for life's exertions,” according to their mother.)

Wherever this news team went, Grigovians appeared to be contributing to the communal good in meaningful ways. We saw citizens handing out thick woolen blankets by the truckload, distributing baskets of hard cheeses and pickled vegetables in primarily immigrant neighborhoods, holding canned food drives and generally going out of their way to live up the notion that “Twigs in bundles become pillars”, Grigovia's unofficial national motto. “Instead of spending tax dollars on fleets of vehicles to plow the roads and contaminate the land with salts, we buried all power and telecommunications lines and created in even the smallest high-valley village satellite nodes for essential services where citizens can obtain medical care, educational materials, access to the national Wi-Fi network, and the materials needed to craft warm items for sharing with their elderly and disadvantaged neighbors,” said Qutomar Rastoyend, spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior's Winter Division. “Furthermore, we have added new buildings and installed new beds to the network of Care & Comfort facilities that stretches from Grig in the south to Pyltagrad in the north-west, where old and infirm alike can bed down for the winter, if they should so choose.” So it goes all across this fine little land: people bettering themselves by first bettering others.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

one more day

Abandoning his pursuit of Happiness in favor of working every day to pay the cable bill, the automo-bill, the apartment bill, the water bill, the sewer bill, and the credit card bill, hard-working area stepbrother Duaight Razmusseon put off his life's true calling for one more day. “If I weren't relaxing on my financed sofa and watching the shows I payed for on the television that I'm still paying off, and if I didn't have to go to bed soon in order to get up before dawn and work my second job, I'd be doing what I love to do, which is to determine and catalog the sonic frequencies of all objects in and around my house.” Duaight arose from the couch and was heading toward the drawer where his notebook and resonating instruments are kept when he veered off at the last minute to grab a box of ice cream. 'I'll do it later,' he told himself while spooning a slow-churned caramel swirl into his gaping pie-hole and staring at the drawer. 'It's just not the right time, I'm kind of tired, and I haven't seen Prometheus since I saw it in theaters.'

Samual Blaisse entered his backyard's shed and immediately began knocking back cheap beers. 'This is the life,' he told himself while peering through the blinds to see if his wife had for some reason come home early, even though he knew she was driving with the kids to her mother's house, two states over. “Yup, yup, yup,” Mr. Blaisse said as he was shuffling around the little space opening and closing various storage compartments. He finished a beer, crushed the can under his foot, and had bent down to pick it up when he noticed a clear box containing an oddly-shaped item. “I've been looking all over for this,” the loyal father of two said, moving an old weed-whacker and a torn shoe box out of the way. He pulled the strange device out and turned it over a few times in his hands, his heart swelling with all the joyful memories he'd learned to associate with it. “Ach,” he said upon remembering his fatherly duties. “I'll play with you another day.” He put away the special thing and reached for another beer, his hand resting for a moment on the clear box, until his supposedly rational thinking process convinced him to go clean the gutters instead of just letting loose and enjoying himself for a few hours.

Slamming the front door to her second-floor apartment in the aftermath of her third lousy date this month, local dental hygienist Annabella Blankenschmied (née Chester) ignored the nagging little voices in her head urging her to vent her emotions through the majesty of song, instead taking on all of the blame for her persistent romantic failure and blinding herself to the fact that the guys she's been dating have been total fucking losers. “You'll never be pretty enough,” Annabella said while looking at herself in the mirror and toweling herself off after twenty minutes on the elliptical machine. She segued into a free-weight-based workout routine but pulled a tendon trying to lift a heavy barbell without the proper leverage. “Damn it!” she screamed aloud in a mixture of pain and frustration, cradling her injured arm and hopping up and down. Ms. Blankenschmied began to relax after she had had a quiet little sit. Her soft, tuneless humming had begun to turn into full-on song when Annabella caught herself thinking a happy thought: “I hung on for one more day; those dumb guys don't matter – I love myself, and that's enough.'

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

on BANYAPAN – acronym

BANYAPAN is the slogan for the 21st century velocipedist. With it, he criticizes timid and hesitant drivers who fox everything up because of their timidity and hesitation; with it, he boosts his own ego and convinces himself of his total infallibility. BANYAPAN stands for Bitch-Ass Nigga You A Pussy-Ass Nigga. It is part of rap song so cruel and so foul that its name has been been wiped from the memory-banks of all major world libraries; when said aloud it can enrage the overly-cautious driver to the point that his eyes will fill with the tears of incompetent uselessness and he'll drive straight home, abandoning his chores and forgetting his errands so as to weep helplessly amid the torn and tattered remnants of his tarnished self-esteem.

Acronyms have gained importance in America since this nation backslid into the tar-pit of political correctness, which demands that individuals lie to each other rather than voicing their true opinions, their deep-seated prejudices, their long-held beliefs; now, in order to protect people's purported feelings, a body must say IDGAFF instead of I Don't Give A Flying Fuck, OMFG instead of Oh My Fucking God, and GFYS instead of Go Fuck Your(S)elf; now, hatred is expected to fester and boil behind the calm facade of the honor-bruised lady, she who has been taught to wallow in silent torment rather than to speak her mind freely.

Say BANYAPAN when someone fails to exploit a gap in traffic; yell it when the driver in front of you taps the brakes just in case his green light should turn yellow; shout it when that blue-haired old bag tries to merge without using a turn-signal. BANYAPAN is versatile, useful, and concise; it conveys one's opinions clearly; it boldly states to a candid world the true extent of one's dissatisfaction with all the bitch-ass mothers who fox up a body's daily commute. So join the trend, don't panic, and speak your mind; but always remember where the exits are, and don't be afraid to flee. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

Romney's hair quits

Following the failure of its host to gain the U.S. presidency, the alien hairpiece known to its fellow space-faring coiffures as ch'ch'iibuk violated the terms of its contract by leaving early. 'This blows – I'm outsville,' is the last verified written message ch'ch'iibuk left for the Republican challenger before vanishing as if into a puff of smoke. (In reality, it sealed itself into a box of cheap, processed sausages and re-gifted trinkets that the Romney family then sent to the White House as a congratulatory gift; ch'ch'iibuk fled in hopes of supplanting the toupee of one of president Obama's lesser aides.)

“That god-damn motherfucker,” governor Romney said while tearing through his Massachusetts home in search of the missing wig, his scalp pale and oddly barren. “That piece of shit motherfucked me! Outright motherfucked me. How dare he violate his contract?! If I have to go back to wearing that scratchy old... the Council of Intergalactic Species Relations [CISR] will hear of this in about 3 minutes. Honey – where's my phone?” Instead of replying that the device was on the couch next to her, Ann Romney broke down and started to cry. “There it is,” Mr. Romney said upon finding his mobile. “Would you lay off with the fucking tears already? Fuck, Annie, you've been crying since election night. I have a hairpiece crisis on my hands, just two days before meeting those Russian investors our son arranged for his upcoming real estate deal, just one week before having my picture taken signing the paperwork that will ship all those high-paying American jobs overseas, and all you can do is weep? Go iron my pleated jeans or bake a log of cookies – something, anything, but please make it appear as if you were of some use around here.”

When the CISR finally managed to track ch'ch'iibuk down (after failing to find a good hiding place atop a person close to Mr. Obama, it had hitched a ride upon a scabrous truck driver and merged with Karl Rove's mane of pubic hair), the hairpiece-from-outer-space defended its decision to flee, stating, according to official transcripts: “I stayed on Mitt's head for the duration of his campaign; I was never out of place or under-waxed; I was always wavy, making sure to show just the right amount of gray on his temples to convey the agree-upon level of seniority; I let myself be combed and washed and snipped and touched by all those worthless fucking barbers, and then, when I take off two weeks before the end of my contract, y'all send out a fucking ART [Alien Recovery Team] to bring me in? This new spot is kind of nice – it's real warm and sweaty, and I only get washed once in a fortnight. Could you please just leave me here?” After having been removed from the nether regions of Mr. Rove, ch'ch'iibuk was forced to merge with an old, rat-eaten, lice-infested bear skin shoved under a shed next to Mr. Romney's second vacation home out in southern Utah, where it remained until the beginning of January.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

hovercraft replace trains

To the delight of many commuters, some of whom had resorted to running, bicycling, or trying to catch a ride to get to work in the lower portions of New York City, this city's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) announced today that it would leave many miles of track flooded and replace some trains with boats. Said chief engineer Alonzo Cristobol de Luz y de los Diaz, 57, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, while standing in knee-deep trying to restart a pump, “In order to get things moving again down here,we're gonna be using either hovercraft or the type of shallow-bottomed boats those gator hunters use in the Florida everglades. Strung together bow to stern and propelled by jet turbines set just above the water-line, these watercraft will allow our organization to provide the quality, on-time service the people of New York have come to expect while eliminating future outages due to global-climate-change-related flooding.”

“This fuckin' sucks,” said Geronimo D'ad'uubak, 22, who lives in the Bronx. “I hate boats, especially boats that go through tunnels.” “Yeah,” added 52-year-old tablet computer enthusiast Harold K. P. Wang, from the Upper West Side. “Last year, I accidentally dropped each new tablet computer – roughly 7 or 8 devices – onto the tracks while waiting for trains and not paying attention to my surroundings; each time, the station supervisor sent a nice man down to get it for me – after the man had waited for a thumbs-up from the signalman. Now, if I drop one of these babies onto the tracks, it'll sink and die. Do they expect me to buy shockproof AND waterproof covers for all my gadgets?” Various MTA workers interviewed along Mr. Wang's regular route expressed dismay over his inability to maintain a firm grip on his personal belongings, and wished he would be more careful.

In addition to the self-propelled boats mentioned above (which, as with trains, would require the worker driving them from one station to the next to be trained in the intricacies of nautical navigation, including interpretation of the new flag-based signaling system and the difference between port and starboard), the MTA is planning to replace trains with narrow-bodied, hybrid-electric hovercraft for sections of track that move out of tunnels onto elevated tracks. (Instead of trying to climb the elevated tracks and becoming stranded as their cushions deflate, plans call for the hovercraft to merge with street-bound, four-wheeled traffic and to reacquire the tracks once these return to ground-level.) “Our new service will obviate the need to shut down vast sections of track due to flooding,” said the city's superintendent-of-pathways Eleina Honduisen. “If anything, flooded sections of track will allow us to expand the use of self-propelled skiffs and turbine-driven hovercraft to areas where track repair is becoming too costly in terms of tax-dollars or too dangerous in terms of the risk of electrified or contaminated groundwater. We are currently studying the emergence rates of various water-borne diseases and plan to forestall spikes in cholera and dysentery by maintaining a high chlorine-to-water ratio in the flooded areas similar to the mixture found in swimming pools. Things will soon be back to normal and AOK, alpha oscar kilo.” No city agency has yet released a statement regarding whether or not the city's inhabitants will be allowed to hitch their personal watercraft to hovercraft and be towed to their destinations.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

team creates need

After months of hard labor and many long hours of taxing and deliberate brainstorming, the advertising wizards at Johannsin, Grosch & Wong finally convinced a statistically-significant portion of the American population that it needed to pay for a new service. Bearing the unwieldy official title of Dermatology-Specific Matching Software, the service was re-branded as tone-&-hue-4U just in time for the launch of its new application (or app), which retails for $19.99 and will be available for all Apple and Android operating systems as soon as those Chinese hackers get back to work. The app features software that analyzes the tone of the paying customer's skin (by processing a current picture of her) and the hue of the garment she is thinking of buying by running both pictures through a series of complex algorithms originally created to track and monitor the stripes of individual African zebras; the software then produces responses culled from thousands of different surveys from dozens of different fashion, ladies', and juniors' magazines, responses such as “businessy, but not in a bad way”, “omfg-NO!“, girls-night-outerrific”, or “sure to get him hard.”

“We are confident that the ton-&-hue-4U application will revolutionize not just how women buy clothes but what types of fabrics and tones designers use to make those clothes,” said lead developer and co-owner Brenda T. Wong, a young lady who lives in New York City. “And while many a woman knows enough people with the fashion-savvy necessary to make these decisions or has the knowledge needed to make the right choice when it comes to which color of blouse to buy in order to sway a board of directors in her favor or to convince a guy to ask her out on a second date, this new software is designed specifically for women who have no friends, whose friends are morons when it comes to this type of thing, or who are simply too lazy to figure this kind of shit out for themselves – it's a win-win.” According to the first sales numbers leaked by the aforementioned advertising firm, tone-&-hue-4U is selling well in flyover country.

“I'm so very joyous to have had a hand in developing this revolutionary new product,” said Darian Wendell-Mossburgh, 42, from Bridgeport, Connecticut, the team's primary hue consultant. “Just look hue happy I am, just look!” Next season's product – which is already in the design phase – will take the guesswork out of hue-matching by featuring a scroll-down menu that will allow the user to choose the type of setting or event for which she is preparing. While the ton-&-hue-4U team was out for celebratory drinks, Chuck Johannsin and Olut Grosch, both in their late forties and the advertising firms' two other primary owners, took turns pulling from a bottle of cheap whiskey while chewing the fat despondently under a nearby bridge. “I'm ashamed that we got an invitation to the Hue Matcher's convention,” said Chuck as stared sadly at the few scummy bits of trash bobbing in the shallow little stream. “Oh god, yeah… I'm sad that we spent 500,000 dollars making a product for people who really didn't need it in the first place,” said Olut. “Our revenues are up, I guess, but, what do you think, Chuck, do we cut loose and set Brenda adrift? I got into this business to, maybe, do a bit of good for humanity. Selling software to fat lonely chicks in the Midwest that matches tones and hues? Dude – what the fuck?”

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

on Grigovian anarchy

Much has been said of late in the international press about the merits of anarchy and the benefits that this complete and total liberty bestow upon all persons lucky enough to have lived it even once. The citizens of the United States of America gave up their liberty in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks for the fleeting assurance of safety, thereby proving themselves worthy of neither liberty or safety; luminaries from various universities and myriad walks of life point to the months and years following those tragic events as the period during which the last vestiges of Ynki anarchy were bashed to bits by the batons of terrorism-addled police officers, when they were steamrolled to nothingness under the massive weight of rapidly expanding federal power.

Compare the sad state of liberty in the western hemisphere to the abounding freedom and joyous prosperity in which the people of the Glorious Republic of Grigovia wallow. Here, in modern, high-speed Grig, the nation's capital, people of all ages do as they please to their own bodies and minds so long as they are not directly violating their neighbors' person, freedom, or property; here, from the smallest cottage sitting in the highest high-valley village to the largest apartment complex set firmly into the low granite cliffs of the rushing Yalung river, people leave their doors unlocked in the knowledge that true lovers of liberty would never dare to enter the home of another with sinister purpose, take things without paying for them, or do anything to harm his meager belongings or physical health without written and notarized permission. This notion of liberty-through-responsibility does not just govern interpersonal relationships: it is alive and well also in business, where environmental pollution is virtually nonexistent, contracts are rarely broken, people live up to their word, and a company in a position to monopolize a market will choose rather to encourage competition than to face the wrath of an army of babushkas willing to boycott anyone trying to make them pay a single kopper more than something is worth.

The roots of total liberty extend deep into Grigovia's past. Beginning with the nation's spiritual founder, Krikuv the Watchful, who came to the area to escape European plague-rats and to breed tubers for his mythical green-tuber borscht (the recipe for which is said to have survived to his day in the spicy concoction of the late Queen Pylta the Terrible), nearly all subsequent leaders – with the exception of a few puppet-kings installed by meddlesome proto-Russian czars in the 19th century – have turned away supplicating emissaries and invading armies alike, in no small part because of a rabidly-allegiant populace and the freedom and democracy it has enjoyed since wise Krikuv first started applying the lessons he'd gleaned from his vast collection of old Greek and Latin texts. Grigovia's modern anarchy stems from King Hyu-Yennd Yündlennd, who abdicated in 1912 after attending a series of lectures held in Vienna by famed Hungarian anarchist Dr. Wilhelm D. Tomaz; it continues to this day in the likes of Erya Rovend – who recently broke Grigovia's boycott of the United Nations in order to tell the U.S.A. to, “Kindly go fuck yourselves and leave my fellow Grigovians alone” – and in the smiles and shouts of legions of school children who begin in preschool to learn the basics of close-quarters-combat instead of being allowed to run around mindless during their lunch break. The Glorious Republic of Grigovia proves every day that anarchy foments liberty, and her people prove that liberty is the wellspring of Happiness, a phoenix rising from the ashes of fear and oppression. Praise be to anarchy, and to old man Krikuv.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

candidates postpone election

Citing the need to visit affected areas and have their pictures taken in emergency shelters and amidst the rubble of homes and businesses destroyed by one-time hurricane Sandy, contenders Mitt Romney and Barack Obama agreed in a session closed to the public to postpone the election until after their campaigns had gathered enough disaster-related footage to make them appear worthy of the presidency. Rather than use his massive personal fortune to help make a difference in the lives of persons affected by the frankenstorm, Romney held a canned food drive in towns not affected too severely by the tropical depression, exploiting the generosity of middle class American stranger so as to make himself appear as if he were a man of the people. Meanwhile, the sitting president was kicking butt and taking names in states all up and down the eastern seaboard, handing out tax dollars in the form of emergency assistance and not even flinching when New York's mayor Bloomberg told him haughtily to stay away from the island of Manhattan.

Unbenownst to both Democrat fear-mongers and Republican war-mongers, the 2012 election proceeded as scheduled, the American people deeming it unnecessary to remind the political duopoly that the date for elections is defined in the Constitution. “Postpone the election?” said Morris Plains, New Jersey, resident Samwell Gupta-Smith, whose house was still power three days after the storm had passed “Are they that fucking stupid?” “We heard that Obama and Romney wanted to push this thing back,” said underemployed materials specialist Egon Valorbound Goldsmied, of New York's Lower East Side. “Which would be all well and good if – and only if – we all happened to live in whatever fantasy land those two seem to inhabit. But we don't, so, on November 6th, my wife and I will walk through the mud and the muck to our neighborhood polling station and vote for a third-party candidate.”

Mr. Goldsmied's sentiments were echoed by nearly everyone with whom we spoke: a women's group in Connecticut showed us a letter they had written to their former political overlords in Washington in which the corrupt officials were kindly told to go fuck themselves and to not let the door hit their posteriors on the way out; a group of freshly-minted teenage voters in Indiana – after realizing that neither ass nor pachyderm would address the real problems facing our nation – celebrated the candidacy of Dr. Jill Stein by occupying an abandoned lot, planting therein a community garden, and turning their cardboard Romney signs into compost; a men's bridge club in Florida dismantled the enormous “O” (for Obama) that they had helped bolt to the entrance sign of their nursing home, replacing it with a recyclable banner supporting governor Gary Johnson, the candidate for the Libertarian party. From the shores of the Great Lakes to the tasseled fringes of the bible belt, citizens from all walks of life shrugged off the stifling mantle of politics-as-usual and made the first cautious steps in the lifelong effort of taking their country back – by smashing their TV sets to pieces and bravely casting their ballots for a third-party.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)