Grigovian fairy-tales 1

Davoyend of Grissend was a naughty boy. He'd show up late for school; he'd eat only bread and sweets, refusing all vegetables; and he'd steal his younger siblings' presents on the feast of old King Vuolvesst the Merciful, on the night of the winter solstice, when it was customary to exchange gifts.

'Happy Fest of Vuolvesst,' said Therr, Davoyend's younger brother, hoping for a kind word in return. The older son, however, as he was wont to do, reared back and punched the boy in the eye-socket, pushed him down the hill next to their house, and ran inside to raid his meager stash of loose liquorice sticks and peppermint bonbons wrapped in paper.
'Look at me, I am the greatest,' Davoyend yelled as his brother struggled through deep and swirling banks of snow. With brown and sugary juices staining his chin, the older child made as if to push his brother back down the hill. Therr tricked him, however, by feinting left but going right. Rushing through the gathering night back to the house, the young boy pulled the door closed behind him and ran to the fire, to warm up.
'You rush in here caked in snow,' said Ulentha, their mother, shaking her head at the wet footprints staining the rough, wooden planks. Her scolding completed, she resumed chopping vegetables for the mutton stew, a meal customary eaten on the Fest of Vuolvesst. 'Where is your brother?' she asked.
Therr, shivering violently as powdery snows turned to water and ran down the back of his shirt, tried to answer with words, but could only manage a croaking sound.
'Perhaps he went to atone for his sins at the shrine of the mountain spirit,' said Ulentha, bending to the dishes, their clatter keeping her from hearing Davoyend pounding weakly at the back door.

The next morning, the village watchman in the course of his rounds found Davoyend leaning against the wall of his parent's home, frozen stiff, his face stained with sugary juices, his mouth, for once, empty of venomous vituperation.

***

One evening, while following a faint animal path toward his home, woodsman Heiryath Bordendt tripped over a piece of string. The string had been strung across the path and attached to some bells: they chimed softly. From the surrounding bushes came suddenly a couple of men running, bows armed with arrows, hollow eyes flashing in gaunt faces. Finding a man instead of a deer sprawled on the ground at their feet, they decided to rob him.

Heiryath, however, was clever, and quick. As soon as he realized that the men meant him harm, he spun into a fighting crouch with his hunting knife and ax extended in front of him. Blinded by hunger and greed, the men charged. Heiryath knocked each man unconscious with the blunt side of his ax, but instead of causing them injury, he left them with the last of his food and a note telling the local green grocer to feed them and send to the woodsman the bill.

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town sells roads

Hoping to refill coffers sucked dry by years of poor financial decisions, the town of Yankee Hollow, West Virginia, recently sold the rights to its roads. “We thought that, by leasing our highways and byways to Bangalore-Thrimsdale Holdings (ltd.), the town would receive revenues from electronically-enhanced ticketing and pay-as-you-go regional bypass routes,” said deputy mayor Brysz D. Weinericht as he pulled into the queue of drivers waiting to pay in order to drive through the center of town. “But, so far, we've seen little beyond price hikes, aggressive enforcement of the new parking laws, and toll booths going up at our major intersections. I told Beki this was a bad idea.” When pressed for details, Beki-Jane Rathnolnikov, who currently acts as the city council's secretary, said: “I only take notes at meetings, but people keep blaming me because the council sold our water rights to that European conglomerate, and that it voted to reward all sitting members with life-long pensions and health-care. Again, I only take notes.” While pulling the third ticket in a week from under the windshield wiper of his dilapidated Chevy Caprice, underemployed town resident Egon Platts-Duinfeld shook his head in disbelief. “I've been parking my car on this street, in front of the house I pay taxes on, for the past fifteen years. Would you look at this ticket? It says I need to buy an $8 permit, each and every month, in order to park here. I've tried talking to the town council, but they keep adjourning to go on vacation. Do my taxes subsidize the wages of all those foreign-born toll booth operators? Can we expect traffic to get better, or worse? This used to be a nice, simple little town, but now it's just an experiment in fiscal irresponsibility.”

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on MOHD

Have you ever had to choose between a great job and a great apartment? Have you ever wanted to just uproot your crib and truck it to a different city? Have you ever clawed your way out of a mobile home while it was being sucked under by a raging, swollen river?

The new MOHD series from Maison Modular & Mobil lets you watch without trepidation from your living-room window as the tsunami rips your neighboring structures to pieces. Replace your home's entire roof in a single afternoon! Move to any city that has parking spaces, and bring your entire household with you as you go! The Mobility-Oriented Housing Design (MOHD) unit fits in any standard parking space, yet, inside, it is big enough for eight people to sit, or for two to live, comfortably. Once in place, the unit is bolted to the ground via three thick steel cables that are accessible only to the inhabitant via a floor hatch (this makes it difficult to move the MOHD unnoticed). The unit fits onto any but the smallest flat-bed trailer, and its underside-mounted wheels, which were originally designed to aid in positioning it in a parking space, allow it to be towed, albeit slowly. The MOHD's exterior and interior panels can be customized in most any way imaginable and are prefabricated in an ecologically-friendly certified process. The core of each panel contains a sandwich of interwoven, enmeshed circuitry designed to block electronic surveillance. (The circuitry does not interfere with the unit's built-in Wi-Fi router or its send-and-receive capabilities.) The panels, doors, and windows are designed in such a way as to form an airtight seal that, in conjunction with built-in reservoirs, can keep two grown adults alive for at least 48 hours, providing them with fresh air, clean water, and a steady supply of electricity. (The actual length of life-support depends on fuel-cell charge levels, stockpiles of food, and the ability of the semi-rigid, roof-mounted floating snorkel to extend above the surface of the rising floodwaters).

MOHDs are conceived for the urban working individual who wants to save time looking for apartments and spend less money on home repairs. The staff at most home improvement centers is trained to replace or repair MOHD panels quickly and inexpensively, and the panels are easy to replace using a few, simple tools (provided one watches the appropriate training video on YouTube). The septic system of the MOHD includes the recapture-and-reuse of wastewater and methane. (The recaptured methane then recharges the fuel-cells.) Furniture in a variety of styles and shades is available for purchase from third party vendors. MOHD units are designed to connect to one another, so one can create a maze-like warren all one's own in the overflow parking area of an local strip-mall. (The standard MOHD design resembles in appearance a loaf of bread with square sides, a rounded top, and a blunt snorkel.) Inconspicuous (most designs) and intrusion-resistant (all designs), each unit has mount-ready external hard-points for attaching a number of remotely operated items, among them cameras and mini-guns. The MOHD is the complete package: compared to an immobile house, it is low in price; it floats; it is partially self-sustaining (with necessary roof-garden and solar panel / wind turbine upgrades); it is simple to relocate; it is easy to repair and upgrade; and it looks way cool sitting out behind those abandoned stores down the street. Buy a MOHD today, and never hunt for an apartment, die in a tsunami, fall victim to prowling vagrants, or watch your house get towed, ever again. At select retailers.

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in the Americas

Have you searched to no avail for high-quality, low-cost products that were: “Made in America”? Do you yearn to spend your hard-earned money on items made by Americans, in America, for Americans? Are you loathe to purchase items made in foreign factories that took weeks to cross the oceans in a container ship?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, consider purchasing items made by honest and industrious native peoples working in North, South, and Central America. We don't care if the Chinese sell their goods to the Africans, if the peoples of the Pacific Rim peddle their wares to the Russians, or if the Europeans hawk their crap to each other: we Americans buy goods produced by other Americanos using the abundant indigenous resources with which our lands have been blessed. It matters little if the producers live in San Salvador, Columbia, Chile, Brazil, or Nicaragua; what does matter is that they were born in America, that they work in America, and that a love for America burns deep within their loins. Who cares if they come from a nation located on the isthmus of Panama, or if they speak a language dominant in the Americas to the south? All we care about is that the foods we eat, and the goods we consume, come from our own, native soil. So, next time, consider purchasing goods Made In The Americas, because Uruguay is fucking close enough.

(This message sponsored in part by Grupo Internacional De Todos Las Americas, GmbH.)

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ambitions in cash

During a recent conversation about the merits of socialism, my counterpart argued that, in the absence of monetary remuneration for labor, ambition, ingenuity, and creativity would disappear. He claimed, in other words, that people would stop working if they stopped getting paid money to work, that productivity would vanish if the potential for gain also vanished. If this theory were true, parents would stop showing up to coach their kids' little league teams, our interstate hiking trails would become overgrown for a lack of volunteers to keep them cleared of brush and dead-fall, charities would all but cease to function, and little would transpire within religious organizations other than those tasks performed by paid clergy.

Many man hours of unpaid-for labor are performed in the United States, every year. This labor is performed to satisfy an ideal, to give back to the community, even to calm that deep inner need to do something for the good of mankind without being paid or even recognized for it. I believe this zeal to provide for the common good is inherent to all persons (although most of us in the Western world have it stamped or beaten out of us in childhood). I also believe that our current economic system of Me-First Capitalism has ensnared this zeal, subjugating it to the fleeting but hollow satisfaction of conspicuous consumption and generosity for the sake of praise or thanks. We are not all bad, or shiftless; we have merely unlearned to cherish those things that are precious beyond their monetary value. So take the first step on the journey to true freedom, and burn a Benjamin today. Mahalo.

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(due to sickness-induced delirium, I accidentally posted this here; it should have gone to americanifesto.blogspot.com ; whatev's)

anti-graffitos punished

In Los Angeles (LA) county court today, seventeen members of a graffiti removal team were charged with destroying and defacing public property. Armed with metal-scraper-tipped poles, the individuals had been seen poking at and otherwise leaving large and prominent scratches upon mile upon mile of utility- and traffic-signal poles throughout the greater LA area. In their defense, the accused stated that they had been hired by the city to remove stickers, wheat-paste posters, and any other adhesive street-art, and that the scratches were merely a byproduct of their lawful efforts. Judge K. D. Geisternand, presiding, allowed as evidence video footage from cameras operated by the city's Department of Transportation (LADoT), red-light-camera footage that showed eight of the seventeen accused individuals using paint-brush-tipped broom-sticks to apply to dozens of poles layer upon layer of a light-gray paint so thoroughly underwhelming as to cause passing drivers to fall asleep at the wheels of their cars. Pictures of the damage perpetrated by these Artwork Desecration Teams can be found at the LADoT's own website, under subsection Lunacy, by clicking the tab entitled Oh, My Word, What Have We Done.

When asked about the reasons why LA chooses to defile indiscriminately its very own precious and irretrievable graffiti, the honorable judge Geisternand stated from among the dark, shadowy recesses of her chambers: “How these people are allowed to deface and destroy this city's street art; how we pay them to thoroughly damage the structural integrity of pristine metal lamp poles; how they are sent out, in broad fucking daylight, to unceremoniously paint over some of the finest art the world has ever seen; these things I do not understand.” The seventeen counter-vandals were released with a severe warning, but Judge Geisternand docked the graffiti removal teams' organizer – a company owned by the company formerly known as Halliburton – a surliberty of ten whorphans, and sentenced its executive officers to life without joy.

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all step together

(The following is a summary of Erya Rovend's speech to the United Nations (UN) in New York City (NYC), New York, United States of America (USA). To request a full transcript of the speech, contact your local censor.)

“Come now, friends, and let us all step together, a million feet moving as one, a million minds bent to the task of making our common future one of peace, honor, and Happiness.” With these opening words, Erya Rovend addressed the general assembly of the United Nations, the first Grigovian to do so since 1954. After having refused to join this community of states out of a desire to mind its own business and not waste a lot of money on layers of unnecessary bureaucracy, Grigovia has chosen one of its brightest young minds – Ms. Rovend, who leads the Farflung Free Nations branch of the Yaelong tribes – to break its half-century of silence and address the various nations of the world as one.

“Just as the people of Grigovia once suffered from Soviet oppression,” Erya continued, “our brothers and sisters in the Middle East and Central Asia now suffer from America's misdirected energies. When in 1952 our country was overrun by great numbers of Moscow's troopers, we did not complain, nor did we rob our own people of their liberty or invade sovereign foreign states – we bit our tongues, filling our wounded hearts with pride and honor so as to free them of fear and hatred. Grigovians are not special amongst the citizens of the world: all societies can bestow upon themselves the blessings of common purpose and pervasive virtuousness by conquering hardship through honest labor, by ending strife through rational debate. How do we do this? By teaching our children that sharing is better than hoarding, that the prosperity of all members of the community is more important that a few people's luxury, that words are precious and must be closely minded, and that sacrifice must always come before self-aggrandizement.” At this point, most of the individuals in attendance rose to their feet, and applauded. “Please do not look to me as the one who has done these things, as the person responsible for Grigovia's achievements, as she who is to be praised for our high level of productivity, low rates of crime and poverty, universal health-care and top-class educational system – look to the simple lessons that I have come here, today, to share with you. With a bit of effort, we can replace malice and discontentment with peace and prosperity, hunger and privation with joy and productivity.” After praising the achievements of various small nations, Miss Rovend tackled larger and more pressing concerns. “You Americans,” she said, pointing over at that country's delegation, which sat stone-faced and unmoving throughout her address. “You have taken a nation founded on the ideals of shared and common purpose, of liberty and justice for all, and, after having thrown off your own mantle of tyrannical oppression, you yourselves have become tyrants.” Again, much applause. “You spend the majority of your country's wealth on making war when but a fraction of that amount – if spent on civic and social improvements instead of tanks and bombs – could lift millions of your own starving children out of poverty. If you but had the courage to guide mankind to that bright and shining future that you choose rather to forestall with every preemptive strike, with every war of aggression, the world would be better place for all mankind. Shame on you.” Here, she wagged her finger. “My father died fighting the Russians; his father, the British; and these scars here on my torso,” the young lady at this point pulled aside her tunic to show long, deep lacerations pitting her young and supple bosom. “These here come from a land mine made by Americans and sold to a splinter group of religious extremists who were supposed to use them to fight the Soviets, but who instead turned them on women, and children. Again – shame on you.” At this point, a silence fell over the packed hall. A member of the American delegation leaned toward the microphone as if to speak before sitting back, deflated.

“Not that long ago,” the young lady said, smoothing her robes back into place, “the Roman Empire ruled the world; it fell and was replaced. Over and over this process has been repeated – with the Byzantines and the Austro-Hungarians, the Spanish and the English. And nearly every time, these empires fell into shameful ruin because of their aggressive military expansion and a refusal to respect the rights of the rich and the poor as people first, as spreadsheets second. Ladies and gentlemen of the various assembled nations, my brother and sister Americans, the Grigovian people have recently voted to release a Declaration of National Sovereignty. This document was drafted in part to say to the world that Grigovians fight religious extremism as well as imperialistic overreach wherever these twin evils should raise their heads, be they within the ring-road of Grig or on the highest peak of some distant nation; that we shall defend Liberty against all who seek to do her harm, especially against those who claim to be her champions but who are really her foes. So come, friends, let us put aside anger and discontentment, and all step together into a peaceful and verdant future of our own common making. Mahalo.” Ms. Rovend plans to tour NYC while her ocean-going catamaran is made ready for her voyage back across the seas.

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smog settles in

The town of Rykles Hollow, NM (population 3012 as of publication) is unique in the western United States. “There is one other settlement, over in Nevada, whose conditions nearly match these,” said geologist Eluttibandt “Tibby” Dannand of the New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. “This town is much higher in elevation than its counterpart, however, and although it lies far from any major metropolis, the bad air somehow keeps coming.” The bad air, as Mr. Dannand puts it, is very bad, indeed. Tests performed by a seemingly endless succession of forensic meteorologists have shown what the local people have long suspected: their micro-climate contains toxic levels of many long-chain artificial molecules, industrial chemicals, carbon dioxide, methane, DDT, a healthy dose of that new-car smell, and most of the particles that make up smog. State and federal investigators, who change the filters on their gas masks every day – nearly religiously – frequently express surprise upon seeing locals who breathe the air unfiltered still walking around the next day. “I live on a fixed income,” said 82 year-old longtime resident Ida Rimmbrandt-Morales while hoeing a patch of carrots growing in her back yard. “I can't afford new filters for the gas masks the government keeps sending me, so I do without. My vegetables love these conditions, but my doctor and my grandkids keep begging me to stay inside.”

Despite years of intensive study, no one can say for sure why or how so much pollution finds its way into Canyon Escondir Paz Del Mundo, the box canyon's official name. Some theories point to its steep, cliff-like walls and deep, wide basin; others insist that the area just so happens to sit where pollutants from cities farther West, among them San Diego and Los Angeles, make landfall again after having been picked up by sea-borne breezes and blown eastward across the southern Rockies. “I used to ride my horses up through the scrub, all day,” said Jain Nanhoven, 38, the owner of a hermetically-sealed, perpetually-ventilated roadside tavern. “But after Delia, my Bay mare, died of a lung infection, I sold the rest of my livestock to a cousin in Idaho. Now, I barely even go outside. It's a shame.”

Some local businesses, however, are seeking to make profitable use of local conditions. The High Stakes Growers Association, which specializes in running greenhouses and other such industrial farming operations at high altitudes, among other such companies, considers Rykles Hollow to be the prime location for a new venture. “What with skilled labor sitting idle and atmospheric conditions perfect for growing squash and pole beans, we have begun looking for parcels of land for sale outside of town. Our workers will get used to wearing respirators when they see how fast things grow up here, and how quickly their common shares gain in value.” Most residents seem content to stay, and adapt. “I grew up here,” Ida said as she sat drinking tea by an open window near her back door. “And I shall die here.”

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Rovend in Manhattan

Erya Rovend traveled to New York City (NYC) recently as the spokesperson of the Grigovian delegation to the United Nations. Chosen for the role at Grigovia's recent Summit to Secure our Sovereignty, the young lady – an avid equestrian and spiritual leader of the Farflung Free Nations, a Yaelong tribe – asked us to condense her interview into the following piece.

In many ways, the American metropolis known as the Big Apple rivals fair, cosmopolitan Grig. Both are world cities with extensive public transportation networks and lively, vibrant night-life; both are regional powerhouses to which the young and the ambitious flock, places where dreams are made real as often as they are crushed and the opportunity for rebirth and renewal is always there, waiting. Grig's Ring of Woods cannot compete with the sheer size of Central Park; however, its green-spaces, while generally smaller, are spaced about town more evenly while offering more amenities, such as clean public bathrooms, high-speed Wi-Fi, and performance spaces within which artists and members of the public can perform, share, and congregate, year-round. In New York City, prostitutes and drug dealers have been forced to retreat behind closed doors and to execute their trades away from the public eye; in Grig, though, as in most other Grigovian cities, these specialty services have their own districts and unions, colors and routines, circumstances which conspire to improve the health and wellbeing of such citizens as are interested in buying clean sex or unadulterated cocaine. (A glaring exception is alcohol. Grigovians, who are intelligent enough to apply the lessons learned through scientific inquiry, classify booze as a hard drug; it is sold only to persons of legal age; those who abuse it are treated similarly to the poor, lost souls who have succumbed to meth-amphetamine or heroin.)

Another differences between these two cities is the number of police officers roaming NYC. Whereas in Grig the streets are kept safe by the united vigilance and mutual respect of its inhabitants, and people go about their business without fear of institutionalized reproach or admonition, in New York one is constantly watching one's back to make sure there are no cops snooping, or spying. The police state that exists within Gotham closely resembles that of Nazi Germany during the 1930s and -40s, with the modern addition of cameras and other surveillance technology, facial-recognition-software, and crime-prediction algorithms. To top things off, legions of homeless children populate this city's dirty and forgotten places, where they are exposed to violence, hatred, and filth, while in Grig, these too-easily disenfranchised individuals have access to resources and programs which provide them with the tools they need to become productive and happy members of society, once more. That this American metropolis allows its young people to huddle and shiver, ignored and unwanted, in the shadows of glass-and-steel temples that reach into the skies in honor of greed says a lot about its dark and twisted soul.

In all, according to Erya, New York is a nice city to visit, so long as one has money to burn. (Miss Rovend spent less than a quarter of the funds allotted her for her stay by the Glorious Republic of Grigovia, preferring modest quarters to presidential suites, simple meals to lavish feasts, and the freedom of walking to the mobile prison of a taxi-cab.) She invites every American to come see Grig, where they might learn a lesson or two about the benefits of mutual prosperity through individual modesty and communal sacrifice.

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grumpy cat purrs

In an instant shedding all vestiges of fame and losing every single follower on facebook, tumblr, reddit, and fark, the droopy-faced feline known as Grumpy Cat purred for the first time, last night. The audible indication of pleasure was brought about by the attentions of Vil Ignacio Plour, a 3 year-old human child and son of Grumpy Cat's fifth owner in as many weeks, who bashed it on the head repeatedly with a plastic shovel after kitty had refused to move from a warm spot by the window. Mewling with glee, the feline shuddered with delight upon having finally found a person brave enough to push all of its buttons and punish it for being such an adorably despondent dunce.

Having bought Grumpy Cat from its previous owners – the staff of a small web-design firm in Brooklyn, NY – in order to capitalize on its popularity by first securing the copyrights to its image and then selling t-shirts and bumper-stickers with its face and trite sayings printed on them, Mr. Thomasz Plour, 42, was outraged to find the cat's fame tanking. “I thought this was a done deal,” he said while he was pounding cough-syrup in an upstairs linen closet. “My son and I drove all the way to New York to pick up the worthless beast and payed good money for it. Now, the thing will cost me more in litter and food than I stand to make off of merchandising. And here I thought my late entry into the market for 9-11 memorabilia was a bad move. Sheesh.”

While not a single person in the cat's legions of fans actually heard it purr or saw it leap friskily, they could all totally tell from its most recent video that something had happened to make it just a bit less grumpy, enough to ruin the joke. “Damn it, that shit was perfect,” said tumblr re-blogger wayfunnystufftwofourseven. “Now I'll have to go back to band-wagoning on those stupid Victorian-era postcards with their snide modern captions.”

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drones over America

As a sign of mutual respect amongst nations and an attempt by the U.S.A. to prove her dedication to multilateral cooperation with her foreign allies, the Obama administration granted the armed forces of Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan the right to assassinate suspected enemies living or residing in America. “It was not enough for us to provide financial and material support to these, our allied nations,” said president Barack Obama at a press conference held in unseasonably warm weather out in the Rose Garden. “Therefore, we will reciprocate our ability to kill persons we merely suspect of wishing to do us harm who are living in the rugged hills of Kundus or the jumbled suburbs of Aden by giving our allies the ability to rain death from the skies anywhere from Spokane to Bangor, from the Twin Cities to Corpus Christi – basically from sea to shining sea. Our allies now share with us the right bring their foes to justice, wantonly and without oversight, in blatant violation of international law and a half dozen different treaties, just as we continue to do, today.”

In preparation for this significant policy shift, foreign soldiers by the thousands have been arriving quietly on Ynki shores through various ports of entry. Traveling exclusively by night in blacked-out military convoys, the newcomers only got a glimpse of non-military American culture before they arrived at far-flung, mostly secluded Air Force bases, to begin training. “Through a loose flap at the back of this truck, I saw a woman driving a car with her shoulders exposed,” said Garnush Muhammed, a lieutenant in the People's Army of Afghanistan (Air Division), who comes from Herat. “The sight of her has offended my religious sensibilities; I shall talk to my superior about annihilating her, and her family,” he said, smiling kindly. Many of the other soldiers we interviewed expressed excitement about their new role, but also trepidation. “My brother and his children were killed by a terrorist group funded in part by hard-line Islamic extremists living in the western region of an area known as Oklahoma,” said flight group leader Esto Buiyeh of the Yemeni National Air Defense Wing. “I hope I will be stationed within range of their meeting hall; I hope to pilot the done that bombs it into ruin, killing everyone inside. With god's blessing, it will be so.”

President Obama and a slight majority of Congressional Democrats approved the measures, citing in part the fact that America has already violated every virtuous ideal it might have once stood for. “Look,” said Harry Reid, (D) Nevada. “We have stood by these past few years as the president approved the killing of foreigners and Americans not convicted in any court, not condemned by any judge. Is it so much of a stretch that we are now allowing foreigners – good foreigners, mind you, ones with whom we have friendly relations, ones trained by our allies – to operate a few drones over a couple of cities here in the homeland? Relax, people – if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” The first missiles fired from drones by foreigners operating on American soil have already begun to fall, mostly as part of military training exercises. “Would you look at that,” said major-general Rick P. Snolpe, of the United States Air Force, as a he watched a missile fired by a Pakistani pilot destroy a remote-controlled school bus. “These little brown fuckers can shoot.” Washington has mailed out fliers to Americans who may be targeted by state-sanctioned foreign aggression; the pamphlets read, simply: “Run, but don't expect to hide.”

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Grigovia harnesses wind

Fed up with importing natural gas from plutocratic Russians, and sick of buying sweet crude from autocratic Saudi Arabians, the Glorious Republic of Grigovia (GROG) embarked on an ambitious national program to become energy independent. Whereas in other modern nations such projects are heavily subsidized by – and therefore beholden to – federal governments, here in this small, landlocked nation that straddles a mountain-range known as the Yiptlong Massif, private industry is leading the charge. “Operation Updraft was designed for maximum citizen participation,” said, in a joint statement released shortly after the project's modest unveiling ceremony, GROG's Ministry for the Interior and the nation's Alliance of Executives for Grigovian Independence and Security (AEGIS). “All companies interested in enhancing the development of native battery and wind turbine design are welcome to the research data we already have on hand; all we ask is that any technological breakthroughs in and improvements to current methods for harnessing and storing renewable energy be shared with the rest of the parties working on this program, in the interest of improving the lives and wellbeing of all Grigovians, equally.”

Blessed with extensive deposits of such rare-earth-minerals as are needed to make cutting-edge, high-capacity battery banks, and with a landscape dominated by sloping foothills that culminate in high, craggy cliffs, Grigovia is a nearly perfect candidate for the adoption of large-scale wind farming. “The wind gains in intensity as it rises up from the plains around Grig, reaching nearly gale-force as it enters the jagged spires and stark facades of the mountain peaks in the higher elevations,” said Ordend Haryyiend, Ph. D., a geologist at Pyltagrad State University. “According to my colleagues in this school's department for electro-physics, even if we built a mere handful of wind farms using current technology, we could capture and transmit enough electricity to power most of beautiful, cosmopolitan Grig, our nation's capital, as well as many of the bucolic regional population centers. These are exciting times.”

In recent years, Grigovia has faced pressure from Western conglomerates – chief among them Ynki organizations applying pressure through the American Department of State – to lease out vast stretches of pristine national parkland for environmentally-unsustainable mining, forestry, and resource extraction. “We have been fighting a shadow war against foreign parties hellbent on raping our land of its treasures and transporting our riches to distant markets beyond our borders,” said Hesta Noryindt, an analyst at the Ministry of Natural Resources, which controls leasing and licensing on Grigovian territory. “Similar to the Ynki Apollo program, which harnessed the will of the American people to reach a goal, Operation Updraft aims to harness the will of the Grigovian people to shake off our addiction to foreign energy and to become a world leader in methods for capturing and storing direct and indirect solar energy.” (Wind is caused in part by changes in atmospheric pressure resulting from solar radiation, i.e. sunlight.) AEGIS thanked the people of Grigovia for their enduring patience and communal sacrifice by installing German-made GMG grenade launchers at all major civilian defense centers.

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child sues president

Upon reading the Constitution to the United States of America for the first time in her second-period civics class, 11 year old doll enthusiast and life-long Illinois resident Georgette Jeane Yarbroshnikov filed suit against president Barack Hussein Obama. Citing in her case the commander in chief's wanton disregard for the role clearly spelled out for him in the Constitution, our nation's second-most important document after the Declaration of Independence, Ms. Yarbroshnikov also referenced Common Law, the law of the forest, and the law of the preservation of energy to dismiss the president's more heavy-handed actions, among them the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and his continuing insistence on killing Americans and foreign citizens alike via drone-strike.

“There is an old saying that goes something like this,” Georgette said during a press conference held in her older brother's ramshackle tree-fort out by Mr. Eth's pond. “Before I forget, though, please don't tell my brother we were in here, because he'd get pissed at me and torch my doll's clothes again. Anyway, the saying is: 'It is so obvious even a kid could see it,' or similar. What it means is that our sitting president's actions constitute continuing, glaring, and brazen assaults on the fabric of this nation's democracy; his persecution of non-violent marijuana users alone is a crude erosion of the Constitution's very preamble, in which it states that the role of government is to secure for us all – commonly and individually – the Blessings of Liberty. Do no-knock raids and the levying of prison sentences and fines against peaceful drug consumers sound like the Blessings of Liberty to you? No, not to me, either. In fact, they sound like full-blown tyranny.”

To the surprise of prominent law professors, activist judges, and officials at the falsely-named Department of Justice, Ms. Yarbroshnikov's suit has proceeded past the lower court of Illinois, its progression to the Supreme Court all but assured. “Not only are the young lady's arguments slick, concise, and well-written, she makes a compelling case against many of Mr. Obama's actions as president,” said Dr. Theobald D. Kluff, former dean of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It is not for a lack of trying that we have not been able to check and balance the various branches of government according to the Constitution. Believe me, we have been concerned with presidential power-grabbing since Mr. George W. Bush started going overboard in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, but we have not been willing to spell things out so clearly. My hat goes off to this young lady.” Although Georgette's lawsuit does not specify punishment beyond a harsh, public scolding and increased scrutiny of the president's future behavior, rulings from previous cases – among them Winnifeld v. Stone and Hsu v. Gonzales – show that such cases can have teeth, and are nothing to be scoffed at.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

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.

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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.

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opinions not voiced

Preferring the proven tactic of smile-and-nod over direct confrontation or the voicing of his personal opinions, thirty-something whorphan Wellington Erasmoss Denyels of Shelter Bay, Connecticut, emerged from the belly of the beast largely unscathed. “Fuck,” he said aloud while driving back home through the early fringes of frankenstorm Sandy, his whirring wiper-blades the only things breaking the trip's growing monotony, before his inner monologue kicked in, saying: 'I'm glad no one pressed me on my political views, and I'm so happy that I didn't have to explain my shifting religious philosophies and say just how little I think Jesus is guiding the steps of my life.'

Thinking back to the night before, Wellington shook his head and forced himself to laugh as memories danced across his mind's eye – the woman asking if his wife were sitting in the chair next to him even though he was not even wearing a wedding band and there was no indication he had brought a date; the tattooed, self-proclaimed street minister insisting on pointing out the salient features on his chopper-style motorcycle while making sure to mention after each breath that “Jesus saves”; the condescending ease with which nearly everyone in attendance threw around the name of their religion's god while subtly sniping at each other and touting their own virtues and achievements to anyone within earshot.

Deactivating his vehicle's cruise control so as not to ram a slow-moving car that had lurched suddenly into his path, Mr. Denyels breathed a sigh of relief in the knowledge that he was leaving the South and that he would no longer have to drive past house upon house whose owners had chosen to cement six-foot-high Romney/Ryan signs into the ground mere feet from the edges of busy, narrow byways. He shuddered when remembering the fact that a majority of North Carolinians had but recent amended their state's constitution to restrict the rights of homosexual Americans and to define marriage according to the societal and religious rules of a Bronze-Age desert people, thus exposing their innocent neighbors to the harsh punishments of YHWH, the god of the ancient Israelites. His patience nearly shot and his gas-tank approaching empty, our whorphan exited somewhere in northern Virginia, to have a stretch and to sniff the air for hints of moral repression, of which there were thankfully few.

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Yaelong pledge allegiance

Citing incessant pressure from radical Muslim groups and greedy Christian infiltrators, the various Yaelong tribes officially declared their material, military, and logistical support for the continuing independence of the Glorious Republic of Grigovia (GROG). Descending on foot, on horseback, and in battered pickup-trucks from the foothills of the Yiptlong massif to attend the Summit to Secure our Sovereignty, which is being held in the fortified banquet halls of the spartan HM Queen Pylta Hotel in downtown Grig, this capital city of roughly 1.5 millions of inhabitants. Exuberant and battle-hardened, the leaders celebrated their safe arrival in the manner of their fore-bearers – by unloading their Kalashnikov rifles, passing them to the person to their left, and feasting upon fermented green-tuber borscht washed down with great flagons of wine made from czabtyip, a weed with hallucinogenic properties also known as mountain sharpstand. Then, as part of the traditional peace ceremony, the leaders passed the horn of a young ram slaughtered in the ancient rite of yepyündling to the person to their right, invoking the blessing of saint Grigov and goddess Libertas and swearing an oath of fealty and love to their neighbor's family, tribe, and honor.

Rising from her seat and waiting patiently for the assembled warriors to quiet down, tribal leader Erya Rovend of the mythical Farflung Free Nations said: “Thanks be to Lady Liberty, she who inspires our every waking thought, who guides our every conscious act. Despite my initial refusal, the members of my tribe requested that I be sent here to this Summit, the first of its kind in all of our proud history. May peace be upon us all; may we leave here united and strong, a fist full of twigs yielding neither to the heavy hand of American forces nor to the sinister touch of al-Qaida in Central Asia. My brothers and sisters, I love you all.” The young woman then sat back down onto her rough horse-hair mat, her cheeks turning a deep red as all other persons in the hall – even the stone-faced old military types – rose to their feet in standing ovation. As soon as the commotion had died down, Erya was elected to the post of Summit spokesperson, she who would announce its declarations to the world. One or two other leaders rose to offer their greetings and to bless the assembled, but they soon stopped in honor of the great strength and raw purity of young Miss Rovend's words.

After six days of talks, debates, yoga, and heated discussion, the Summit ended. Before sending Erya Rovend to the United Nations headquarters in New York City to denounce Ynki imperialism and religious radicalism alike, the Grigovian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reissued its Declaration of National Sovereignty, asking kindly that all foreign powers leave it in peace and not infringe upon the course its people had chosen for themselves. Furthermore, it mentioned that the nation's tribes would be automatically deputized if it were invaded, combining with its well-trained standing armies to become an indomitable force for self-determination. At the end of the document, it issued a list of reminders, among which were the following: “Please do not cross our borders without permission; please stop trying to corrupt the officials in charge of environmental protection; please stop trying to take our vast deposits of rare-earth-metals without paying fair prices; please stop trying to nub-cut our forests and strip-mine our hills; please – everyone – keep your religious opinions to yourselves; please understand that even the slightest act of aggression will be countered with outright and total war; please ask nicely for the recipe for fermented green-tuber borscht, and stop trying to steal it; please let us decide which system of government is best for us, and, especially you Americans, stop threatening to impose upon us your bullshit fake democracy.” Erya Rovend is scheduled to address the U.N. on Halloween in an eye-slit burka, to protect her virtue.

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man becomes cog

After reclining into his comfortably-sticky pleather lounging chair, local cog Phinzend K. Woldebomm, age 62, asked his spawn's spawn to gather closer so he could tell them a story. “Come closer, spawn of my spawn,” Phinzend said with due gravitas. “And let me tell you about my humble beginnings.” The docile and obedient children approached on quietly-shuffling feet, their noses wet with snot, their eyes moist with apprehension. “That's about close enough,” the man said, holding up his right hand when the youngster had approached to within arm's reach. “Now, where was I. Oh right – the beginning.”

Born third out of a total of six to Daroll and Brunhilda Woldebomm of Wichita, Kansas, Phinzend grew up largely unnoticed, a middle child whose older siblings excelled at their schooling and whose younger twin brothers were so fussy and poorly-behaved as to take up nearly all of their mother's time. In hopes of garnering some paternal attention he dedicated his young adulthood to the study of all things related to wallpaper, in which industry his father was employed; the patriarch, however, having lost the battle for his wife's attentions to their two youngest sons, chose to follow professional racecar driving, preferring to frequent with some of his buddies a bar near a feed-mill half of the way home from their work. Phinzend, in turn, was the only kid in his class whose family missed his high-school graduation; he spent a good forty minutes in a Denny's parking-lot trying to get a picture of himself throwing his mortar-board into the air and smiling without it looking as if he had taken the photo himself. Undeterred, he was accepted to the interior compliance program at the College for Domestic Sciences of Western Kansas, which specializes in wallpapers, floor-coverings, paint-shade-matching, and the like.

Sacrificing at least two college friendships and one potential romance in his drive to master the intricacies of wallpaper – its science and secrets, even its scent – young Woldebomm graduated early in hopes of spending as much time with his father as possible, who was approaching his mid-sixties and thinking about retirement. The young man applied for and was accepted as a customer service representative at Gooseneck Interior Coatings & Coverings, where his father, Daroll, also worked. Contrary to years of hopes and dreams, however, old man Woldebomm showed just as much interest in his son as he had while the boy was growing up – zero. In fact, Daroll went out of his way to ostracize his middle child, playing pranks on him and bad-mouthing him in front of his drinking-colleagues, at one point inviting him to tour the big industrial printers and then locking him in an uninsulated storage shed for four hours during the middle of winter. Finally accepting his lot in life, Phinzend latched onto and, after a courtship of but seven months, married Bristol Anne Woldebomm, née Trinkle, daughter of the man who owned Gooseneck. Soon after getting pregnant with their first child, Bristol Anne began to exhibit bossy and overbearing tendencies and soon adopted the habit of ignoring Phinzend, focusing most of her time on watching television by herself and eating bags of potato chips on the bed in the back of their modest trailer.

“And so, my young munch-kins,” Phinzend said while nudging with his foot the smaller of his grand-children back into wakefulness, as they had fallen asleep. “That is my life's story. Bristol Anne and I had three more children before she left me for that Baptist minister, and, well, one of them – Daroll Jr. – had you all. And when your daddy's early-onset shingles gets to acting up, he drops you off here, with me. Circle of life, I guess.”

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women choose wisely

Sick and tired of the status quo, and fed up with Washington's shell game of politics-as-usual, women – who make up a majority of the American voting population – chose wisely this November 6th by electing Gary Johnson to the presidency. (This article is an obvious fake, as Americans do not elect their president; he is chosen for them by the electoral college.) At once shocked by the Republican assault on female reproductive rights and appalled by its attempts to deny homosexuals such rights as are granted to heterosexuals, Ynki voters possessing of two (2) X chromosomes had also had enough of president Obama's crack-down on the right of fully-emancipated adults to use drugs of their choice, including marijuana.

“We've had enough of this bullshit,” said Staci-Rose Fluenchif, chairperson of the New Ynki Women's Freedom Council (NYWFC), while inspecting a shelter for battered women in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “I'm sick of watching two greased politicians yelling statistics back and forth at each other during their so-called debates, both of them dancing around the issues yet neither really saying anything of substance. Hillary Clinton's efforts at (the) State (Department) notwithstanding, we think that the Democrats, in a hundred and fifty years of existence have failed to do enough to to protect freedom or to spread opportunity equally amongst the various peoples of this land; and the Republicans, well, they seem to have just completely dropped the ball, lounging around in their plush D.C. offices and finger-banging each other over their efforts to destroy the rights of gays and lesbians. Unbelievable.” Walking while she talked, chairperson Fleunchif also managed to review a steady stream of Council-related documents coming in on her hand-held tablet computer.

Upon hearing the news, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson breathed a sign of relief. “Now, things are really going to get interesting,” the freshly-minted president said. “With the backing of the NYWFC, and with such overwhelming numbers of women voting for the libertarian ideals of freedom and reduced taxation, this election signals the end of the old political processes and an ushering-in of a new era of peaceful prosperity for all Americans large and small, gay and straight, male and female, dark of skin and pale of face. In the weeks leading up to this decision, my staff and I kept seeing sterile-looking properties with their meticulously-kept yards and a Romney/Ryan flag out front, figuring it likely that most of those homes had at least one woman living in them whose voice had been cowed into silence by years of both outright and passive-aggressive male chauvinism coming not only from a husband's political party but also from a pastor or priest and from the constant stream of vituperative effluvia coming from today's conservative talking heads, on television. Our decision to speak directly to these women payed off in that they finally woke up to their own enormous, untapped potential and voted for the only party dedicated to the ideals upon which this nation was founded, those being the right to choose for ourselves how to Live, to choose for ourselves how to be free, and to choose for ourselves what activities or substances make us Happy.” Here, president Johnson paused to answer a congratulatory telephone call from Nelson Mandela. “My fellow Americans, today our successful future lies, as it always has lain, in the gentle hands of this nation's women. May Lady Liberty herself bless you with long, healthy lives and quick, painless deaths. Mahalo.”

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bird stays put

Enjoying her moderately-warm perch too much to find another, red-breasted robin #18 didn't even bother to move on this fall's first freezing morning, even though the valley's resident man-child continued to come and go directly beneath her. Dropping her excrement all over his bolted-together old car tires, and violating her flock's rule requiring avian beasts to stay at least two dozen feet away from humans at all times, #18 thought to herself: 'Fuck it – it's too fucking cold to fly away, and this douche-bag doesn't seem like a threat, so I'm staying.'

Wondering if the bird had perhaps frozen to death, the man-child – a lowly whorphan of modest means – concluded that, since she was still balancing on that length of old electrical conduit and had not yet fallen to the ground, she must be alive. He proceeded to split a wheelbarrow full of wood and waited until the robin had flown away in order to return his shit-stained tool to the exact spot whence he had initially retrieved it. While watching from a nearby vantage point – this one caressed by the first warm rays of the rising sun – mademoiselle Eighteen rhythmically uncurled one foot after the other in an attempt to force warm blood into her exposed extremities; her wings she kept tucked tightly against her body, however, using them to insulate her torso against the frigid morning air.

#18 continued to run into the resident whorphan for the rest of the day, fleeing before him a few times as he was performing the season's last mowing with his new muscle-powered push-mower and, later, hopping out of the way as he turned swiftly onto the property's gravel lane and came crunching down it toward the house, on his velocipede. Out of concern for the birds' dwindling supply of little red berries, the man-child decided to stop waffling already and finally bought them a big bag of bird seed.

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Grigovia prepares for invasion

During what has now become a series of routine preparations undertaken whenever a foreign party threatens to invade their country, the people of the Glorious Republic of Grigovia (GROG) made ready to go to the mattresses. Said Muiryast Hyünndend while changing circuit-boards on a battered but serviceable surface-to-air missile battery: “We used this baby to take down what few Russian pilots dared to fly at this altitude and in the winds coming off of these high plateaus.” Her job nearly completed, Muiryast went to banging around on the weapon's motorized servos with a ball-peen hammer until they seemed to function to her liking. “That should do it,” she said, wiping grease off her hands with an old, dirty rag. “Now, I go back to village and help the other ladies move pickled vegetables and other non-perishable foodstuffs deeper into the caves before oiling my AK-74.”

Similar efforts were under way in nearly every hamlet and village around this small, landlocked nation, including in its capital of Grig. This reporter watched as mountains of supplies disappeared every day into the hundreds of miles of winding passages that connect Grig to the nation's larger towns and to massive limestone caverns used by the local inhabitants since the Middle Ages to weather foreign aggression. “It didn't matter if they were Greeks or Persians, Mongols or barbarians, British or Russians – every time an enemy thought we had given up, another pack of crazed children armed with slender knives would climb up out of a spider-hole to hamstring entire battalions, slashing at the invaders' throats with shrill cries, the blood staining their soft, little hands,” said national historian and best-selling children's book author Dr. Aliyannda Grikochenka, chairwoman of Grig's own Historical Preservation Society. “The Americans are winding down operations in Afghanistan, our regional neighbor, which means that they will start coming after any countries that yet resist their attempts to install a Rothschild-controlled central bank. That will not happen, here; we Grigovians will keep our liberty, and remain sovereign.”

At least three dozen former officials have already been tried and sentenced to their choice of banishment or forced labor – or a combination of the two – for violating the country's constitution by attempting to pass legislation that would move the country off of the gold standard; their efforts, the nation's high court ruled, would have endangered its currency, the yind, and exposed its remarkably-stable financial markets to rampant speculation and outright money-grubbing similar to that which has brought entire economies to their knees, among them those of Iceland, Ireland, Spain, and Greece. Said economist Durdev Yvend, a financial expert who advises the national assembly on matters relating to debt and foreign investment, “The economic policies espoused by the Ynki and their ilk are unsustainable in the long run. If they would just let everyone else mind our own business and figure out what works best for us, we would all be better off.” Mr. Yvend paused on his way out of a gun-emplacement set into the marble base of a monument to independence from Soviet oppression, into which he and a half-dozen other men were carrying one canister after another of high-velocity machine-gun rounds. “The way it stands, though, the American economy survives only when the country is at war, and it has been making war on people whose countries are rich in rare-earth minerals, or crude oil. Since Grigovia is known for its vast deposits of lithium and, especially, helveticum, it does not take a genius to figure out whom they are going to invade next – us.”

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government slashes taxes

After declaring that the American military shall be out of Afghanistan by the year 2014, the Obama administration announced plans to lower taxes for all Americans. Said the President while shotgunning a mocha latte on his way to a middle-school performance of Inherit The Wind: “We are going to cut these taxes by not renewing the contracts of over half of all service military personnel and by waiting two full calendar years before placing any more orders for tanks, jets, frigates, uniforms, or machine-pistols. We've got so much of this shit just lying around collecting dust, anyway, and, since we spend many times more on so-called defense than all other major world players combined, including Russia, and China, we have built up a bit of breathing room for ourselves. By reducing our war-related expenditures and not paying hundreds of billions of dollars to independent war-related contractors, for example, we can afford to collect hundreds of billions of fewer tax-dollars.”

The decision to draw down the military to numbers capable of protecting the homeland – that being the physical constraints of fair Columbia – has been applauded by administration critics and supporters alike; the decision to spend money rebuilding schools and hospitals here in America rather than rebuilding them in far and dusty lands has been met with joyous praise and loud cries of thanks. “The other parents in my Parent-Teachers-Association and I have been curious to know why nearly 54% of our taxes was being spent on trying to kill sneaky jihads overseas while only a fraction of it was being used to educate young minds in our own backyards,” said concerned housewife and mother-of-one Bridgit Romaine-Staudemeiyer, 28, from Seal Beach, California. “It seems as if our elected leaders are slowly getting their shit together – slowly, mind you, but, we hope, steadily.”

“In our age of information-technology warfare, it doesn't matter how many tanks a country has, or how many sovereign nations its forces occupy,” said Ululandno Iishitakko, a security consultant for Heath & Hearth Industries, a consulting firm bent on creating a peaceful and verdant world in which America's troopers can finally come home and get some rest. “When a pod of starving hackers working out of a filthy basement in some former Soviet-bloc republic can infiltrate Pentagon security and hack a drone flying over a battlefield in al-Anbar province, those selfsame scumbags can shut down the U.S. military's various communications networks at home and abroad, rendering them effectively useless. It's a whole new ball-game, boys and girls.” While entering Marine 1, in which the head of state would fly to Camp David for a series of meetings with leaders from South America's socialist-leaning countries, Mr. Obama said, “We're gonna take the money we've been spending to maintain physical presences in hot-spots around the globe and use some of it to beef up our communications networks here at home, networks that were shoddily constructed by sycophantic security consultants during my predecessor's administration, networks so full of holes that they resemble that good Vermont swiss cheese I love so much. We need to start letting the various peoples of the world figure out their own problems; we need to stop acting like the globe's recess monitors, picking sides and choosing winners. We start healing America again by slashing taxes across the board.” As his helo alighted from the ground with a bone-clattering thwacking sound, the president showed the assembled reporters two fingers on his left hand spread into a V, for victory.

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