The bathroom on our floor, and by our floor I mean the basement, is dirty. We have light cleaning every day at one o'clock and mysterious professional 'deep cleaners' who come in on weekends and clean our offices until the carpets sparkle. Then they leave without having entered our bathroom, except perhaps to use it. Someone here (not me, because you have to slaughter my family before I think to complain) finally complained about the state of our bathroom to upper management, and the response we received was so typical of management that I could not describe them better than with this phrase: 'Please provide more details about the bathroom'. Within a week I predict the following: 1) a corporate email; 2) a policy change regarding a) our cleaners and b) protocols for lodging grievances related to week-old dried urine sightings; 3) a weird off-hand suggestion floated in a production meeting that the basement staff maybe look after such matters ourselves, followed by 4) another terse corporate email announcing that we've hired a new batch of professional cleaners. I will not go into the details of 5), which will occur when we discover that the new cleaners aren't cleaning the bathroom either.

Fortunately for all of us, the funniest thing in the history of our puny species is on the Internet. Keep reloading the page and read the results out loud. Truly, we are bonused to live in such funny times. Here's a few riddles to provoke laughter and illustrate my point:

Q: What did George Wuh Bush say to the pathetic Middle Eastern country with a population largely under fifteen and a deteriorating military that hadn't had access to spare parts in over ten years?
A: Die, country, die!

Q: What did the new improved Jesus that George Wuh Bush built in his basement out of Strom Thurmond say?
A: Never mind the New Testament. I was drunk on the flesh. Go out and smite.

Q: What did G. Wuh B. offer the hungry Iraqi child?
A: A cluster bomb.

Q: Why did US military intelligence believe that the majority Shi'a population would embrace Operation Iraq Freedom?
A: Because Ahmed Chalabai came to the Pentagon dressed as Santa Claus and promised them a pliant Iraq for Christmas. Because the White House and the Pentagon imagined that people in Iraq would enjoy being governed by an overseas power and not prefer home rule and the ability to govern their own resources and the shape of their own society, for better or for worse. I'm sure that the American population would welcome an Iraqi occupation government in Washinton. Fucktards.

A SCIENCE FOR 1200 A.D.¹

On the corner of Victoria and Albert, the intersection of the two main drags of this city, is the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool building, an old stone building with columns and gargoyles with pouty expressions. My morning walk to work used to take me past the building every day (back when I lived in a gigantic old townhouse that was slowly sinking into the earth), where a bank of windows revealed men and women in lab coats at little stations with flasks and bunsen burners and clip boards. Cool, I would think: wheat science. Meeting our changing world head-on with wheat-based solutions.

¹I know that A.D. has been replaced by the more enlightened CE, but old habits and all that.

NON-IRONIC DEATH BLOTTER

NEW YORK (Reuters) - World famous diet doctor Robert Atkins, advocate of a popular but controversial high protein, low carbohydrate diet, died on Thursday after falling and hitting his head on an icy sidewalk. Atkins underwent surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain but went into a coma and died more than a week later from complications. He was 72.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Karen Morley, the blond star of 1930's movies whose career was cut short in 1947 when she refused to answer questions at a Congressional hearing about her possible involvement with the Communist Party, has died of pneumonia. She was 93.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Teddy Edwards, a tenor saxophonist who helped create bebop jazz and performed with musicians ranging from Benny Goodman to Tom Waits, has died of prostate cancer. He was 78.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AP) -- Cholly Atkins, who choreographed the smooth moves of countless Motown artists and won a Tony Award when he was 75, has died of pancreatic cancer. He was 89.

DAILY DECISION

You may recall that yesterday I decided that the word 'bonus' should replace 'bless'. Today I decided that pop music is actually a war between alien intelligences battling for galactic supremacy on Earth, or perhaps a battle between earthly powers in the far future being staged in the past. The weapons? Chart-topping hits. The proof? Well, I can't reveal my sources, but I've recently learned that Canadian crossover queen Shania Twain is actually a super-dense cube of an unknown metalllic material that fell to Earth in 1908 in northern Siberia. Nabbed by Soviet scientists in a 1927 expedition and brought to Moscow, the cube proved resistant to extremes of heat and cold and electricity. Nicknamed "The Cockroach Cube" (but in Russian), it languished in a vault until 1965, when a radio snuck in by a scientist played a pirate broadcast of The Beatles performing in Hamburg. In front of the scientist's astonished eyes the cube reconfigured itself into electromagnetic waves and escaped into the upper atmosphere, bouncing into the radios of households all over the world. Over the years the cube has assumed many guises: The Mamas and the Papas, Yoko Ono, the Bee Gees, Duran Duran, Lenny Kravitz.

What the cube could not have known at the time was that it was not the only such entity on Earth. Indeed, acts such as the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, John Denver and the duo of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice were actually emanations from the Earth's solid nickel-iron core, itself a member of the same race as the cube, that had accreted the planet around it millions of years beforehand. The core went into attack mode when it detected the presence of the cube, emanating ever more bizarre and grotesque pop music to destroy its enemy: The Guess Who, Elton John, Sly Fox, The Strokes, O-Town. Dazzled and beaten into hiding by these attacks, the cube hid in the ionosphere as ham radio broadcasts before coming up with the strategy of the Country Crossover Pop Offensive (CaCaPoO?) Making a tentative foray with Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart," the cube retooled country music until it became a corny and insipid version of pop. Now the massive armies of Crossover Country, led by its most fiendish creation yet, the computerized Shania Twain, are assaulting the charts and proclaiming dominance. And now we stand on the brink of a musical abyss, waiting for the next wave to come storming over the lip, humming a little tune.

parode - exode