The Red Balloon has its charms, but its a dangerous fantasy people! Recent example: the Roman Catholic priest who went missing in seas off Brazil after lifting off in a pile of helium balloons. His story reminds me of Larry Walters, the man who infamously piloted a lawnchair rigged with 42 balloons 16,000 feet over Long Beach in 1982. It had been a lifelong dream, and once it was reached, there was nothing left to look forward to. He killed himself in 1993.
B. A. Baracus, they called him. They said that it stood for Bad Attitude. But we knew it really meant Bad Ass! But even bad asses have healing hearts:
Former The A-Team star Mr. T once stunned a sick child's family by bringing him out of a coma - after doctors begged the actor for help.
The poorly kid fell unconscious in Detroit, Michigan in the mid-1980s - and the only physical movement he made was in response to hearing Mr. T's name.
And when the mohawked star was in town, he stopped by the hospital to visit the ill boy - with miraculous results.
He tells Britain's Empire magazine, "His family put toys around him and one of them was a Mr. T doll. And whenever my name came up, the boy moved his arm."
"Somebody told the doctors I was in town, so they called me down there. I closed the curtains and prayed. Then, as I was walking down the hall, the kid suddenly came out of the coma and hollered out."
"That was my supernatural moment."
Because our allies are terrorist targets. Salut -- to friendship!
Having spent a lot of time at the Baldwin Hills mall, I can tell you that the scene down there would certainly be livened up by more spontenous musical numbers. This is the best Improv Everywhere mission I've seen in a while, if only for the fundamental insight into universal mall culture that lays the point of departure from sanity on the Hot Dog on a Stick girl: 
And it was in the toilet. And alive. 
A bold proclamation for a bold writer! Believe it or not, this fan club was not started by me. Even under a pseudonym. Kyle Minor is a real person, in Ohio, and a very fine writer himself. Now that he has thrown my hat in the literary ring, I can finally cash in on the promise of all this social internetsworking hoo-hah. Next stop: best-seller/world dominationa/IPO! For those interested in joining, I am not an administrator, but I have noted that officer positions are apparently open to all. Yeti Wrangler is taken, but I think we could arrange Co-Yeti Wrangler for those interested. (Sorry Krafft!)
As the Homo Floresiensis debate rages (summary: hobbits versus tiny "cretins"?) new evidence emerges in the form of more little people! This time the bones were discovered in greater numbers, and in diving paradise Palau. This is where I spent a month in 2004, communing with a baby monkey and pretending that Bush didn't win. Who knew I was so close to such important paleoanthropological/cryptozoological find? Turns out the researcher who discovered the bones was also in Palau on vacation, specifically because his wife wanted to go to a place where it would be unlikely to find any bones. (Palau is solid limestone, with limited opportunity for burial and therefore also burial sites.) But on the last day he talked to a local who said he knew of a cave full of bones. There they found 1,200 specimens of humanoid skeletons: three feet tall, orbital ridges, and teeth "at odd angles." Hmm. Small, dentally challenged, and big brows. Could it be that our new contemporary cousins are neither hobbits nor cretins but rather the extended family of our old friend Chaka?
With passover approaching, everyone's searching for strategies as to how to endure yet another interminable trip down the memory lane of old mitzraim. Surprisingly, painting eyeballs on your lids and napping doesn't fool anyone! PSPs, iPhones, and other electronic devices are banned. Clandestine messages in morse are too time consuming to decode. What's left? A magical inner voyage? Counting to ten thousand? Drugs? Well, that's how Moses apparently started Passover:
According to Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, psychedelic drugs formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times.
Writing in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy, he says concoctions based on the bark of the acacia tree, frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, contain the same molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.
Burning Bush explained! Not only was Moses passing the bitter herb back in the day, but so were the rest of the gang. (Wouldn't you if you were stuck in the desert all that time?) In fact, it sounds like the whole Sinai scene might have been a proto-rave:
"The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness," writes Shanon. "In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings."
My guess is that Moses broke those tablets because he was pissed that no one gave him a flyer for Golden Calf 1280 BC, Mark II.
Otherwise this could be you: 
In fifth grade I used to draw Garfield. Don't know why. I just did. With the help of graph paper, I got pretty good at it, copying Garfield from the many horizontally bound Garfield collections I had. Then I started doing freehand, inventing Garfield in different poses, other Garfield hijnx situations. Pretty soon girls at my school would pay me to draw Garfield for them. This was my sole leverage with girls at this time. Later it would be calculus tutoring, which would be responsible for my going to prom with the cutest valedictorian the world has ever known. But that was later. In fifth grade, the girls just wanted Garfield. I'd draw Garfield on their notebooks, on their homework, on their hands. When I got a hold of some of my father's oversize computer paper form JPL, my cottage industry moved into the big time. Soon, the girls were commissioning special edition Garfield-by-Bearman posters, one-off bootlegs for their bedrooms that, if any still survive, must surely be worth a fortune. Which means in retrospect I probably should have charged more than fifty cents.
Anyhow, all these years I though I had a lock on the secondary market of what I like to call "Interpretative Garfield." And then I saw garfieldminusgarfield. Some genius discovered that Garfield without the cat is a funny and penetrating commentary on live that Jim Davis ever intended. Example:
