Montezuma’s new band Organ Transplant By Proxy is currently on tour with Peter Frampton and Rivers Cuomo’s Weezer.

Dear Montezuma,

My aunt, who is Welsh, gave me a brand new Macedonian flag the other day. It’s absolutely beautiful, its bright red and yellow stripes almost look like a weirdo Japanese flag. I’ve got it hanging up in my bedroom so I can think about Macedonia while I make love to my girlfriend. I guess what they say about that fine nation’s flag enhancing lovemaking is true! Which makes me curious. Why do male ducks often drown female ducks when they do it?

Simon Smedleyman
Lathe, NE

Simon, did you know that Macedonia is also the Land of the Rising Sun? In 1946 over 300,000 Japanese refugees arrived in Macedonia. Through some as yet inexplicable phenomenon, many doorways in Japan lead to the verdant fields of the Balkans. With these fleeing wretches came throngs of Asian ducks. Ducks from the Orient are generally much larger than the species which are their counterparts on the European mainland, though English ducks are themselves quite large. Those fabulous Brittanic water fowl have been throughout their history quite lazy, so no problems ever arose from that quarter. However, with such a rapid influx of oversized quackers appearing in the middle of the great Socialist Republic of Macedonia, things began to change. The mischievous birds from afar soon took a liking to the delicate, flat-billed denizens of Europe. Unfortunately, what scienticians have dubbed the largeness gene is transmitted only through the male sex chromosome. While sexy duckish broads remained as dainty as can be, their brutish counterparts became so overgrown that they often destroy those with which they choose to procreate. You can see what a dangerous country this Macedonia is.

Montezuma!

I was coming out of the store last week and this dude is standing there all proud with his blue windbreaker what got SECURITY written on the back. Me, I was minding my business, but this hard case up and says hello to me a bunch of times and starts chasing me with a hilighter. Why’s this banana head wanna wave a pen in my face?

How A Real Dude Operates Nicely
Topeka, KS

My, my, HARDON, you’ve put me through quite the ringer on this one. Four cultures are known to greet strangers through the use of a merrycolored hilighter-styled penulator: Nicaraguans, Australians, Zambians, and the Remans. As the Remans no longer exist, we can rule them out. I called up an old 43 man squamish partner who works at the Department of Homeland Security, and she stated that no Zambians or persons of Zambian descent currently reside in Kansas. Australians have been assumed to exist, but this is not proven, so I believe it improbable your security man is one of them. This leaves us with your security guard being Nicaraguan. However, it is widely understood that the Uighur people will greet a passerby waving a hilighter to express melancholy.

Hi Montezuma,

I don’t really understand this “alt porn” stuff. I mean, I get that it’s supposed to appeal to people of my generation because everyone’s all tattooed and pierced and they have funky hair and some of the guys have sideburns. It’s apparent to me that they’re trying to present me with girls who look like the girls that live around me. The problem is, really, that I expect unwashed trendnik guys and punked-out girls to be licentious (I’ve been to a couple of Sum 41 shows). Why isn’t it as interesting as watching what you think is medical drama, only to discover that unthinkably the nursing staff is engaged in orgiastic rites with bed ridden accident victims?

Slappy Ass
Brooklyn, NY

Sociologists have discovered, Slappy Ass, that a prime component of any viewing of pornographic content involves the visualization of the participants at some point as elderly. This is quite easy to do when the characters presented to you are engaged in reasonable occupations and appear (apart from certain enhancements) to be standard issue humanity. Unfortunately this is quite impossible, it has been found, when viewing pornography containing the sub-culture you mention. Everyone expects such people to die at an early age due to an inability to gesture at one another about oncoming traffic, or an overuse of irony and sarcasm leading to massive blunt trauma to the cranium. Essentially, “alt porn” cuts out a necessary step from the erotic experience: believability.

Dear Montezuma,

I really like vintage, retro clothing and culture. Unfortunately, no one makes products for me: the girl who enjoys the culture of America in 1831. Is there some publication, shop, or online destination which might be able to fit my needs?

Rebecca Anne Delaney
Traviston, LA

RAD, no, there isn’t. I did manage to find the wonderful folks at 1833-o-Rama, in downtown Roanoke, Virginia, who specialize in all things from Canada in 1833. If you are capable of moving, changing your preferences only slightly in temporal and geographic terms, they could be just the place for you. 1833-o-Rama is a clean, welcoming place, which runs a mail order service by telephone or over the interconnected network.

Dear Montezuma,
Let’s say I had three nail clippers, a used up deodorant tube, a plain metal lunchbox, a bottle opener decorated by the Estonian flag, a dog food bowl with the name Saint Xavier on it, half a black boardand an uncovered cap of detergent. How much would that be worth in 2020 dollars?

Mickey Hart
Elmsworth, WY

About three Euros, but I’m unsure of the exchange rate that far in advance.

Have a question for Montezuma? Email him at montezumaREMOVE@MEdanielbester.com.

Answers From the Great Beyond!!!

Montezuma II recently wed pop singer Anne Riboflavin. Their first child, Autumn, is scheduled to be born this summer. He enjoys bridge, checkers, fasting and colouring books.

Dear Montezuma,

First of all, I am a normal fellow who has had many healthy long-term relationships. But for some reason every woman I’ve ever dated, hooked up with or even made out with at a party has been named Michelle Thompson. What is up with this strange thing?

Michael Thompson
Thompson, GA

Mike, have you considered your local Council Law 36257 which states “All female children born within the city limits shall be lastly named in accordance with the name of this fair city (Thompson) and shall be firstly named with an Anglicized version of the greatest of Archangels, Michael?” Well, you would be good not to consider it as this law was repealed in 1935. However, the tradition still remains rampant amongst the populace and you are more likely to engage in physical activity with a woman within the confines of Thompson who is named Michelle Thompson than anywhere else on the planet earth other than Angkor Wat.

Dear Montezuma,

How do trees work?

Fiona “Gator” Stevens
Hambone Council, FL

Trees have a very poor work ethic. Continue reading →

Montezuma II is the Answer Man to the Stars. He has answered questions for Tim Conway, Loni Anderson, Sam Waterston and others. His newest book in nice.

Dearest Montezuma,

I have too much change in my pockets a lot of the time. It falls out whenever I sit down and makes a big clanking sound when I walk down the street. All the bums know when I’m coming and run down the street after me calling me a liar when I tell them I don’t have any change. I really hate running. Is there some change storage solution for someone like me: a five foot tall Mbuti pygmy living a modern industrial lifestyle in the West?

Cephu
Boston, MA

Ruminating on your question took place over the course of an extremely busy and tiring week. A cup of tea was in order and my new assistant, Mary Margaret Nelson, quickly procured one for me. The tea gave me a wonderful idea. I have mailed you complete instructions for building a pneumatic coin storage harness made of polyvinylchloride piping, a vacuum pump, a mesh screen and black lacquered syringe box modified to store the coins. I have also included some decorative suggestions for the harness to deter the homeless including: lion, winter and a little monster I like to call the Scarebum. Clever name, isn’t it?

Dear Montezuma,

I am male, but my mother contributed fifty percent of my genetic material. However, I don’t look like her and don’t exhibit quite the same internal physiological characteristics. So I find it a bit unfair that she gets such a large share of my genetic makeup. People get mad at me when I ask what exactly it was she did that was so great. What is a moon roof?

Highly Expectant Radio Man
Edgewise, PD

You will have to challenge a clever fellow like myself quite a bit more, HERM, else you risk no answer at all. The credit for this answer must, I fear, also go to my new assistant Mary Margaret Nelson, who has again proven her worth. It seems the moon roof was a device Galileo Galilei erected in Pisa to block out the light of the city while he observed the skies, most especially the moons of Jupiter. An interesting bit of trivia: a small, whimsical painting of buttocks was created on the forward left corner underneath the roof. The great scientist would occasionally point this out to bored visitors.

Hey Montezuma,

So walking down the street the other day, I thought it would be really cool if golfers wore samurai armor. The armor would protect them from the Sun, they could keep their favorite golf club in a belt loop and they could identify themselves to spectators with a handy flag like the samurai wore. What do you think of my idea?

Bob Kerrey
President The New School University
New York, NY

P.S. Please don’t steal my idea.

I am amazed at how positively useless this idea is. It would take more energy to steal this idea than it is worth. My suggestion is not to send an application to the Patent Office, burn any record of it and continue on with your life, never mentioning it again to friends, family or strangers.

Dear Montezuma,

There’s this nice girl I met and while she’s totally the bee’s knees, she keeps insisting that various things have killed her father. First it was pigeons, then bricks, a cheese grater, eggs, the mafia, Vorlons, a spigot, seven ninjas, a donkey, a Charles Darwin impersonator named Kevin…oh lord, the list goes on and on. She’s claimed that up to 700 different things have killed her father at various times. How could her father die 700 times, I don’t get it. Is she lying to me? What’s up with her?

Hando Peppermill
Yasper Falls, ME

Hando, the spigot is probably the clue you should investigate further. Was he killed by the spigot first? You see, spigots have a medicinal property whereby someone whose life was ended by one can come back to life almost immediately. Should her father have made it through two deaths before, for instance, being mauled by a spigot, he would also revive, though memories from puberty will disappear due to some as yet undefined interaction between the spigot’s voracious DNA and the memory centers of the brain. You might ask her if her father can remember exactly when hair began growing around his pubic and underarm areas.

Dear Montezuma,

Why are there both flashlights and candles? If flashlights are so useful, why are there still candles? Shouldn’t candles have died out long ago along with butter churns, mule carts and the dumb waiter?

Lucy Tarquin
East Bestoria, MV

One might as well ask why there are both wishing wells and oil wells, Lucy. Yet, annoyingly, upon my exclamation of this fact, my new assistant Mary Margaret Nelson went out and found the reason for the existence of both wishing wells and oil wells. I am starting to find her constant presence and overeagerness to please grating and, might I say, cloying.

Dear Montezuma,

Recently a strange thing started to happened to me. Once a month or so, I get these terrible cramps, then I feel irritated and bloated. At the same time, blood flows from a bodily area I’d rather not mention. Plus, I’ve started growing hair in strange places and my nipples are tender. What’s going on? Is it cancer? Or possibly FOP? I need to know before school starts in the Fall. Everyone in 8th grade will think I’m a freak.

Sarah Bonnet
Woodside, NY

Dearest Sarah. There is nothing to worry about whatsoever. The changes you are experiencing are all completely natural. As the hive intelligence replicates itself in your body, the tiny individual cells which make up the whole spread throughout the body. They communicate through an intense release of protein polymer change in the bloodstream while they settle into strategic locations throughout your innards. During the hive’s takeover, it is routine to experience such physiological manifestations, but there is simply not a thing to worry about. Except the irritation you are experiencing. According to my diagnostic reference manuals, irritation is not a symptom of the hive. I would suggest asking the hive what’s going on in there, then maybe seek the advice of your guidance counselor.

Dear Montezuma,

Why is it that English is the only language that makes any sense? Every time I hear a language other than English all I hear is jabbering and nonsensical funny talk. How come of all the languages in the world, only English is useful for communication?

Charles Schumer
Albany, NY

Charlie, did you know that the word jabber comes from the Middle English javeren? I did not know this either. My new assistant Mary Margaret Nelson just brought it up whilst poring over your letter with me. That was the final straw I had to let her go.

Dear Montezuma,

Why aren’t limericks ever funny? What is up with them?

Pugsley Islington
New Kennewhack, EL

Unfortunately I was unable to find any information on what a Limerick is as I no longer have an assistant. Should I find a new assistant, I may be able to answer this next month. Please check back then.

Montezuma recently became the first man to circle Lake Champlain eighty times. He owns a goat.

Dear Montezuma,

Don’t ask me how this came up, please. Which weighs more: a cubic foot of unsalted butter or a cubic foot of an adult blue whale?

Stefan Hawkwing
10th School District
Greater Derby, Derbytown
County Chippewa
U.S. Autonomous Mining Zone

Such questions, Mr. Hawkwing, which show exceeding perspicacity as relates to the Issues of the Age endow my blood with a tinge of Olympian ichor. Drinking the ambrosia of your thought has brought rarefied understanding of the times to my often ontologically challenged psyche. To offer the least-stultified view of a possible answer to your query: The pre-cooked weight of unsalted butter contains a large percentage of Impressionism, whereas adult blue whale has been found to contain, in part, large quantities of the Categorical Imperative. If you will refer to your copy of Brinson’s Scientific Measurement Tables of the Products of Movements in Thought and Art, you will find that a standard copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is almost equal in weight to Vasili Vasilyevich Vereshchagin’s “Pause in the War.” Thusly we can observe that slow evaporation would yield equal parts Impressionism and Categorical Imperative.

Dearest Montezuma Mine,

Did atheists first come from Athens?

Thomas Falconer
Bath, United Kingdom

While questions on the Creation of atheists have long been settled, their dissemination to the public at large has been, at best, desultory. The last person known to have asked this question was one Ramona A. Stone, part-time apiculturist and bar maid. The first person known to have asked this question after an answer was found (by the Honourable Sir William Kingston Kingsley Thornton), was poorly-read academic Nathan Adler. In short, the Honourable Sir William Kngston Kingsley Thornton found that atheists originated in Wichita, Kansas.

Hey Montezuma,

Way back in the 1970s there was some guy in Italy who was going to eat a whole car piece by piece. Any idea what happened to him?

Eddie “The Eagle” Belfour
Toronto, Canada

Yes.

Dear Montezuma,

When a deaf person is schizophrenic, do they hear people talking to them or do they just imagine people signing to them?

Gil-Scott Heron
Chicago, IL

Only one deaf schizophrenic exists within the continental United States. It is apparent from multiple drawings, audio recordings, etchings, paintings, performances, books, essays, web sites, letters to the editor, teletype communications, and encoded dispatches that he sees patterns in a cavalcade of imaginary lions which pervade his imagination. Furthermore, upon the onset of his dire affliction, he was instructed only to obey every third message these patterns of lions divulged to him. This causes some confusion as he obviously lost count in 1996.

Dear Montezuma,

I just started working in the maintenance and repair crew for the local power company. Love the job, but I’m having some problems with my co-workers. Like today, we just had this hole dug in the roadway the other day. I climbed down into the hole to start work on the electrical conduit that got broken. Then Gary comes over and says “Is this your first hole?” He laughed and I was humiliated. Then the other guys on the crew came over to find out what all the laughing was about and Gary told them it was my first hole. Then a kid walking down the street wanted to know what was going on and they told him it was my first hole and he joined in. Then an old lady came out of her house near where we were working and she asked what was going on and they told her it was my first hole and she let out this cackle like you wouldn’t believe. I almost started crying. How can I make my shoes
more comfortable?

Ethan Hawke
Austin, TX

You should change your name to Ian Hawke so that your initials would become IH. I find it more aesthetically pleasing. I am not positive a position with the local electric company is the best type of work for a pregnant woman and so I’m not surprised people would laugh about your first baby. People are often cruel about children. I would overrecommend bed rest for you and perhaps a nice, cooling pitcher of gin and tonics.

Dearest Montezuma,

Have you ever noticed that most people don’t look at trees? I’ve never seen anyone really take a good hard look at a tree and I wonder why. They’re very sexy, from their barky branches to their sensuous green leaves. Why don’t more people look at trees?

Onatop Flamingo
Amazing, EL

Trees really chose their evolutionary path. They stand in the sight of humanity, but are generally unnoticed for the dire consequences they sow upon humanity. From the dreaded allergens they spread constantly in any hot weather to their ability to create intense electrical fields around automobiles, trees are a danger to humanity and must be stopped at all costs.

Dear Montezuma,

Is it Kosher to eat fish with cheese? My favorite restaurant; the Shangai Garden Kosher Taco House Buffet X-Press serves excellent perch parmesan, and I hate to miss out on it because it violates the mitzvot against meat and dairy. Surely eating fish with dairy or chicken with dairy is okay because these animals have no mammary glands and I would under no circumstance consume a chicklet in its mother’s milk.

Rabbi Armen B. Sparrow
Duluth, MN

Oh Rabbi. Shouldn’t ye know the divergent vagaries of life. While the families of fish and fowl are not at all similar to the mammalian creatures we so love to consume, they do contain the potentiality in their genes to create mammary glands and produce milk thereof. While I am not of the same religious belief as you, even I don’t eat cheeseburgers made of fish.

Dear Montezuma,

Why is it that there are two types of screwdrivers and screws? I understand that flat heads allow more instruments to be used as drivers and that Phillips heads provide easier screwing, but why are there two types? Which is best?

Alexandria Bluejay
East Katharinetowne, WD

Alex, Alex, Alex…there are four types of screwdrivers and screws. Please do some research before writing me.

Dear Montezuma,

Why do the Euopeans use such weird paper? It’s all tall and thin and useless in American fax machines, three ring binders and such. Why can’t the Europeans use regular 8.5 x 11 paper? What is wrong with that continent?

Felix Gnu
New York, NY

The Europeans are much more advanced than us. Please see their six hour work week.

Dearest Montezuma,

I hate my clothes, several boys and a ton of girls. I’d have a happy life if I did the things I like. What should I do?

Elmo Finch
Nortown, AC

Elmo, it would be best if you cleared up your acne with some sort of astringent such as witch hazel. Then you could moisturize with a combination of cocoa butter and a light margarine-vinegar mix. Should clear that problem right up.