During This Month in History:

• 2005 AD: Axes & Alleys’ offices enter their second month without a secretary. Almost every staff member has started coming unglued by this point and documentation of the period is scant.
• 2004 AD: President Dick Armstrong wins the Radford, Virginia Bird Call Competition for a third year straight when his near-perfect Alaskan gray mallard call scores an astonishing 9.4.
• 1982 AD: After declaring war on the decadent West, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China jointly invade India in retaliation for the destruction of a Soviet transport in the Black Sea by a British destroyer.
• 1971 AD: Pop-Artist Andy Warhol sits in his underpants eating cornflakes and watching cartoons for two and a half days straight.
• 1947 AD: Howard Hughes accidentally impregnates a crashed Dran visitor, who gives birth to a male child in 1948. With his origin covered up by the Illuminati, the infant William Gibson is adopted by a couple in South Carolina, who never reveal the truth about his past.
• 1943 AD: General Douglas MacArthur defeats Chiang Kai Shek in a bout of bare-knuckled pugilism, enabling U.S. Army Private First Class Phillip Donner to win $4,000.
• 1912 AD: Suffragette Elizabeth “Kitty” Standon dons a five foot diameter, eighty-three stone hat which causes her to topple over before she can ever chain herself to a railing.
• 1899 AD: Jakob Schwartzkinderpopologan invented the cathode ray cone, an almost completely non-functional predecessor to the tubes found in most modern televisions.
• 1865 AD: Corporal Ebenezer Johnson becomes the last person to die in the Civil War when he chokes on a peanut eight minutes before Lee’s famous surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.
• 1854 AD: Future president Horace B. Borden spends five days inconsolable over the loss of his favorite pair of shoes. The shoes are eventually found behind a divan and all ends well.
• 1721 AD: Sir Seymour Dial Button invents the knob.
• 1603 AD: Skippy Sellase, a close relative of the Ethiopian Emperor, unwisely points out that the empire’s not terribly impressive.
• 1532 AD: Hungarian explorer Jan Troplovich becomes the 328th person to discover the New World.
• 1333 AD: Nuctuhualpayo, an ingenious Incan man, creates a wheeled cart for transporting goods. His village is not impressed. Several weeks later he attaches the cart to an alpaca, creating the New World’s first coach. He is incessantly mocked for the invention’s ridiculous appearance and quickly abandons it.
• 1066 AD: William the Bastard of Normandy, on his way to board a boat steps on a frog, causing him to careen into a nearby fruit stand where his head gets stuck in a large melon, blinding him so that he steps on a hoe which smacks him in the head, knocking him back into a pile of cow manure which subsequently catches on fire. He is able to turn this into a good omen by proclaiming “Shit, I hate the Anglo-Saxons.”
• 89 BC: Sulla and Marius both arrive at an orgy wearing the same toga style in an event which would eventually prove disastrous for the Roman Republic.
• 1290 BC: Yatkub ben Gelafa, formerly part of the Exodus made famous by God’s The Bible, sneaks back into Egypt to retrieve his favorite loin cloth.
• 3280 BC: Shokindush of Ur invents the wheel after his ninth unsuccessful attempt to invent the donut.
• 14102 BC: While others around him are slowly getting to know wolves, sheep, goats and oxen a little better, Trufgor thinks frogs could be mighty useful friends.