Letters: Tiberium 2007

Dear Sirs,
My cell phone company claims to offer me “unlimited calls” each month. However, it takes me at least two seconds to pull up or dial a number, and often two or three seconds more for the signal to go through. Factor in half a second of actual call time, plus another half second to hang up and you get roughly a six second minimum per call. If I did nothing but this, I could make no more than four hundred and thirty two thousand calls in a month. That’s hardly unlimited, is it? And, if I wanted to sleep, go to work, or actually talk to the people I called I doubt I could top even fifty thousand calls a month. Who are they trying to fool with this so called “unlimited” plan? Only God can make truly unlimited calls and to say otherwise is an abomination unto the Lord.
Good day,
Milo T. Huckenfoll
Grasping, WV

To Axes & Alleys,
I have noticed that Jodie Applegate of Good Day New York is a rather attractive woman and that Weather Authority Mike Woods is a rather attractive man. Together, they would produce some beautiful children. Could you please help me with my Fox 5 eugenics program? I would also like to see Linda Lopez and Ron Corning get together.
Melissa Foch
Staten Island, NY

Dear A&A,
If I could have one thing in the world, it would be a cornea that wasn’t all scratched up by sandpaper. If I could have two things in the world, it would be to have two corneas that weren’t all scratched up by sandpaper.
Yours,
John Chesterford-Bradley
Boston, MA

Editors,
I am incensed by the decline in the quality of your publication. Why, the current issue just seems rushed. Almost as if you had other things to do. I would prefer next time that you simply leave the pages blank and let me guess what might’ve gone there.
In distress,
Mary Bluepoint
Selden, NY

Axes & Allleys,
Yes, I’m sorry I spelled your name with three “l.”
Bets!
Penny Grumlin
Grumlin, OH

Dear Axes & Alleys,
The advertisement for Happy Goat Brand goat hangars is utterly distasteful. I don’t appreciate your use of a dead and decapitated goat’s head. In fact, it made me vomit while reading it. Next time please use a live decapitated goat’s head, instead. They have tubes and pumps for that sort of thing these days.
Shimmy Lanhorne
Oak Bridge, WY

Hey Guys,
I’ve been trying to figure out where your magazine fits into the grand scheme. Are you post-Dadaist? Para-dimensional? Pre-Modern? Anti-Futurological? Another hyphenated term? I just can’t seem to place you.
Marisol McWhorter
Puerto Rico, America

To the Editors,
I am deeply upset by your sticker from this month’s issue (Sticker Page, Volume 456-BR8, Issue 08). The yellow pentagon claiming “My Other Personality is Hot” values people only as objects of intellectual desire. Is that all we are, minds? There is such a great variety of bodies out there and yet your sticker slights them by its very existence. How dare you!
P.B. Ribbon
Milwaukee, WI

Dear Axes & Alleys,
I don’t like that you haven’t featured Matisyahu in your pages yet. Not only is he a novelty act, but he makes really good music, too. I’ve never liked Reggae before in my life, but his God-centered stylings make me yearn for the Lord. Why can’t you put him in your pages?
Best,
Stone Gossard
Olympia, WA

Dear Axes & Alleys,
Please tell me the history of popcorn. I want to know!
Love,
Tina Von Diesehn
Wurtemburg, Nebraska

Fifty Things to Do Before You Die

1. Portray Blanche Dubois in a stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire.
2. Affix postage to a live duck and try to mail it to Walla Walla, Washington. It only counts if the stamps are canceled.
3. Shave a swear word into your pubic hair with a straight razor and a stencil.
4. Dance the Flamenco with Bruce Villanche.
5. Share a firm handshake with the sideshow’s glass eater.
6. Deliver a ten minute speech about radishes.
7. Put an eight dollar trifecta on “Lucky,” “Chance,” and “Fortune.”
8. Write several letters to a Colombian pen-pal.
9. Make a toast in honor of the Prime Minister of Canada.
10. Lose a backgammon tournament, but remain a good sport about it.
11. Dial a number at random and ask for Steven.
12. Chase an escaped canary across a frozen lake.
13. Play Trivial Pursuit with members of your local VFW.
14. Sneak seven kilos of heroin through customs.
15. Have sexual intercourse with Sarah Polley.
16. Eat an entire Virginia ham in a single sitting.
17. Swindle a vegan.
18. Attend a rodeo while dressed as Thomas Jefferson.
19. Smile at an albatross.
20. Break a glass and then blame it on your sister.
21. Pretend to date a cute blonde girl named Samantha.
22. Get winked at by a fat guy using a gas station slot machine.
23. Feign interest when Isobel talks about her back ache.
24. Discover a new atomic element.
25. See Rock City.
26. Face down an angry moose while bearing only a can of Pepsi.
27. Receive your ordination by mail and bless water fountains in your town.
28. Put on your aviator sunglasses, grab your corn cob pipe, and show that Chester Nimitz your MacArthur impression.
29. Ridicule an old lady’s knick knacks.
30. Lay underwater cable across a local pond.
31. Dress up like a samurai to impress girls.
32. Dress up like a gun moll to impress boys.
33. Fax a crossword puzzle to a dairy farmer.
34. Perch on a tree limb and pretend to be a songbird.
35. Make nuclear reactor construction plans out of origami.
36. Put chain link fence around a cubic foot of space.
37. Eat spaghetti (with or without meatballs).
38. Deride the works of that tart Chopin, but get him confused with Franz Liszt.
39. Cross the streams.
40. Buy something, anything, that says “manufactured in Micronesia” on it.
41. Play your wax paper and plastic comb harmonica for a bus full of graveyard shift factory employees on their way home in the morning.
42. Argue with a German about how Cologne is really part of France.
43. See Daniel Bester, Inc.’s Humongotronic, the audio-visual telescreen borne aloft by four zeppelins, as it makes its stately procession over Katharinetowne.
44. Play drums in a band which achieves minor celebrity amongst the nation’s so-called tastemaking class.
45. Engage in sexual activity with someone who isn’t that into it.
46. Attempt to organize the defense of a bee colony. Exhort them to go down fighting if the operation wavers.
47. Sell charcoal-filtered air on a street corner in brightly-coloured plastic bottles.
48. Remind five people a day for an entire week that Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens and it rhymes with lemons.
49. Construct a ramshackle Greek trireme on wheels, plug your ears with wax, give it a good push down the road and strap yourself to the mast. Include some friends who are easily distracted by singing if you want verisimilitude.
50. Experience the groaning agony of pancreatic cancer.

Katie Stalin in Atlanta

stalin

Atlanta

Atlanta, GA– Why, you might ask, am I writing this award-neglected travelogue from Atlanta, even though the fat cats at Axes & Alleys paid for a trip to Reykjavik? Well, it all has to do with the little light-up signs on the airplane. When you need to put on your seat belt the sign shows a seatbelt. Makes sense, right? Now, the No Smoking sign shows a cigarette, doesn’t it? Not a pipe. In fact, no one ever mentioned pipes at all and yet you pull out a pipe after dinner and they act like you’re a godless communist or something. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’ll bring you a brandy. What was I supposed to do, just sit there drinking brandy and not smoke a pipe?

Yeah, so they went all ballistic and I got stuck in Atlanta. Luckily, I met this cute doctor at the hotel bar. It was lucky for me because he works at this company called CDC and offered to give me a special guided tour. And it was lucky for him in a few different ways that I won’t mention because this is a family magazine.

CDC is a pretty cool company, I guess, you know like in a futuristic way. But their headquarters is pretty big and it’s easy to get lost. There are lots of long, white corridors and rooms full of science and medicine and stuff. They probably even have a janitor’s closet reserved for “maths.” Anyway, they had the biggest refrigerator I’ve ever seen, like almost as big as a whole Arby’s!

There were also a bunch of vials and stuff, and it turns out they were all drugs. Sweet. Though I didn’t know the actual street value of the stuff, I figured it would be fun to try them out and see what happened. I am a journalist you know, and I seek the truth, especially the truth about cool new drugs that even I’ve never heard of like Smallpox or Polio.

Turns out this stuff must have been really expensive. Seriously. You think they freak out when you get caught loading an ice machine from the hotel onto your truck, that’s nothing compared to how these CDC guys freaked. All these astronauts ran in the room and they were armed to the teeth. And they’re all yelling and stuff and made me put all the drugs back.

Atlanta is stupid. First, the hotel pool was closed and second the police won’t believe you when you say you’re not a terrorist. And police station coffee sucks. So, I’m like, who do you have to blow to get good coffee around here? Turns out it’s Special Agent Picket. He took me to get coffee and then while he was in the bathroom, I skipped out of there before I had to pay up on my part of the deal and hitchhiked to the bus station. Sherman was right; screw Atlanta, I’m going to Iceland.