AT WAR WITH THE MYSTICS

At a press conference today, President-Elect Barack Obama expressed a reluctance to evoke dead Presidents past for advice, stating that "I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any seances." The blogosphere is already yapping about whether or not this is disrespectful to the ailing former First Lady (who fell off a ladder while painting zodiacal constellations on her ceiling earlier this year), but to do this is to miss the entire point. Obama doesn't need to hire a medium because HE CAN ALREADY SPEAK WITH THE DEAD.

As we stated the other day, this powerful entity who just won the popular vote and has inspired an epidemic of newsprint larceny is possessed of a wide, deep range of uncanny supernatural powers that will only reveal themselves gradually, lest the electorate emigrate en masse to America's Beard, Mexico. That he is human is clear, but after that, you're on your own. And with the tools of the federal government at his fingertips, he will be like Will Jones and Tommy Lee Smith in The Men Who Wear Black - COMBINED. Let us pray that he uses his powers to aid the forces of Efficacy instead of embracing the Ugly/Fat/Lazy/Stupid Side. That is, if we're praying types. Which we're not - "pray" is just a metaphor for something more secular that we don't really have a name for. Oh wait - HOPE. Yeah, that's it.

TAKE ON MEDIA

Much election-wise chatter has been spilled about the Cable Newsworthiness Network's so-called "magic wall," which ostensibly displays the revolutionary ability to change the course of history through clever applications of graphic interactibility. The Turner Broadcasting Concern saddens us with their low regard for our collective memory. The use of "magic frame" technology has been concretizing graphic images for over 23 years, as this promotional 1985 music video from the Norwegian engineering firm A-Ha Electrosolutions Ltd. will attest. Seriously, Turner, have you less shame than none?

This rebuke having been delivered, we stand staunchly opposed to the mainstream adoption of magic frame technology. It is only due to highly expensive containment systems that anthropomorphic representations of regional districts didn't spring from the screen to do bloody battle against each other on the CNN studio floor, dramatizing the returns in the most gruesome fashion imaginable.

And furthermore, what would happen to these newly three-dimensional entities once they had been unleashed onto the world? Would they be required to acquire citizenship in the geographic area they resemble, or, as unaccountable aliens, would they be sent to Guantamananomomo Bay-like detention facilities, where they would become meta-political cause celebres? "States' rights" indeed.

THE CONSPIRACY SUCCEEDS

The American people have elected to the Presidency of the United States a crypto-Muslim, who is in reality a crypto-Satanist, which crypto-identity that may in turn mask, Russian doll-like, a nigh-infinitude of other crypto-identities. But one thing is certain: America has its first federal leader with ties to the underworld - by which we mean not the Mafia, but the powers of Hell itself. Whether this is better or worse for a nation battered by eight years of incompetence remains to be seen. Reports of Obama as a potential Antichrist are premature at this juncture, and in any event may be just another slippery counter-counterintuitive ploy.

QUANTUM OF MENACE

It was only a matter of time before a real live mad-scientist doomsday device was invented - but who would have expected it to be in Switzerland? The Apocryphist, that's who. Ever since reports began to surface about the genesis of the Large Hadron Collider - a super-cyclotron created for ostensibly peaceful "study" purposes by CERN (Center for Europeans Researching Nuclearity) that runs a 17-mile circuit beneath the Swiss countryside - we knew that there was more to the project than its maddeningly neutral proponents were letting on. And, despite the naively positive press the endeavor is receiving today, its opening day, we stand uncorrected.

First, a little subterranean geopolitical primer: until the 17th century, a race of cave-dwelling troglodytic peoples lived relatively unmolested in a series of caves beneath the Alps. In order to protect their peaceful existence against the coming onslaught of Modernity, they signed a treaty with the Swiss government in 1647, essentially declaring the underground stratum of the area a separate nation from its surface. Rather uninspiringly known as Subterranea, this nation survived and even flourished despite its occasionally cruel attitudes towards its own citizens. (Proto-anthropologist Dante Aligheri published an early ethnography of these people's quaint practices in his 14th-century monograph Inferno.)

Fast-forward to the 1940s. Previously unaware of the existence of Subterranea (which, in stark contrast to its upper counterpart, secretly and somewhat quixotically fought against both the Allies and Axis powers during WWII), former Nazi war criminals looking for hideouts that did not involve long ocean voyages or having to learn Spanish found its craggy confines to be a comforting alternative to execution. Within a generation, Subterranea became the most popular tax haven and libertarian skulking-ground the world had never heard of. That it soon attracted a new class of megalomaniacal supercriminals should come as no surprise.

This burgeoning breed of masterminds were no mere Nazis - rather than simply taking over the world, they wanted to hold it ransom for vast sums and/or sell its citizens as food to passing extraterrestrial warships and/or just destroy it outright for private, psychotic reasons. The vast majority of these projects were doomed to failure before they even made it to the drawing board - but with the creation of the Large Hadron Collider, a new chapter has been opened in the book of mega-evil.

By hiding its activities under the believable-sounding acronym CERN (unlike its risible predecessors SMERSH, SLUDGE, EEEEVIL), the criminal conglomerate was able to enlist the aid of scientists and national governments worldwide under the aegis of its stated goal: to advance quantum physics by throwing molecules into each other at unbelievable speeds in order to approximate the conditions of the world at the time of the Big Bang. That otherwise respectable people were drawn in by what is obviously a horrible threat thinly veiled by scientific jargon (you know what happened at the time of the Big Bang? THE MOST UNBELIEVABLY GIGANTIC EXPLOSION THE UNIVERSE HAS EVER SEEN) is a testament to the insidious intelligence of these evildoers.

Among the other stated goals of this project is to create a theoretical particle known as a Higgs Boson - but anyone remotely literate should be aware that this is not an actual scientific concept, but rather a sly reference to Bos'n Higgs, the demented leader of the pirate mutiny in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of maritime adventure, Pirate Mutiny. In reality, as many mainstream scientists have declared in recent months, the Large Hadron Collider is liable to do nothing more than create tiny black holes, which can either be inserted as ammo into black-hole ray-guns (which can be shot at Fort Knox security guards in order to warp them into another dimension during a daring robbery) or else destroy the world outright.

Only time will tell if CERN's nefarious scheming will pay off - the Collider is going to take several months just to warm up. In the meantime, let us declare that we are not proclaiming a judgment - either positive or negative - on this mind-blowingly insane project. Just as evil can sometimes come of good, good can occasionally come of evil. If one of the side effects of this horrifying endeavor is, say, extreme human mutation of the wing-growing/x-ray vision variety, or the return of Atlantis to the surface of the ocean, or the awakening ofthe hibernating Cthulhu deep within Antarctica - well, let's just say we won't altogether mind.

FROM BAD TO NORSE

The dearth of recent news stories on the subject of Vikings is a troubling trend that we feel obligated to address. Most people consider Vikings to be little more than a bygone race of Scandinavian sea pirates that roamed Western Europe a thousand or so years ago before their reign of sack and pillage was brought to an end by the mass embrace of Christianity in their home region. These people are dangerously deluded, in dire need of being smacked around, shouted at, and quite possibly spat upon.

One of the primary misconceptions of the modern world is that the Viking menace is past. The truth is that there is a direct line of descent between Vikings and modern terrorists. Bereft of their dragon-hulled battleships, many of them migrated inland. Some wound up in Middle East, where they have stoked havoc for nearly a millennium. Others sat around in Central Europe scratching their asses until the circumstances were promising for Fascism. Still others wrote operas about Vikings, in which Viking stories were sung in Viking costume by Viking singers. But despite the fatness and femininity of some of these performers, their singing did not spell the end of the Viking era. In fact, Vikings continue, in their guises of regular, everyday people, to have a profound impact on the workings of recent history.

As such, please study, memorize, and tremble in fear of this list of "Five Events in Recent History That Were Actually Caused By Vikings - Yes, Vikings!"

1. THE BOER WAR - When a group of Edwardian Vikings decided that they wanted to terrorize the Southern Hemisphere for a change, they went straight to South Africa and subjugate the British, who were in turn subjugating the Dutch Boers, who were in turn subjugating the Zulus, who were in turn subjugating the lions, who were in turn subjugating the giraffes, who were in turn subjugating the the mimosa trees, who were in turn pretty much screwed. There were no victors.

2. COMMUNISM - Originally a shiny, happy philosophical system of shared resources and equality devised by the world's first hippie, Carl Marks, Communism could very well have served as a solution to the world's ills were it not for the Vikings who secretly overthrew the Russian Revolution and decided that it would be a lot more fun to kill millions of people and turn the verdant greenlands of Siberia into a crappy prison camp.

3. THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL - Vikings have a known propensity to disguise themselves as corrupt politicians and sabotage the system from within. During the reign of President Harden G. Warning, whose cabinet was lousy with them, Vikings accepted millions of dollars in kickbacks from the tea lobby in exchange for the promise to affix a giant handle and spout to the Capitol building in Washington, DC. (In a planned double-cross, these accoutrements would, at the final moment, be replaced with classic Viking horns that would cast their pointy shadows across the Mall for generations to come.) When the scheme was discovered, the Vikings were unceremoniously kicked out of Washington until the next President was sworn in.

4. ISHTAR - Unhappy about their portrayal in such historical films as Erik the Red-Faced, Kill All the Vikings! and Wild Strawberries, the Vikings decided to strike Hollywood in its most tender part: the money. Infiltrating the studio establishment, secret Viking producers created a bizarre proposal for a buddy comedy starring the aging comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who play songwriters at the ancient temple of the Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, Ishtar. Though the film fared poorly at the box office, it failed to destroy the entertainment-industrial complex of the United States, as originally intended.

5. 9/11 - What were those deadly airplanes if not Viking vessels of fearmongering and attempted conquerment? Sure, they didn't have dragons emblazoned on the front, but that was merely practical - the Viking-descended members of Al-Qaeda would have loved nothing more than to paint some scary teeth onto the noses of those jets, only by doing so they would have been caught before liftoff.

And what are they up to right now? It is believed that a group of Vikings has joined the Steampunkerism movement's attempts to revive the corpse of Queen Victoria, in the hopes that a new British Empire would give them something more interesting to conquer than the amateur crap being thrown down by the current United States government. Of course, the Viking scourge has grown so diffuse in the generations since its acme that it is difficult to imagine them banding together and traumatizing the world en masse. Still, Viking sleeper cells are present in every nation of the world, and it is only a matter of time before one of them dons their ceremonial helmets, drinks an assload of grog, and starts swinging a battle-axe at your friends and relations. Look sharp!

BEST-TRIED GLORY

That The Apocryphist is a fan of musical theater should be a surprise to no one who understands the unexpected ways the levers and pulleys of this world are manipulated. The Broadway musical is an occult thermometer of Western civilization’s internal temperature, stuck right up the keister of show business. As such, it is with nearly shrieking gleefulness that we regard today’s announcement of a major Broadway revival of West Side Story, performed in the original Spanish.

In this election year, no musical could possibly present itself as a better illustration of the riven state of our electorate. An updating of Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s Romeo y Julietta (which also served as the inspiration for a popular line of smokeables), it follows the doomed love of Antonio, a dark-skinned barrio resident, for Mary, a fair-haired bastion of a conservative family with the reputation for being a “maverick.” Their urban affair, which unfolds across the boulevards of western Los Angeles, involves the shooting of more dark-skinned people, and much debate about when and how to stop said shooting. The show’s finale climaxes in an epic escape in which Mary, an escaped prisoner of the enemy gang, is airlifted off the stage by a live helicopter effect while the noble Antonio remains below, fighting off both gangs simultaneously. This ambiguous ending may not sway people’s votes, but it is certainly a sign of the times, much as it was during the musical’s premiere during the Vietnam Era of the early 1970’s.

The creators’ decision to stage the show in its native language is a bold one, especially since so many of the show’s classic tunes (including “Proud Mary,” “Pretty in Pink,” and “(They’re Coming to) America”) have been radio hits in English. But it’s long been rumored that Spanish-speaking people (albeit very few from Spain) will be voting in the upcoming election, and it’s probably good to keep them entertained by the mainstream theater establishment, lest they grow restless and waste their votes on a third-party candidate. Hats off to you, Broadway (top hats!) for once again having your fabulous, gaunt, near-dessicated finger on the pulse of America!

FRENCHED

This rare, hand-tinted early daguerreotype of French revolutionaries blowing up the original Eiffel Tower can only mean one thing: Bastille Day is here again.

Americans – along with the British, other Europeans, denizens of former Communist Bloc nations, citizens of the Third World, Canadians, and the majority of the French – nurse many misconceptions about the 18th-century Gallic struggle for liberté, égalité, and fraternité (roughly translated: “libraries, eagles, and fraternities,” otherwise known as the Holy Trinity of Universal Literacy, Nature Conservation, and Limitless Booze, the age-old earmarks of Liberal Education). As always, we are prepared to jump into the breach with some straight talk.

King Louis XIV, the self-styled “King of the Sun,” fancied that the French royal line were the descendents of solar aliens, the same race that ostensibly constructed the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and China. He decided that he needed an earthly construction to define his glory and compete with his supposed ancestors’ finest achievements, and so he called upon the royal engineer Alec Eiffel (who previously designed the haunted underground grottoes of Versailles) to create the world’s tallest structure – a 324-meter high wooden throne that would allow the entire world to view Louis in all his glory.

In order to fund this edifice, the peasants were forced to preemptively sign over the income of their next twelve generations of progeny to the French court. This worked for a while, but by the time the third sou-less generation came of age, during the reign of Louis XVII, the deal no longer held its former appeal. When Benjamin Franklin visited the nation in 1787, his fiery, demagogic speaking style and bloody rhetoric whipped the peasantry into a frenzy, and the French decided to join their American cousins in revolution.

For the Tennis Court Oath (which was actually sworn on a badminton green, which the proletariat found too faggy to identify as such), selected members of the French underclass dressed as Indians in order to disrupt the decadent games of the aristocracy and have their sporting equipment thrown into the Seine. As birdies, lacrosse sticks, and frilly knee-pads floated through the city, the anger they spawned pointed in one direction: the Tower.

In the decades following its erection, the Tower had been nicknamed “Bastille” (a French diminutive of “Bastarde”) by Parisians. This symbol of monarchy gone phallically awry represented all of the grievances of the People, and so, on July 14, 1789, they stormed it, rigged it up with a bunch of firecrackers, and watched it burn to the ground.

The years that followed were full of blood, both metaphorically and physically. Robespierre’s Reign of Terribleness began when Revolutionary leaders held a contest to devise the most fucked-up way of killing people – and thus the guillotine was born. The killing only ended when Louis XVII’s bastard son, Napoleon Bonaparte, reminded the people that there was no more Tower or racquet sports, and therefore the monarchy was dead. He then named himself Emperor.

It wasn’t until the reign of Napoleon’s grandson, Napoleon III, that everyone remembered how cool the Tower was, and plans were instantly drafted to rebuild it in iron, so the rabble couldn’t burn it down. Instead, they could pretend to burn it down every year, in a ritual similar to the Wicker Man ceremonies of ancient pagans and horror geeks. And so to this day the French enjoy having an excuse to make a lot of noise and set off fireworks in emulation of the July 4th holiday of their older post-Revolutionary siblings, the Americans. They’re like children that way.

HERITAGE ON YOUR CHEST

Again, we’re not the sort to advocate the stewardship of rare natural or cultural treasures by earthly bureaucracies – if something ancient and precious is going to get blown up, knocked down, or winnowed away to nothing by the fierce and remorseless desert winds, there’s often a damn good reason for it. Likewise, those landmarks and artifacts that are truly important to mankind’s progress upon earth are more than capable of taking a few lumps for the team. (We’re lookin’ at you, Sphinx.)

That being said, the World Heritage Centrrer (a division of UNICEF) has just released its new annual list of “Inscribed Properties” earmarked to be the subject of increased vigilance and protection over the coming years (though exactly how chiseling one’s organization’s name across the face of a “property” is tantamount to “protecting” it is beyond us). It serves as an interesting matrix of what mainstream humanity considers significant and amusing, a litmus of how little the League of Nations understands the true workings of the world it claims to represent.

This year’s list reads as a rogue’s gallery of history’s also-rans: Vanuatu, Mauritius, San Marino, Kenya, Slovakia – sure, each of these locations houses important populations of relict Lemurian descendants, but can we please let it go? Lemuria was a failed continent, and it failed for a reason. The very powerlessness of the League of Nations stems from its secret history as an epicenter of the Lemurian diaspora – and look where it’s gotten them. They’re starting to get as tiresome as the so-called Atlanteans, who are actually just a bunch of ancient Welsh fishermen who got lost and needed some kind of story to explain why they were missing for a thousand years. Put it to bed, people – we’re bored.

However, even more notable than the list’s inclusions are its omissions. Where are the Antarctic Mountains of Madness? Amityville, NY’s Portal to Hell? The Bedrock City of the Dakotas? Surely these sites are worthy of the care and attention of a few dozen drunken, incestuous Lemurians?

The most intriguing entry on the new list, however, is Sturtsey, the volcanic island currently growing off the coast of Iceland. It is clearly a bald attempt to breed a new lost continent that will be the subject of myth and rumor for many generations after it has finally disappeared from the face of the earth, and for this boldness of vision we salute its architects. Sure, we can think of about thirty million more opportune locations for the advance of a mysterious civilization (the North Atlantic? Right near a populated island? Come on, guys!), but the very unlikelihood of its position might prove to be an unmistakable asset. The very fact that the Lemurians are recognizing it in this way is evidence that they are quaking in their stupid little boots. Rugged Sturseyans of the future, let us be among the first to preemptively invite you to your eventual mastery of the human race. We’re proud to say we'll have known you when.

PERPETUAL WINTER FOR PERPETUAL SPRING

If there’s one thing we have in abundance here at The Apocryphist, it’s hunches. Our nose twitches at the scent of the possible; we are highly susceptible to cool draughts emanating from the as-yet-unknown. And lately we’ve been smacked upside the head by a cold draught indeed: the extended chill in the air outside, suspiciously prominent in its mid-April freakishness.

Many people go around and indiscriminately accuse the government of being responsible for every trivial ill. But not us: we only accuse for the big stuff. And nothing is bigger than the weather.

We’ve written previously about the perceptual causes of global warming, but this particular weather pattern we’re experiencing in the United States right now – unseasonably frigid, barely any sun, lacerating rains – is of a different class altogether. However, it is similar to global warming in that it has everything to do with politics.

No one, from the top to bottom of our nation’s vast beaureaucracy, denies that the war in Iraq is not going well. The question is, what is to be done about it? Congress has one idea; the executive branch has another; and this dichotomy is being played out in every corner of our 52.5 states.

The National Weather Service – the agency responsible for the nation’s weather, duh – is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is in turn subsidiary to the U.S. Department of Commerce – an agency answerable to the White House. All the pieces are now in place. President Bush – at the advice of Karl Rove – has ordered his lackeys to lengthen winter, causing citizens to spend so much time bitching about the cold that they don’t have time to concern themselves with politics. After the full manufacture this artificial crisis, he will command the National Weather Service to embark upon a late spring, for which the people will be so grateful that thoughts of war will be even further from their minds.

This is far from the first time that such a policy has been adopted. FDR initiated particularly cold winters during the Great Depression to encourage unemployed workers to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and enlist in New Deal programs. More recently, Richard Nixon issued a gorgeous summer in the midst of the Watergate controversy, but a fat lot of good it did him.

Our hunch is that our hunch about this is correct. Just when things feel at their worst – this morning, say – the skies will begin to clear and we’ll all be grateful for the sun and warmth. Too bad the weather report is forecasting more of the same for the foreseeable future.

GETTING HOT IN HERE, OR ME? (ANSWER: YOU)

The papers tell us that the Supreme Court decided yesterday to make a landmark decision involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s need to regulate greenhouse gases. We’re all like, sure, whatever. It’s not like it’s going to do a damn spot of good.

There are conflicting theories as to the causes of global warming. Some believe it involves the trapping of manmade carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, absorbing heat without releasing it. Those fundamentalist Christians who are willing to acknowledge the phenomenon aver that it is caused by the fires of Hell, leaking out of the earth’s crust in a calculated bid on the part of Satan to take the underworld mainstream. Still others think it’s a dragon.

Compelling though these theories are (and leaving quite aside the distasteful “farting cow” hypothesis), they are all distractions from the main issue at hand. You see, it is simply not true that the atmosphere is heating up. On the contrary – the earth itself is cooling down.

Pretty much everyone (except those fundamentalist Christians again) believes that the universe was created in a fiery blast of matter a handful of billennia ago. Fair enough. Consequently, it should be stressed that this fiery blast of matter was HOT – stars needed to be made out of it after all, as well as tropical beaches, Thermador convection ovens, and lust.

So imagine a hot little earth spinning through a cold universe. What’s it going to do? Cool off, of course. Sure it has a molten core that still holds the original warmth of the Big Bang, but there are all sorts of little cracks and wrinkles and zits across the earth’s surface that slowly release this primal torridity into the cosmos. As the ground beneath our feet chills even as we walk upon it, the air around us feels warmer. And it’s not just a matter of human perception – the conflicting pull of the earth and its atmosphere makes all of our equipment go all farblonjet, resulting in the popular illusion of global warming.

So why didn’t this effect make itself clear in previous generations? Easy: there was greater moisture surrounding the earth previously. Every time a rocket or satellite is launched, it takes a little bit of the atmosphere’s moisture along with it, drying the world ever so slightly. In other words, one could say that, in the past, it wasn’t so much the heat as (wait for it) the humidity.

Mainstream scientists will not look kindly upon these conclusions, and that only stands to reason; this is not a very lucrative theory, after all. We apologize if this posting puts Al Gore out of a job, but truth will out.

SYCOPHANTIC PUPPET FOUND GUILTY

The nation is abuzz with the news that former Dick Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been convicted on four counts of being a federal jackass. The only surprise here is that Cheney’s greasy monkey wrench wasn’t potent enough to gum up the gears of justice. How did things come to this pass?

It all started when Libby was accused of outing CIA agent Valerie Plame as a lesbian. Because the Bush administration had publicly accused the gays of hiding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, any such allegation had the effect of political botulism – and not the good kind. Plame’s career in tatters, Libby went on to accuse Meet the Press host Randy Quaid of making the whole thing up. After framing reporter Judith Regan for soliciting incriminating evidence in the form of a murder confession by beloved Naked Gun actor O.J. Simpson, Libby’s machinations began to be perceived as serving no purpose other than his own entertainment. This is when the anthropomorphic vultures began to pull out their silverware, tie napkins around their necks, and greedily lick their chops.

The question of the hour is: where was Cheney during all this? The answer is disarmingly simple: the bathroom. It’s still unclear what he was doing in there, but he failed to emerge for a full three years (a Washington record surpassed only by President William Howard Taft, who spent his entire 1909-1913 term in the bathtub). The next step in the investigation will no doubt involve trying to determine whether Cheney had a cell phone with him. If he did, the whole house of cards can be expected to fall like so many dominos.

Nicknamed for the way that, during potty training, he would wipe his behind by dragging it across the ground like a dog, “Scooter” Libby leaves behind a rich legacy of governmental malfeasance. As a State Department employee in the 1980s, he was charged with accelerating the fall of the USSR by making demeaning crank calls to top Communist Party officials. Working for the Pentagon in the early 1990s, he argued against intervention in Bosnia on the grounds that Balkan people “smell like hamsters.” More recently, as Cheney’s Chief of Staff, he chose a screaming chartreuse for the color of the Vice President’s bed linens.

Libby’s lawyers have already declared that they’re going to appeal the ruling. Meanwhile, Cheney’s press secretary recently announced that the VP “has to take a whiz,” which most likely means a further period of self-imposed exile. However, just because the cookie jar snapped closed on his hand, severing it, doesn’t mean that Libby won’t keep busy: his autobiography – I, Lewis “Scooter” Libby – will be released by HarperCollins this fall.

AN ITCHY, BURNING CRASH

So the U.S. economy was inches away from landing ass-first in the fecal, rat-infested depths of a Greater Depression yesterday. Some blame China, and its nefarious secret leader, Dr. Jonathan "Fu" Manchu (the Westernized grandson of the fictional pulp villain). But the fact of the matter is that economies, like the human beings subservient to them, are capable of catching bugs and viruses, and Tuesday's drop in the market was merely the financial equivalent of a nasty head cold.

Most people assume that disease far predated currency as a scourge of mankind. The truth, hard as it is to believe, is that money actually introduced sickness into the world. The fossil record shows that in the Paleosticene Era, humans first began picking fruit and trading it for other fruit or, more often, sex. Engorged on sweet treats, the homunculi located in the sperm grew corrupt and ornery, thereby initiating the world’s first STD. Other diseases followed. The Christian story of the Garden of Eden is simply an allegory for this primal monetary transaction.

Of course, if economies are able to spread illness to humans, the same is true of the reverse. Tuesday’s crash was not the result of a vast, interconnected web of socioeconomic factors; rather, it can be traced to one man, a 33-year old stockbroker in Shanghai named Chang Eng, who accidentally sneezed on the economy while walking to the rest room. The economy (which, as shares of citrus sales this quarter reveal, has not been taking its Vitamin C) thereby developed a fever, and an excess of mucous in the form widespread journalistic analysis. It was only one of those 24-hour things, though, so it’s feeling much better now, even though it’s still blowing its nose quite a bit.

The Stock Market Crash of the 1930s can similarly be attributed to biological causes. The freewheeling spirit of the Jazz Age encouraged massive amounts of binge drinking, and, due to excessive optimism levels in the bloodstreams of most flappers and dandies, the effects were deferred to the cash in their pockets, which soaked up the alcoholic residue sweated out of its hosts during novelty dance crazes. As such, what we consider the Great Depression was actually the Goddamn Hangover.

It’s best to consider events like yesterday’s as economic cold sores, painfully flaring up at annoying and embarrassing times to ooze information about our unhealthy past. Yes, this is gross, but so is licking a dollar bill.

WE'VE GOT OSCAR STOMACH FLU!

It’s a little-known piece of Oscar trivia that the physical awards themselves can be used to pass through international borders in lieu of valid passports – the United Nations recognizes an Academy Award as a carte blanche surpassing all national sovereignty, catapulting winners of this honor into a cosmopolitan netherworld of unfettered access. However, as a check to the nigh-unlimited power the wielders of these golden statues would possess, Oscars are not allowed on airplanes. The result is that it’s unlikely for a terrorist go through the trouble of developing sufficient acting, writing, directing, producing or (more feasibly) technical chops to work his or her way up the Hollywood ranks in hopes of gaining a coveted nomination. It was briefly feared this year that Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro might secretly be an al-Qaeda operative (he has a beard), but any panic was laid to rest by the Academy’s unwillingness to nominate this shadowy, ethnic figure for an award. However, the overall preponderance of Mexicans in this year's nominations testifies to the willingness of our friends to the South to do whatever it takes to cross the U.S. border unmolested.

All of this is by way of prelude to the Apocryphist’s analysis of last night’s Academy Awards ceremony. It’s no secret that the results of this ostensibly entertainment-oriented contest have grave sociopolitical implications, and it is our goal today to uncover a bit of this secret knowledge for your delectation.

First of all, a clear message was being sent by the fact that the winners of the two leading performance awards – Dame Helen Mirren and Forrest Whitaker– portrayed world leaders going through a period of crisis. Not only that, but in their polar opposition – female vs. male, white vs. black, good vs. evil, skinny vs. fat, hairy vs. bald, etc. – further crucial details were being communicated to those with the savvy to detect them.

The technical explanation could keep us occupied for a full month of posts, but the pith of the matter is that the Academy believes the Antichrist will be elected U.S President in 2008. However, the interpretation leaves unresolved whether this will turn out to be Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They represent the dual forces at play in the presentation of last night’s major acting Awards – except one of them needs to gain some weight between now and next November. Whichever of the two breaks the scales during the next eighteen months could very well usher us into the End Times.

On a lighter note, wasn’t Jennifer Hudson fabulous? Imagine having to sing that show-stopping tune after losing the Award! Luckily the predictions were correct, and she was able to turn in a triumphant performance that simply blew away the crowd.

Finally, a word about Pilobolus, the dance company whose shadow-puppet antics delighted the restless crowd. The idea was for the shapes they created to be projected through the scrim onto Jack Nicholson’s bald pate, which would then reflect them through a skylight in the Kodak Theatre’s roof and project them onto the moon as a worldwide celebration of cinema magic (this is why Nicholson was always bathed in a blinding corona of light whenever he was on camera). Unfortunately, host Ellen Degeneres sabotaged the affair, believing that it would detract from the planned announcement of her Presidential candidacy. However, our inside correspondent tell us that Degeneres was scared straight when, in an unanticipated move, Pilobolus attacked and engulfed her behind the scrim, and threatened to snap her neck with their athletic thighs if she went through with her plan. Though the Nicholson-spotlight display was still unable to proceed, neither were Degeneres’ Presidential aspirations, leaving Hillary Clinton the sole lesbian candidate for the Democratic nomination.

TOMORROW: A semiological analysis of this year’s Oscar fashions.