indings of the 9-11 Commission distressed many in the government and law enforcement agencies this week, with media attention quickly turning to allegations more could have been done to prevent the tragedies. Some were alarmed at revelations the CIA had information about Al-Qaeda’s plan to use airplanes as weapons as early as 1995. More troubling, the twenty-first century disaster had been predicted as far back as the sixteenth century.

The question has been raised amidst the report: Could intelligence from Nostradamus have prevented 9-11?

Some, and not just stoners, are saying yes. Michel Nostradamus first released his information on the disasters in the sixteenth century, in his usual reporting style of quatrains and vague language. Still, little confusion could come from the prophetic announcement that “The sky will burn at forty-five degrees latitude, / Fire approaches the great new city / Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up / When they want to have verification from the Normans.� The Commission interviewed several experts on the sixteenth century seer and what exactly the government knew at the time of the prophecy.

“I’m extremely dismayed,� said some senator on the panel, “to think we had this information nearly five hundred years ago and still couldn’t respond appropriately.�

Interviewed by the Commission was Nostradamus expert Professor Paul Fischer, from New York University’s Humanities Department. In fact, Fischer is regarded by some not so much an expert on Nostradamus as one of the few people who knew anything about Nostradamus’ work and had Sunday off to testify.

“There are numerous reasons why the ‘Nostradamus intelligence’ proved insufficient to react to the Al-Qaeda problem,� said Fischer, before the Commission. “For one, the language of the prophecy is non-specific and did not really offer a date the attacks would happen. Secondly, a probable one-hundred year lapse came between the announcement of the prophecy and its translation into English, and even then there is no exact record for when it came to the attention of anyone in America. And thirdly, the United States would not come into existence as a government for another hundred years after that, and at the time did not have a bureau of intelligence. But if this Commission is determined to find someone of the era to blame, let’s just say King of England Charles II for the sake of getting this whole thing done with.�

The Commission then proposed Charles II be called upon to publicly testify to what he knew about terrorism during his administration, or reign, and faced minor embarrassment when a Senate page informed them the Merry Monarch has been deceased since 1685.

Speaking on a condition of detailed notoriety, Sen. Bill Willey expressed dismay at the Commission’s exoneration of Charles II and pre-revolutionary intelligence groups.

“Frankly, I’m not convinced all was done to prevent the horrors of September eleven,� said Sen. Willey, on Larry King Live. “The world around us changed in ways we never could have imagined on that dark day. It seems inconceivable someone could not have seen it coming and taken the Al-Qaeda threat seriously.�

rom coast to coast, American drivers are facing the soaring cost of gasoline in the midst of economic hardship. The highest pump price was $2.54 a gallon last week in San Diego, and many are worried the costs will continue to rise as OPEC announced recently it would cut back, not increase, oil production. Unhappily, most Americans shrugged and bowed to corporate bidding in response.

"It's the inevitability of a corporate oligarchy," said Trenton, New Jersey resident Manuel Torres, while filling his Vista Cruiser. "What can you do?"

Indeed the general consensus by the public matches Torres' intention to bend over and suffer through the economic buggering. Americans are filling up their cars no less, demanding no new changes in import laws or fuel regulations, and are still buying gas-sucking SUVs in ridiculous numbers. Media watchers, lurking in the bushes, speculate it might not stem from a lack of information on the issues so much as a total demolition of the will to resist, and the death of democracy.

"Nobody wants to pay so much for gas, but it doesn't seem like you got any choice," summed up Marilyn Hoscomb of Richmond, Virginia, at a Shell station where the prices had reached $1.84. "We've squandered our freedom voting for parties who have crippled unions and segregated the public on meaningless issues of morality. Now that our spineless leaders are firmly in the pocket of gargantuan energy firms, even mobilizing voter turnout, an impossible feat, would do little to help us. I suppose I'll just fill up during the week and not go driving as much on the weekends."

The issue has stimulated some political discussion, with Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry promising to put the pressure on oil-producing countries to give us more gas. "That ought to solve the problem forever," said Kerry, clapping his hands together and crossing his arms. Bush countered by accusing Kerry of wanting to raise taxes on gas, something Republicans have never done before, and offering no insight on how to stem the problem, but the mere fact he mentioned the problem ought to make us normal citizens feel privileged.

Custard Patch, Wyoming's Jed McGernihey found the higher gas prices affecting his livelihood, as the cost to refuel his gypsy U-Haul continues to skyrocket. "I used to be able to cover my expenses, but gas costs so much I might have to find me a new line of work. I don't know why the government ain't doing nothing about it—unless the very same people we put into office are nothing but cheap puppets of the energy industry, companies like Enron and Halliburton, corrupt and bloated with profits and high-paid CEOs. Companies that safeguard their interests by pocketing political figures to turn a blind eye to their number-fixing, book-altering, and price inflating, which says nothing of their hazardous safety records and environmental pollution—but all of whom remain free from the punishment of the law because they own the lawmakers, and only have to answer to the deceived stockholders to stay afloat. Of course, that's just a guess."

Professor Lawrence Dill Vanderhouten of Harvard's Political Science Department, addressed the gas pricing issue for the commune.

"Shit, I got me no clue," said Professor Vanderhouten. "I'm gonna wait till it drops down again and then buy a thousand dollars worth of gas. I'll freeze it and sell it when the price goes up again. Make a killing and get out of this shit job."

Last installment we ended with the great video game crash of 1982, which treated the world to visions of programmers heading west across the dust bowl in Calistoga wagons, embarrassing holes worn through their one-dollar pants. Entire landfills had to be created to accommodate the vast influx of unplayed games and unused gaming consoles manufactured in the early 80's. The town of E.T., Maine, was founded around a massive landfill that Atari created to hide the shame of the millions of unsold E.T. game cartridges produced before the company realized that not even stamping the name of a hit movie on the cartridge could save one of the shittiest games ever produced.

From this smoking hole in the ground Nintendo would emerge with the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Hujitsu Homanama had formed the company to sell his sexy playing cards in 1889, naming it "Nintendo," a Japanese word meaning "eat the children." Over time the company would evolve into other areas of gaming, scoring hits in the early 80's with arcade hits Donkey Kong and Stick Dick in Hole for Blow. But total world domination would have to wait until 1985, when the company's first home console grabbed the world by its balls and mopped the floor with it, like some kind of weird ball-handled mop.

The driving force behind the success of the NES was its megahit pack-in game, Super Mario Bros. Offering gamers a glimpse of what happened to those bickering, deranged Italians after they finally climbed out of the sewer at the end of the original Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. delighted children the world over with its colorful, drug-induced imagery and perhaps the most cruelly addictive theme song of any video game ever. Years later, respected American composer George Crumb would be shamed in the international community when he realized he had inadvertently written the Super Mario Bros. theme into one of the movements of his grand fifth symphony. Regardless, anyone who had grown up with a NES controller fused to their mitts and that maddening little song in their ear was quick to forgive.

And the hits kept coming for Nintendo, thanks in part to the system's forward-looking peripherals. The NES light gun and Duck Hunt made the fun of unprovoked attacks on animals possible without the horrors of spending time outdoors. And thanks to the Robotic Operating Buddy peripheral and the game Gyromite, millions of kids developed critical thinking skills trying to figure out why in the hell Nintendo had put out a complicated robot controller that only worked with one lousy game.

Nintendo even branched out into 3-D games with the inimitable Rad Racer in 1987, a driving simulation title that perfectly captured the powerful nausea someone would experience trying to drive a race car while wearing red and blue glasses.

Though certainly a milestone in the racing game genre, Rad Racer was hardly the first, or the radest. Most rader. The first arcade racing game was actually 1979's Chicken Run, a bizarre title unrelated to the later claymation movie. The game revolved around how many chickens a player could run over with a Datsun in three minutes, based on one of the game creator's DUI convictions from college. Though undeniably fun, Chicken Run would soon be pushed to the back pages of history by 1982's legendary Pole Position. Pole Position remains to this day the most accurate driving simulation ever created, marveling gamers with its realistic physics, and is still the program that the Army uses to train its formula-one drivers.

Pole Position was followed by Sega's Outrun in 1986. In Outrun, the gamer took on the role of a red convertible piloted by a couple of Californian genetic freaks capable of surviving repeated rollover wrecks that would have decapitated a Samoan. A hit cartoon of the game had to be pulled from the air in 1987 because parents' groups thought it was giving young children the message that rollover fatalities are fun.

And thus we're backwardly introduced to Nintendo's only real competition, if you could call it that, in the era of 8-bit home gaming, an American company called Sega. Sega was started by a Korean War veteran named David Rosen as a front company called Service Games, which Rosen used to sell chintzy Japanese pinball machines to American families as a magnetic homeopathic therapy for kids with cancer. Rosen claimed the machines would cure a variety of fatal illnesses, as well as play a fun little song if your wellness score topped 100,000. Later he shortened the name to Sega because he was a very lazy and uncreative man.

Sega scored early hits with the frog abuse fantasy Frogger and the Dr. Seuss-inspired Zaxxon, which grew enough hair on Sega's balls that they thought competing with Nintendo sounded like a good idea. Thusly in 1986 came the release of the Sega Master System, which was actually Sega's fifth console, but the first that didn't have the added functionality and electrocution risk of a built-in juicer.

The only problem was that Sega forgot to make a Super Mario Bros. for its own system, opting instead to put out a whole line of crap. Later, the Turbo Grafx 16, Neo-Geo, Atari's Jaguar and 3DO would all attempt to compete with the NES and lose, because they all sucked a giant dong. The Sega Master system was relegated to "little bitch" role, having to settle for finding a home in households that somehow couldn't find a NES or weren't sure how to buy one.

Sega would later turn the tables on Nintendo with their 16-bit Genesis console, which outsold the Super Nintendo due to confusion about what a hedgehog was, and the surprisingly large number of dumb kids who didn't want to have to choose between "soup or Nintendo." Nintendo would have the last laugh, however, with the release of the Game Boy in 1989, an extremely crappy portable gaming system and technological leap backward which would go on to become the best-selling gaming machine ever. Since the Game Boy was cobbled together inexpensively from components of Russian consumer electronics leftover from the early 1950's, Nintendo's profit margins were enormous and executives spent the entire decade of the 1990's laughing.

Later, even more shit would happen. Stay tuned.

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