n less than a week, 330,000 soccer fans from around the world will descend upon Japan for the biggest melee of apeshit social chaos since Cats: World Cup 2002. Japan is hoping the tournament will provide a boost for its belly-floating economy, and also hopes that soccer fans will leave enough of the country intact that it might be made livable again some time in the next 20 years.

Ever since Japan was selected along with South Korea to co-sponsor the games in 1996, Japanese and South Korean officials have been calling around, trying to figure out who nominated their countries and where they should mail the horse heads. Both China and North Korea are among the leading candidates.

The tournament will sprawl across Japan starting May 31st, destroying everything in sight and most likely leveling all 10 cities from northern Hokkaido to southern Kyushu, as well as virtually everything in neighboring South Korea.

"Oh yeah, there's no doubt about it. These crazy assholes are gonna soccer Japan and South Korea back into the stone age," noted Norio Kamijo, a senior researcher at Dentsu Institute for Human Studies.

Kamijo said the World Cup could generate some 3 trillion yen ($23.6 billion) for Japan — which should be more than enough to rebuild the Japanese cities that will need to be bulldozed into the Pacific and built up again from scratch after the tournament is over.

South Korea has offered to allow Japan to host the first several high-profile matches in the tournament, which some observers see as a sign of the warming of once-strained relations between the countries. Sources close to the events, however, suggest that South Korean officials merely hope that fans will be tired of smashing everything to shit by the time they get to South Korea.

"Hooligan experts" from Britain and Argentina have been invited to give tips and suggestions on how to spot and handle violent lawbreaking fans, inviting derisive giggles from the governments of previous World Cup host nations and forehead-smacking from British and Argentinean con-men who never thought of fobbing themselves off as "hooligan experts." British expert Sidney Bockle comments: "Jesus Christ in a sushi bar. Did you see what those animals did at the Gold Cup last year? They're gonna eat Japan alive. You don't need to hunt down an expert to guess what happens when you let loose 80,000 berserk Argentinean soccer fans in a country where all of the buildings are made out of paper. This is gonna make WWII look like Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws. They should hide the whole country under leaf clippings and hope the World Cup thinks it moved away."

In the city of Sapporo, where the much-anticipated match between Britain and Argentina is to be played at the Sapporo brewery to save on beer transportation costs, city officials have set up machine-gun turrets in strategic placements around the building. They also plan to have several dozen coked-up bulls ready to be set loose into the streets at a moment's notice, with hopes that confused Spanish fans will lead the rioting crowd in racing the bulls out of the city.

Japanese newspapers and TV feature a daily "Countdown to Armageddon," describing scenarios of possible hooligan attacks and featuring scary backlit profiles of black-listed uberhooligans thought to be hiding in Thailand. Police in Niigata city have even staged an exercise on a ferry boat to counter the hypothetical event of crazed fans tearing up the Pacific ocean and crippling the Japanese fishing industry.

The National Police Agency announced that for every major game, particularly the matches with the British national team, they plan to mobilize more than 7,000 riot police with the instructions to shoot at the first sign of a crowd. When asked if this approach might be considered overkill, NPA head Usaki Shinjo answered "No," speaking like a ventriloquist without moving a muscle in his controlled, icy stare.

ourth and eighth-graders tested nationwide really screwed the pooch on a recent history exam, while 12th-graders were about as dumb as expected, the Education Department announced Thursday. The Bush administration was not impressed, calling the results "a shocking wake-up call of historicalistical proportions." More than 29,000 students took the history test that's part of the National Assessment of Educational Ineptitude, known informally as "Operation: Dumbo Drop."

Among fourth-graders, 67 percent had at least a basic understanding of the concept of history itself, though few could name any specific events. 13 percent showed no sense of events happening in the past at all, beyond a vague concept of everything happening "yesterday." That was three percentage points higher than in 1994, the last time the test was given.

Some 29,600 students, 87 percent of them apparently high on drugs at the time, took the test in 2001. The randomly selected test-takers answered multiple-choice, short-answer and essay questions with only a slightly higher success rate than a control group of lab mice trying to play "Axel-F" on a small Casio keyboard during the exam. Students were alarmingly befuddled by questions like these for fourth-graders:

Pilgrims came to North American in the 1700's fleeing what in Europe?
(a) the bubonic plague.
(b) religious persecution.
(c) Napoleon's army.
(d) Godzilla.


Only 45 percent answered correctly with (b).

What was a major cause of the Civil War?
(a) East Coast rap calling out West Coast rap.
(b) People in the North and in the South disagreed over slavery.
(c) Montel Williams.
(d) The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.


Correct answer: (b); 57 percent answered correctly.

The answers to the multiple-choice questions, however, looked like the minutes from a meeting of MENSA when compared to the short-answer section of the test. Asked to write in their own answer to the question "Who led Germany during World War II?" 57 percent of the students wrote "Arnold Schwarzenegger." The second and third most-frequent responses were no less alarming: "Tupac!" and "banana."

Deanna Norvich, an education historian and NAEI board member, called the students' answers "fuckin' hilarious" and said the seniors' scores were "about what you'd expect from a bunch of Taco Bell trainees."

"Since the seniors are very close to voting age or already have reached it, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see more professional wrestlers elected to public office in the near future. I'd be frightened if I weren't looking at the bright side: No way in hell someone younger than me is going to come and take my job in the next millennia. These kids couldn't operate a salad shooter."

She added: "Clearly, our high schools are failing to teach U.S. history well to these paste-eating morons. And by the time they're seniors there's no way you're going to get them to stop fucking and doing blow long enough to learn about Benjamin Franklin. It's just not happening."

According to the National Assessment Governing Board, the independent group that develops the NAEI for the Education Department, only 17 percent of fourth-graders scored above the "vegetable" level. Of those, 11 percent scored at the "head injury" level and another 3 percent fell into the higher "slow country cousin" grouping. Alarmingly, only 2 percent scored in the "can handle plastic silverware" group, the highest level attained in the test this year.

To be sure, many questions were tough, especially those asked of older students. An example:

There were many significant factors that led American colonists to form the First Continental Congress in 1774. Among them were colonial frustrations with laws passed by the British Parliament. What is your name?

Thirty-nine percent got that one right.

The NAEI is given in different subjects periodically, though always to predictably pathetic results that make adults feel smart again after their bank account has been drained by a ten year-old hacker. The 2001 national history test was the first given since 1994, when it was designed to test the effects of crop dusting on the nation's youth.

NAEI scores in geography are scheduled to be released this summer, with Vermont crossing its fingers that the state will be recognized for the first time ever on an NAEI exam.

Let there be no mistake: I love my new wife, Felchyana, but she's starting to get on my nerves. Being a veteran of two marriages and three wars you'd think I might be familiar with this growing feeling of spite I'm experiencing, but it's not the case. She must be one of these "modern women" I keep seeing represented on sitcoms and the like. I can't say I approve, good people.

I finally got the chance to take us away on a honeymoon. You may recall the expense of the wedding and bail for bachelor party attendees left me a little strapped for cash. Tied down screaming to a medieval wooden rack, actually. But fate intervened, and after correctly guessing the number of jellybeans in the jar at Red Bagel's annual commune picnic I achieved a great windfall. It was apparently the loudest windfall ever since I won some sort of contest three states away, and the prize money was enough to take my blushing new bride off on an extravagant honeymoon.

You would think that enough for any woman, right? Wrong! Not for Felchyana. We had a quarrel over where to go on our honeymoon, the first argument we've ever had. If you discount all her attempts to get out of the wedding. I wanted us to see beautiful Niagra Falls, even though I don't approve of the racial epithet in their name. Felchyana wanted us to visit Leavenworth Penitentiary, judging by her frantic pointing to the picture in the paper. Well, you can see this is an almost insurmountable difference of opinion, but we decided to compromise. I locked her up inside the apartment and went to Alabama.

It was quite a wonderful tour through primitive culture, good people. After hearing our beloved Editor describe it with such vivid detail I was anxious to see what it was like and see all the great tourist spots—the world's smallest library, the place Red Bagel slept, so on.

Imagine my surprise to return home and see it had been taken over by the Russian mob! Well, okay, it wasn't that big a surprise. But it was quite a shock to see Felchyana apparently involved in some manner. There were four or five large men surrounding her, the shortest of which said his name was Yogi and persistently called me "dude." He instructed me that he was Felchyana's cousin and would be taking care of her while she was in the states. He said he was happy I had married into the family seeing as I was such a man of means—I would say the throw pillows worked in making the apartment look a lot more upscale. He also warned me that if I hurt her in any way he would break my legs into splinters, if he could find them. He found that addition particularly funny.

So, like the hired hand who agreed to clean up the rhinoceros cage, I'm in much deeper than I ever imagined. Felchyana has been strutting around the apartment like she owns the place lately, ever since those mob fellows gave me their friendly warning. She even cries less than she did after we were just married. Chalk it up to falling into routine, maybe she's even happier with things this way, but it feels like the spark is gone.

Not that I'm giving up. You know me, good people, I'm in it for the long haul—thirty years or death, whatever comes first. And there's a certain amount of truth in that old wives' tale about people being different from each other. Felchyana is no Arvelyn, that's for sure, but obviously I wasn't happy with Arvelyn's attempts to kill me and backstabbing bed-jumping. So maybe everything will work out for the best. It will require a little bit of change on my part, like not locking my wife in our home when I leave at any time, but if other people can learn to do it, so can I.

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