he entire Middle East got a warm fuzzy this week when leaders of Iran and Syria, two of the many points on President Bush's "Pinwheel of Evil," announced to everyone they were "best friends." Any attempt to attack one, the united leaders warned, would mean an attack on the other.

The announcement came shortly before a promise by Israel to "kick ass and take names" in Syria if the bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub on Saturday could be traced back to the country. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon held a finger purposefully in the air for a moment, with the pledge that, "Seriously, we are no longer fucking around with you guys."

On Saturday morning, however, before the news of the night club bombing (Great White have so far not been implicated), Syrian Prime Minister Naji al-Otari and Iranian President Mohammad "Oh, Mammy" Khatami stood together, arms around each other's shoulders, and announced to a crowd their nations were "best friends."

"Make no mistake: We love these fuckers," said Khatami, shaking buddy al-Otari quite forcefully. "Anyone raises their hand to strike my brother, it will quite honestly be the opening of a great can of whup-ass. I cannot wait to pound on the infidel who would come between myself and my bro Huge Naj. Or, for that matter, between any member of our country and theirs. The same goes true for us all, on both sides of the border."

"That's right," affirmed al-Otari. "No one puts a hurting on this bitch but me." The two party leaders then engaged in playful shoving on the platform, as the crowd of Syrian and Iranian nationals cheered them on and blew raspberries.

The thinly-veiled threat of retaliation against any country who strikes one or the other worried some analysts, who had been much more at ease with the notions of larger, more well-armed nations batting around the individual nations of Syria or Iran like flies. Together, the two pose a slightly greater threat, like batting around a flying pig or some airborne equivalent, but others reason that it remains to be seen whether the proclamation of friendship is so much talk.

Pentagon Defense Strategist Michael Compt elaborated for the commune.

"As an historian on the alliances of rogue nations," said Compt, "I can only wonder: What the hell were the voters on American Idol thinking when they kicked off Jennifer Hudson? However, this has nothing to do with my field of expertise. So I instead illustrate with historical examples how claims of unified fronts between countries have seldom stood up to real tests. One that comes to mind quickly, was the 'friendship to beat all' Cambodia had with Vietnam. True, both countries ended up going to war with the United States, but only after Cambodia loudly declared Vietnam has misrepresented its intentions."

For other examples, Compt also cited the "private club" effect when Germany, Italy, and Japan formed their original Axis powers, only to have the alliance fall apart quickly when the group eventually broke up over creative differences. Other noteworthy failed enterprises included when the Soviet Union declared China its "soul mate," only to have the two break up years later, when the Soviets accused the Chinese of being incapable of love.

"It's one thing if a country says it has your back in a fight when things are all Jim Dandy," said Compt, doing a little two-step with his feet to punctuate his point, "but really stick with each other through thick and thin, that's a hard thing to find. It's not the same thing as when two countries are really meant to be together, like East and West Germany. Sure, they have the occasional fight—but what they got, that's true nationalism."

olice announced Friday that they had apprehended a suspect in the murders of up to 10 killings, the notorious BTK killer, as DNA evidence may prove. The alleged BTK killer made no confirmation of his accusations, but did call national news media “fuck ups� who couldn’t even “get a simple three-letter name right.�

The suspect, Dennis Rader, blasted newspapers and television media for screwing up the killer’s chosen name since the earliest days of the first BTK victim. Between 1974 and 1986, or possibly even as late as 1991, the BTK killer (BTK standing for “bind, torture and kill�) compiled 8 victims, with two more potential victims being examined by police, and went through at least 6 public name changes as the media attempted to pigeon-hole the serial murderer.

Upon the death of the first four victims, an entire family, early pioneering journalists attempted to name the perpetrator “the Family-Size Killer.� When the next victim was discovered, three months later, the media hoped they had a serial killer on their hands, and dubbed him, “The Wichita Stabbing Strangler.� City officials glowered at the negative publicity, and demanded they change the name. Newspapers were in favor of “The Jayhawk Stabbing Strangler,� while news media won out with “Mr. Poky-Squeezy.� Upon the serial murderer being confused with a local birthday party clown of the same name, they changed his name again to “The Country-Fried Killer.� Around the same time, police confirmed letters being sent to them were likely from the perpetrator of the crimes, requesting the title “The BTK Killer.�

Even then, the news media fucked it up. A typographical error on the police memo lead to the killer being called “The BK Killer� for the rest of the year, and scared off many people from eating at all local Burger Kings. Other residents, who received their news from the radio, were misinformed about the “The DQ Driller,� and stormed area Dairy Queens to dig in to the new treat.

Angrier, even more irate letters arrived for the police and national media, all in caps, with the name “BTK Killer� underlined, and specifically noting the meaning of the letters in very contrary language. Some broadcast news outlets then, possibly on purpose, released the name as “The Beady Cake Killer.� Allegedly pissed off, the perpetrator sent even more contrite letters to police and the media, using some especially nasty words that rhyme with “rocksuckers.�

The BTK Killer continued to have trouble with his public name over the years, as media outlets alleged different meanings of the BTK notation, including “Bloody Tick Killer,� “Brown Taint Kicker,� “Bottled Tar Keeper,� “Billionaire Testicle Kruncher,� “Black Titty Kisser,� “Barmaid Toasted Kelp,� “Bunched-Toe Keds,� and “Blacula Tossing Kid.� Some even speculate the BTK Killer ended his string of murders when he did because he was sick and tired of being confused with Wichita tire merchant Birchfield Thomas Kinnear. This reporter was then asked to quit speculating and leave the police press conference if I had nothing worthwhile to contribute.

Suspect Rader did address the subject of the BTK Killer’s many names, while not admitting any connection to the murders themselves.

“Birchfield Thomas Kinnear? Please,� said Rader, in a statement released by Wichita police. “That makes no sense at all. If the BTK Killer was Kinnear, why the hell would… whoever he is… call himself that? If he murdered Kinnear it would make sense. And probably the only reason he wouldn’t have gone ahead and done that, not that he didn’t think about it, was he didn’t want to be forever confused by a callous, forgetful, illiterate industry of news people.�

Rader had been sought by police for questioning about the crimes, and was pulled over in a routine traffic stop when the police found his car parked illegally on the shoulder as Rader spray-painted the words “It’s Bind, Torture, Kill! IDIOTS!� on a Motel 8 billboard. The alleged murderer, however, refused to explain how the killer could stand having a name as redundant as the Bind, Torture, Kill Killer.

Every once in a while I receive a reader question that really knocks me off the toilet. The latest came from Shane Bugelskow of Jersey City, New Jersey, wrapped around a rock and thrown through my bathroom window. Shane wonders, among other things, why there's no Channel One on his television. I promptly wrote him back and told him the truth: that it was because he has a small penis.

More discerning readers of my column, wherever you are, will likely want a more in-depth answer. None of you, unless you're insane or living overseas (or more likely, both), have a Channel One on your television, and you can't all have small penises. Some of you have no penises at all. My sincerest apologies to those unfortunate readers.

The answer to this question actually has a long and varied history. The original TV sets had no Channel One completely on accident due to a mishap at the first Zenith TV set factory, when an uptight quality-control engineer became paranoid that he'd get fired for signing off on a television that had a channel "L". Despite the reassurances from others in the factory who hadn't been huffing hair perm solution, the engineer couldn't be convinced that it was definitely a "1" and the further scrutiny also made him suspicious about the zero, which he began to worry might be a dial position for the letter "o". Since he had already nixed two of the television set's fifteen channels within the last ten minutes, the rest of the factory workers decided to drop the issue before they started producing expensive fish tanks that didn't get any channels.

The U.S. public back in the 50's was so mesmerized and confused by the first television sets that the lack of channels zero and one didn't strike them as odd at all. People in the 50's were accustomed to being told what to think, and if they had asked about the channels they would've bought any old ludicrous explanation about swamp gas and weather balloons anyway, so there was really no point in asking even if the thought had been coughed up in someone's primitive 1950's brain.

Other television set manufacturers like RCA and Philco were quick to follow Zenith's lead by starting with Channel Two, since the public was highly superstitious back in those days, and likely would have interpreted the addition of previously-forbidden television channels as serious bad voodoo. Unfortunately this decision spelled disaster for the RBC television network, which had outbid ABC, NBC and CBS for the coveted "first-channel" slot in the realm of broadcast bandwidth. RBC dutifully soldiered on and broadcast a full slate of shows for a year and a half after their launch, but eventually folded since only a small handful of people with broken television sets could tune in their network at all. RBC still beat ABC in television ratings, but advertisers never learned this fact since the results were only broadcast on RBC.

After the failure of RBC, the Channel One bandwidth was bought up by the U.S. government, which told an extremely gullible U.S. public that it would be used for ham radios. Americans rushed to stores to buy ham radios, and for six months in 1953 you couldn't get anybody to go bowling because they were all at home, trying to figure out how to turn on their ham radios. Three people succeeded, and were never heard from again.

In actuality, the U.S. government created their own network called USN to air on Channel One, mainly to give governmental higher-ups something else to watch while all the civilian slobs were watching I Love Lucy and Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. The network originally aired a stultifying blend of training and hygiene videos, culled from the government's massive collection of archived film strips. But eventually, poor ratings (even for a top-secret network) drove USN honchos to migrate toward racier fare, taking advantage of their security clearance by showing secret footage of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, nuclear tests, and grainy, flip-book footage of the Lincoln assassination. Channel One soon garnered a reputation as cutting-edge TV, decades before the advent of cable.

The Zapruder footage of President Kennedy's assassination made its network debut on USN in 1963, playing on a constant round-the-clock rotation that television wouldn't see again until Michael Jackson's video for "Thriller." Even after the footage hit the rest of the public networks, USN still had the upper hand thanks to their multi-angle coverage and exclusive first-person footage. The network wouldn't have another hit this big until they scored with their helmet-cam footage of the Watergate break-in in 1972.

With the advent of digital tuners being built into television sets in the 1980's, the U.S. government faced a new challenge. Rumors about Channel One had spread by word of mouth on college campuses and among lazy slack-ass pigs during the 70's, and the chances that nobody would ever bother to hit the one button on their new TV sets were fairly slim. The government briefly considered launching a Gestapo-style raid on all digital television sets nationwide, but this was considered impractical since television sets are really heavy and most soldiers and pretty lazy when it comes right down to it. Instead, the USN higher-ups developed an ingenious encryption technique that made the network's broadcasts look just like television static to average slobs, but added 3D visuals for government officials who were granted a special pair of glasses with one white lens and one black lens for USN viewing.

To further throw the slackers off their scent, the government also launched an "educational" program to bring "Channel One" to the nation's classrooms, a program that mostly entailed grade-school children sitting through commercials for Fritos on sputnik-era television sets that had to be wheeled in on a cart from the A/V room.

But the subterfuge was successful, and to this day, high-ranking government buttwipes wile away their non-productive hours watching real alien autopsies and how-to videos on crop circle formation, while the rest of us have to make due with American Idol and that great show where you turn off the TV and just stare at your reflection in the tube since it's more entertaining than anything being broadcast that night.

So that's why you don't have a Channel One, commune readers. Any other missing channels can be blamed on either your cable provider or your penis size. Good day.

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