ATOMIC DOG

It's happened again.

About a month ago, I was knee deep in possible Atomic Dog topics, but I couldn't make up my mind which one I should develop into an article.

So I served up short versions of all of them, making sort of an Atomic Dog dim sum, filled with literary rice noodles, prawns, dumplings, and egg tart.

Some people thought it was just the right meal, others were hungry again in a half-hour, and still others kept hitting on the waitress and were thrown out into the alley by a big Chinese guy named Chong Li.

Regardless, I'm faced with the same problem again of having too many topics while not being able to decide which, if any, I should develop into a full-length cinemascope article.

And my solution is much the same this time, but instead of dim sum, and in honor of the holiday season, I'm serving up an Atomic Dog turducken.

So for those of you who don't like de-boned literary turkey, you can nibble on the de-boned duck or the de-boned chicken.

Hasta La Vista, Baby

Automated weapons systems are as entrenched in modern warfare as M-16s, tanks, and MREs.

Every day, thousands of drones deliver their deadly payload to unsuspecting insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and ground robots are regular companions to foot soldiers on their sojourns into hostile territory.

Sometimes things go wrong, though. A few months ago, an automatic antiaircraft gun malfunctioned during a South African training exercise and killed human soldiers.

Military researchers are having high-level discussions on how these robots and automated weapons are changing the face of warfare, with a lot of discussion centering on safety.

In an effort to coordinate all these drones and other automated assets, and presumably make them safer, Great Britain has established a network of satellites.

The name of this system?

Oh-oh.

You Sure You're not Describing the Jonas Brothers?

A star was recently born at a goat exhibition in India. The goat has six legs, four testicles, and three penises.

"Discharge of urine," explained the owner, "is witnessed after frequent intervals from different penises.

"But still, it is a special goat that attracts attention."

Cockblocked by Geico

If you took out all the commercials, time outs, penalty calls, shoving matches, and referee reviews, a football game would be, according to the Playboy Data Sheet, about 12 minutes long.

Okay, we can accept that.

We can begrudgingly accept that brushing lint off the quarterback or receiver constitutes roughing the passer or defensive interference. We can accept (barely) the stupid rule that displaying any post-touchdown emotion beyond the detached demeanor of Zeno of Citium, the founder of stoicism, will draw a penalty.

We can even understand the ever-so-brief and infrequent shots of the cheerleaders shaking their nonnies. Heavens, we only want the suggestion that football's appeal is sex and violence; holding the camera on them for more than a tit-nanosecond would confirm it.

But there's one thing we won't stand for, and that's the maddening banner ads that eclipse the views of the cheerleaders when they break to (or come back from) the "real" commercials.

You know the ones I'm talking about, the camera will pan across the undulating midsection of some supernatural mammal in hot pants and devastating halter top when a virtually opaque banner ad for freakin' Geico or Budweiser cockblocks our view of her body.

If I didn't know any better, I'd think the NFL was doing everything it could to kill itself.

Strangle a Mountain Ox With My Bare Hands

I've got a thang for actress Olivia Wilde (see pic at right). I can't really put my finger on it. I mean she doesn't even have large breasts or anything.

I know!

I'm not the only one who sees something in her, though. Megan Fox, during a GQ interview, explained, "I mean, I could see myself in a relationship with a girl — Olivia Wilde is so sexy she makes me want to strangle a mountain ox with my bare hands. She's mesmerizing."

Can you even imagine the kind of money a pay-per-view event could generate? I'm not kidding. Oscar De La Hoya has generated some 611 million dollars through pay-per-view, but that's over 18 separate events.

I'm betting a girl-on-girl pay-per-view of Megan Fox and Olivia Wilde would eclipse that dollar amount in one event.

Video Killed the Radio Star

Tony Soprano didn't go for that shit but aspiring rapper Raymond "Ready" Martinez sure did.

I'm referring to the sideways gun pose apparently favored by nouveau gangsters everywhere. Tony thought it was bullshit, but Ready Martinez must have thought it was cool.

Too bad it seems to have led to his death.

Police were chasing Ready though Times Square a couple of weeks ago when the wanna-be gangster fired two shots, holding the gun sideways, "like a character out of a rap video."

Unfortunately for Ready, the sideways grip caused the gun to jam, enabling the police to shoot and kill him.

Most gun experts and fans of gangster movies credit the sideways gun grip to the 1993 Hughes brothers' film, Menace II Society.

Brian Palmer, however, journalist with Slate, traces the origin of the sideways grip back to the 1961 Marlon Brando film, One-Eyed Jacks. Palmer also points to Eli Wallach using the grip in 1966's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The reason? It allowed the camera to get a better shot of both the gun and the actor's face.

So if someone holding his gun sideways ever threatens you and your friends, calmly explain to the assailant that his stylish gun-grip might cause his gun to jam, which could lead to a very awkward, embarrassing moment, possibly punctuated by snorting laughter where milk comes out of everyone's nose.

The Chicken Ranch, Now With Strutting Cocks

Bobbi Davis, owner of the Shady Lady Ranch, a small brothel near Beatty, Nevada, is very happy.

Davis wanted to add male prostitutes to her stable of sex workers, but until last week a language quirk in the Nevada health code prohibited men from selling their services.

The code specifically stated that prostitutes must undergo cervical testing for sexually transmitted diseases, which obviously ruled out men.

Urethral exams have now been added to the code, paving the way for male sex workers.

I'm strongly considering sending in an application, but I haven't decided on a male prostitute name yet. I'm leaning towards either "Beef Flanks" or "Smoky Paprika" (I got the names from one of my mom's recipes for stroganoff).

Main Entry: iroány Pronunciation: \ˈī-rə-nē also ˈī(-ə)r-nē\

"I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life."

—Kanye West, promoting his book "Thank You and You're Welcome"

20 Layers of Butt Makeup

Sammy Sosa corked his bat.

My 7th grade crush, Tammy Newcomb, padded her bra.

My parents lied about Santa.

Given that it's Christmas time, I suppose it's only natural some new Grinch come along and destroy one of my cherished beliefs.

This time the Grinch was a Victoria's Secret angel by the name of Selita Ebanks who told the New York Daily News that the reason the models look so good on the runway is, choke, an illusion.

"People don't realize there are about 20 layers of makeup on my butt alone."

Ebanks elaborated further, explaining that the body makeup takes about an hour to apply, plus hair and makeup, which takes another three to five hours. An average of five people worked on each of the 38 models used in the show.

How do I feel about it?

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

A Swatch of Snatch

Most people assume that sexual permissiveness is a modern trait, the sordid affectation of a society on the decline, but even a casual examination of history reveals that sexual permissiveness appears to be cyclical and much more widespread than generally supposed.

Case in point, few people realize that pre-Victorian England, from about 1714 to 1837, was a hotbed of debauchery.

Sex clubs abounded, filled with "posture molls" who posed nude on tables and swung their stuff like current day lap dancers. Pairs or groups could retire at any time to private rooms, and fashionable ladies could make use of "rent boys".

Popular too, was the habit of cutting of swatches of your lovers' pubic hair as tokens of affection. Lovers would exchange them and players of the time would affix the pubic swatches to their hats and display them as symbols of their conquests.

Too bad today's shaved pubes don't allow you to do that. I mean, at best, you might be able to scrape off a little stubble and save it in a Mason jar that you carry around, but it's not nearly as rakish as a hat with wild plumes of pubes.

Jinx! You Owe Me a Couple Thousand Cokes!

Laura Buxton, 10 years old, was bored. There just wasn't much to do in her hometown of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England that day.

She then got the idea of blowing up a red balloon. She wrote, "Please return to Laura Buxton" on one side of the balloon and she wrote her address on the other.

She released the balloon into the moderate winds, but instead of floating a few feet and impaling itself on a tree branch, the balloon soared high above her until it was just a speck.

Then, for some unknown meteorological reason, it started to travel against the prevailing winds.

A few weeks later, a hundred and forty miles later, a man in the town of Milton Lilbourne found the balloon stuck in a hedge that separated his house from his neighbor's.

He noticed the name on the balloon and then took it to his neighbor's house to show it to the 10-year-old girl who lived there.... a girl whose name was also Laura Buxton.

The second Laura Buxton wrote the first one to tell her she'd found the balloon, and because of the extraordinary coincidence, they decided to meet.

Laura of Milton Lilbourne found that Laura Buxton of Stoke-on-Trent had the same color of hair styled in the same way. They were both the same height, which was unusual because they were tall for their age. Coincidently, both were wearing the same outfit to the meeting, a pink sweater over jeans!

Both, coincidently, had brought along their pet guinea pigs, and they too were nearly identical in color and markings! Both confessed to having two other pets, a black Labrador retriever and a grey rabbit!

Because of the freakish similarities, the girls formed a strong bond and remain friends to this day, about 8 years after the balloon was launched and found.

You might be expecting a punch line, but there isn't one. They weren't twins separated at birth; they weren't related in anyway. If you're looking for meaning, it might just be that in a world this big, with this many people, there are bound to be amazing coincidences. It's the old story about a million monkeys sitting at a million typewriters who, eventually, just by chance, recreate the works of Shakespeare.

Sure She's Blind, but My God, the Bitch Can Give Head!

Chinese scientist Libiao Zhang of the Guangdong Entomological Institute found that short-nosed fruit bats spend more time having vaginal intercourse if during copulation the female bat licks the penis of the male bat.

"We did not expect fellatio in fruit bats," said Zhang.

The study was apparently funded by Bruce Wayne, an American, but no one has been able to ascertain his motive.

Hey John Connor, Got Another Job For You.

Opponents of the Hadron Collider in Bern, Switzerland, fear that the machine might inadvertently create a mini black hole that could expand and swallow the Earth.

The machine was built to recreate the immediate aftereffects of the Big Bang and observe the Higgs bosun, thus giving physicists an inkling to the origins of the universe.

While the collider was set to begin operation over a year ago, it's been beset by inexplicable part failures. Scientists have repaired most of them and succeeded in firing up the mother last week, even though it's operating at a relatively modest 450 billion electron volts instead of the 7 trillion electron volts its capable of.

Why has the project been beset with problems? Two of the prominent physicists argue that it's being sabotaged by the future.

The physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, worry that observing the Higgs bosun might result in calamity, and that agents of the future keep traveling back in time to stop it.

Says Nielsen:

"While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one."

Now if only those time travelers would destroy Skynet too, before the catastrophic world-ending shit really hits the fan.