Two weeks had gone by, and on the appointed day Paul had showed up at the doorstep of America Manor. The servants had shown him in, made a few gestures here and there by way of showing him around, and then, in broken Star-Spanglish, indicated that they would be leaving to let him spend the night alone and that he could help himself to anything in the fridge. And then that was that… as the last of their 254.4 million cars pulled away towards Mexico, Paul shut the gate and turned back.

After a brief deliberation Paul decided to spend the night in the New York wing of the house, which had been recently renovated and was generally considered quite safe. His footsteps echoed down the empty streets and hallways, past silent animated advertisements that were selling six foot Naturally Whitened smiles to nobody in particular.

Picking a room which looked cozy, a loft facing the bay, Paul settled in. The sunset was brilliant in the west, reflecting off the buildings and distant calls of scattered birds. They seemed jubilant, aware something was different. Joyful in the stillness. Peaceful.

Paul found himself smiling. This was his now, and while he couldn’t fathom why, or even be sure that his uncle had really meant to bless him with it, this was where he found himself. Like that proverbial gift horse, now separated into ashes, metaphysics, and memories, there wasn’t a proverbial mouth here left for him to look into, and therefore he would keep his gaze focused on the bright future that lay before him.

Though he may still work at the 7-11, it would be clear that things had changed. He might not actually have much money to speak of, but so long as America Manor would run itself – and his uncle had made sure that it would by bequeathing him his crony capitalism and mostly-free market – Paul no longer had to worry about providing a roof over his head or meals on the table, and there went most of his expenses right there. And anyone who came into that 7-11 would see, looking into his eyes: here was a man with money, or actually just a really sweet house fortified to survive all but the most explosive housing bubbles. Respect would slowly dawn across their features like the rising sun in winter. And then they would buy a candy bar, and it would be $1.06, and would they like their receipt?

They wouldn’t.

But, there were two questions which nagged, albeit somewhat halfheartedly, at the edges of Paul’s peacefulness. First of all: why did he have to spend this first night alone here? Spending the night in a totally sweet house, free of charge, no one to bother him – now how was that a test of any sort at all? Did his uncle just want to make sure his possibly-beloved grandnephew was not a monophobe?

And secondly: was he really alone?

He was just wondering, you see.

All of a sudden (OH FUCK) there came a loud knock at the door, breaking the stillness, shattering his reverie, and causing him to drop the sandwich he’d been holding. “Y-yes?” Paul called, fumbling around, his heart stopped between the five-second rule and the unseen visitor.

“Room service,” called back a somewhat gravelly, but nonetheless cheery voice.

“Oh. Um. Thanks!” Paul found the sandwich, re-plated it on his nightstand, and strode to the door.

The hall was as empty as he had found it on his own way in. The only difference was a tray on the ground, bearing a single silver-domed plate, steaming slightly. A tangy, spicy, pungent, delicious aroma made a beeline for his nose, and he realized with a start that maybe the sandwich really wasn’t what he had wanted after all. Paul glanced down the hallway to look for the mysterious busboy, but there was no sign either of him or of his bus.

Paul shut the door and set it down on his bed, then removed the cover. Steam billowed up and a bolt of flavor shot his nostrils right through… buffalo wings… but then he saw it.

The plate had clearly originally contained about twenty wings, ten tiny buffalos worth. But someone had eaten most of them, and left their bones… arranging them to spell “GET OUT” in letters writ red with hot sauce. This was mildly ominous – scratch that, medium-hotly ominous – and entirely mysterious. It did occur to Paul that having someone else left in America Manor with him might technically be a no-no, but it wasn’t his fault so they could hardly blame him. And while their shyness and uncanny method of communicating raised all of the hackles on Paul’s craw, gullet, and navel combined, it was also quite possible that they simply meant that he should get out more, a sentiment he rather agreed with.

In the lower-left corner of the plate, they had left him about five wings. Paul was running out of gift horse metaphors and was hungry, so he ate them straight away. He finished, licking his fingers to free them of their rouge covering as best as he could, then headed to the bathroom to wash up.

He was not in there for more than a minute when he saw something which made his blood run cold, and he screamed as if he had never screamed before and was consequently not very good at it. He looked around frantically to find something to prove him wrong, a box of Kleenex, a tattered newspaper, anything to make it right.

Paul America’s secret worst fear had come true, far worse than the imagined horrors of poverty or of double shifts at the 7-11.

Whoever usually lived here, there was something deeply wrong.

They were out of toilet paper.

Click for bigger pictures.

In my entire time on the big island, I’ve not seen a single other non-Hawaii plate. There aren’t any roads from Juneau to the continental US, let alone the incontinental US! Even my sister’s car, shipped here from my parents, has a new Hawaii plate. What is this doing here? This is what a lynx spider looks like right before it attacks and destroys farkle-farkle’s camera.

Apparently they didn’t sell enough of these before 2001. At this point, they probably never will. I really want to see the “of Hawaii” belonging to Cowboy! After I finished this, I did in fact pound my hands on the table and yell, “I HOG POG.” Brad was not amused. The only company name dumber than this one is Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. Hilo’s Borders sells only the finest!

After seeing the price tag, it makes sense why Uwe Boll can afford Jason Statham. SCHINDLER’S LIFT Hoping to see fragments of the USS Arizona for sale, I patronized the Hilo Army Surplus. I was disappointed. Instead of char-broiled sailor’s hats and unexploded Japanese munitions, I saw a series of horrifying mannequins. This one is probably the worst. I cannot decipher what emotion her Cheshire Cat grin is supposed to belie. I only know that it stimulates my fight-or-flight instinct. These kids, and something about the haphazard way the helmets and wigs are thrown on the heads, disturbs me deeply. I am troubled by the way their sightless eyes stare unseeing into my soul, and do not know why two soldiers so young would be marching to war in American fatigues. It does not bode well for the next generation if they are to be drafted at so young an age to fight against all the evil in the world (such as the woman seen above).

Also, it’s impossible to tell from my shitty cellphone camera, but the one kid only has one finger remaining on his left hand. A ringing testamonial for our soldiers’ present situation in Iraq! COMPELLING DETAIL The stuff of FooTay’s nightmares.

This vacation happened a year and a half ago but Tanzmetall was simply too lazy to scan the I Hog Pog picture until just now. So there.

One not-so-dark and not-terribly-stormy-either night, three stunningly attractive and inconceivably brilliant men convened at a home on Juliet street in Oakland. One was a visionary, a man with ideas, plans, and an affinity for German dance metal. One was a technological expert with a voice so deep he can get elephants to spontaneously defecate, known to most of the Internet as Burpen. One was an incredibly negative sod who also happened to have a few good ideas, also the most skilled player of grabass in the world, certified in the crucible of official competition. Over heaps of parmesan cheese these three gods among men formulated the plans for what the internet has not yet realized is its most glorious destination.

These three übermensch there hatched the plans for the website that would proceed to make the internet jealous. It was to be a site featuring only original content. All of the material on Clunkline was to be produced by the authors of the site. These three dashing and impossibly virile men determined it made sense to include only original material because it was the only way to guarantee the site would be better than any other. There would be the main site, featuring nothing but the most side-splitting articles, and the authors’ corners, for more avant-garde work to be appreciated by people who understand art.

With these goals in mind, Tanzmetall and Burpen convened to create a server to broadcast our good work to the internet.

Jesus, so named because He was spreading the good word, was in Good Friday condition when Tanzmetall and Burpen, whose sperm sells on the black market for millions, started to work on it. The endeavor of resurrecting Christ was not one for any simple-minded fool. Burpen, however, is capable of setting Marilyn vos Savant’s hair ablaze purely by firing thought-waves at her, from any point on Earth or low-Earth orbit. Jesus went from having no idea He had a hard drive to rising to the heavens totally resurrected in no time thanks to Burpen’s expertise. After many sleepless nights, the site was assembled and The Word was finally available to anyone who had access to port 1000.

Or at least, so we thought: The problem with Jesus was it was very difficult to get Him to interface with the internet. In order to accomplish the task, Tanzmetall with MacGyver-like guile bravely employed over 100 feet of cable and some bacon-tape. Thanks to his heroic efforts, Clunkline now had a tube. And it was a tube to behold. We send pictures of it to people on Craigslist all the time.

In those early days of yore, Clunkline began to flourish with content that is now considered classic. Videos like Fuck it’s an Owl, images like Tanzmetall’s fake ads for real products, the beginning of the esteemed Ronnicles, and How to Maik Postah. We also talked a whole hell of a lot about why we hated Hillary Clinton. Lesser beings would have spent the rest of their writing careers trying to live up to these incredible works, but we at Clunkline are supreme beings, and we continued only to produce the finest material.

(Are you at the dramatic part of the music yet? If not, please wait for it to get back to that part before reading this. You can masturbate to our glory while you wait.)

And so we did, for a month or so, and it was good. But, what we didn’t know was it was about to get even more orgasmically fantastic because Lo! On the horizon rode nom de pomme on a horse so brilliantly white that your mom had to avert her eyes when she was fucking it! And he brought with him the level of prolificacy that only rabbits used to know. With the arrival of nom de pomme, Clunkline became a veritable dynamo of diarrhea. A diarrheanamo, if you will.

But tragedy had not yet ceased its siege on His Holiness. Every few days Clunkline’s glorious tube would clog itself as it shed an old IP address and tried to flush it like last night’s kielbasa and sauerkraut. We had more downtime than a General Motors factory worker. Something had to be done. After months of fervent procrastination, Jesus was transplanted from His home in Pittsburgh to the domain of Grabass_Champion in faraway exotic tropical Greensburg.

From this new home Jesus much more steadily broadcast the Word of Clunkline. And it was good. Except that Grabass_Champion needed to use a proxy to get to the site which bothered him just enough that he didn’t write as much. But everyone else picked up that slack anyway.

The time following that was rather uneventful. We launched a merchandise effort, through CafePress.com because we were way too lazy to print our own shirts, but we knew that the world NEEDED T-shirts with pictures of the Titanic colliding with the Hindenburg on them. We also naïvely believed that people wearing “Clunkline.com” would get other people interested. Pssh. They were already interested! So far we’ve sold literally tens of shirts to pretty much ourselves and some midwesterners.

We were kind enough to allow lesser internetfolk to advertise on our site, and we returned the kindness of being paid for adspace by mercilessly insulting the folks that bought the ads.

We wrote a lot of funny things. We frequently met in undisclosed locations and ate inordinate amounts of pizza [...]]]>

Since Clunkline has just entered its new glorious auspicious second phase of righteous harmony, known to non-party-members as Clunkline 2.0, we as the Clunkline staff feel it’s necessary at this juncture to issue a review of the past two years of Clunkline history.

One not-so-dark and not-terribly-stormy-either night, three stunningly attractive and inconceivably brilliant men convened at a home on Juliet street in Oakland. One was a visionary, a man with ideas, plans, and an affinity for German dance metal. One was a technological expert with a voice so deep he can get elephants to spontaneously defecate, known to most of the Internet as Burpen. One was an incredibly negative sod who also happened to have a few good ideas, also the most skilled player of grabass in the world, certified in the crucible of official competition. Over heaps of parmesan cheese these three gods among men formulated the plans for what the internet has not yet realized is its most glorious destination.

These three übermensch there hatched the plans for the website that would proceed to make the internet jealous. It was to be a site featuring only original content. All of the material on Clunkline was to be produced by the authors of the site. These three dashing and impossibly virile men determined it made sense to include only original material because it was the only way to guarantee the site would be better than any other. There would be the main site, featuring nothing but the most side-splitting articles, and the authors’ corners, for more avant-garde work to be appreciated by people who understand art.

With these goals in mind, Tanzmetall and Burpen convened to create a server to broadcast our good work to the internet.

Jesus, so named because He was spreading the good word, was in Good Friday condition when Tanzmetall and Burpen, whose sperm sells on the black market for millions, started to work on it. The endeavor of resurrecting Christ was not one for any simple-minded fool. Burpen, however, is capable of setting Marilyn vos Savant’s hair ablaze purely by firing thought-waves at her, from any point on Earth or low-Earth orbit. Jesus went from having no idea He had a hard drive to rising to the heavens totally resurrected in no time thanks to Burpen’s expertise. After many sleepless nights, the site was assembled and The Word was finally available to anyone who had access to port 1000.

Tanzmetall used bacon-tape to hold the tube to the wall where he routed it around his door.

Or at least, so we thought: The problem with Jesus was it was very difficult to get Him to interface with the internet. In order to accomplish the task, Tanzmetall with MacGyver-like guile bravely employed over 100 feet of cable and some bacon-tape. Thanks to his heroic efforts, Clunkline now had a tube. And it was a tube to behold. We send pictures of it to people on Craigslist all the time.

In those early days of yore, Clunkline began to flourish with content that is now considered classic. Videos like Fuck it’s an Owl, images like Tanzmetall’s fake ads for real products, the beginning of the esteemed Ronnicles, and How to Maik Postah. We also talked a whole hell of a lot about why we hated Hillary Clinton. Lesser beings would have spent the rest of their writing careers trying to live up to these incredible works, but we at Clunkline are supreme beings, and we continued only to produce the finest material.

(Are you at the dramatic part of the music yet? If not, please wait for it to get back to that part before reading this. You can masturbate to our glory while you wait.)

And so we did, for a month or so, and it was good. But, what we didn’t know was it was about to get even more orgasmically fantastic because Lo! On the horizon rode nom de pomme on a horse so brilliantly white that your mom had to avert her eyes when she was fucking it! And he brought with him the level of prolificacy that only rabbits used to know. With the arrival of nom de pomme, Clunkline became a veritable dynamo of diarrhea. A diarrheanamo, if you will.

But tragedy had not yet ceased its siege on His Holiness. Every few days Clunkline’s glorious tube would clog itself as it shed an old IP address and tried to flush it like last night’s kielbasa and sauerkraut. We had more downtime than a General Motors factory worker. Something had to be done. After months of fervent procrastination, Jesus was transplanted from His home in Pittsburgh to the domain of Grabass_Champion in faraway exotic tropical Greensburg.

From this new home Jesus much more steadily broadcast the Word of Clunkline. And it was good. Except that Grabass_Champion needed to use a proxy to get to the site which bothered him just enough that he didn’t write as much. But everyone else picked up that slack anyway.

The time following that was rather uneventful. We launched a merchandise effort, through CafePress.com because we were way too lazy to print our own shirts, but we knew that the world NEEDED T-shirts with pictures of the Titanic colliding with the Hindenburg on them. We also naïvely believed that people wearing “Clunkline.com” would get other people interested. Pssh. They were already interested! So far we’ve sold literally tens of shirts to pretty much ourselves and some midwesterners.

We were kind enough to allow lesser internetfolk to advertise on our site, and we returned the kindness of being paid for adspace by mercilessly insulting the folks that bought the ads.

We wrote a lot of funny things. We frequently met in undisclosed locations and ate inordinate amounts of pizza while discussing the finer points of poop. You’re welcome.

It was a major milestone when we were graced by a visit from the Pope (he wanted to see Jesus) in which he blessed our servers. We repaid the favor by gifting him with a Fleshlight (we were done with it).

When the G20 came to Pittsburgh, the events tragically coincided with a failure of Clunkline’s servers. This triggered massive rioting, which really hampered the international conference. We’re sorry, world leaders.

Clunkline again achieved world fame when Michael Jackson read How to make TOST and died from an overdose of awesome. You’re welcome again: you wouldn’t have wanted to watch him get old.

Most recently we made news again as Barack Obama traveled with an entourage of irony to Oslo to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize for us to give us article material. It was going to be about how interesting it was that Obama was picking up a peace prize while escalating a war. Thanks for takin’ a hit for the team, B-rock! We never wrote the article, because it wasn’t about pooping, but we appreciate you doing us a solid, man. Shout out to mah President!

Despite this series of fantastic honors, Clunkline was not free from problems. Tragedy again struck when Grabass_Champion went on an expedition to the mysterious Orient in search of a cure for yellow fever. The frequently-ailing Jesus had no able caretakers living with Him, and it was only a matter of time before the three Moldovan cyclists that power Grabass_Champion’s home would starve and all of Clunkline would shut down until his return.

But when that plane arrived in New York, a new era of Clunkline was begun. And this glorious era was brought to you by one hangtthedj, whose graphic design prowess can take an old, crappy-looking site that only its writers read and turn it into a site that people actually take time to look at without suffering spontaneous bowel movements. And that’s where we sit now, comrades, on the brink of a new era. We may look back from time to time, as we have here, but forward is the direction things are ceaselessly progressing. Brace yourself, brothers. The future flies on detachable wings.

…Ehh, who are we kidding? In reality, Clunkline has far fewer views than this:

Iowans

Facts about Iowa

*As everybody knows, Iowans are grown in fields, sprayed with pesticides, and machine-shucked. If you eat an Iowan, it will be preserved in your poop.

*Gay Marriage is legal in Iowa, making the state one step closer to consummating its forbidden love for Minnesota.

*The Iowa Caucus is a well-known, asinine political contest contrived to make Streptococcus give up its title as the worst thing that ends in “coccus”.

*Ever since 2004, the Dean Banshee has wandered the wastelands of central Iowa terrifying farmers with his haunting wail.

*Iowa is horrible.

Appropriate Slurs for Iowans: Cornballers, Biofools, Kerry Voters

Belarus

Facts about Belarus

*Even within the State Department, few are aware of Belarus’s existence. When asked to label a map of Eastern Europe, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton guessed first “Poland” and then “Weird Poland”.

*Belarus is a former Soviet bloc country torn between its desire to hate Russia and its utter insolvency without Russia.

*Belarus is commonly mistaken for the Ukraine, in that it has no distinguishing characteristics and you shouldn’t care about it.

*Alexander Lukashenko has been Belarus’s President since 1994. He’s pretty much a huge dickhead. This is in no way important because Belarus is irrelevant.

*Belarus is horrible.

Appropriate Slurs for Belarusians: Jerks, Russians

Upstate New York

Facts about Upstate New York

*Upstate New York is like a parasitic twin attached to New York City, which itself is like a child with Down’s syndrome.

*I once drove the wrong way down a four-lane one-way street in Downtown Syracuse at 7 P.M. I didn’t notice it until I had traveled several blocks, because there was no other traffic to show me I was going to wrong way. That’s because all the people who would have been in Downtown Syracuse instead left for places that were less miserable, like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Hell.

*Upstate New York sometimes dresses in drag and pretends it is Pennsylvania.

*Popular things to do in Upstate New York include leaving, being unhappy, running away, being forgotten, evacuating, crying, and fleeing.

*Vermont is said to be threatening a border war with Upstate New York over a maple tree that is 2/5ths inside NY’s borders. Upstate New York is widely expected to lose the war.

*According to my imagination, Upstate New York’s motto is “Upstate New York: Where the Fun Happens.” You have to have a very powerful imagination indeed to picture someone having fun in Upstate New York.

*Upstate New York is horrible.

Appropriate slurs for Upstate New Yorkers: Canadians, New Yorkers

Guatemala

Facts about Guatemala

*I don’t know anything about Guatemala, so here are some facts about Mexico.

*Mexico has a huge international drug trade and a huge international people trade. Sometimes the people eat the drugs when they cross the border. Oddly, this does not make them a “drug-people” trade. They are instead called “mules”, because, like the offspring between a horse and a donkey, they are sterile.

*Mexico’s president is Mexico City.

*Guatemala is horrible.

Appropriate slurs for Guatemalans: Hispaniolics, Mayans, Wannabe-Costa-Ricans

Everybody Else

Say this out loud.

What are you before you go to the bathroom? (American.)

What are you when you’re going to the bathroom? (European.)

What are you when you look at the dick of the guy next to you? (Uruguayan.)

What are you when he notices and smiles at you? (Paraguayan.)

What are you when you pick a fight with him for no reason? (Irish.)

McCain is reportedly “delighted”, fully confident that Palin can hold her own against the 6’2” Obama. “Some irrationally optimistic stuff about Palin’s odds,” said McCain, as he usually does.

It is true that Palin earned the nickname “Barracuda” on her high school basketball team, but Obama is more in-shape, having recently played against Indiana high school and college basketball players before the Indiana Primary, winning 15-5 against players less than half his age. He is a former state champion and has a jump-shot that the New York Times praised.

McCain may have been so eager to accept Obama’s challenge because at present, his odds in the state are looking grim, remarkable for a state long considered safely Republican. A one-on-one matchup between Obama and Palin is likely to be competitive, perhaps more so than an actual election would be.

According to Constitutional Law professor Barack Obama, “It might sound un-Constitutional, but it is not. States have the power to choose how they award electoral votes. An election will be held, but it will be a beauty contest. The electors won’t be selected until after the basketball game.” Although Prof. Obama meant “beauty contest” in the metaphorical sense—an election without electoral consequence—his remarks prompted glee from Palin, who came in second in the 1984 Miss Alaska beauty contest.

According to Professor Obama, the ballots cast in the election will be sent to recycling plants so as not to be outright wasting the votes.

Because if there’s one thing the Electoral College doesn’t do, it’s waste votes.

Content was originally created by Tanzmetall and published by readme.