the Funnelwhich

Scientists find evidence of plants, seeds, fertilizer, soil, and water at a Mars Home Depot.

[AMBALA, INDIA] It’s here in the remote region of Shropshirefarmbriar that Marvin, a local boy of ten who attends the preparatory school in nearby Shimla (London), discovered commerce on Mars. But all is not well in Marvin’s family. It all began when the Royal Academy of Scientific Royal Astronomy visited this young lad of twelve years.

“How was your experience with the RAS, Marvin?” I ask, sitting down for crumpets and trumpets … music. “They’re more like royal douchebags,” Marvin replies in a tone as bitter as the tea I’m served. They swarmed this tiny apartment wearing monocles, fluffy suits, and fluffy monocles.

“They stole my ideas, plain and simple,” Marvin says.

“What were you saying? I couldn’t hear you over the bitterness of this tea.”

“I said they stole my ideas.” He grows quiet, perhaps also disgusted by the bitterness of this tea.

The astronomers, however, paint a much different picture. “He clearly used our data,” says spokesman Cory Starr. “We run the machines, we control the data. Do you have any idea how hard it is to arrive here day in and day out to make sure the machines are still doing all the work? Pretty hard, I’d say. I wouldn’t know. I’m just a spokeswoman.”

“I mean spokesman!”

“Don’t you think you’re being too hard on the kid,” I say.

“He’s 14! He should be able to handle this sort of healthy scientific competition.” “No, he’s 12.”

“I’m 8, actually,” Marvin says as he pops through the door segregating Marvin’s office from the hallway.

“You said 12!” I accuse him. “Actually, I said 10, but I was lying. You should really take better notes.” I blush and wait for a change in the conversation. It came, but only after three hours of silence.

“So, do you think life exists on Mars?”

Cory replies, “Well, we know commerce exists, which means CEOs exist. Are CEOs alive?”

We stare at each other before mutually agreeing that no, they in fact are not. But without consensus between the RAS and Marvin, the question remains hotly contentious among the scientific and the surprisingly well-informed pornographic community.

To resolve this dispute, I brought the two parties together for some one-on-one face time, which seriously cramped into my three-o’clock massage.

“Look, I think you should be reasonable,” Cory says to Marvin.

“I should be reasonable? You’re calling it Cory’s Depot. And you’re just a spokeswoman! I mean spokesman.”

“It’s our data.”

“I found the depot first on my telescope.”

“Prove it,” Cory yells, knocking Marvin’s telescope out of its painstakingly found coordinates. Cory runs away, giggling insanely. Marvin sighs and swivels the telescope to the planet. He asks me to look through. Instead of seeing a Home Depot, I see dejected Martians disassembling their Home Depot and scribbling a gigantic symbol into nearby rocks.

“What are they writing?”

“It’s the Greek symbol for impending doom or impending hope. I don’t know which; it depends on the context. The Greeks were an ambivalent lot, you know.”

I nod, pretending to condone their ambivalence when—in reality—I loathed them for it.

“I don’t think they want our attention anymore after they saw this dispute air on our news networks,” Marvin says quietly. “Can you blame them?”

Marvin brooded for a while before walking to his local county courthouse, changing his name, and then buying a cape and pistol from the costume and weapons shop right next to the pharmacy and peep show store.

“Marvin, where are you going?” his mother asks, fear in her eyes and elbows. “Don’t call me Marvin. Call me John Wilkes Booth. Booth because I love telephones, Wilkes because I love the names of old people, and John because I love farewells. I’m leaving to set some things straight in this twisted world of ours.”

I try to ask for an interview, but he swooshes his cape at me and walks away. And that’s how I inadvertently caused the deaths of a million human beings.

Republicans and Democrats unite in apathy.

[WANI, INDIA] In a breathtaking vote, Republicans and Democrats have voted to officially shun the American public. In a 509-3 vote in a joint Senate-Republican vote, our legislative branch of government has decided to officially make the foremost and only concern of the nation themselves. “We’re tired of going through each and every election cycle, wandering aimlessly without getting anything done,” said Representative Harold Goldback, Missouri. “It’s time to do things right. It’s time for us to be happy!” he screamed, pulling off his suit and unleashing his inner surf rock.

Most are riding ponies around the Congressional dome that once stood proud to generations of statesmen. Some have affixed horns to their ponies so that they are pony-unicorns. “I always wanted a pony,” Representative Leahy yells at me from his 20-feet tall pony or, more accurately, Bronco God. He bought his Bronco God after he sanctioned stem cell research for the sole purpose of enhancing recreational horse size. He also reduced the size of the Congressional dome so that his horse, whom he has named Grant, can jump over it whenever he pleases. In addition, Leahy and many other senators turned horse-riders have removed the agricultural incentive programs suppressing oat growth so that they may feed their colossal, horrifying genetically engineered pets. When little Susie asked if she could have a pony, the answer was a resounding No. Susie would have cried had not a law banned that the previous day because the new horses melt at the first sight of water.

They melt into a pool of disillusion, quickly coined the Reflecting Pool by many D.C. tourists because, if you lean far enough in so that your reflection touches your nose, the acid will instantly blind you. Thus, you are given the rest of your life to reflect upon where the dilapidated state of American politics.

In addition, many statesmen have taken to the streets, naked. Everybody else, horrified. “My eyes,” screams one. “My eyes,” screams another. Demand for optometrist surgeons have skyrocketed in the local D.C. downtown area as naked representatives of our once great nation parade their birthday suits up and down the streets screaming, “Table this, bitches!” and giving the finger to the Ways and Means Committee, a committee of losers largely ignored and ridiculed among all the other more popular Congressmen.

The 2008 election cycle immediately stopped in its tracks. Instead of pandering to the retarded middle class of America, politicians from Obama to Booth have instead entered into a physical competition for presidency. Many hold Kucinich as a contender because most people want to see people get beat up or, failing that, see the analogous versions on prime-time reality TV or digg’s vigilante justice of the week category.

However, the White House remains impotent. Upon inquiring, all the press found was the president sitting on his regal throne, clearing brush from his faux ranch built inside the Lincoln bedroom. “Yeah,” he said shortly before I left.

Jesus complains that John McCain is talking down to him.

[SITAPUR, INDIA] “He never saw me as a friend,” Jesus says as he begins the long, sordid tale of John McCain. “I was his tagalong, his subordinate, or his resource.” “But never his—his friend.”

As a child, Christ was an outcast. He asked too many questions and claimed he talked to God. His nickname was “Jesus d’Arc.” There was one other boy like him, John McCain. Nobody would play with McCain because he was eighty years old at the time. And he slept a lot. And sometimes his heart medication would fall into other people’s food. He was never a blast to be around. He was voted “Most Old” by his admittedly uncreative second grade.

Christ and McCain became friends, bonded by the glue of exclusion. But, unlike McCain, Christ only became a superstar whereas his friend became a political sensation. Jesus had only begun to learn wiffleball when McCain cancelled their lessons. Then John McCain stopped showing up at the Jane Austen book club. And slowly he faded out of Christ’s life. Christ, embittered by his return to the limits of society, committed suicide by violating the Roman Empire’s most sacred law—the one against jaywalking.

Jesus rebounded from his death, but he was never the same.

The two men eventually reconciliated during a 2007 meeting in which McCain made a pact with the Savior in return for a chance at being president, a long-time dream of his. Little is known of the details, but election staff close to McCain report a lot of crying, a lot hugging, a lot of transubstantiation. Thus, Christ’s recent revelation of a rough relationship in an intimate Larry King’s Still Alive interview surprised everybody who was not a religious scholar.

“He’s condescending. He thinks I’m one person. Hasn’t he ever read the Bible? Just because he’s mortal doesn’t make him better than me,” Christ said shortly before throwing a camel at a wealthy person. Ultimately, he said unaware to an open mike, “I just want to shave his arms.” In a statement released to the press amid the resulting confusion, Christ would only say, “You’d all know what I mean if Peter had included the Book of Hygiene. You’d all know.” And he disappeared in a puff of smoke.

John Wilkes Booth remains at large.