the Funnelwhich

Emma Watson grows more emotionally distant

[QUILON, INDIA] Following in the steps of her Harry Potter co-star Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson has become increasingly aloof and contemptuous of both costars Radcliffe and Grint. Says Daniel, “I offered her an apple one day during a shooting, and she threw it back at me. Then I cursed her with a Paralysis spell and forced her to eat the apple until the director finished cackling and told me to stop.” Daniel paused and then whispered, “I’m gonna kill that fucking director.” Then he exposed his bare chest and offered me tickets to his new play Naked People Doing Very Adult Things. And Also Did We Mention There Are Guns? in which Radcliffe produced, directed, and acted.

When contacted, Emma Watson’s new agent released a statement stating that Watson is attempting to “try out new things” in an effort to distance herself from the successful Harry Potter franchise. “Rather than being seen as Hermione her entire acting career, Emma would prefer that people see her as the actor who plays Hermione but is, in reality, a jeak—as all adults are.” Although Watson’s new agent has yet to be photographed, many fans of Emma Watson recently spotted a looming, shadowy figure hovering behind her at the MTV Movies Chosen by Harsh Teenagers Awards that, after Watson reportedly squealed excitedly, placed a bony hand on her shoulder and clamped and shook its head.

When asked about the specter in a recent E! Loud Entertainment interview, Emma Watson would only shake her head sadly, as if she had made a mistake like the Native Americans did when they sold the Louisiana Purchase to Secretary of Land Nicholas Jackson in the 15th century. When asked if her new agent had affected her acting performance, Emma Watson would only mention that all her scenes in the upcoming Harry Potter and Hey, We Can Just Shoot The Wanded Bad Guys movies involve her crying, even when she is kissing Daniel Radcliffe, creating a very salty kiss. The films’ editors could not be reached for comment according to a statement released by Warner Brothers. They are busy creating a CGI replica of Emma Watson with no additional physical enhancements except for the lack of tear ducts.

Harry Potter and The Morality Play can be seen in theaters nationwide July 2007. It is rated S for Same Old.

“At long last the terror of Ashton Kutcher is gone”

[COW, INDIA] In the small town of Lightsville, Colorado, a small town is breathing relief after the MTV series Punk’d ends its four-year reign of terror in this small town. A quiet town that sits on the edge of the majestic Rockies, it was once a booming railroad station until the robot horses replaced the locomotive. But unbeknownst to the rest of America, Lightsville has undergone a daily regimen of terror ever since 2003. Town elder Francis Arthur recounts how it started.

“We were all minding our business one day when a limousine pulled up to our general pharmacy. This young, loud kid with this crazy haircut got out and stood here, his hand twirling some punk gun.

“He starts yelling, demanding a mineral water and some vodka. Our pharmacists and our mayors have to go to him and calm him down. Apparently he was shooting some kind of big movie over by Granite and he had gotten lost even with his GPS navigation.

“So we got him some sodas and that seemed to calm him down until one our children stumbled over asking for an autograph. Mr. Kutcher starts snorting and laughing. ‘Why would I ever give an autograph to you, you stupid kid?’ he said. ‘You’re nobody!’ Eventually he laughed so hard he spilled some soda on his windbreaker. That’s when he started getting really mad.”

According to Mr. Arthur, Ashton Kutcher began to yell, “I will break this motherfucking town with my motherfucking cock and I will shove it up this collective asshole with my gigantic dildo of a cowshit motherfucking hentai cum senile asshole smegma.” And he drove off. This was 2002. The town did not hear from Kutcher until 2003 when rumor has it that Kutcher developed a new TV show, originally named Revenge Has It and then Revenge’s It and then Punk’d. The premise was to go around and prank celebrities but little did America know that Kutcher specifically intended to target Lightsville.

“He would put flatulence disks on our chairs that were permanently glued so everybody kept passing gas. He stole the kid’s bicycle and replaced it with one that had the brakes cut. The kid died crashing into a moving car, which we suspect Kutcher drove, because it also ran over the kid’s pet penguin, which had just given birth to a litter of cubs. He installed electric tripwires in our houses that would trip and shock people at the same time. Also, he burned our houses and raped everybody.”

When Lightsville attempted to contact the highest authority in the land—Dateline’s “Are You A Rapist? Well, Are You?” segment—they received no response and MTV personally filed hush papers over the entire case so that nobody heard from Lightsville until now. Eventually America’s ADD conscience passed over the town’s plight, and they suffered quietly and continuously for four years. One day, in 2007, Kutcher mysteriously disappeared. Today, the town rises in the morning tentatively, stepping around the tripwires and flatulence disks. It is another Kutcher-free day, and so they breathe easily as their hopes are vindicated.

Virginia Tech hires Scooby Doo Gang to resolve bad luck

After a string of carbon monoxide leaks, tripping, and bell tower antics, Virginia Tech principal Josh Cautious hired the Scooby Doo Gang to inspect for weird paranormal phenomena around campus last week. “We are sick and tired of the fear, all the fear, all the fear coursing up and down the scaly, blood-soaked walls, oh the fear,” said Principal Josh in a phone interview done … without any phones. The Gang Report, released today, ultimately detailed a series of health hazards and architectural anomalies, but no paranormalities.

“This is, like, the most boring place I’ve ever visited, man,” said Shaggy Rogers, official spokesperson for the Scooby Doo Dang. “I find this place in total lack of decorum and paranormal circumstances with which to hang a hat,” intoned Scooby Doo, dropping his normally goofy accent for the press release, thus causing a mob to spay and neuter his British accent and his dignity. “The most exciting thing, gang, that I’ve seen in this place is a termite’s shadow!” exclaimed Fred “Tyrone Killer” Jones, “And Daphne’s sex-spider.” “Jinkies, that’s too much information!” said Andy Moore, audience member. Andy Moore was then booed out of the auditorium as Velma had died only days earlier due to a fatal accident involving ghosts, zombies, and and the truck that ran into her. Moore immediately tripped into a cauldron of dirty plum ego knives.

Morning dawns. Today, Virginia Tech principal Josh Cautious remains disillusioned though he tries to be resolute, blaming the turgid Gang Report on once again Virginia Tech’s bad luck and, of course, video games.

Marsh environmentalists protest at penguin deaths

[HARSAWA, INDIA] Several environmentalists emerged from their swampy, Eastern Europe hidings today to protest the deaths of over five penguins at the hands of scared Palestinians. Said one in a thick, Slavic accent, “We do not approve of how our leaders place religion and politics over the well-being of the environment we lived in.” They took to the streets in their dripping wet clothes, carrying protest signs made long before the dawn of this century, some with antiquated messages such as “Save the dodo.” or “Where is this Germanic bus going?”

As they made the slow crossing from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, they walked wearily and tiredly as if they knew this was their last time on Earth, as if they knew what was going to the happen in the future, these old souls that had chosen to align themselves with one of the four elements. They could not stop for barbecue, though the young Armenian man offered them it. They could not stop for Harry Potter, though the Georgian girl offered them tickets. They could not stop for the sorrow in their heart pressed them onwards into the great desert city on a hill, beneath a mountain, and near a river of trash and pollution.

Upon reaching Palestine, they were trampled by the happy mob. One survivor reported the chaos and tragedy later that day as he sat in the cool awning of a Middle Eastern Starbucks, reading the literary magazine Starbucks, which sold a special coffee stained edition at Starbucks that covered the Starbucks region and had a recent Starbucks article. He pointed to the Starbucks stained Starbucks Starbucks “Starbucks’” Starbucks retraction and uttered, “This is the type of reporting journalists today embrace, empty of Nature and beauty.” He sipped his mint hot chocolate as the long, swampy tears filled with moisture of ancestors past swirled into a brown darkness and breathed for a long time.

Bridges everywhere choose to collapse before 2008 begins

Following the I-35 MSR Bridge and Hunan bridge collapses, many bridges have begun pondering implosion or explosion. “We’re sick of people walking all over us, you know? We have feelings too,” said the Brooklyn Bridge, an old stalwart of the anti-human movement among primarily American infrastructure since the turn of the 20th century. “Did you know that they make car tires specifically to touch us and hurt us as much as possible?” Many bridges have adapted to the car annoyance by growing spikes or venom glands, leading to many horrific deaths as a car’s steel slowly warps into a tiny metal box, trapping humans inside as the bridge’s internal immune system ejects it to a tiny, watery death beneath, where the water demons hide and wait.

On Thursday, thousands of bridges marched down the streets in protest—destroying the streets in the process—chanting “We’re not highways, we’re not highways; Let us through, we’re not byways!” that echoes the bridge-highway tensions ignited in the 1955 Infrawar in which thousands of American casualties occurred after one resident called the Brooklyn Bridge the Brooklyn Highway by accident. In the world of bridges, the social hierarchy follows like this: airports, seaports, railways, bridges, roads, streets, and people. The rules, once de facto, were codified permanently in the 1821 Bridge Order Resolution Memorandum, commonly known as SimCity to many lowly pedestrians. It’s a common misconception that SimCity is a simulation game, an old wives’ tale held predominantly among humans. In reality, SimCity is an arcane and complex work of synthesis, bringing together legions upon legions of ancient infrastructure lore into one complex reference model of an idyllic world without any humans. It’s most telling that, though no humans appear in the SimCity games except Dr. Wright, who is actually an alien made excitement and hair, humans still believe the game is about them. “That’s a key example of how humans are always about themselves,” says Professor Rhodes, a bridge who works as a professor emeritus at the University of Hard Knocks. “Humans cannot bridge the cultural and social, ha ha,” and he could not stop laughing at his own pun. He died of asphyxiation due to the fixation to his own verbal libation.

The new parallel bridge installed as a companion to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, quickly assimilated into one bridge, expects to collapse in December of 2007 in an attempt to postpone the inevitable conflict and to warn humans of the danger they face traveling not only it but all bridges without the due respect bridges everywhere demand. “It’s sad,” Mr. Narrows says, “but this is the we only way we know how to change people’s opinions about us.”

Other books unhappy with Harry Potter glory

[RATANGARH, INDIA] Books everywhere, from Vanity Fair to Mary Ashley & Kate Kick Bad Guy Nuts, have united in outrage over the accolades readers have rewarded to Harry Potter. Says The Pickwick Papers, which represents the Dickens Union, “We were promised increase book readings across the board. What did we get? These stupid promotional Harry Potter Voldemort action figures!” To stress his point, he then squeezed Voldemort, producing a sort of bile from the plastic nipples, bile that dripped onto my black and white and waddling shoes.

Indeed, library checkouts of ordinary books have dropped by 3% since 2000, while Harry Potter has increased steadily by 2% per year, says Statisticks and Numericks About Libraries, whom I also interviewed.

When reached, the International Literature Council, currently headed by humans for the first time in three centuries since the Adobe buyout, refused to respond. They would only ominously speak of a day when all books would be gone and only electronic memory disks would be needed, disks that were compatiable with your 8-in-1 card readers and government databases. Also, eBooks.

Special prosecutor weighed for Gonzales

At a portly 183 pounds, Samuel Bottom is neither ashamed nor suicidal about his grossly overweight body, deflecting all invasive, personal questions I asked him with “It’s more muscle and water than fat. I work out a lot. I work out, OK?” His wife, however, paints a different story. “He comes home sobbing and exhausted, physically and emotionally. He just lies on the bed all day, absentmindedly doing casework on our bed headers. You know, those wooden things that sandwich fancy beds.” I did not know what she was talking about and was forced to back out of the interview session slowly, never making eye contact.

Ever since Secretary of Windmills Alberto Gonzales has taken reign of the Wind Department in the Jackson administration in 1281, he has implemented a strict and immortal regime of weighing prosecutors. Says Gonazales, “Es una guerra contra abogados gordos la que aspiramos hacer y nadie nos puede impedir.” However, in 1489, the High Court of Wizardry did indeed stop Gonzales because weight is a privacy and abortion issue, citing Fatso v. Feelings Hurter, Fat Baby v. Death Knell Pill, and Ass a Lot v. Kicks Ass. Thus, only state governments may go on death genocide sprees targeting the fat and the infirmed, a major win for state rights advocate Josh Gordon.

Gordon and his long lineage of hateful skinny people have hunted their fat brethren ever since the Jackson administration began in 1028 after the downfall of the God-Jesus theocracy due to a tornado of rampant graft and corruption that was no match for the Jackson-Jackson-Jackson 1027 election message “Light treason only.” Ever since Gonzales came in power, though, Gordon has had to stop because “all the federal bazookas were shooting down our fatsies,” citing that his AK-47 were no match for the Flying AK-47 Helicopters, living AK-47s that are the size of helicopters and can fly, with endangered animals as their primary source of prey and happiness.

Recently, however, the High Court of Wizardry has passed on to new federalist hands. As more power consolidates in the federal courts each day, the citizens wonder if have yet another pint of blood to spare for that day’s federal tax and another blonde, maiden daughter to sacrifice for the Supreme Jackson Deity whose hunger remains cruelly boundless. And it is people like Samuel Bottom who must suffer.

Barack Obama is, indeed, actually our first president Abraham Lincoln

In a press conference held today, Barack Obama undressed from his disguise to reveal himself as a heavily tanned Abraham Lincoln. A collective gasp escaped from the reporters’ bench. Said one reporter from The New York Times, “That explains his light skin.” (Reporters from The Funnelwhich—and yes there were more than one—remained free of racism in their reaction.) Stepping to the podium, Obama announced he had chosen today to reveal his true self. “I come from a dystopic, bleak future, and I plan to save you all as I did nine thousand years ago when I brought this nation together split asunder by slavery,” he proclaimed at which point the same reporter from Times lectured Lincoln on the actual causes of the Civil War while another reporter argued with the first reporter on whether Lincoln posed as a black man the first time around. (He was and went by the pseudonym of Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass Published by Harper Collins, causing great distress among black intellectuals in 68th century before Christ. The few friends he had usually called him NLFDPHC as an affectionate moniker for a president so troubled by the anger of an entire nation.)

Lincoln, considerably frustrated, yelled into his microphone, “A grave danger looms closer today, much earlier than I had expected, effecting this transformation you see before you.” It was too late. The reporters’ squabble turned into a raging nitpick convention. Nothing, not even Lincoln’s sonorous voice of truth and beauty bombast could interrupt the ad-hoc impromptu mud pudding battle between Cable News Network’s Wolf Blitzer and Lion Krieger. Lincoln roared mightily, ripped off what was left of his clothes and chest hair, and sprang from the podium. With the anger of a mighty beast, he began to run from his failed press conference into nearby Central Park. “Stop right there,” a commanding voice behind the press box cried. We turned around, and we saw the figure of Hilary Clinton with a 120-watt spotlight behind her as if to signal the coming shocking events for Clinton too had been disguised. “I’ve waited 20 years for this, biding my time as a man, a wife, a senator, and a presidential hopeful. And now the time has come.” Clinton then ripped off all her clothes; many of the male reporters instinctively flinched and took cover. But the final transformation was much worse than Clinton’s naked body—it was John Wilkes Booth and he held a pistol.

Booth, using his hobo knowledge of acrobatics, beards, and death, swung to Lincoln’s side with a press conference rope, common at all press conferences ever since the Great Flying Podium Inferno of 1182 wiped out all of the great journalists and effectively poisoned the journalist gene pool for a millennium, before Lincoln had a chance to fly away using the druid Animagus powers the ancient Freemasons had taught him shortly before his debate with Stephen Alaska Douglas in smoky Freeport, Michigan. Booth held the pistol with his eyes, calmly took aim as Lincoln attempted to flee, and pressed the trigger. Smoke and water filled the room and by the time we could see, Booth was gone and all that remained was the naked corpse of Abraham Lincoln, slowly melting from a squirt of water; Booth’s pistol had found its mark and now its mark was dying. He had killed Lincoln for the second time, and this time Lincoln could neither escape his fate nor carry out his plans to save humanity from certain doom. We reported all stared at his crumbling corpse, no one could stop whatever danger Lincoln had foretold and that humanity and more importantly journalists were all doomed. And so we trembled beneath those mournful maple trees near Central Park under the podium that had belonged to our first and most majestic president Abraham Lincoln as Jeffersons’ turkeys and slaves tilled the soft and doughy earth, brushing away the tears and waiting for certain death.

Believed margins of error for a recent poll about 9/11

We polled Americans to see what they thought caused 9/11 and sorted below from least to most popular. Then we polled them to see what margin of error they thought the poll had, which is presented below sorted from least to most popular.

5%, 7%, 2%, 3%, and 1%. The margin of error for this poll will be decided in the next edition if America somehow gets more interesting between this Sunday and next Sunday.

Terry Zhivago whimpered softly and rolled over

In Heaven today, Terry Zhivago slept soundly in her bed. She’s snuggled in her bed covers now, dreaming of beautiful things. If you were to open her bedroom and peek your head inside, you would hear the soft snores of a person who’s at better times now and the contented rustle of a person sleeping like a log. And you would be touched, if you knew the whole story, and you would probably cry a little.

Jesus wipes his eyes and leaves the bedroom corridor.