Everyone gets Christmas or Channukah presents that they don’t want. Sometimes it’s an ugly holiday sweater, other times it’s a Wii Fit (when all you really want to do is lie on the couch and absorb calories through your pores.) Maybe it’s a major league football team, which is theoretically worth millions of dollars, except who has the time to manage a football team? I don’t know what people are thinking with some of the gifts they give you.

So what you need is a way to properly deal with those unwanted gifts. I’ve taken huge gobs of time out of my busy holiday schedule to come up with the following gift disposal ideas. These should work whether you got a sweater, Wii Fit, football team, or even some other unwanted gift that I didn’t think of ahead of time.

• Find the appropriate government czar for your gift and send it to them. For example, send your football team to the national football czar. If they are returned undeliverable, then try to deliver them in person. Just leave your unwanted gift on their porch, ring their doorbell, and run. Be sure that you don’t accidentally leave a note explaining why you’re leaving them along with your name and address, because they’ll almost certainly be returned to you, possibly with a large fine and jail time.
• Burn the unwanted gift on the beach at sunset. If you don’t live near a beach, first move to the beach, and then burn the gift at sunset.
• Transubstantiate the gift into something more useful, like a reindeer, or the blood of Jesus Christ. Note that if you turn the gift into blood, you should also get some biohazard warning labels, since nobody wants to be accidentally touching untested and possibly smelly blood.
• Make the gift into ice cream. Almost anything can be made into ice cream if you churn it long enough. My family loves my world famous Old Tire Ice Cream. It takes forever to churn the rubber from an old tire into a creamy cream, but it’s so worth it when you let its deliciousness cover your tongue like methanol covering a colony of ants.
• Regift the gift to your worst enemy. The major downside to this is waiting for an appropriate time to present the new gift; you’ll most likely have to wait until your worst enemy’s birthday, or next Christmas. If the gift was a football team, that means you’ll need to manage them for up to one year, which could be disastrous for both you, the team, and the sport of football as a whole. The best way to do this is if your worst enemy is the President of the United States, in which case it is completely appropriate to give him a gift on President’s Day, which really isn’t that much after Christmas.
• Turn the gift into jam or marmalade. This should be self-explanatory.
• Lick the gift until you reach its soft, chewy center, at which point rabid raccoons or starving squirrels should finish it off. This is probably more reasonable for a nasty fruitcake than a football team, unless the football team is composed solely of ice cream cones.
• Build a highway out of the gift. This way you not only can get rid of the gift, but you can improve your country’s crumbling and neglected transportation infrastructure. If you can build the highway somewhere where there currently is no highway, then you can make traffic slightly more manageable as well! You will be hailed as a hero and a genius, and be given a special protective guard that will make sure that starving squirrels don’t eat you alive.

This should take care of all possible unwanted Christmas presents. I hope that your gratitude at being given this guide for free is so great that you will shower me with presents (or with water, that might actually make for a less painful shower, especially if your gifts are heavy and/or sharp and pointy.) In closing, I leave you with the famous words of Mar Imur, who said, “I recently conked the arctic tundra with a fire extinguisher, and the foul imitations rehardened their mesozoic fins immediately. Merry holidays and fun aphorisms and obese washdays to you all!”

Welcome! It’s another Friday, September 5, 2008, and you know what that means! As with all September 5th, 2008s that fall on a Friday, it’s porcupine movie scripts day! Hooray!

You can read the complete shooting draft of the screenplay below, or you can down the PDF script of Porcupines are Deadly, 100% free of charge and guaranteed to work in all weather environments — tropical storms, hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes excepted.
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We have a new short film movie script up for you all to enjoy. This screenplay is for Trigonometry McCain and the Potatoes of Doom, which might sound like a fast-paced high concept action adventure masterpiece, but is really a subtle and poignant observation on politics, potatoes, and Prussia.

You can either read it in HTML below, or download the PDF version of the script. The choice is yours and yours alone.
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If you go to your bedroom and open the antique cabinet in there — you know, the one that was probably once used by Thomas Edison until Howard Hughes swept in on his gigantic flying cricket and stole it from him — I think you’ll be in for a surprise. I think you’ll discover that I’ve stolen your antique cabinet and replaced it with a timid gnome.

I bet you didn’t see that coming. I bet that when you tried to open the gnome, it probably bit you, and now you’re infected with Gnome Protein IV (GPIV.) Sorry about the deadly disease, but I bet you learned your lesson about trusting your furniture to not have been stolen while you weren’t looking.

Too many people think their furniture will stay where it is forever. Too many people — like you and Thomas Edison — are wrong. Too many people — like me and Howard Hughes — are likely to snatch away your furniture without a single warning. Some of us (e.g., Howard Hughes) leave nothing in return, while others (e.g., me) leave something that at first glance may appear to be furniture (e.g., a timid gnome) but on second glance isn’t furniture at all.

Luckily for us, most people never give their furniture a second glance. You singleglancers are the greatest scourge on our lands. I call you all to my house for appropriate punishment, probably involving avocado being stuffed up your collective noses. Nothing else is severe enough to train you in the importance of a second glance.

Well, sure, giving you GPIV would work, but my gnome supply isn’t what it used to be. You know, economic recession will do that to you. Ask Ben Bernanke, I’m pretty sure even his gnome supply is at critical levels. Rumors are that gnome prices may break $500 a barrel within the next two weeks, and at that point I’ll have no choice but to start hoarding avocados in expectation of a run on gnome alternatives.

Maybe I shouldn’t have revealed my avocado plans here. Maybe Billy Ray Valentine and Louis Winthorpe III will try to teach me a lesson and corner the avocado futures market. Maybe I need to learn the importance of keeping confidential financial strategies on my secret website, and not on one wide open to the public.

Or not. You guys with your gnome diseases won’t be around long enough to cause me any problems. Go off and get haircuts while you still can, and leave the futures market to me and the Dukes.

Today, the Fourth of July, I wish a fond Happy Birthday to these United States of America, and hope that you are able to blow out all of the candles on your first blow. I sing this Independence Day — not the one with Will Smith — birthday song to you:

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear America
Happy birthday to you

From your shining blue seas
To your genetically enhanced trout festivals
Your birthday will seize the imaginations of lesser countries
But not of greater countries
Since they couldn’t care less

From your fields of wheat
To your meals of sheets
From your rocket’s red glare
To your Victorian goblets of Buddhist mercy
Your birthday is a fun day

Happy happy happy happy happy happy birthday
Your childlike mothball factories are awesome
And your ceramic rodent lawn ornaments are awesome, too
But nothing is as awesome
As your birthday day to me.

(Repeat)

Come on everyone, sing along!

There are several ingredients that you must have if you’re trying to throw a fun and memorable party. I will now list them here, in one convenient place, for your party-throwing pleasure. If you would be so kind as to invite me to your party, I would be most appreciative. If you use this advice without inviting me to your party, I might have to sit at home alone and cry. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you?

And now, with just a little further ado, the most important ingredients for a fun party:

• werewolf liver
• poisonous nicknames (e.g., “Molly”, or “Nevermore”)
• sneeze syrup
• millions of molecules of mermaid milk
• a titlark
• no scythes
• antisocial thermostats
• 1/2 cup sugar
• junkie squids
• a dash of garlic
• chocolate chip blue jeans
• Paula Abdul
• a representative from the Wildcat Wrestling Federation (WWF)
• one gravity
• a noisy and nebulous night

If I hear — and I do have my sources — that you have thrown a party using my ingredient list (or any portion thereof) and have not invited me, my wrath will be biblical and swift. There will be no cookies or ice cream in my wrath, it will instead be all wrathy and mean. That’s right. Mean.

You can leave your party invitations below in the comments. If the comments are so fully packed with existing invitations that you can’t squeeze yours in — and I expect that to be the case within a few short hours of posting this — then feel free to send me a postcard invitation instead. I accept invitations of all kinds.

“Stup!” he shouted.

Why should I stup now? This neighborhood has to be the least stuppiest place I’ve ever seen or imagined. And trust me, I’ve been around. I spent a month in the lair of the breakfast puma, constantly hiding from his enraged Rice Krispies tantrums and his Count Chocula killing sprees. But I would much rather stup in the breakfast puma’s lair than stup here.

After all, here the astronauts can see me.

Here the mongoose eggs all look translucent in the streaky light.

Here a flank steak can beat up a filet any day of the week.

And still his shouted “stup!” lingered in the air. I poked at it with my umbrella, but all I could do was dent it; its inherent stuppiness was still quite evident. No, this hovering, lingering word would require extra ammunition.

This word would need to be doused in a 50-50 mixture of alcohol and holy water, and then set on fire. This word needs to be burned to a crisp until all that’s left is the lone descender from the bottom of the “p,” which would then fall to the ground and disintegrate like a cell phone in a hockey rink.

No Stanley Cup for you, you unwanted exclamation! I banish you to a soothing land of milkshakes and backrubs. No, wait! That’s all wrong! Cancel that order! I meant to banish you to a meatmall land where you are always the cowbell and never the cow.

“Ha!” I shouted in reply, after I burned and banished his word. I was victorious once again.

Poor Karl Rove.

There he was, innocently sitting on his couch and watching the American Idol results show. He had no idea what was about to befall him. He was pure and innocent as driven snow, uncorrupted and virginal.

And then disaster struck: David Hernandez was voted off.

Karl Rove just sat there in shock. David Hernandez, that sweet gay stripper? How could the people of America vote him off of American Idol so coldheartedly? Didn’t they empathize with David’s secret dreams and desires? Or was Karl Rove the only one who really understood him?

Either way, Karl Rove was still in shock. Tears started welling up in his eyes, although he tried to put on a brave, strong face around those teary eyes. But nobody was tricked; they easily saw how deeply this vote had affected poor Karl Rove.

What they didn’t know was how Karl Rove would react. Would he just sit on the couch and cry like he did when Saddam Hussein stopped returning his phone calls? Or would he turn green, grow disturbingly steroidial muscles, and start smashing things with his hulking grunting sounds that always scared the working class? Everyone enjoyed watching the working class huddled scared in their hovels, but if they had to vote, they would vote for the quiet, crying Karl Rove.

How did he react? Who will go home next? Will William Shatner crawl out of Ryan Seacrest’s shirt pocket and devour the entire audience? You’ll just have to tune in to find out. FOX, Tuesdays. Be there or be The Incredible Hulk.

Join us! We are tintyping. We reject your plastic electronic computer keyboards which fatigue your fingers, rust your diners, and cause you to ceaselessly kowtow to Karl Rove.

Tintyping is the future. It’s a future where all the diners are rust-free, Karl Rove is ignored, and your fingers lovingly caress that tin keyboard every hour of the day. That tin keyboard that lets you tintype with reckless abandon, throwing away the ancient plastic keyboards of your great-ancestors.

If Groucho Marx was still alive today he would certainly be a tintyper. If the ant from Pixar’s A Bug’s Life ever started his own web site he would create it with a tintyping keyboard. If spacewomen from the future landed on Earth and started sending out harshly worded memos — as they are often wont to do — they would type up those memos on tinboards (Tinpedia asserts that “tinboard” is an acceptable shortening of tin keyboard.)

I can’t vouch for licking a tin keyboard. Best to just restrict yourself to typing on it. I’m sure Cory Doctorow has one by now, securely hidden somewhere within his cape.

Get yours today! It’s the perfect St. Patrick’s Day gift for that special someone in your life. Don’t terrorize them with continued harassing phone calls and by stalking them on Facebook. No, show them how you really feel by forcefully welcoming them to the tintyping revolution. It’s like the Ron Paul revolution, only with even more blimps!

Today’s movie script, fresh off the cookie sheet that bakes movie scripts, is an educational film called How to Act in a Cafeteria. You can enjoy this script either through PDF form, or just by continuing to read on for the plain old web page version.

The choice is yours. Choose wisely, for your decision may alter the course of history, much as the improper cafeteria behavior in this screenplay does.
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