Words On Fire

Islamic fundamentalists, outraged by the burning of copies of the Quran, have responded by burning books sacred to Westerners. Unlike previous protests which have featured burning Holy Bibles, the protestors have done their homework. “We realize that most American’s do not hold the pages of their chritian book to be sacred as we do,” said Cleric Ali Mohammed Ali. “They may revere their God, but the book itself is not seen as being the actual vessel of his holy word as we do.”

So in response, Afghan crowds have begun burning material that will truly incense the West. “We began with setting fire to TV Guide, but quickly realized that American’s no longer honor the book because of PVRs,” said Ali. Demonstrators quickly moved onto other texts determined to inflame the passions of viewers in North America. Across Kabul piles of “Twilight”, “The Help”, “O” magazine and the “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition” can be seen sending up columns of smoke.


When asked where they go from here, Imam Ali responded, “We are expecting a huge shipment of Janet Evanovich and Sophie Kinsella books from Amazon.com. The whole Stephanie Plum series plus all the Shopaholics. We are very excited!”

Oscar Sabotage!

Academy Awards’ security staff are scrambling to prepare for a possible red carpet disruption by Sasha Baron Cohen. The British actor is well known for pranking unsuspecting groups in films such as “Borat” and “Bruno”. In addition, his comic antics have disrupted Hollywood gatherings in the past to promote his films. Organizers are concerned he made show up to the festivities dressed as General Aladeen, the title character from his soon to be released picture “The Dictator”.

However, a publicist for Cohen has told Dogs & Jeans that it is unlikely he will sabotage the evening masquerading as the flamboyant Aladeen and if he appears in disguise it will be something more subtle. We have been supplied with a list of other possible Sasha Baron Cohen costumes:

• Chewbacca the Wookie
• Jaime Edmondson
• President Obama
• The late Rip Taylor
• Flo, the Progressive.com spokeswoman
• Don Quixote
• The Elephant Man
• Peter Griffin’s Millionaire Space Cowboy
• Iron Man
• Outrageous hockey commentator Don Cherry
• Whitney Houston

GOP Show Must Go On

Many Americans feel the Republican nomination race has contained far too many debates. They stopped being interesting a month ago and organizers have attempted to encourage vitriolic exchanges between the candidates to increase the drama rather than actually increasing the quality of the ideas. Like most things on TV today, political discussion is more about entertainment than it is information.



On that note, Dogs & Jeans suggests the rest of the campaign embrace the theatrical and really give the audience what it wants:

• Cheerleaders: Even the NHL has seen a bump in viewership in normally poor hockey markets in the South with the addition of Ice Girls cavorting on the rink during breaks in the play. Why not include scantily clad ladies like the Miami Heat Dancers, Laker Girls and “celebrity” NFL cheerleader Jaime Edmondson at the next event?

• Trap Door: Nothing keeps a candidate, or the audience on their toes like the possibility of a trap door opening up underneath them when they say the secret word.

• Costumes: Every hostess knows the way to turn a dull cocktail party into a memorable night is to make it a costume party. Upcoming events should require all candidates to dress up. Organizers could even experiment with themes: favorite president, movie heroes and heroines, 1980’s “hair” bands, Star Trek characters etc.

• Transportation: The candidate who spends the remainder of the campaign travelling by the most unusual (and inconvenient) method is the winner. Who wouldn’t want to see a presidential hopeful campaigning on a unicycle?

• Security: Events have remained relatively calm because the GOP has been employing bouncers tasked with keeping Sarah Palin from crashing them. Let’s lay these boys off and see what kind of damage the former Governor can really do when she is unrestrained. As they say, “Release The Kraken!!”

• The Olympics: Organizers could take a page from the Olympics and increase the difficulty, and therefore the viewership, of the campaign. Increase the opportunity to make events synchronized and/or equestrian. How about requiring candidates to perform in time to the music while twirling a ribbon. Or go really crazy and include X-Games events like downhill ski-cross and snowmobile backflips!

With ideas like this for the nomination, the actual election will seem like a let-down.

Get The Message?

Wireless service providers say they are coming to the maximum of their capacity. With the exponential boom in cellular and tablet devices, the FCC says the airwaves are growing too full of voice, text and internet traffic to handle much more. This “spectrum crunch”, as the industry calls it, cannot be resolved simply by erecting more transmission towers either. Until an alternate technology for carrying wireless messages is developed, the major service providers Verizon, Cisco, Sprint, AT & T and T-Mobile are proposing a multi-phase program to coordinate a reduced demand on the current available bandwidth.

Phase 1: Beginning in June 2012, all text messages sent to receivers within the limits of major cities will be passed through a gossip network of retired ladies. Messages will be delivered by courier first thing in the morning and will be routed throughout the day at various coffee meetings, knitting circles and majong games. Shouting across the alley between buildings will also be utilized but only while in the act of hanging out laundry and accompanied by expressions such as “Can you believe she’d say that?” and “Tell me something I don’t know!”

Phase 2: Cross-country semaphore service for text messaging will be initiated in late 2012. Using platforms spaced at 2 mile intervals, “flag-people” will be capable of sending messages a distance of 100 miles in just under one hour. Carriers expect to hire over 1000 new workers per state with this initiative, making this the largest employment program since Roosevelt’s New Deal.





Phase 3: Early in 2013 Wikipedia will be removed from the Internet and be available only through a "Request for Information" service. People interested in querying Wikipedia will submit a request in writing to the Wikipedia America head office in Scottsdale, Arizona. Within 5 business days, the corresponding pages will be mailed back. Updates to pages will also be made in the same manner, with new information being compiled and available to users within one month of submission.

Phase 4: Twitter updates will be restricted to airplane banners by sprint 2013. Tweets will be dragged behind small engine planes over the city where the message is relevant. Banner tweeting will remain in place until America’s telegraph wires that were removed 20 years ago can be re-laid. Then normal (although slightly altered) tweeting can resume. For example:


“party at brittneys stop five buck solo cups stop”


“brandon is a pig stop he wont stop stop”

Presidential Superheroes

With all the buzz surrounding the upcoming release of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Hollywood studios are scrambling to produce the next in a series of films featuring the exploits of past presidents and their battles against evil.

Dogs and Jeans is pleased to add to it's menu of President's Day features with this list of Super President movies coming soon to a dodeca-plex near you:

• John Adams: Werewolf Whisperer
• James Monroe's Celebrity Apprentice
• John Tyler and the Case of The Murdering Mummy
• James Buchanan: The Invisible Man
• Ulysses S. Grant Is Not Buried In His Tomb!
• Rutherford B. Hayes: First Mutant
• Chaster A. Arther: The "A" Stands For America, Bitches!
• William McKinley And Grover Cleaveland's Excellent Adventure
• Warren G. Harding Knows What You Did Last Summer (and he's pissed!)
• Herber Hoover vs Godzilla
• Save Us From Zombies Richard Nixon!

How To Be Happy

Scientists in Geneva have discovered the secret to living a happy life. Working in an secret underground laboratory for the past 16 years, a team of researchers have isolated the key to living a life free from care.

"It all comes down to not worrying about things," said Dr. Ingrid Schroeder, head of the study. "Too many people spent time being anxious over things they cannot change. Our research found that our test subjects even continued to worry over things they could change but chose not to."

The findings of the team can be summarized in the following graphic:

The American Association of Self-Help Book Publishers disputes the results of the Swiss research, claiming they are too simple. "We release over 500 new books a year aimed at helping people deal with relationship issues, addiction, body image, sleep disorders, debilitating fears etc. You can't replace all that wisdom with one picture that tells you to stop worrying," said Steve Miller, a spokesman for the organization. "There is an entire industry of public speakers that rely on peoples' anxiety."

When asked if the criticism of the self-help book publishers bothered him Dr. Schoeder replied, "Is there something I can do about it?" Then she smiled and walked away.

Ghostbusters Need Help

After more than 20 years in hibernation, the Ghostbusters may be coming out of retirement. The long awaited Ghostbusters 3 is now in pre-production (which is Hollywood-speak for finding actors, money, a studio and a script). But what has taken so long? Considering the massive financial success that accompanied Ghostbusters 1 and 2, you would think producers would have been falling over themselves to jump on that money train as early as 1991.



The problem seems to have been coming up with an original idea for the film. After defeating Gozer the Gozerian in the first film and Vigo the Carpathian in Ghostbusters 2, writers have had difficulty coming up with a suitable antagonist for the Busters to bust. Take a look at the following rejected plots and see if you don’t disagree with their decision to cancel each project:

• On a trans-Atlantic cruise Peter Venkman finds love with a poor, deaf but beautiful passenger. He helps train her to become a boxer but she becomes paralysed in a freak buffet line accident. When the ship becomes infested with spirits from the ghost ship Mary Celeste, the Ghostbusters must do battle before the captain (who has gone mad by this point for an unexplained reason, but his madness is crucial to the story) can run the ship into an iceberg.

• Having recently emerged from failed marriages/long term relationships, the Ghostbusters meet at a lakeside retreat to discuss life, love, friendship and the bonds that keep them together.

• Egon Spengler invents a ‘reality’ device that accesses an alternate reality pulling in the four Ghostbusters from another dimension. The new Ghostbusters are identical in every way except for being left-handed and preferring iced tea over cola and must be returned to their world before the Time-Space continuum collapses completely. Kenny Loggins had already signed on to write the title song when the project was scrapped.

• Jesus Christ returns to initiate The Rapture. The Vatican contracts the Ghostbusters to capture and eliminate the Son of God since his reappearance is bad for business. Despite the commitment of Tom Cruise to play Jesus, the movie was cancelled after massive protests from the Catholic Church and the SPCA (for some strange reason).

• A giant asteroid entirely inhabited by alien ghosts is on a collision course with Earth. The President asks the Ghostbusters to join a team of NASA and Soviet astronauts to destroy the asteroid and save the planet. One week before shooting began, “Armageddon” hit the theatres.

• The Ghostbusters join forces with the animated Ghostbusters (from the TV series) to do battle with villainous ghosts from classic fairy tales. The project was actually moving along well and would have beaten “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” in the live action/animated genre. However, as a result of a bizarre reverse copyright lawsuit, the producers were forced to include characters from the Hanna-Barbara cartoon family. The writers were able to accommodate The Flintstones, the Scooby-Doo gang and Yogi Bear, but the script broke down over the inclusion of Wally Gator, Atom Ant and Grape Ape.

• The daughters of the Ghostbusters are all cheerleaders for the New York Jets. Unaware of their fathers’ former careers, they stumble upon the coveralls and backpacks in the attic of Ray Stantz house. Discovering their heritage, the girls decide to revive the business: cheerleadres by day, sexy Ghostbusters by night. Frankly, this one sounds like a hit to me! Lights, camera action!