Miss Favors' class has been on an extended vacation while their school has the asbestos removed from the drop ceiling, so I have had to search out new groups of people to query. Sure, I could have found a different class of kids in a nearby school, but I would have felt like I was betraying the trust placed in me by Miss Favors and all of the children at Whitebrook Elementary.
With "kids" off my agenda I decided to turn to the arena of politics. I cashed in my frequent flyer miles and hopped a redeye to Washington. I grabbed a cab to the Whitehouse and entered just as a cabinet meeting was breaking up. It's amazing, you can just walk in there and ask the President's cabinet whatever you want and they will be happy to take the time to answer any of your questions. Some of the cabinet members had already left, but I was able to sit down with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. Norman Mineta was there too, but he had talked too much without asking permission during the cabinet meeting and was confined to quiet time in the corner.
This great bunch of people patiently answered my questions with surprising candor and a great sense of humor. I hope you enjoy reading their responses to my questions as much as I enjoyed talking to them.
|
 | "I resolved to throw no more than one javelin a month through the chest of a barbarian. It's going to be hard, but I think if I just limit the number of javelins I have sitting around my house it will be a lot easier." |
|
| "I will defeat breast cancer." |  |
|
 | "The Lord works in mysterious ways and hopefully one of those ways is in giving me the strength to overcome my crippling addiction to P'Zones. You'd think when Pizza Hut stopped selling them I'd stop being addicted, but no, I've got to ebay the damn things and I don't even think they're safe to eat." |
|
| "I have got to stop crying after sex. That's not my resolution, I'm just thinking outloud." |  |
|
 | "1600 by 1200. Linux, of course." |
|
| "I resolved to finally stop drinking. I intend to ingest all of my fluids intravenously through this PICC line in my carotid. It's dual purpose, too. If I disobey the President he can just pull this plug and I'll bleed out in a matter of seconds." |  |
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|
| "Probably back in November when I finally willed my egg tooth to grow in between the giant gap in my front teeth. It makes my smile less distracting and it will really come in handy if I ever have to pip my way out of a difficult situation. Like, say, being trapped in a giant egg." |
|
| "I finally finished my decade-long project to write the guitar tabs for "Psychotron" by Megadeth. To be honest, now that it's done I feel kind of empty." | |
|
| "I got this absolutely brilliant happy slap on this old bird riding the bus in Surrey. She literally slashed in her knickers. Me mates was crackin' up. It's up on our website at happyslaps.gov if you want to see." |
|
| "I managed to wrap up the paperwork on offshoring my business. We make extra large American flags for Bob Evans and Ponderosa." | |
|
| "My wife and I remarried and had 970,000 beautiful children. She is half ant. I am all ant." |
|
| "I marched in a big anti-war protest in Montreal. I don't really care about the war or whatever, but there were some smokin' babes there." | |
|
|
| "I met Bono once. He smells a lot like when you buy a DVD and you first open the case. That sort of plastic and cardboard dust smell. Anyway, my choice would be Mr. Peanut." |
|
| "The American worker. I don't really respect the American worker, I just really like vague cop-out choices." | |
|
| "You may hate him, but there is no denying that Mr. Peanut had the greatest impact on the world of any individual." |
|
| "I'm torn. I really want to say Mr. Peanut but I also really like cop-out answers. How about Mr. Peanut's victims?" | |
|
| "Wait, Condoleezza said Bono was the winner? I thought it was Mr. Peanut." |
|
| "No, it was Mr. Peanut. Personally, I liked Bono better and I think I'm the only one here who has met them both." | |
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|
| "I don't watch movies. I prefer to have memories implanted in my brain via the Dream Inductor and no memory is more precious than the time I freed Narnia with the help of a talking lion." |
|
| "Stealth because I think we should make a robot jet like that and also a Jessica Biel like that." | |
|
| "I attend every Star Wars movie dressed as Mara Jade and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was certainly no exception." |
|
| "Oh, that's a tough one. I would have to say it's a tie between "Butthole Angels 17" and "Cum in My Gaping Butthole." | |
|
| "Munich was hysterical! Two big thumbs way way up!" |
|
| "I have to go with Racing Stripes. I don't know if it came out in 2005 but Norman Mineta and I got it on NetFlix and we watched it together curled up under a blanket on my couch." | |
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|
| "The President only taps wires inside the positronic brains of Al Qaeda robots. Think about that the next time you're trying to hate America." |
|
| "The authority to issue secret wiretap orders without judicial oversight was implied when Congress approved the war in Afghanistan. Sort of like how when you stay in a hotel it is implied that you are allowed to take all of the towels and light fixtures." | |
|
| "¿Qué? No hablo inglés." |
|
| "The President has many powers. One might say that he has super powers. One might even say that the President is the Incredible Hulk. Of course that person would be wrong because the Incredible Hulk is only an alter-ego of Bruce Banner, the real POTUS. " | |
|
| "There are some things we know about this war and some things we don't know. The key here is to know what you don't know so that you can know what you know by a process of elimination. Unfortunately, we can't know what is unknown without first not knowing about it, so you can sense the complexity of this situation." |
|
| "The President can tap my wire any time he wants, if you know what I mean." | |
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|
| "Is that guy from Schindler's List still alive? He could run Israel like a business." |
|
| "The order of succession has been decided by the Elders of Zion centuries in advance." | |
|
| "If it's going to be decided by way of a battle of the bands I would like to throw my hat into the ring and showcase my virtuoso zither playing." |
|
| "Maybe it would help them find a new Prime Minister if we got all of the Jews in America onto a big boat and sent them over there to live. I'm just thinking outloud again." | |
|
| "I'm not actually sure whether or not he's Jewish, but Paul Wolfowitz would be a great choice. I know he did a fantastic job drinking the blood of white babies as my deputy and that's got to be like half the job right there." |
|
| "I could do it. Hell, I wouldn't even have to quit my job with Agriculture. All I do here is let Monsanto fly a plane around scattering seeds into farmer's fields and then sending them a bill for the crops. If Israel gives me the job over there I'll have Gaza covered in 10 foot high corn that lives by digesting rat carcasses and sings at night." | |
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|
| "Not pulling the trigger on Mr. Peanut when we had him trapped in that canyon. We could have dropped a tactical nuke on him, but the Democrats wanted us to reason with him. We tried, but they just wanted us to keep him talking and talking and by the time they had some real proposal of what to do he had cut a swath through the troops we had bottling him up." |
|
| "Allowing egg sandwiches in the cabinet commissary. Maneta goes through those things like my wife goes through cotton balls. The big difference is that I'm usually not shut up in a room with my wife for five hours while she rips stinkers that could set fire to a rock face." | |
|
| "Did the President cancel Firefly last year or the year before?" |
|
| "Probably when I wore my white pantsuit to that press conference during the middle of my period. Flow control my ass." | |
|
| "Does vehicular manslaughter count as a political blunder? If so I have something to say about what Norman Maneta did last summer." |
|
| "Probably the time I stopped by Rummy's house with my pet ant eater. I will never forget the sound of his wife screaming. It was this high-pitched monotone wail with these clicks in it." | |
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I think all of this just goes to show that you never know what those crazy cabinets will say next! I hope you enjoyed the article and hopefully in a few weeks all of the asbestos will be cleared out of Whitebrook Elementary and we can get back to talking to the kids there.
– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)
