Saddam Escapes!

By now, everyone knows feared Dictator-For-Life Saddam Hussein has escaped his American captors by digging a secret hole beneath his bunk with soup spoons. My information has it that he emerged from his tunnel just on the other side of the American Green Zone's barbed wire fence sometime around 5:58AM Saturday. By 6:20AM, he was out of his prison garb and back into desert camo fatigues (an accomplice hid them in a shrub). By 6:48AM, a thug in Ray-ban's picked him up at a nondescript rest stop off Baghdad 66. By that time, he had already shaved his salt-n-pepper beard, leaving only his classic generalissimo moustache. He slipped his own pair of Ray-ban's on while calmly getting into the unmarked black sedan. "This Ace of Spades always trumps," he is said to have quipped to his crony. Now that it's been two days, there's little doubt that he's presently parasailing off of St. Kitts. Look, I want the guy captured and justice served as much as anyone else, but I predicted this when I edited Saddam's wikipedia entry three weeks ago, liberally sprinkling candid photos of man-made holes, diagrams of prison bunkers and images of soup spoons randomly throughout the entry's main text. Hey admins, see if you can revert it to Vindicated.

Cracks in the World Wide Web

By now, everyone knows this earthquake off Taiwan broke close to a dozen of the international underseas cables that the internet travels on. It has severely disrupted service in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Malaysia and Japan. They said it will take three weeks to fully fix it because "crews fixing the cables would have to pull them up and transfer them to a ship for repair." It fucking sucks, cause I can't access any Google sites, including Gmail. Wikipedia is really shaky. And I definitely can't log into Blogspot. I'm forced to use this truncated version of the internet, filtered only through Yahoo's Hong Kong page. It fucking blows hard. I would blog about this experience, no doubt taking the line that indeed, yes, the internet is basically a series of tubes, yadda yadda, vindicated. But I can't. I feel completely cut off. Hopefully one good soul will receive the letter in a bottle I tossed into the bay this morning and make this posting on my blog by tonight. Vindicated.

Santa Claus: Merely an Idea

By now, we've all come to grips with the notion that Santa Claus is not the person our parents led us to believe he is. He is not the one who brings us presents on Christmas. Nor does he live at the North Pole. In fact, no one lives at the North Pole except for scientists (and we don't want any presents from them anyway.) Santa Claus is not even necessarily "jolly." Nor is he the begrudgingly merry middle-class father Tim Allen would have us believe he is. He is none of those. He is the unmarried United States Postal worker at your local mall. He is lonely, and he is tired. And he might be just as disaffected as you. He is a product of his time. Much like Gerald R. Ford. What with the Nixon scandal at his back, that guy didn't have a chance. Do yourselves a favor. Go easy on Santa this year, and go easy on Gerald Ford. R.I.P. Somewhere a sleigh bell rings out: "Vindicated."

Vindicated Exclusive Look: View from Inside Britney's Vag

By now, we've all seen Britney Spears' bristly mound of red-raw vag. It's all over the internet. Just go to Perez Hilton's blog and you'll see it, along with many other candid shots of celebrity whores' holes. Pantiless upskirts, it seems, are the new sex tapes, just as sex tapes were the new beating-up-your-maid, and beating up your maid was the new rehab visit, and rehab visits were the new getting-caught-with-a-prostitute, and getting caught with a prostitute was the new bellybutton reveal, ad infinitum. Whenever a celebrity realizes he or she has no talent, he or she must get caught in a compromising and controversial situation to revive interest in them. What we here at Vindicated want to do is stay ahead of the trend, so I'm giving our readers an exclusive first glimpse at what can only be the next crest on the celebrity-by-controversy wave of public interest. I give you the very first shot taken from inside a celebrity's cum dump. Vindicated.

What to Do with the World's Tallest Man

By now, you must have heard about Bao Xishun and the heroic way he saved two dolphins by reaching in their throats and removing shards of plastic from their stomachs. The dolphins' handlers called in Bao when long mechanical prehensile arms and the Heimlich didn't work. Bao has since been praised by fellow Guinness World Record holders for elevating himself above the "freak" status so commonly associated with those awards. Because of the stunt, Bao now stands in the running to receive another world record - Most Amount of Actual Good Done with a Guinness-Lauded Grotesque Disability or Ostracizing Collection. But the competition is stiff. Top competitors include Niek K. Vermeulen of the Netherlands - who used his largest collection of airplane vomit bags to successfully carry 29 baby softshell turtles to safety from a burning pet store - and Stephen Clarke of Orlando - who performed several emergency cesarian sections on a parents-to-be cruise that went skerry-logged off the coast of South America, no doubt aided by his world-record fastest pumpkin carving time. The Guinness World Records Association has done a lot to boost the self-esteem of social outcasts - disfigured either by God or their own obsessions - and given them cause to celebrate their plight as if it were an achievement. After so much coddling, it's time now for these monsters to give something back. It's like Michele Santelia of Campobasso, Italy, said, "Sevlesmeht morf su naht egnarts ssel esoht tcetorp tsum ew." (He holds the world record for most books typed backwards (56) and as Mussolini's top code-cracker is given much credit for an Allied win on that front.) Freaks, your malformations can serve some purpose. I congratulate you, Bao, for taking this first step and hope it's not too little, too late. I think your next move should be to reach those gangly limbs down into my stomach and pull out some vindication.

Licking It Up


By now, everyone knows that 11:30am is totally lollipop time. It doesn't matter what you got yourself into last night - you could have fallen down the stairs and on to your best friend's wife or got yourself elbow-deep in dolphin throats - lollipops will forgive. And, like 300 years ago, they invented the "tongue tattoo," which is a lollipop with a picture of Santa on it in white, and if you suck the Santa bit real hard, it rubs off on your tongue. This was invented in the dark ages as an early precursor to the daguerreotype. All this and more can be found on my palimpsest, "Daguerreotypes, Palimpsests, What Came Before, and How Right I Was All Along." The obverse side reads, "Vindicated."

Hang in There, Big Red

By now, you've heard that scientists discovered evidence of water on Mars, and you probably think that means the planet could have some form of life on it. It's very likely that it does. I sure hope it does. We all do. But I have to be honest with you. The likelihood that Mars will suddenly wake up - with all the spirit and vigor from those Ray Bradbury stories you used to read as a kid under the covers late at night - is pretty slim. Even if we are able to find signs of life, all those eons of dehydration and neglect have surely rendered it enfeebled, at best. To be honest, I doubt any lifeforms would even have the capacity to recognize us, should we ever venture to the red, lonely planet. We have two choices, it seems. We can either sit back and watch our old, withered friend slip into the abyss, one painful gasp at a time. Or we can do what's merciful and end this death watch right now. By my calculations, a steady bombing campaign against the surface of Mars that unloads at least five hydrogen bombs a week, every week, should effectively demolish enough of the crust to jolt it out of orbit and hurtling toward the sun by the end of this century. At this point it's the only decent thing to do. Well, you tell that to these Republican politico big-wigs and see what happens. Just try to get them to utter the word "decency" and see if they don't spit up a piece of their black hearts with it. Makes me sick. Vote Nader. Vindicated.