McDougal in the Twenty-Third Century (excerpt)

Copyright 1983, Starbox Press

McDougal angled the starship down toward the surface of the alien planet, firing off several bursts from the laser cannons. His newly formed army sat quietly below him, in the ship's cargo hold. McDougal chuckled to himself, thinking about how surprised the Alien Overlords would be when they encountered these tiny humans they had so carefully bred to be docile and obedient. The lobotomies had fixed all of that. Certain traits of mankind can be suppressed, but they can never truly be eliminated. Certain circumstances, such as a strategically placed ice pick, can unleash the basest instincts of even the most civilized human. No one knew the awesome potential of viciousness, gluttony, lust and altered brain chemistry like McDougal. Certainly not the Alien Overlords. The surgery had succeeded beyond McDougal's wildest hopes. The future humans were now so aggressive and prone to violence that even McDougal himself sometimes had trouble controlling them, and in minutes they would be unleashed on their unsuspecting oppressors.

McDougal felt a slight twinge of guilt about lobotomizing Xerxes. After all, he had taught McDougal so much in the preceding months. Like how the tools and equipment the Alien Overlords issued to all human workers could be extremely dangerous if mishandled. And the exact locations of the safety devices installed in all of those pieces of equipment which kept them from being even more dangerous. Xerxes even taught him how to operate the starship which was now diving directly toward one of the alien planet's major cities. One thing McDougal did not feel a bit guilty about was wiping out the entire population of that miserable planet on which he had been imprisoned. They were nothing but surly and rude toward McDougal from the day he arrived, but they made excellent live targets when it came time to train his army.

McDougal pressed the button to activate the ship's primary weapon and fired off a single shot. As he watched the entire city below him dissolve into white-hot liquid, his chuckling grew into great peals of laughter.

McDougal in the Twenty-Third Century (excerpt)

Copyright 1983, Starbox Press

The council decided that McDougal should be banished to a planet in a distant galaxy. Xerxes would be allowed to accompany him so that his education about 23rd Century life might continue, however McDougal would no longer be allowed access to modern technology. It would take years to repair the damage done to Earth's capitol city, and even with the Alien Overlords sending in the latest cleanup technology, they still could not guarantee that the area would be free from contamination.

There were many planets to which the Overlords allowed Earthlings to travel that had become quite popular as vacation destinations. The planet that had been chosen for McDougal was not one of these. This was not because the planet was inhospitable. Far from it, in fact. It was remarkably similar to Earth in nearly every respect. It was even inhabited by a race of creatures almost identical to humans. That is, identical in every respect save one.

The human eyeball is a remarkable piece of equipment. The only organ more remarkable is the human brain. The eye, you see, has one potential flaw. Because of the way its lens is constructed, all of the information the eye perceives is broadcast to the brain upside-down. Fortunately for us, our remarkable brains are able to interpret this information so that we think of our feet as being down and the sky being up. The brains of the dominant race of the planet to which McDougal and Xerxes were about to be sent, so humanlike in every other respect, were not able to perform this feat that we take for granted. This biological quirk resulted in these creatures having an extremely pessimistic worldview. Instead of seeing the sky as a realm of limitless possibility soaring above them, they saw it as a frightening void which all living creatures dangled above precariously. Outdoors they walked around staring at their feet, contemplating their tenuous grasp on the planet above them, too terrified to gaze down into the blue abyss. They preferred to spend their time indoors, inside houses with low ceilings, which they found comforting, and few windows. In their entire history they had never constructed a building with a second floor, much less lofty structures such as pyramids or skyscrapers.

This race viewed humans as unbearably cheerful and optimistic creatures. When the aliens arrived to conquer this backwater planet they were surprised that the residents did not put up any sort of resistance, as the Earthlings had. In fact, many seemed almost relieved by the arrival of the aliens. This was because most of the planet's major religions predicted that one day something malevolent would rise up from the void and destroy them. The most religious of these creatures were naturally relieved to find they had been on the right track all of their lives. Once the aliens conquered the planet, however, they had little idea what to do with it. There was nothing in the way of technology to exploit. In their millennia of existence the residents of the planet had accomplished very little. They were mainly a medieval agrarian society, due to the fact that farming was the one occupation that allowed them to spend most of the day gazing up at the dirt. But now, because the planet was completely devoid of modern technology, the Alien Overlords considered it the perfect prison for McDougal.

For more information, click here.

McDougal in the Twenty-Third Century (excerpt)

Copyright 1983, Starbox Press

Once the effects of the freezing had finally worn off, McDougal immediately set about exploring his new environment. However, he didn't make it much further than the laboratory's doorway. In the 200 years he had been packed away, the world had become almost unrecognizable to him. The streets teemed with alien life forms and modes of transportation he could not fathom. With no frame of reference from which to work, the sights and sounds of a Twenty-Third Century city caused him to sink into a nearly crippling state of confused amazement. Xerxes realized that McDougal would need months of instruction just to begin to understand modern society.

It would not be an easy tale to tell. McDougal seemed mentally unstable to a dangerous degree and there was no telling how he would react to news of the massive environmental failure, plagues, and eventual conquest by intergalactic enemies that had befallen Earth in the Twenty-Second Century. But that was not Xerxes' only concern. If McDougal had been a big man in his own century, he was absolutely massive by Twenty-Third Century standards. Because larger humans were such a drain on Earth's limited resources, mankind had been genetically engineered to a smaller size by the Alien Overlords. No modern humans were more than five feet tall, obese or particularly muscular. McDougal, on the other hand, was all three by a considerable margin. Xerxes could not fathom why the people of the past would have made this gigantic maniac their emissary to Earth's future.

The McDougal Campaign Handbook (page 36)

The key to out campaign strategy is to make as many wild accusations against our political opponents as possible. For example:

• Our opponent is actually a robot.
• Our opponent had sexual relations with Bigfoot.
• Our opponent was sent back from the future to prevent McDougal from becoming the best President ever.

The reasoning behind this is twofold.

1. If forces our opponent to respond constantly to these bizarre attacks, rather than focusing on the issues, an area in which McDougal is notoriously weak.
2. It draws attention away from the fact that McDougal is a Sasquasexual robot from the future.

Spring Break

"Do you ever get tired of writing all those lies about me?"

And so began another confrontation between McDougal and I about the contents of this very web page. These were becoming an almost daily occurrence since his discovery of my weblog while he was on the run from the law following that nasty business on Superbowl Sunday.

"They aren't lies McDougal, they're the honest-to-God truth."

This particular discussion was taking place through the bars of a jail cell in Key West. McDougal absolutely despises Florida, yet he owns a great deal of land in the Keys. I suspect there is a story in there somewhere, involving illegal activity. His presence in the jail had nothing to do with that though.

"If they aren't lies then why the hell don't I remember any of that shit."

McDougal was incarcerated because he was the only person in the Keys that fit the description of the man who viscously assaulted a street performer the previous evening. Some sort of singing wizard or some such nonsense. The street performer, that is... The suspect was described as a white male, approximately 7' 3", 415 pounds, wearing a toga fashioned out of a banner advertising a popular Mexican beer and a crown of barbed wire.

"Um... If I had to guess? I would say a combination of booze and drugs, coupled with rough living. You know, repeated blows to the head and such..."

Apparently the street performer made a joke about McDougal's appearance, as if a man wearing a robe and a peaked hat, strumming a guitar has much room to talk. Obviously McDougal took offense, because they found the man beaten senseless with his own guitar.

"I do believe I'm going to have to kill this son of a bitch."

McDougal was speaking of the public defender who was standing next to me. I suppose you are wondering what a man of McDougal's wealth and power was doing enlisting the services of a public defender... The county was anxious to move the weekend's backlog of cases through court, however McDougal's attorney had spent the entire day before his client's arrest engaged in nine rounds of the Diary of Anne Frank Drinking Game with McDougal, and had not yet regained consciousness. There wasn't a single other lawyer in the State of Florida who would come near McDougal with a ten foot pole.

"Mister McDougal..."

That was the maximum number of words McDougal would allow to escape the public defender's mouth before he interrupted him. The attorney explained to me that he wanted to pursue an insanity plea based on statements McDougal made to the 27 arresting officers about his abilities to move fluidly through time and space and to make the laws of physics bend to his will. McDougal wouldn't hear of it.

"The United Nations wasn't able to find me insane, what luck does this shitwater burg have?!"

The public defender just looked confused by this argument. Apparently he didn't read the newspapers much between '85 and '87. McDougal changed tactics...

"I'm going to tell you a story. Listen carefully, because I'm only gonna tell it once. When I was hiking in the mountains of Austria back in 1892 I came across a family who were being set upon by a pack of rabid wolves. Now, ordinarily, I would have walked on by, maybe stopping for a minute to point and laugh. But the family had a young boy with them, and so, for once in my life, I decided to show a little mercy. I fought those wolves for three hours, losing a bit of my left thigh in the process and contracting a case of rabies. That young boy grew up to be Adolph Hitler. I have to live with that every day of my life, and I haven't shown a millisecond of mercy to anyone since."

The public defender repeated that story in court the next morning and all charges were immediately dropped.

What the clock?

I have awakened this morning to a bizarre shift in the space/time continuum. You must understand I am a heavily medicated man. The pills are the only silence for the demons that haunt my black, black soul.

I have just returned from the McDonald's eatery nearest my home, where they were no longer serving breakfast. Why had they desisted with preparation and serving of the most important meal of the day? Because to their reckoning, it is after 9:30 a.m.

Their reckoning could not be more wrong, despite the staunch arguments of my loyal and devoted Red Cross volunteer, Anne Marie.

I own a $44,000 Rolex.

And if that minimum wage burger jockey wants to argue about the merits of his grease-stained $34 Fossil hunk of tin shit and his notion of time versus my brilliant time piece and even more brilliant mind, then I shall continue this argument in Hell.

So I gave him a fucking swirlie in the deep fryer. I'll be joining him in the next two thousand years. We shall continue this conversation then.

In the interim, the manager was far more reasonable. Shortly after I fried his fry cook (that's funny, right? No, don't type that. I was asking you a question. Please stop typing now.)

No, type this. Just don't type that part I was saying to you.

No, I just want to tell them the physics part.

I don't know who. The people who read this glog. What are you laughing at?

Glog, blog. LIke I give a fuck what it's called. You know what I meant. Now type what I mean, not what I say. Thank you.

Tell them what I told the manager.

No, I don't remember it now. The thing about the wormholes.

I don't know. Just copy and paste some shit from the Internet. Tell them that's what I said.

THE INTRIGUING notion that time might run backwards when the Universe
collapses has run into difficulties. Raymond Laflamme, of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico, has carried out a new calculation which
suggests that the Universe cannot start out uniform, go through a cycle of
expansion and collapse, and end up in a uniform state. It could start out
disordered, expand, and then collapse back into disorder. But, since the COBE
data show that our Universe was born in a smooth and uniform state, this
symmetric possibility cannot be applied to the real Universe.

Physicists have long puzzled over the fact that two distinct "arrows of
time" both point in the same direction. In the everyday world, things wear out
-- cups fall from tables and break, but broken cups never re- assemble
themselves spontaneously. In the expanding Universe at large, the future is the
direction of time in which galaxies are further apart.

Many years ago, Thomas Gold suggested that these two arrows might be
linked. That would mean that if and when the expansion of the Universe were to
reverse, then the everyday arrow of time would also reverse, with broken cups
re-assembling themselves.

More recently, these ideas have been extended into quantum physics.
There, the arrow of time is linked to the so-called "collapse of the wave
function", which happens, for example, when an electron wave moving through a TV
tube collapses into a point particle on the screen of the TV. Some researchers
have tried to make the quantum description of reality symmetric in time, by
including both the original state of the system (the TV tube before the electron
passes through) and the final state (the TV tube after the electron has passed
through) in one mathematical description.

Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle recently extended this idea to the
whole Universe. They argued that if, as many cosmologists believe likely, the
Universe was born in a Big Bang, will expand out for a finite time and then
recollapse into a Big Crunch, the time-neutral quantum theory could describe
time running backwards in the contracting half of its life.

Unfortunately, Laflamme has now shown that this will not work. He has
proved that if there are only small inhomogeneities present in the Big Bang,
then they must get larger throughout the lifetime of the Universe, in both the
expanding and the contracting phases. "A low entropy Universe at the Big Bang
cannot come back to low entropy at the Big Crunch" (Classical and Quantum
Gravity, vol 10 p L79). He has found time-asymmetric solutions to the equations
-- but only if both Big Bang and Big Crunch are highly disordered, with the
Universe more ordered in the middle of its life.

Observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation show that the
Universe emerged from the Big Bang in a very smooth and uniform state. This
rules out the time-symmetric solutions. The implication is that even if the
present expansion of the Universe does reverse, time will not run backwards and
broken cups will not start re- assembling themselves.

(As dictated to, and plagiarized by Red Cross volunteer Anne Marie.)

Flight Log (Flying with McDougal: Part II)

Live notes on traveling with the big guy ...

11:30 AM (EST)
I think McDougal just picked up Senator Gephardt's endorsement for President. There was a brief conversation, followed by shouting and a very minor physical altercation, which ended civil enough and involved the Senator handing McDougal the piece of paper below:

“Thanks for all your help, McDougal. Good luck in '08. (Something illegibly scrawled on the bottom – likely "fuck off")

(Meant to scan this, but technology not available.)

12:45 PM (EDT)

We're sitting in the taxi way of the airport. Flight is running very late.

McDougal keeps loudly saying to me, “Goddamn, Frank. There's plenty of chinks on this flight, huh?”

I asked him to please not say that again and he choked me for a minute.

He still has issues with his treatment during the Battan death march. (Historical records indicate McDougal was serving in the motor pool in Ft. Meade, Maryland, at the time of the march, but the old guy swears he was there. Anyway, he hates Asians.)

So the Japanese guy's sitting across from us and McDougal keeps looking over at him. He's reading a book in Japanese. McDougal's either fascinated or infuriated by this. Hard to tell. We're both shithouse drunk.

1:05 PM (EDT)

We're finally airborne.

Good news on this flight – a 757 with three-wide rows of seats. There's an empty seat in our row, but McDougal still insisted on sitting in the seat right next to me and sandwiching me into the window.

He keeps pointing at things outside he wants me to look at. Then, when I turn to look, he jams my face into the window. This makes him laugh loudly. Several people have moved to other seats away from us.

Second brush with fame of the day – the crew on this flight consists of George Taikei and the Oakridge Boys in skirts.

1:40 PM (EDT)
McDougal finally said something to the Japanese guy across from us. McDougal is usually pretty well spoken, so it didn't surprise him when he leaned over to the guy and yelled in his face, “Ching Chong Chinaman!”

He's done this three times in the past five minutes or so.

2:00 PM (EDT)

McDougal says his ass is asleep and he's doing windsprints up and down the aisle. (He always wears a parachute when he flies. George Taikei initially asked McDougal to check it. McDougal broke his own thumb, which somehow convinced George Taikei that he should be allowed to keep the parachute (and helmet, which McDougal has not taken off all day).

2:20 PM EDT

I just re-set my watch to Pacific time, which has infuriated McDougal. He says he's never heard of such a thing, and is now yelling at other passengers, asking them what time it is. He does not like that he has received three or four different answers (Eastern, Central, and West Coast times, plus someone just made some numbers up and told him.)

McDougal is now convinced that we're in a time machine, and he's crying about 1984 and his virginity. Oh, wait. 1484.

No.

Now he says just '84. Delete that floating comman thing, he says. Apostrophe. He doesn't want me to type the word apostrophe. His fist is the size of a canteloupe and he just punched me in the ear.

2:35 PM EDT

McDougal just yelled that “ching chong chinaman” thing at the Japanese guy across the aisle again.

The Chinaman, err, I mean Japanese guy just did some kind of karate chop thing on McDougal's throat.

McDougal's awake, but not moving. Weird.

Oh. He's paralyzed.

Thank God. I can finally get out to take a leak.

McDougal Slow Facts

Fact: McDougal has been at war with the Portugese for over 1200 years.

I'm not trying to suggest that McDougal is actually that old though. That would be ridiculous. He's only about half that. So how is that possible you ask?

Fact: McDougal owns and operates the world's only functioning time machine.

He stole the design from the Nazis back in WWII. Actually, he thought he was just stealing a priceless painting by Sandro Botticelli, but the time machine design was hidden on a microfilm embedded in the frame. The Nazis never built the machine because they couldn't figure out how to power it. In case you are wondering, McDougal wasn't an Allied soldier during the war. He preferred to work freelance.

Fact: McDougal's time machine is steam powered.

To create the enormous amount of power required to send himself back and forth through time, McDougal re-routed a river in central Africa to pour directly into the couldron of an active volcano. The steam serves the dual purpose of powering the time machine and hiding it from Portugese spy satelites.

Fact: No one knows exactly why McDougal hates the Portugese so much.

I have heard rumors that one year someone accidently gave McDougal a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets form the Portuguese as a Christmas gift. McDougal was so enraged that he vowed to destroy whoever was responsible. He probably should have destroyed the gift-giver (who intended it for his fiance) or even E.B. Browning, but that kind of rational thinking has never been McDougal's strong suit.

Fact: McDougal's war with the Portugese is the only war in history to be fought backwards chronologically.

Obviously, the Portugese are now fully aware of McDougal's operation even though they are unable to stop it. But by travelling through time McDougal is able to fight each subsequent battle a few years prior to the former, thereby catching the Portugese completely unaware.

Fact: If it weren't for McDougal's interference, the Portugese would have discovered the Americas a full twelve years before Columbus.

The expedition was fully outfitted and consisted of six ships, each of them larger than Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria. There is every indication that it would have been a monumental success and would have given Portugal a massive influence in world affairs that would have lasted to even the present day. However, at the last minute McDougal showed up and convinced them to abandon the expedition and instead sail East in search of an island which grew a fantastic spice the likes of which Europeans had never tasted. He provided them with a map to the island and a sample of the spice as a gesture of goodwill.

Fact: McDougal provided the expedition with a Shoney's kids menu and a Crown Royal bag full of Lowery's Seasoned Salt.

Found this on my bathroom floor this morning:

Dear Mr. McDougal,

Thank you for your employment inquiry. Shell Oil Global Incorporated welcomes applicants with your qualifications and diverse background. We would like to meet you and discuss further the opportunity to employ you and benefit from your many talents.

We hope you do not consider it to untoward if we ask a few questions before setting up a meeting with yourself and the Shell Board of Directors;

• When you say in your resume that you "fucked an entire army of Marilyn Vos Savant clones", do you mean that you reached fulfillment with each and every one of them? Or are you describing more of a general grab and pant orgy with them, in which all members may or may not have been satiated?
• How exactly did you travel from 17th century China to the present-day home of Barbara Streisand? You made it very clear what you ate and defecated daily on your trip, but the vessel of travel was not mentioned. Just a point that needs clarification.
• If you were to work for Shell Oil would you continue to, as you describe in your resume, rip the knees off anyone you meet in a public restroom who makes less than $800,000 a year? And if so, why?
• Ivica Račan, of the Croatian People's Party, was in the early 2000s the minister of public works alongside Radimir Čačić, who was in turn a former president of the party. At the time they worked together they had two deputies in the Croatian Parliament. What were their names?
• What would you say motivated you to write the words "eat my ass on a plate" on the top of the first 17 pages of your Letter of Intent?

If the answer to question 1 is that all of the Vos Savant clones were satisfied, could you please give us some insight into the pleasure points and erogenous zones of Ms. Vos Savant?

Thank you, and we look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

Lynn Elsenhans
President of Shell Oil Products U.S.