AIIEEE! It's the HAM RAPTURE!

It's official: influenced by the highly successful Turkey Rapture a few weeks ago, at 5:58 am EST, all the world's hams and pigs and slabs of bacon and pork bellies pre-empted the holidays and Raptured themselves into Pig Heaven, where they'll pretty much do the same things pigs have done in the past, except they'll glow a lot more -- and gloat about all the spiritually UNCLEAN ham they Left Behind. Yes, in case of Ham Rapture, your ham will indeed be unhammed.

"This was reported previously," said an anonymous FDA official, "but because of the huge number of pigs, ham, pork bellies and bacon in the world, it took a lot longer to get all that protoplasm transmuted up into Pig Heaven. Think of the logistics." The official added that he's really sad to see bacon go, but that he understood that pigs had a right to spiritual ascendancy, too.

DANCE Weird Fringe-y Peanuts Characters

Besides the Christmas tree scene, the dance sequence is still the best part of, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" -- esp. given the obscure nature of the two above numerical characters, namely, "555 95472," or 5 for short (orange shirt on the left) and his twin sisters, "3" and "4" (3 appears above, or is that 4?). His parents are apparently 1 and 2, which means that A Man Called Da-da would probably be #2. Either way, like Da-da's ex-wife, Lucy's still pissed, but has no idea why, and Franklin still can't eat with the honkies.

Damn honkies!

We Need a Littler Christmas

Da-da's currently listening to the spooky, Masonic Christmas imaginings of the Golddiggers. You can almost FEEL the beige polyester.

Stormtroopers Missing Badly

So, this has bugged Da-da ever since he was forced to watch, "Empire Strikes Back," 54 times without sound when he worked a speakerless box office at a drive-in back in '81 (ACK, ANCIENT HONKY DA-DA ALERT), but since his FIVE YEAR OLD recently picked this out during a recent viewing...

"Da-da, why are the Stormtroopers always missing?"

Da-da said something nice, of course, about them having a bad day or missing on purpose, but for lack of a better explanation: Stormtroopers suck, son. If they didn't, the plot would grind to a halt, and that right soon. Their marksmanship is horrendous, plastic suits of "armor" useless, organization terrible and in disarray, and horribly prone to cheap Jedi Mind Tricks. Bottom line: Stormtroopers need better training... and man, does their moral suick from watching so many of their brethren choked and fried by the Dark Side.

Which begs the question: why do so many people dress up as stormtroopers when they suck so bad and lose in the end? Are these people nostalgic for fascism? That's as weird as Franklin aced out by whitey. And while Da-da has you, how can any Stormtrooper tell who outranks any other Stormtrooper? They all look alike, save for Lord Vader and his black-clad nasties. Whatever. Like Hewlett-Packard employees, maybe they're telepathic clones.

Well, as The Old Man of the Sci-fi Mountain, Da-da dimly recalls another group whose aim wasn't that good -- but it was a hell of a lot better than Vader's schmoes -- so the below snap could have something to do with Stormtroopers missing badly:

And which came first: the Clones, or the Cylons? And how soon till you hear THIS at an airport near you?

("SCAN FOR IDENTIFICATION")