The American Adventure - Vol 20

1 - 31 January 99

If you want to go straight to Vol 21, you may do so now!

...

The New Year started very quietly in the Wevel-Pyatt household. We sort of did some Spring Cleaning, a little early but certainly needed as we had been maintaining an air of tidiness by stuffing all the cupboards full of stuff. That has been rectified, all the cupboards have been opened (carefully), cleaned out and restacked neatly. Now we can find things again. We also did a few other household chores.

One day, Tim was downstairs looking after the kids and mucking about on the computer. Kajsa had got out the vacuum cleaner and was giving the kitchen a quick once over. The vacuum cleaner that we got from our furniture rental people, while not Swedish in design, is a very good one. It is a barrel type, unlike the standard American stand-up type (designed circa 1940). It does, however, work a little like the stand-up types. You can connect up a cable to operate a spinning brush that is in the housing at the business end of the metal tube. Anyway, this arrangement means that you can use the vacuum cleaner on a range of surfaces (carpet and bare wooden floors, as well as on mats and stairs when you disconnect the spinning brush housing).

Tim was happily tapping away when he heard a great banging on the floor above. This usually means: "I can't be bothered shouting at you but I want you to come upstairs (and get off the bloody computer)". Tim continued tapping away, trying to finish what he was doing and there was another series of thumps, this time a little more frantic. Tim got up from what he was doing and stomped upstairs.

Kajsa had just been washing her hair. Kajsa's hair takes a while to dry. Kajsa's hair is long. If she bends over, Kajsa's hair touches the ground. A powerful vacuum cleaner such as ours is very good at sucking in light stuff like hair. A spinning brush, just like our vacuum cleaner has, is very good at reeling in the heads of people who have long hair and have bent over and let that hair get sucked towards it.

You may by now have the picture. Kajsa was lying on the floor with about 20 cm of her hair wrapped up inside the vacuum cleaner. She'd been able to turn off the machine but not get her hair out. She'd also managed to wrench her neck. She was lying on the floor in pain, feeling very silly and not particularly happy. After a while, when we had got Kajsa's hair out of the machine and put ice on her neck, we were both able to see the funny side of it. Tim was very solicitous and didn't laugh about Kajsa's misfortune for at least ten minutes. Kajsa is now a little more respectful of the vacuum cleaner's power.

Some people say that weather prediction is quite good in the US. We are not so sure about that. The two big weather events of the month were pretty badly predicted . Early in the month, they lied about a big storm which had been devastating the rest of the country but totally missed us. We got a little bit of snow and ice and then it rained hard during the wee hours so that there was nothing more exciting than wet grass when we got up in the morning. It did get very cold during the following few days, though - down to minus 13.3C. That was impressive.

Kalle went back school on the first Monday of the month. As they are getting older etc etc, the class no longer has a nap in the afternoon and it shows. Kalle has been very tired during the evenings and some of his little wobblies about the rubbish he has to eat have got worse. We are hoping that he will get into a routine eventually and things will settle down.

One of the evenings when Kalle got home, he was very keen to ring a classmate, Aby. Apparently, they had arranged between themselves that he would go over to her house. She had written down her telephone number and told Kalle to "call me sometime, big boy!". Kalle wanted to call as soon as he got home and he wanted to go over that night. Eventually, Tim was able to convince Kalle that that wasn't going to happen and he could go over later in the week instead. Once that was made clear they tried to call Aby. There was one minor problem.

Aby writes her numbers in a special way. 0s are easy. 1s and 7s are almost identical. 3s and 5s are reversed. Tim had to try about eight different combinations before he worked out the "22" at the end of the number, rather than being "55" was actually a "25". You see, Aby reverses the 5s but not the 2s. Well, he got through and Kalle spoke to Aby. After a while of listening to fascinating kindergarten small talk, Tim spoke to Aby to try to find out where she lived.

"I don't live in my real house, we're in another house and it's got lots of lights and it's green and lovely." - Ahm, what street do you live in? "It's a very nice street." - Could I talk to your mother? "She's not here".

Finally Tim spoke to Aby's nanny and sorted out the details for Kalle's visit. He'd go over on a day when Kajsa was finishing work early and could pick him up on the way home.

Kalle was over the moon. He kept jumping up and down and saying that he was "so excited". He wanted to ring Aby again no more than 10 minutes later. He called her the next day just to tell Aby how excited he was about coming to her house.

He did have one reservation. "Pappa, do you think that there will be any boy toys at Aby's house?" - Well, she'll certainly have a toyboy, I don't know about boy toys! "What?" - Don't worry about it, Kalle.

It is obvious that Kalle is very taken by this girl and equally obvious that he needs training in the "dealing with women" category. You should never, never, give away how enthusiastic you are about going over to a girl's house. Once you do that, she'll no longer put in the big effort to impress and your days are numbered. You've got to play hard to get. Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen. Of course, this is Kajsa's advice. Tim suggests plying the woman of your dreams with fine wine, roses, chocolates, attention and witty reparté (or if that doesn't work, take some valium and try to make it through a shopping excursion without whining about how mindstaggeringly boring it is to spend the whole afternoon looking at lots and lots of black shoes and dresses - note that you lose points as soon as you suggest that shopping for lingerie wouldn't be as bad).

On the following Friday we got some snow. The forecasters were forecasting about 1" accumulation but we ended up getting about three inches. Both of us went to work, admittedly Tim was a little less enthusiastic about it than Kajsa was. Normally Tim goes in with Scott and Scott drives. On this particular day, Scott had taken the day off to spend with Georgina while the kids were at school (school ended up being cancelled so the idyllic day they'd planned ended up a little less than idyllic). Anyway, as a result of Scott's plans, Tim had to fend for himself that morning on treacherous roads with snow-crazed Washington drivers. Bad weather seems to bring the worst idiots out onto the roads. Then again, perhaps they are always there and you just notice them more when the driving conditions get worse.

The first indication that Tim's drive was going to be interesting was seeing a car that had crashed on our street, about two hundred metres from the house. The driver had come round a corner, seemingly unaware of the fact that if there is snow all over the road, you tend to slide sideways if you are hooning around corners and therefore you should think about slowing down a bit. The car had ended up in a ditch with the back wheels up in the air and wasn't going anywhere in a hurry.

Tim had to take the smaller backroads into Washington because he had no passenger (the major road into Washington is HOV - all Transit Lanes - in the morning). The backroads in Great Falls are really narrow and curvy and some of them are quite steep. Tim was carefully (some might say paranoidly) making his way along one of these roads when some idiot in a big truck pulled out from a road with a stop sign. Tim said some very bad words but was fortunately able to stop in time, but only narrowly. Later it was a taxi that pulled out in front of him, just avoiding an accident. Tim also witnessed a taxi go sailing through an intersection, almost cleaning up a Volvo (at least Tim's memory is that it was a Volvo, this might have been wishful thinking). His legs were jelly like when he finally got to work.

Throughout the morning it was supposed to get warmer and the snow was supposed to turn to ice and then rain, washing away all the snow. That did not happen. Almost no work was done that morning as everyone sat and stared out the window at the increasingly heavy snow and swapped horror stories about how bad it was driving in. Eventually, when it was reported that the weather service had absolutely no idea when it would actually stop snowing, the call was given for everyone to go home.

Tim's drive home was a little better than the drive in, mostly because the major roads were open to everyone at this time. It was, however, a very slow drive. You couldn't see that well and people were being very careful.

There was one part of the drive that was quite scary. When turning off Route 7 (major road, four lanes) onto Towlston (backroad, narrow, windy, little traficked), Baldrick went into a bit of a slide. By this time, Tim had had a bit of practice with snow driving so he was able to recover traction but it was still scary enough to make his heart leap. The first thing that he saw after getting the car back under control was Hans Mosberg's car coming up Towlston towards Route 7. Tim was immensely relieved that nothing had happened, partly because it would be expensive to get Baldrick fixed but mostly because it would have been so very embarrassing to get out of the car and have the first person who came past to witness the crash be a friend. From experience, Tim knows that when you do something embarrassing, you don't want witnesses and if you must have witnesses, they need to be ones that you hopefully will never see again!

Kajsa drove to work, worked, came out, scraped three inches of snow off of Rusty and drove home. So, it snowed a bit. Big deal!

After Swedish School, the next day, Tim had put the kids down for a nap and was working on the computer. Meike had gone off to Tysons Corner to do some shopping. Tim was surprised when she came home less than fifteen minutes later. She was in tears and sobbed that she didn't know what had happened but the car in front of her stopped and she had crashed our car (Rusty) into them, she was terribly sorry, she'd never had an accident before and she would pay for it, her parents insurance would cover it, she didn't know how it could have happened ... Tim stopped her and confirmed two things, she was not hurt and the people in the other car were not hurt. Okay, we have insurance. That's what it's for.

Apparently, there had been a car in front of the car in front which braked suddenly. The conditions on the road were still not good and Meike was not able to stop in time. The car she ran into was not damaged at all. The front of Rusty had crumpled, as he designed to, but there was no major damage.

USAA, our insurers, were excellent. There was no haggling, they just took down the details when we called, booked a time to check out the car and made sure that we knew what our entitlements were. By the following Tuesday, Rusty was in the body shop (panel beaters) and we had a rental car for the time that he was out of commission. The insurance check was ready the day we picked him up. No problemo.

On the evening of Rusty's bingle, we went to the Doherty's for dinner along with the Mierisches. It was a great dinner, this time with an Asian Contagion flavour and we stayed much later than we expected to. We finally stumbled home about 2am.

Kajsa's work held a little party for the staff the following night. To say that the party was - ahhh, how to be diplomatic about this? - less than riveting, would be unkind. Not untrue but certainly unkind. We sat there for about forty five minutes and then made our getaway. Some of the people there claimed that it had livened up after we left. This is not overly surprising, it could have hardly got quieter. Part of the problem is that many of the staff are under 21 and 21 is the legal drinking age. Therefore there was no alcohol, that great social lubricant. We're pretty sure that if there was some beer, even if not everyone drank, it could have been a happening thing.

Kalle suffered a little bit of a setback in his hot relationship with Aby in the following week.

- How is Aby, Kalle? "She's not so interested in me anymore. That's a bit strange, isn't it?" - Well Kalle, that's the way girls are sometimes. "Do you think that's the way it is with Aby?" - Ah ... yep.

Strangely, given his enthusiasm the previous week, Kalle was completely non-plussed about Aby's apparent change of heart. It might have been that he was still on a Batman high. On Sunday night he saw the world premiere of the newest series of Batman - Batman Beyond. We had taped it and Kalle insisted on watching it over and over each night. He probably insisted on telling Aby about it over and over. Some girls can accept the strange fixations of the male species (football, beer, cars, etc) but it probably takes years of exposure before they come to that level of serenity.

In this particular area, Kalle has it really bad, being totally obsessed by Batman. Even some of his male classmates seem to think that his level of interest is unusual. (After all, you shouldn't be concentrating your spending power on only one range of product - you should just go out there, buy all the Batman toys and move on, buy the full set of Power Rangers, Star Wars action figures, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, Lost World dinosaurs, Bug's Life characters, Godzilla merchandise, Furbies and whatever the toy conglomerations decide that kids are going to like this year.)

On Thursday night, Tim had his wish fulfilled. The region was subjected to a real ice storm, maybe not one as impressive as the one they had in Canada last year, but one that caused a bit of havoc. During the day it had been cold and the forecast for the evening was for snow, then ice, then freezing rain and finally some normal rain to wash it all away (very like the events of earlier in the month).

What happened was that it started to snow just as the sun went down. Very shortly after than it started to ice and then then freezing rain started. We had been told about freezing rain and Kajsa has seen it in Sweden. Basically what happens is that rain starts falling in warm air and then passes through colder air on the way down. When it gets to ground level it is ready to freeze but it doesn't actually freeze until it hits something. The end effect is that everything outside gets covered in a thin film of ice. Or at least this is usually what happens.

In this storm the forecast rain never came, it stayed as freezing rain through the next morning and there was a total accumulation of about a centimeter (half inch) of ice on everything, including trees and power lines. We went outside at about 10pm to have a look and were amazed. It was beautiful, with lights glinting off everything, haloes of ice around the trees and grass that crunched underfoot. Earlier in the evening we had taken some of the ice from the holly leaves at the front door which the kids had a lot of fun with. By 10pm, the ice leaves were about a half centimetre thick. The balcony had ice on it that was also about the same thickness and icicles had formed on the railing. Eventually we got over our amazement and went to bed.

At around 4:30 the next morning we were awoken by huge cracking sounds. A slight wind had come up and branches of trees that were weighted down with ice were breaking. A few minutes later, power was cut off as somewhere a power line came down, either due to its own increased weight, or because a branch came down on it. Tim made an executive decision that he wasn't going to risk going into work. Scott made the same decision. He lives on a road on a hill and had been kept awake from about midnight to 2am by the sound of a taxi trying to get up his street. He wasn't going to bother trying to conduct a repeat performance and he was without power too. Later in the morning, when Tim was trying to call work to advise that he wasn't going in, he found that the phones were dead as well.

One amazing thing about the ice was that it was so thick. "How thick?" we hear you all ask. Well, put it this way - Kalle went ice-skating on the deck (balcony). It was truly amazing. Standby for photos.

Later in the morning, after Kajsa had gone to work (Kohls is a lot less forgiving that the Embassy), Tim took Tasha and Kalle for a walk. It was truly beautiful down near the lake. It was like a crystal wonderland (despite the large number of broken trees). Unfortunately he didn't take the camera and the photos from the evening before didn't come out that well. Hans took some and we may be able to borrow a couple to put up on the gallery page so that people know what it looked like.

Later in the day, once the phones were back up, Tim found out that the power company were advising that it might take as much as four to five more days to get the power back to everyone. He raced out to buy more firewood but was well behind the main wave of panic buyers - there was nothing left at Safeways and he wasn't willing to risk driving all over the place on what was likely to be a fruitless quest. By the time he got back home to admit abject failure, the power had been restored and the two dozen candles he bought were no longer required.

Pepco (the power company) were quite accurate in their predictions. By Tuesday, most people had their power back but there were still a few hundred people who were having to manage without lights or television.

We had a busy evening on the Saturday following the Great Ice Storm of 1999. We went to Staffan and Anna-Carin Lundegårdh's house for dinner. It was very pleasant and Kalle and Johan had a great time playing with each other. We were there a little longer than we had expected and had to race away at the end because we had planned to go and see the Cowboy Junkies at the 9:30 Club. We dropped Meike and the kids at home and raced into town (this seems to be the standard when it comes to going to the 9:30 Club). Unfortunately we had totally misjudged the popularity of the Cowboy Junkies. Most people reading this will be thinking, "Who the hell are the Cowboy Junkies?" That's what we thought that most people here would be thinking. Actually the show was a complete sell out and had been for days. We couldn't get a ticket.

Instead of just giving up and going home, we went to a cocktail club that Tim knew about, called Ozio. It was quite nice to be able to go to a nightclub together and listen to some good music. It has been a long time.

On Sunday we went to Great Falls National Park and wandered around in the mud for a while. Surprisingly, there were very few damaged trees in the park. We met another Siberian Husky and he and Tasha got to say hello. Tasha is still a very dominating dog but she got on reasonably well with this Husky, perhaps it's because she likes her own kind better than other dogs.

All was quiet in the house until the following Wednesday when Taltarni got sick. She seemed very unwell so Tim stayed home and took her to the doctor. It must have been no more than a 24 hour virus because by the next day she was as good as new. While she was sick though, she was running a fever of 40C or more and had managed to throw up everywhere.

During the next afternoon, Aby came over to visit. Apparently, the romance was back on and Kalle very happy. At the end of the visit, Aby didn't want to go home and there were lots of hugs given and received. Perhaps this will be a long-term thing!

January is tax-time in the US, at least the end of December is also the end of the financial year and January is the month that most people get their earnings statements. You have until mid April to put your return in. This has not been a worry before as Kajsa had not been working but this year we have been forced to contend with the forces of the IRS. We had absolutely no idea what we were supposed to do and, in fact, no idea where to start. We asked around and were told horror stories like that to get your tax return done professionally would cost you $800. Eventually Tim found some tame Americans at work who could give him some useful advice - "The forms are on the internet, just look up the IRS."

Tim dutifully sat down in front of the computer and did a search for "IRS". There were a bunch of pages that were found but the one that caught his eye had the title "IRS", which seemed simple enough. He followed the link and his eye was immediately caught by a second link that seemed a little incongruous. Tim followed that link too.

There is nothing that upsets an ultra right wing person more than having to pay taxes. Ergo, the IRS must be part of the vast conspiracy intent on establishing a New World Order, with Washington DC as the capital of the new World Government (note that the Capital Beltway is shaped like the skull of Satan with the CIA Headquarters in Langley forming the eye of the skull, the Washington Monument - if you count the eleven feet underground - is 666 feet tall and that the total length of the Beltway is 66.6 miles. The whole city of Washington is an immaculately designed and implemented shrine to dark forces - this information was so totally convincing that, especially given my first hand experience of the brutally efficient machine that is the Washington DC administration, I did not feel any necessity whatsoever to check any the details.) The main topic of the page, however is the vast underground city below the Denver International Airport, you guessed it, another headquarters of the vast conspiracy replete with satanistic imagery and Masonic icons. This way to the page, if you're interested.

Unfortunately, despite considerable efforts to relocate it, Tim cannot find the first page he stumbled across. More indications of the vast conspiracy at work.

Eventually Tim did find the right page. Of course, everyone knows what "IRS" stands for don't they? Infernal Revenue Service. Ha ha ha ha.

Kajsa was working on the next weekend, so it was pretty quiet. Tim spent some time updating the photo gallery while Kalle was at Johan's house and Taltarni had a little rest.

Kalle got a "polis" t-shirt from his Moster Ingela for his nameday (28 Jan). He was very proud of it and spent all of Sunday running around with the t-shirt and his Mini-Polis ball cap on, looking very official. After his rest that day he got his pocket money and it was decided that he now had enough to go and buy an airport.

Kalle gets $3 pocket money most weekends (there is the occasional, well actually quite frequent, weekend when we forget - but we are getting better). One dollar goes into his silver koala money box and that is for when he gets older. One dollar goes into his Bamse money box and that is for something in the mid term. The last dollar goes into his wallet and can be saved or spent that week, depending on what he wants to do.

What Kalle has been saving up for in the mid term is an "airport". Each week that we remember to give him his pocket money, he gets asked, what is this money for? "When I'm big." ... and this? "For my airport." As you might understand, ther has been a lot of build up to the big day when he will have enough money to make the trip to the shop and buy the airport.

On this Sunday, we brought down the money box, emptied out the contents and counted out $30. We changed the coins for notes (part of the process of learning about representative currency) and told him to put the money into his wallet, to put the wallet into his pocket and to take care of it.

Kalle was very concerned that this money holding activity might be a departure from the character that he had been maintaining all day. "Do police have wallets?" - I'm sure they do Kalle. Kalle's face reflected a sudden revelation. "Of course they have wallets," he said, "They need money so they can buy donuts!"

It is truly amazing what children pick up.

Going to buy the airport was a total disaster. Tim had no idea what this airport was supposed to look like and Kajsa had a vague recollection that there was a mat involved somehow. Kalle had been invited to a party the following weekend so we had to go to buy Patrick (the next-door neighbour's youngest) a present. Kalle, oddly enough, decided that what Patrick really needed was a Batman action figure. So it was off to Toys R Us.

Toys R Us has just about every type of toy and game that the average child could ever imagine so we thought it was the best place to look for an airport. We were so confident that they'd have something, we even thought that there would be a range of airports to choose from. No such luck. There was one, something by Matchbox, the toy car makers, but it didn't look like an airport at all. We discussed the joys of shopping with Kalle, about how you need to look around and try to find the best version of what you want for the money you have and then we set out bravely to look at other toy shops.

No-one had anything remotely resembling an airport. On top of that devastating fact, it was now getting late (we had waited until Kajsa got home from work) and the shops were shutting. So, at five minutes to six on Sunday evening, we were racing around the vast expanses of Tysons Corner Shopping Mall, asking all the toy shop staff whether they had any airports. All we got in return was blank stares "Don't even know where you'd start looking!"

A couple of days later, Tim rang around and got the same response from about ten more toy shop chains. We went back to Toys R Us and got Kalle the Matchbox airport a little over a week later (in February). The moral of this story, if at first you find something that is sort of what you are looking for, buy it because it is a real pain in the backside to track down exactly what you want, especially if you don't know exactly what it is that you want.

Kohls Sterling held their inventory on the Sunday and Monday before Australia Day. The family shoe department did well after a rather stressful start. Kajsa thought that she was going to lose her job because of the huge number of shoes that were apparently missing. Eventually, as usual, once it was all sorted out, she was complimented on having the best managed shoe department in the history of the Western World.

(Except perhaps the one in ancient Greece, where they only had the one type of shoe - a sandle - which came in "one size fits all" and keeping track of the inventory of the couple pairs of shoes that hadn't been sold that day wasn't really that hard. Today, when you have a gazillion different shoes to choose from and the sale price changes from day to day and customers just cannot be trained to put the shoes back properly - bastard customers - and the stock changes not only with the season but also as a result of monthly fashion updates, keeping a shoe department tidy is a major triumph.)

On the Monday night, Kajsa worked from late afternoon until 5am, Tuesday morning - Australia Day. Tim had the day off, of course, so they were able to have a bit of a sleep-in together. The rest of the day was spent cleaning up in preparation for the much deferred Swedish School Committee Meeting (which is, as Tim writes this bit, going on upstairs). There is a lot of raucous laughter, gibbering on in Swedish (with all due respect, of course) and coffee guzzling. Your humble correspondent just hopes that there will be a bit of cake left over for him. Of course, this is likely to be a vain hope.

This bit is written later and Tim has to admit that there was a piece of cake left for him. Though, he hastens to point out, this probably has less to do with people being thoughtful, and more to do with the Swedish habit of never taking the last piece. Tim has witnessed Swedes chopping the last meatball into halves and leaving one half, just to avoid taking the last bit. It is lucky that we have a dog that has a secondary role as a composter.

Actually, while on that topic, Tasha is quite an amazing dog as far as her culinary tastes go. She really really likes broccoli (raw or cooked), she loves oranges and mandarines and apples, she's not into mushrooms but she loves cheese. Basically, she'll finish off almost anything that doesn't get eaten by the family. Oh, and she likes meat as well.

The last Saturday was very, very busy. As usual we had Swedish School and Preschool but this time Kalle stayed at home with the Preschool crowd. The reason for this was that he was invited to Patrick's party which started at 11:30. He would have missed half of Swedish School anyway. The party included a puppet show which Kalle was very impressed with but no-one has been able to establish exactly what the show was about.

In the afternoon we all headed off to Helena and Tor-Björn's place for their two-year-old, Sigrid's party. It was very much a girl's party with lots of pink and a Barbie motif (actually Taltarni was the real invitee and the rest of us just sort of came along). We were going to try to fit in a trip to Border's Bookstore to see Winnie the Pooh as well, but the kids were exhausted as it was and so we just went home instead.

In the evening we went to the Embassy Australia Day Party. We took Hans and Petra as our guests and Max and Hannah (this is the correct spelling - please ignore all other variations) stayed at our house and were looked after by Meike. It was quite a good party with a few wholesalers turning up to showcase their Australian wines, a two up session, delicious Aussie meat pies (some cooked by a South African) and groovy Australian music in the background (supplied by Tim and Scott for the most part). There was also a raffle in which Tim won a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. All up a very successful evening.

When we got home we were confronted by a very tired Meike. The kids had refused to go to bed and, as it was now about 10:30, they were totally exhausted. They had certainly worn Meike down!

Part of the reason we came home so early (apart from knowing that the kids were playing up) was that Kajsa was working very odd hours that weekend. On the Sunday she had to start at 5am, work through to about 10am. She then had to do another shift from 10pm until 5am. Luckily the first session was a little shorter than expected and Kajsa came home at about 8, at which time she collapsed into bed. Kalle's bed to be precise. Kalle had got up early and was downstairs watching violent cartoons when Kajsa got home. A little later, Kajsa came and collapsed into our bed, forcing Tim to get up.

Kalle had some more company through most of the day, Johan came over. They had a great time, watching Batman and Scooby Doo after which Kajsa woke up and took them out to one of the local playgrounds.

As the month ended (with a second full moon - an event that apparently only happens once every 28 years or, as they say meterologically, "once in a blue moon"), Kajsa was at work yet again while the rest of us were snug and warm in our beds.

There has been the occasional mention in these pages about the local weather. For the second half of the month it was very uneventful, at least in contrast to the snow and ice "events" in the first half. Some would think that maybe winter is over and that spring is just around the corner. Fools.

These people obviously haven't been reading the "Weekly World News", the only paper around here with any credibility. The "Weekly World News" doesn't waste its time reprinting drivel about immaterial Presidental shennanigans or impeachments. Oh, no.

On their special devoted to the weather (January 19, 1999), the "Weekly World News" reported that the "WORLD'S WEATHER IS OUT OF CONTROL!" and "FEBRUARY & MARCH WILL BE AN ICY HELL, SAY EXPERTS!", not to mention "KILLER TORNADOES!", "MASSIVE STORMS!" and "DEADLY FLOODS!"

Some people would say that these are suspiciously like the headlines that you would read in a supermarket tabloid. Not so. The "Weekly World News", although admittedly purchased at Safeways, comes in a format that is a little smaller than a tabloid.

Apart from the weather, the "Weekly World News" reports on many issues that the wimpy liberal press wouldn't cover, like, for instance, the location of Biblical Hell (which is on Jupiter's moon, Io, according to a 12 member panel of theological experts), how to tell if your wife is cheating on you with a gigolo (watch out for the missus saying - "Oh god I'm as horny as a rhino and soooooo looking forward to my visit by the 'physical trainer'.") and advice handed out by America's sexiest psychic (Dear Selena, Midgets follow me everywhere I go, what can I do?).

But these articles, although impressive, are not really indicative of the true greatness of the "Weekly World News". The article which convinced me that they really know what is going on was titled "MAN'S HAIR POSSESSED!" and began "A new wave of demonic possessions have left religious experts baffled and amazed, because it is not the vicitim's souls that are taken over - it's their hair!"

There are two photographs of victims (both are having seriously bad hair days) which are irrefutable proof of the phenomenon. Not even Scully could give a valid scientific explanation (except perhaps "Mulder, these people haven't seen a comb for months and are certifiably insane", you know, something weak like that). You don't have to take my word for it, rush out now and buy "The Devil's Deeds" written by Dr Marylou Wittengern, a doctor of something or other who appears to have been severely beaten by the ugly stick, either that or her hair, her face and quite possibly her glasses have been possessed.