Abraham Lincoln: The Man, The Myth... The Manmyth

Before I Begin Today's Update!

There has been an important issue resting on the back of my mind for the past three, maybe four hours now, and I fear that if I don't share this important piece of information with you then my head will undoubtedly explode and begin showering my computer room with various chunky pieces of my internal organs like a really cool volcano spewing out salsa. My cats' number one hobby these days is throwing up. That's all they ever do; wake up, meow nonstop, throw up, go back to sleep. Since I never see them actually consuming food, I can only assume they obtain all their nutrition via osmosis, but that's to be expected when your cat is loaded full of retarded alien DNA (particular their butt region). A few hours ago, I was sitting here minding my own business, pondering if Harry "The World's Fattest Ewok" Knowles could consume Rob "Cummin' Dr. Taco" Malda in one sitting, when suddenly I began to hear the sounds that no cat owner EVER wants to hear:

"GOOOP. GOOOOP. GOOOP. GOOOOOOOOP."

If you don't own a cat and cannot determine what this poorly reproduced sound effect heralds, then just hang with me here for a second. When either of my cats, Stupid or Cat, is sitting next to me and begins pumping out such lovely noises from the area in their body which is responsible for producing every single grotesque abomination that could possibly spew out of any orifice, I know something bad is on the horizon. The "GOOP. GOOOOOP. GOOOOOOOP." sounds serve as an early-warning notice to prepare me for the incoming pukestorm which will strike roughly 30 seconds later. I rushed around my office, desperate to find something useless that the cat could vomit upon. Unfortunately, my office is full of stupid crap like "computers" and "hard drives," none of which are perfect receptacles for cat vomit. With two seconds left before Project: CAT PUKE began, I discovered a Lee's Summit Yellow Pages phone book and slid it right underneath Stupid's awaiting mouth. It landed there just in the nick of time, and he barfed up a brown log of God knows what right below the phone number for the Missouri State of Revenue Department.

The seemingly innocent phone book... why don't we take a little peek inside!	OH BOY!!! CAT PUKE!!!

Now you may be thinking, "oh no, your phone book has been ruined!" at this point. Oh how wrong you are! This precious gift of cat vomit has made the phone book EVEN BETTER! Before I had just a boring, bland, run-of-the-mill phone book. Now I have THE DREADED BOOK OF DECEPTION! Imagine the look on your face if you opened up a seemingly normal phone book so you could find the phone number of the guy who's going to sell you those bootleg Herb Alpert tickets, and then BAM - you're face-to-face with a bloated, doughy wad of revolting cat puke! You thought you were going to use this phone book to find a phone number but, hey buddy, you were DECEIVED! The Phone Book of Deception strikes again! Muuaahahaha! Stay tuned for future adventures from the Phone Book of DECEPTION as I unveil it to my unfortunate neighbors!

Abraham Lincoln: The Man, The Myth... The Manmyth

A clay mask of Abraham Lincoln. It didn't really look very realistic until I drew in the eyes, so you can thank me for recreating a little touch of history, gents.

Throughout history, America has always been known as one of the most popular countries favored by US presidents. From President Taft's tendency to fall asleep during important meetings and Knicks games, to Jimmy Carter's valiant fight against an aqueous rabbit hellbent on the destruction of the White House, American history is just chock full of tightly-crammed US presidents like one of those new five-pound Nestle candy bars made from caramel, fudge, nougat, chocolate, peanut butter, pork, and unrefined heroin. Americans display an inherent pride for their presidents, a sort of reverence and devotion usually reserved for characters like Jesus Christ and that chick who tried to fly her plane around the world but got lost and died somewhere inside the Bermuda Triangle where her corpse is currently being used to house the insidious Mermen queen's eggs in the Lost City of Atlantis.

Unfortunately, in our push to promote past Presidents to powerful positions of prestige, historians tend to let a few colorful myths and misconceptions slip in along with the facts. Abraham Lincoln, one of America's most revered and important figures in its history, has lately been getting an awful lot of credit for things he didn't say, or so says CNN.com:

Historians expose quotes wrongly attributed to Lincoln - Remarks attributed to the quotable 16th president have popped up in everything from television commercials to speeches by famous generals, presidents and even recent anti-war protesters. Too often, they are phrases that Lincoln never uttered, experts at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency say. "It's simply Lincoln's own status as a cultural exemplar that make these spurious quotations seem credible," said Rodney Davis, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg.

I wish I was the co-director of the Lincoln Studies at some place called "Knox College." Then, when people ask me what I do, I'd reply, "I go the school of Knox... hard 'Knox'!" and the person I'm speaking to would be so overwhelmed by my clever pun that their entire body would implode in a gaseous detonation of compressed wit. Additionally, "Lincoln Studies" sounds like the easiest subject in the world to master. You go into work every day, read a book about Abraham Lincoln and maybe play a few games of Abraham Lincoln Land, and then you come home to take all your aggression out by punching your wife in the face and claiming to friends that she fell down those pesky stairs once again. Nuclear physicists have to know all kinds of crazy shit like math, chemistry, and physics. Abraham Lincolnists have to know what size of comical stovetop hat he wore and if his right arm was a cybernetic implant which could shoot fire bombs (it wasn't). Occasionally you'd have to deal with the wise ass punk kid who sneaks into your office / bathroom and starts spouting vile anti-Lincoln rhetoric, but that's what aluminum baseball bats and handguns were created to do.

Before I begin to address the many misconceptions some of the more dopey dullards in society have formed of Abraham Lincoln, I'd like to provide a little historical overview detailing this energetic President's life. Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 in a log cabin outside of Hardin County, Kentucky. Everybody built cabins out of logs in those days because logs were the only things that could be produced from splitting trees in half. Early pioneers attempted to produce bricks and titanium by cutting trees with a special magical axe blessed by a crazed bearded man who sang songs and skipped through the woods without a care, but all attempts resulted in the production of even more logs. There were so many logs in those days that a special government army had to be created to fend off the advance of incoming enemy logs which threatened to destroy the White House, which was in those days made out of even more logs (only they were white). Frontier towns had special sentries trained in spotting rogue logs trying to enter their city and spread pro-log propaganda, and these individuals were almost as popular as the town whore who could perform ventriloquism acts by only using her vagina. Abe's grandfather was killed by Native Americans in 1786, but Lincoln got his revenge by leading a country which would successfully wipe out all Native Americans in the next 200 years by giving them infected foam trucker hats and slot machines which spewed out clouds of AIDS every time somebody hit a jackpot. Due to his grandfather's untimely murder by an irate Indian, Lincoln's dad grew up to be a stupid retard because he lacked a father figure to tell him things like "go to school" and "stop doing that or else you'll grow hair on your palm." That's why he ended up hanging around in the woods all day and ultimately building a log cabin made from logs.

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: Lincoln had to manually push his jaw up to prevent it from falling off his face and getting it kicked around the floor like a hockey puck.

Lincoln's family moved to Indiana in 1816 because there was better land in that state as opposed to the land in Kentucky, which was (and still is) composed of soil that makes your IQ drop by 60 points and stimulates the nerves in your brain which make the idea of playing the jug on your front porch appeal to you. Indiana also had a significantly smaller amount of slaves than Kentucky and this appealed to Lincoln's family because they were Baptists and believed the only slaves in the world should be slaves to Jesus Christ. This land was a hostile, foreboding territory back in the 1800s, full of wild bears, wild Native Americans, wild horses, wild berries, and wild koopas, so growing up was not easy for the spindly Lincoln. His lack of a formal education prohibited him from discovering what the word "spindly" meant, and Lincoln was forced to learn everything from passing traders who were traveling from Massachusetts to Rhode Island or Prussia. By the age of eight, Lincoln knew how much an adult bear pelt would fetch on the black market. By the age of ten, Lincoln could strip and reassemble an entire ox cart in under 20 minutes, thus leading to a brief life of crime when Lincoln lurked in the shadows, stealing wooden hubcaps from passing ox carts, writing "TYPE R" across the bottom, and selling them to Asian immigrants with an extremely high markup. Lincoln quit this aforementioned life of crime after he realized he was unable to spell and every time he tried to spell out "TYPE R," he would end up scrawling the only phrase he knew, "BEAR ATTACK - PLEASE SEND HELP" in broken English.

His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died in 1818 after failing to successfully live. His father marked this occasion by marrying a living person the next year. Abraham then took a flatboat trip to New Orleans a decade later. At first it may seem like these three events are completely unrelated, but upon further inspection, I have noticed that they are all written on the same website. Coincidence? I think not! Lincoln served briefly in the Black Hawk War of 1832, the battle in which the Native Americans used arrows to shoot down a wooden Black Hawk helicopter that was transporting a troop of armed logs to the front lines. After retiring from the military, Lincoln ran for the Illinois legislature in 1832 and lost to James Semple, a man who later went on to legalize beans and bendy drinking straws. Two years later, ol Abe was elected as a Whig to the lower house for four consecutive terms. Let me tell you, there was nothing more prestigious in those days than being a lower house Whig! His pro-Whig campaign platform was composed of the following promises:

1) If we build more roads, then it will be easier to move supplies to those idiots who live out in the middle of nowhere. Additionally, these same roads will make it even easier to flee when the idiots living there realize we didn't bring them any of the supplies they actually requested, and we instead dumped off a few hundred pounds of cranky logs who want to make out with their daughters.
2) If we build better streams and rivers, then the outrageously successful log industry will be able to take advantage of faster rush hour log traffic and this new company named "Stuckeys" can start building their restaurants all around the area.
3) If we build a road on top of a stream, then we'll have something which our scientists call "a bridge" and this will allow us to drive our ox-carts over the water without having to force the oxen to take nine credit hours of CPR, swimming, and first aid courses.

Ol Abe kicks a little ass inside the pokey. Image courtesy of Brandon Bird.

Advised by Whig Legislator John Todd Stuart, Lincoln discovered the fast paced, exciting world of the legal industry in 1836. In his first case, he successfully defended "Scuzzy" Benjamin Darthauer from the accusations of Marybelle Clearentine, who mistakenly believed Scuzzy broke into her home and stole all the pies cooling on her windowsill. Lincoln used his inherent skills of legal battle to explain that Scuzzy could've never stolen her pies, as he was trying to trick Native Americans into drinking a bottle of liquid lead at the time of the crime. Lincoln also proved that the real culprit was an evil oak log which had rolled into town to steal the virginity of children everywhere and rip off as many pies as possible. This log was eventually caught and sentenced to death by a relative of John Walsh. Lincoln eventually married Mary Todd, some broad with more "genteel" origins than his. The following message is for all you ladies out there: when looking to marry the tall bearded guy who lives in the woods, hits trees with axes, fights off grizzly bears, and then returns home to work on important court cases, be careful that your origins are not more "genteel" than his, whatever the hell that may mean. Wild Frontier log lawyers are very sensitive about their level of raw genteelness. Lincoln's lack of genteelistity caused him to grow very depressed and eventually help give birth to four sons, each of which was more shockingly genteel than the previous.

In February 1860, Lincoln decided that the only thing in life that could lift him from his genteel-inspired depression would be declaring his run for presidency. Unfortunately, William H. Seward was the leading Republican candidate at the time, and Lincoln had to follow the strict party rules to overthrow him for the official nomination. Seward had a few qualities that were deemed "undesirable" in a few of the critical states Republicans needed votes, such as Pennsylvania (he once murdered a blind school teacher there), Indiana (he was on record as saying the state of Indiana was "a faggot state full of pantaloon-wearing queer sissyboys"), Illinois (made many public speeches claiming there was "absolutely nothing whatsoever anywhere" in this state), and New Jersey (offered to sell this state back to the British for $500 and a box of sheep skins). Lincoln eventually beat Seward and was elected President, but at the time of his inauguration on March 1861, seven states had already seceded from the Union and others were threatening to leave if they weren't given better contracts with signing bonuses and a guaranteed 10-year extension. The Civil War soon kicked into high gear and Lincoln had to depend on General Ulysses S. Grant to take command. Grant did so and soon they won the Civil War in a very intelligent and remarkable way which I'm not going to even bother writing about because I don't care and frankly, neither should you.

During the battle, Lincoln was known to use his magic mutant powers to cancel out the writ of habeas corpus, thus allowing him the freedom to imprison over 13,000 people for no concrete reason whatsoever. This was the first instance of the Patriot Act being used in history. Many scholars believe Lincoln was drunk on power at that point, causing him to abolish slavery and allow minorities the opportunity to join the armed forces and get shot at by enemy minorities. These policies outraged many people including noted dummy John Wilkes Booth, who assessed the situation and came to the conclusion that the only reasonable action he could take revolved around placing a bullet inside Lincoln's head, even if Mr. Lincoln didn't really want one placed there at the time. He did this on April 14th of 1865 when Lincoln attended the play "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater. Scientists have been spending the last three decades creating a machine that will bring Lincoln back to life so he may be asked important questions such as "how was the play?" and "would you like to see the play on DVD now?"

As you can see, I have simply run out of room here. Stay tuned for my update next week when I dispel the most popular myths and misconceptions about America's greatest president! As ol' Honest Abe would say: "keep on rollin'!" He was naturally referring to the logs, warning them to pass on by his town and continue their crime wave elsewhere.

Old school Dream Theater kicks ass!

Ryan "OMGWTFBBQ" Adams keeping it real. Real short. Again. I'm up late cause my net access went out, and I've been watching a bootleg KISS concert until the line came back up. And here I am!

When you fly, do you ever look out the window and stare at the clouds and terrain below? If so, good for you. You took up one of those God awful small seats which means one less spot they can stick my apparently abnormal 6'3" body. Oh, and the goons did some photoshopping for you.Candy is dandy but wine in a box is horrible.

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)