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When Brian Emmet’s boyhood dream of blasting off into outer space became a reality, he couldn’t imagine what could bring him down. The answer? Uncle Sam. Although Sam has been known in the past to be a generous lover, he’s showing Mr. Emmet no such generosity. In 2005, Oracle ran a sweepstakes offering a trip to the stars for anyone who could answer a series of questions regarding Java code. Emmet won, becoming a celebrity with interviews and trade shows to boot, but once reality hit, Emmet realized that he would not be able to pay taxes on the $138,000 adventure.

Next week the Indianapolis Colts will face off against the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI, and I couldn’t be more disappointed.

It’s not the match up that’s disappointing but what’s going to transpire during the television timeouts. You know what I’m talking about: Super Bowl commercials. The same mind-numbing, soul-destroying garbage flashing on our screens but with new packaging. It’s the same numb feeling you get watching Dane Cook gesticulating his way into a caricature of himself.

There are many things one could say about the State of the Union address last night. One, it was long and painfully so. Two, it was so boring that John McCain fell asleep. Three, it was essentially useless. You may be sitting there thinking, “You successfully summed up every State of the Union in the history of the United States!” and you would, in fact, be right. Regardless, it is the duty of this faithful Slantmouthian to bring you the highlights.

Michael Devlin, an oafish Missouri pizza manager, is accused of kidnapping two children. While one boy, 13-year-old Ben Ownby, was held for less than a week, the other, Shawn Hornbeck, had been missing for four years. How a 6’4”, 300 lb. man was able to hide a young boy for so long is still a mystery, though authorities suspect he may have smuggled Shawn in between sector four and five of his gut.

Devlin made himself available for interviews from the Franklin County jail, but would not discuss his pending court case. With our need to dig deeper into this developing story, Slantmouth was on the scene.

With all of these reports of global warming, you’d think people would stop complaining about how cold it is, but alas, winter has finally arrived for a large portion of the United States, and a bulk of the Midwest is hurting badly. As though in some sort of slight directed at the President himself, Mother Nature in all of her wonder even smacked around Texas last week.

Steven Hawking, the wheeled prophet, has once again come forward to foretell humanities end, but this time he has brought some friends. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), a Chicago-based organization to which Hawking belongs, is backing up his latest claim of doom.

At a conference organized by BAS, Hawking announced that the organization would be moving their “Doomsday Clock” forward by two minutes, indicating scientist’s growing concern over the rise of new nuclear powers and the increasing effects of global warming. The current time now on the clock is five minutes to midnight. Midnight signifies the end of human civilization, as well as when Girls Gone Wild commercials go into heavy rotation.

Let’s face it: things have been pretty heavy lately. The President, muttering through an evening address to send more to Iraq, Israel threatening to nuke Iran’s nukes, and the big Dick Cheney dismissing the notion of a “war committee.” Yeah. It’s been heavy. Scary. Tyrannical, even. I have shouted, I have cursed, I have cried, I even wet myself a little. But this week, here at Slantmouth, we’re doing a good, old-fashioned news round up about everything except the war, government and politics. Hell, the rest of the news media seems to be trying to distract you from it, why shouldn’t we?

Terrorists have struck at America again. Surprisingly, it seems a new player has burst onto the crowded America-hating scene, and this time it is not predominantly a bunch of brownies, lightly sprinkled with sugar.

The Greek Marxist group Revolutionary Struggle, which sounds suspiciously like a Kentucky Derby participant, fired a rocket-propelled anti-tank grenade into the side of a U.S. embassy building in Athens. The group first emerged in 2003 with the bombing of an Athens courthouse, which presumably was a preemptive attack against their future captors and sodomy enablers.

Today, Democrats lived up to one of their “100-hour” promises by raising minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25. Many Republicans derided the increase, including Charles E. Grassley (R- Iowa) who said, “Much of the popular support for the minimum wage is based on the fallacy that the government can help the poor without hurting anyone,” and with spittle flying from his lips, continued, “But, if the government can increase wages with no ill effects, why stop at $7.25 an hour? Why not $10 or $20? Why not give these poor bastards bars of gold to build their houses, and $100 bills to wipe themselves?” Mr. Grassley then fell to the ground in tears, and writhed around in something closely resembling a temper tantrum.

With the recently elected Democratic Congressional majority being sworn in, the war in Iraq has immediately become a pressing issue, because of an impending White House proposal for more war spending. President Bush is currently formulating a new course of action that should greatly affect the 20 X 20 square foot area that makes up the green zone, aptly named due to the green light it gives insurgents to attack U.S. soldiers.

It seems clear that this new direction will be very similar to the old direction, only with more troops. In a rousing game of StarCraft, Bush found that throwing more bodies at a problem occasionally worked well. What some may consider a computer game, others consider a highly realistic warfare simulator. With aliens.

A new exhibition in Oslo is stirring controversy for its portrayal of various animals being homosexual. As odd as this sounds, apparently there are a lot of animals that are gay. It is behavior found in mammals and birds worldwide, and the question is: is this normal? Coming from a scientific standpoint, no. Normal means that a majority of animals would have to be “batting for the Yankees,” when in fact, the true percentages hover somewhere around 10%, which is just a little more than human percentages. And frankly, when it comes to humans, you are a little prone to lying, so we’ll assume 10% is relatively universal.

Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson has predicted that after September of 2007 the United States should expect a major terrorist attack resulting in “mass killing”. Though Robertson has no links to any intelligence agency, he seemed rather sure of his information, most likely because his source was God.

Using our own highly placed sources, though regrettably not quite as high, Slantmouth was able to have a brief sit down with Robertson to discuss his prediction.

Wow. Today, Slantmouth is officially one year old. Our baby learned to walk, talk, and probably poop this year. We want to thank all of our dear, loyal readers, and in celebration of this momentous occasion, we bring you the First Annual Slanty Awards for Excellence in News Making! The committee was determined based on height, weight, social status, and smell. Taking a grueling twenty-three minutes to decide, our committee finally emerged victorious, having chosen the most important people of the year. These awards go to 2006’s top news figures, in no particular order of importance.

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