After years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the UNIX programmers and Client/Server programmers and website developers, Jack was finally getting some respect. He’d become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. He was working short-term assignments for prestige companies, traveling all over the world on different assignments. He was working 70 and 80 and even 90 hour weeks, but it was worth it.

Several years of this relentless, mind-numbing work had taken its toll on Jack. He had problems sleeping and began having anxiety dreams about the Year 2000. It had reached a point where even the thought of the year 2000 made him nearly violent. He must have suffered some sort of breakdown, because all he could think about was how he could avoid the year 2000 and all that came with it.

Jack decided to contact a company that specialized in cryogenics. He made a deal to have himself frozen until March 15th, 2000. This was very expensive process and totally automated. He was thrilled. The next thing he would know is he’d wake up in the year 2000; after the New Year celebrations and computer debacles; after the leap day. Nothing else to worry about except getting on with his life.

He was put into his cryogenic receptacle, the technicians set the revive date, he was given injections to slow his heartbeat to a bare minimum, and that was that. The next thing that Jack saw was an enormous and very modern room filled with excited people. They were all shouting “I can’t believe it!” and “It’s a miracle” and “He’s alive!”. There were cameras (unlike any he’d ever seen) and equipment that looked like it came out of a science fiction movie. Someone who was obviously a spokesperson for the group stepped forward. Jack couldn’t contain his enthusiasm.

“It is over?” he asked. “Is 2000 already here? Are all the millennial parties and promotions and crises all over and done with?”

The spokesman explained that there had been a problem with the programming of the timer on Jack’s cryogenic receptacle, it hadn’t been year 2000 compliant. It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. But the spokesman told Jack that he shouldn’t get excited; someone important wanted to speak to him.

Suddenly a wall-sized projection screen displayed the image of a man that looked very much like Bill Gates. This man was Prime Minister of Earth. He told Jack not to be upset. That this was a wonderful time to be alive. That there was world peace and no more starvation. That the space program had been reinstated and there were colonies on the moon and on Mars. That technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet, or to watch any entertainment, or to hear any music recorded anywhere.

“That sounds terrific,” said Jack. “But I’m curious. Why is everybody so interested in me?”

“Well,” said the Prime Minister. “The year 10000 is just around the corner, and it says in your files that you know COBOL.”

Please check out his personal website at www.douglasadams.com

Biography

Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge in March 1952, educated at Brentwood School, Essex and St John’s College, Cambridge where, in 1974 he gained a BA (and later an MA) in English literature.He was creator of all the various manifestations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which started life as a BBC Radio 4 series. Since its first airing in March 1978 it has been transformed into a series of best-selling novels, a TV series, a record album, a computer game and several stage adaptations.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘s phenomenal success sent the book straight to Number One in the UK Bestseller List and in 1984 Douglas Adams became the youngest author to be awarded a Golden Pan. He won a further two (a rare feat), and was nominated – though not selected – for the first Best of Young British Novelists awards.

He followed this success with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980); Life, The Universe and Everything (1982); So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984); and Mostly Harmless (1992). The first two books in the Hitchhiker series were adapted into a 6 part television series, which was an immediate success when first aired in 1982. Other publications include Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul (1988). In 1984 Douglas teamed up with John Lloyd and wrote The Meaning of Liff and after a huge success The Deeper Meaning of Liff followed this in 1990). One of Douglas’s all-time personal favourites was written in 1990 when he teamed up with zoologist Mark Carwardine and wrote Last Chance to See – an account of a world-wide search for rare and endangered species of animals.

He sold over 15 million books in the UK, the US and Australia and was also a best seller in German, Swedish and many other languages.

Douglas was a founding director of h2g2, formerly The Digital Village, a digital media and Internet company with which he created the 1998 CD-ROM Starship Titanic, a Codie Award-winning (1999) and BAFTA-nominated (1998) adventure game.

Douglas died unexpectedly in May 2001 of a sudden heart attack. He was 49. He had been living in Santa Barbara, California with his wife and daughter, and at the time of his death he was working on the screenplay for a feature film version of Hitchhiker.

	The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy One Thursday lunchtime the Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and the galaxy is a very strange and startling place. hhgg1
	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons is a curious time to have a cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his curious comrades in arms as they hurtle through space powered by pure improbability – and desperately in search of a place to eat. hhgg2
	Life, The Universe and Everything The unhappy inhabitants of the planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky above their heads – so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals stand between the killer robots of Krikkit and their goals of annihilation… hhgg3
	So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish Left at the end of LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING with the address for God’s Final Message To His Creation, Arthur Dent let this crucial information slip his mind. hhgg4
	Young Zaphod Plays it Safe A quirky chapter which doesn’t really belong in the other books. However, it is included in this list for the sake of completion. hhgg5
	Mostly Harmless It’s easy to become disheartened when your planet has been demolished for an unnecessary hyperspacial express route, the woman you love has vanished in a misunderstanding about the nature of space/time, the spaceship in which you are travelling crashed in flames on a remote and Bob-fearing planet, and all you have to fall back on are a few sandwich-making skills. hhgg6

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;
but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice;
yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet,
and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
and the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
but though we say mother, we never say methren.

Then the masculine pronouns are he, his, and him,
but imagine the feminine as being she, shis, and shim.

Some other reasons to be grateful if you grew up speaking English:

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into! the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
22) I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.

*************

Screwy pronunciations can mess up your mind! For example…If you have a rough cough, climbing can be tough when going through the bough on a tree!

Let’s face it – English is a crazy language.

There is no egg in eggplant or ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.

English muffins weren’t invented in England.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce, and hammers don’t ham?

Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends, but cannot make one amend?

If you have a bunch of odds and ends, and get rid of all! but one of them, what do you call it — one odd and one end?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?

If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

Where else would you park your car on a driveway and drive your car on a parkway?

C
You shoot yourself in the foot.

C++
You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can’t tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying “That’s me, over there.”

FORTRAN
You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.

Modula-2
After realizing that you can’t actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.

COBOL
USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.

Lisp
You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds…

BASIC
Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

Forth
Foot yourself in the shoot.

APL
You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.

Pascal
The compiler won’t let you shoot yourself in the foot.

Snobol
If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.

HyperTalk
Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.

Prolog
You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn’t allow it to explain.

370 JCL
You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.

FORTRAN-77
You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can’t do exception-processing.

Modula-2 (alternative)
You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.

BASIC (compiled)
You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.

Visual Basic
You’ll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you’ll have so much fun doing it that you won’t care.

Forth (alternative)
BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming – where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)

APL (alternative)
You hear a gunshot and there’s a hole in your foot, but you don’t remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened.
or
@#&^$%&%^ foot

Pascal (alternative)
Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.

Snobol (alternative)
You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet.
The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).

Prolog (alternative)
You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.

COMAL
You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand.
or
draw_pistol
aim_at_foot(left)
pull_trigger
hop(swearing)

Scheme
As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.

Algol
You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.

Ada
If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, “Shoot at the feet.”
or
The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette.
or
After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type.
or
After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.

Eiffel

You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way.
Smalltalk
You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal.
or
You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole.
Object Oriented Pascal
You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.

PL/I
You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot.
Postscript
foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you’re long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.

PERL
You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife.
or
You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don’t feel.
Assembly Language
You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.
or
You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.

BCPL
You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg — you can’t get any finer resolution than that.
Concurrent Euclid
You shoot yourself in somebody else’s foot.

Motif
You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.

Powerbuilder
While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.

Standard ML
By the time you get your code to typecheck, you’re using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.

MUMPS
You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building — with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.

Java
You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.

Unix
You shoot yourself in the foot
or
% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%

370 JCL (alternative)
You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.

DOS JCL
You first find the building you’re in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.

VMS

$ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE=”BYE” BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/
LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT

%DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can’t remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.

Apple System 7
Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects.
Click “shoot” button and a small bomb appears with note “Error of Type 1 has occurred.”

Windows 3.1
Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click “shoot” button and a small box appears with note “Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct.”

Windows 95
Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don’t have enough memory.

CP/M
I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.

DOS
You finally found the gun, but can’t locate the file with the foot for the life of you.

MSDOS
You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.

Access
You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.

Paradox
Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.

dBase
You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you’ve forgotten why you shot yourself anyway.
or
You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.

DBase IV, V1.0
You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.

SQL
You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg.
or
Insert into Foot
Select Bullet
>From Gun.Hand
Where Chamber = ‘LOADED’
And Trigger = ‘PULLED’

Clipper
You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_.
Oracle
The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can’t do foot shooting in SQL.

English
You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don’t know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You’ll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.

FlagShip
Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can’t work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn’t work anymore.

FidoNet
You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.

PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can’t shoot yourself in the foot because you’re not a host.
or (host variation)
Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.

Internet
You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.

troff
rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in
4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*

Genetic Algorithms
You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.

CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn’t your foot.

MS-SQL Server
MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn’t enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun’s trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot.
In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.

Sybase
Sybase’s gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn’t told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named “Indy” to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you’ve probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who’s read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot.
If you’re lucky, he’ll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.

Magic software
You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can’t use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot.
After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn’t know whether the initial state is “0″, 0, NULL, “ZERO”, 0.0, 0,0, “0.0″, or “0,00″. You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.

If General George Patton were alive and President of the USA today, this would probably be his Fireside Speech:

My fellow Americans:

As you all know, the defeat of Iraq’s regime has been completed. Since congress does not want to spend any more money on this war, our mission in Iraq is complete. This morning I gave the order for a complete removal of all American forces from Iraq. This action will be complete within 30 days.

It is now time to begin the reckoning.

Before me, I have two lists. One list contains the names of the countries that stood by our side during the Iraq conflict. This list is short. The United Kingdom, Spain, Bulgaria, Australia, Norway and Poland are some of the countries listed there.

The other list contains everyone not on the first list. Most of the world’s nations are on that list. My press secretary will be distributing copies of both lists later this evening.

Let me start by saying that effective immediately, foreign aid to those nations on List 2 ceases immediately and indefinitely. The money saved during the first year alone will pretty much pay for the costs of the Iraqi war.

The American people are no longer going to pour money into third world hell holes and watch those government leaders grow fat on corruption. Need help with a famine? Wrestling with an epidemic? Call on France who, by the way, best be taking care of the tens of thousands of American military grave sites over there…from WWI and the great WWII.

In the future, together with Congress, I will work to cut taxes and solve some local problems. On that note, a word to terrorist organizations: Screw with us and we will hunt you down and eliminate you and all your friends from the face of the earth, so help me God.

Thirsting for a gutsy country to terrorize? Try France, or maybe China.

To Israel and the Palestinian Authority: You boys work out a peace deal now. Just note that Camp David is closed. Maybe all of you can go to Russia for negotiations. They have some great palaces there. Big tables, too.

I’m ordering the immediate severing of diplomatic relations with France, Germany, and Russia. Thanks for all your help, comrades. We are retiring from NATO as well. Bon chance, mes amis.

I have instructed the Mayor of New York City to begin towing the many UN diplomatic vehicles located in Manhattan with more than two unpaid tickets to sites where those vehicles will be stripped, shredded and crushed. I don’t give a damn about whatever treaty pertains to this. Pay your tickets tomorrow or watch your precious Benzes, Beamers, and limos be turned over to some of the finest chop shops in the world. God, but I love New York.

That puts me wondering about the UN.

A special note to our neighbors to the north. Canada is on List 2. Since we are going to be seeing a lot more of each other, you folks might want to try not pissing us off for a change.

Mexico is also on List 2. President Fox and his entire corrupt government really need an attitude adjustment. I’ll have a couple extra tank and infantry divisions sitting around real soon. Guess where I’m gonna put ‘em? Yep, border security…north and south. So start doing something smart with your oil.

It is time for America to focus on its own welfare… and its own citizens. Some will accuse us of isolationism. I answer them by saying damn right.

Nearly a century of trying to help folks live a decent life around the world has only earned us the undying enmity of just about everyone on the planet.

It is time to cut taxes here because we will not be spending tons of our hard-earned cash on other people’s problems.

I’m re-examining the need for so many of our servicemen and women to be stationed abroad. For over fifty years we’ve had a force of nearly forty thousand Americans protecting South Korea’s border. In two months our Korean forces will be returning home. It’s about high time the Koreans learn to get along.

So, to the nations on List 1, a final thought: Thanks, we owe you one.

To the nations on List 2, a final thought: Drop dead.

Thank you, good night and God bless America.

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