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In This Issue

• The New Spec Editorial Page
• A Sojourn to M’Ville
• Fear and Loathing with Jim Henson
• I Can Be Homeless Too, Mommy
• Letters to the Feditor
• She Says, “To-MAH-to,” He Says, “Bll-RR-gh.”
• The Hobo Lottery
• Fractal Tetris
• News on the Party Front(al Nudity)
• Everything is Love and Theft
• Loving the Mailer-Daemon
• Community Time
• “They” Continue to Keep Natural Cures From You
• Fed Bash - NOT! LOLOLomg
• Plagiarismo in Two Lines with Things Like That
• Senator Kennedy Surprises Attendants of "Ted Bash"
• A Letter from Our Sudoku Editor
• Hinden-Fed
• South-by-Southwest Tour Diary
• THEY Watch
• Staff of 21.7

Jesus wept.  

    Let me tell you how I start each day.  I haul myself out of bed using the rails my nephew installed right after Marge died.  I stumble over to my rolltop desk and fish out my glaucoma meds.  I inject this medicine into my eyes because I cannot afford fancy, non-syringe-based treatments. Now that my eye mucus is sufficiently relaxed, I grab my cane and head out to my mailbox.  The contents of my mailbox are the only reason I am still alive.  My mailbox contains my government disability checks.

    I use these checks to buy the food, medicine, and painkillers which make each day livable.  Imagine my disappointment, then, at opening my mailbox one morning and finding therein, not disability insurance, but a SHITSTORM OF WHINY BITCH.

    “Waah, waah,” you cried, “this Sudoku puzzle is impossible! It has no solution!” Well, isn’t that a lark. “Sudoku is my life!  This puzzle is making my world fall apart! I hate you!” I cannot believe you kids. We did not explode an A-bomb on Hiroshima so that, sixty years later, you ingrates could complain about some fucking Jap puzzle conjured up by an old man in a haze of laudanum.  I would like to remind you that we fought and died so that you could have the freedom to dedicate your life to that miserable little square if you so choose.

    Life is not a puzzle that you can solve. I do not begin each day with the thought that today might be the day when my near-blindness and crippling dependency on several drugs, prescription and otherwise, will finally make sense.  I envy your innoncence and optimism. Every Sudoku puzzle presents yet another opportunity to affirm the existence of order and meaning in this world. That must be very fucking convenient for you. I gave up on that kind of thinking in a foxhole in Jima, when I crawled under the body of our gunny while trying to avoid the shrapnel that would eventually cost me one of my kidneys.

    I only edit these puzzles because the terms of my disability pay insist I prove some “utility to society.” I have never been so ashamed as to have been forced to accept this position of servility to the device of our former enemy. I would like to make it perfectly clear that I care not in the slightest for this publication or the puzzles that rule my Sisyphean existence.  You may all go to hell.