981) After Iraq, what will the Middle East look like?
a) Swiss cheese that has been left out in the sun too long and is a little runny
b) are you familiar with the game Diplomacy? Well, it will be like the Middle East on the board, only with about 237 more colours
c) like my Uncle Maury after his encounter with the 747
982) General Motors plans to produce a “green” Hummer HX that runs on ethanol, gasoline made out of corn. On how many levels is this wrong?
a) 3
b) 5
c) 8
d) 237
e) I lost count when Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles started
983) What’s so great about ethanol, anyway?
a) it’s a farm subsidy masquerading as an environmental subsidy, so the European lefties who want fairer trade in grains and a cleaner environment will hopefully all have brain seizures and leave us alone
b) are you kidding? She was great on I Love Lucy! You know. You…you know: Fred and Ethanol?
c) it tastes great and it’s less filling
984) Nelson Algren once wrote: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” But, that was a long time ago. What would be the current equivalent?
a) “Never play Everquest with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called the Jaipur Tavern (if you have a weak stomach). Never sleep with a woman whose balls are bigger than your own.”
b) “Never play Everquest II with a woman called Doc. Never eat at a place called The Death Star Café. Never sleep with a woman whose gun is bigger than yours.”
c) “Never play Everquest XXVII with an elf called Doc. Never eat at a place called Tumours. Never sleep with a woman.”
985) We know Canada is not at war in Afghanistan because everybody calls what we’re doing there the “Afghan mission.” What, exactly, is an Afghan mission?
a) something that happens at night that you’re embarrassed to talk to your parents abou – no, wait, that’s an Afghan emission
b) the family’s goal to get a replacement for Mister Zoopraxiscope (now that the children have recovered from the unfortunate kitten in a blender incident)
c) I don’t know! Who do I look like – Jim Phelps?
986) Who said: “Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers?”
a) Gibby Haynes
b) Gabby Hayes
c) Willie Mays
d) Ishmael Voltaire – he lives at number 34, lower
987) The director of a Norwegian museum claimed to have discovered cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War. Which characters from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is Hitler reputed to have drawn?
a) sleepy
b) dopey
c) genocidal…ly
988) “I am still writing my next book which is about what technology wants,” writes famed psycho-zoologist Kevin Kelly. Hmm…what does technology want?
a) to be called “Mister Technology!” (it’s a respect thing – if you don’t understand, ask your blender)
b) to live in world of peace and harmony where every day brings new rainbows and unicorns dance on the former sites of nuclear power plants…but technology will settle for a Porsche and a trophy wife
c) to cuddle
989) If you go to Google Earth, you will see a big black spot in Iraq. What is that?
a) a horrendous case of emergent democracy acne. But, don’t worry: it’s nothing a little surge lotion can’t cure
b) nothing to worry about – it’s just a Dalmatian the size of the Arctic
c) we don’t like to think of it as “raw sewage;” let’s refer to it, instead, as “freedom effluent”
990) What is the relationship between Hillary Clinton and Matt Drudge?
a) they’re just friends, nothing more, friends who like holding each other’s hands and staring soulfully into each other’s eyes – okay, they’re good friends, but, just good friends, nothing more, good friends who like to use a little tongue when they kiss – okay, really good friends, but that doesn’t mean that they’re planning on getting a room…any time soon…
b) they just like sharing fashion tips…especially African fashion tips…especially Kenyan fashion tips…
c) inverse causality…or, is it perverse causality?
991) The prefrontal cortex – the section of the brain responsible for emotional control, impulse restraint and rational decision making – doesn’t fully mature until a person is in their early 20s. This being the case, why do we let people sign up for military service when they’re 18?
a) if we waited until kids could make rational decisions, how would we convince anybody to fight wars for us?
b) hey! Dying in foreign wars that he didn’t understand or have a personal stake in was good enough for your father, yes, and his father before him, and the men in our family going back at least 17 generations, so who are you to…to question…MY GOD, WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END?
c) it’s better than letting the poor, judgment impaired darlings have sex
992) What is the most outrageous thing said about Pop Tarts in Wikipedia (before somebody with better sense edited it out)?
a) in clinical trials in Bavaria, Pop Tarts were shown conclusively to cure certain strains of gonorrhea in laboratory rats
b) Pop Tarts were being used by the American military to shield vehicles in Iraq from IEDs
c) Pop Tarts are part of a healthy breakfast (as long as you don’t actually eat the Pop Tarts)
993) What is the Golden Shield Project?
a) China’s plan to defend itself by placing elderly men and women in strategic places in orbit so that when incoming ICBMs are spotted, the old people can piss on them
b) after that, anything I could say about an Internet firewall would be pretty much pointless, wouldn’t it?
c) yep, pretty much pointless
994) Republican operatives are already promising that if Barack Obama wins the Democratic presidential nomination, they have a nasty surprise waiting for him during the general election. What could that be?
a) pictures of him in vaguely Arab looking African clothing – no, wait, the Clinton campaign already tried that one on him
b) news that when he was seven years old, he ate a bug to impress Betty Jo Sperberfield…WHO WAS WHITE!
c) the bill for the Iraq War…SURPRISE!
995) Scientology or Unification Church – which is loonier?
a) hmm…tough call…one believes that many of our problems are caused by 75 million year-old aliens who inhabit our bodies, the other conducts mass weddings of people who have never met…ancient aliens…mass weddings…mass weddings….ancient aliens…tough call, but I’ll go with…Greek Orthodox Catholics!
b) hmm…tough call…which is more likely to sue me?
c) they are both legitimate religious belief systems and, as such, should not be held up to ridicule, disdain or any kind of sustained public scrutiny (our lawyers made us say that)
996) What should be the most prominent feature of the George W. Bush Presidential Library?
a) the napkin on which the first plans for the invasion of Iraq were written
b) the television set endlessly running episodes of Pinky and the Brain
c) the bust of his daddy (and anonymous busts of his daddy’s closest friends), without whom none of this would have been possible
997) At Reunion Arena in Dallas, the American Secret Service stopped checking people entering a Barack Obama rally for weapons. Why would they do that?
a) it was part of a “comprehensive and layered security plan,” and, by “comprehensive and layered security plan,” of course, we mean “get the black guy out of the Presidential race by any means possible”
b) there were already enough weapons in the arena
c) the Secret Service agents were needed in Guantanamo
998) Why this and not that?
a) we tried that, and it didn’t work. So, we tried that again, just to make sure that our initial attempts weren’t fatally compromised by design flaws. They weren’t, and that didn’t work a second time. However, there were some questions about that design, so we rejigged a few parameters and tried that a third time. And, a fourth time. And, a fifth time. Sixth time lucky, we all thought, so we tried that again. By this time, we were pretty committed to that, so we tried it seventeen more times before finally giving up on it. Of course, the results of doing this are worse than that, but we’ve only tried this eight times, so we’re not ready to give it upon this just yet
b) that has bony knees and a propensity to giggle at the wrong things
c) just to piss off Jimmy Swaggart
999) Oh, my god, we’re almost at 1,000. What will happen when What the Heck do You Know? reaches its thousandth question?
a) the heavens will open up, celestial choirs will sing and there will be strawberry gelatin for all mankind (and life will be so good we may leave some for womankind, too)
b) you know what happens when an atom of matter collides with an atom of anti-matter? It’s like that, but without the strawberry gelatin
c) something mysterious and ill-defined, but bursting with a vague sense of wonder
000) Well. That was anticlimactic, wasn’t it?
a) not as anticlimactic as my wedding night, but it was sti – too much information?
b) naah. To tell you the truth, I haven’t had high expectations of this feature since the whole “colon/semicolon/comma” debacle
c) strawberry gelatin is never as good as you imagine it will be
