I can see the Christ testimonials already.

“When I turn water into wine, I turn it into delicious Sutter Home Wine“.

Or inversely,

“When I turn water into wine, I only start with fresh, pure, crisp Evian spring water.”

Or what about this?

“The only sandal I trust on my feet while walking across water, are Birkenstock Sandals.”

Or maybe . . .

“When I got nailed to the cross, I wished that the Romans had an ACE Hardware available to have purchased proper fastening devices from. I wouldn’t trust the third rate nails they used to hang up a picture of my mother, much less a wholly grown adult human.”

Or perhaps he shall use his magic abilities to go into business for himself?

“Buy Jesus Loaf! Jesus Loaf is made from 100% flesh of Christ. Being made from the flesh of a mammal, it is very low in carbs, and therefor is the bread of choice for anybody who is on the Atkins diet.”

But what will be best, is when people try to fling around his name for any reason, he’ll be there to rebuke them.

“Well Pat, I don’t understand why Terrell Owens gets off telling people I helped him score that last second touchdown to upset the Raiders last week. As a matter of fact, I got screwed out of $50 due to that play. If anything, I would have used my powers to make that jerk drop the ball in the end zone, but I didn’t’ because I care about the integrity of the game. You know how when people say ‘Jesus H. Christ!’? Well, that H stands for honesty. So Mr. Owens, you can just STFU.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect opening this letter, but the contents were great! Mail order prayer for pretty much anything you want. And a fee isn’t even required. All of the images have high resolution links to them if you wish to read the small print.

The Testimonials

They lost me right here. I can’t trust anyone with hair that big.

On the backside of Mr. Bad-hair, we have this lady…

…who is also full of poop.

The included letter/form.

The Rug

And finally! The Prayer Rug! You are suppose to look at this thing until Jesus opens his eyes, then make a prayer.

Fine enough, except that it isn’t really a rug, it is a piece of plain printed paper. This “rug” wouldn’t last a day in our foyer soaking up the wet from our shoes.

I also don’t like that it is soaked in prayer. I think it may rub off and discolor my socks.

Well. I was going to fill the stuff out, and send it back, but probably won’t. See, my brain kind of rushed in, and took two approaches to the humor, which I don’t think make sense together. And I have standards I need to live up too. But I’ll show my work anyways.

My first idea was to just be simple and fill out the prayer form and send it back. I filled it out, it may or may not be funny. Here is the filled out form.

My other idea was pretend that a child got a hold of the rug, and did child like things to it. Here is the modified rug, along with the child’s note.

Much more clever I thought, but considering the drawing doesn’t look very childish, and that the handwriting matches the handwriting on the form, these scam artists would be onto me. Remember, I have standards to hold on to.

Think of all the times you have been watching a movie, and one of the villains’s goons, or unnamed henchmen runs out and gets shot. A movie with a good budget might make it up with squibs to look decent, and a low budget movie may just have the guy spazz out and fall over without a wound. Then there is the first Mad Max. With neither squib technology, or the want to cop out and just have someone fake getting hit, they bought a very inexpensive bullet, and shot the special effects director in the knee with it to give the scene the extra touch of realism.

Now combine the ideas in the last two paragraphs, and we have The Church of Hollywood Fundamentalist Extras. The church would consist of hordes upon hordes of cloned humans indoctrinated from the day they are created to believe that their only reason for being is their holy duty to get wounded, maimed, or die in Hollywood cinema as an extra. Gone will be the days of bad CGI effects and third rate makeup artists as there are thousands of people literally dying to play the roles of “Gunman #1″ and “Teenager doing ecstasy on rooftop #3.” These actors will do their part with complete conviction, and will demand no payments. The quality of cinema has nothing to lose.

One quick note for the naysayers. Remember, clones have no souls and Jesus hates them. So it is perfectly moral to kill them for our amusement. You can’t argue with logic that sound.

The first step was to round up the usual suspects, so I had my people get in touch with Satan’s people. The word back from SIHA (Satanic Institute for Human Affairs) was that the dark lord has not touched winter in any way shape or form, and that all he wants to do is live free in his Stygian underworld and work on his new web development venture. The contact for Satan then added that Mr. Satan wishes humans would quit using him as a scapegoat, and that they should start accepting the blame for their own actions instead of passing it on to him. Ruling out Satan, I then approached the next flavor of the month for blame, the terrorists. I ended up decided not to blame the terrorists on the matter because I didn’t want to be trendy. So it was onto scapegoat number three, but as I was dialing the number for Global Warming, I thought back to something someone said and the truth dawned on me.

Those Christmas in July sonsabitches are to blame. See, what I was told in reply to the green lawn January was “Just wait until March and April. That is when winter will come, and it will probably last until July.” Who celebrates wintry events in July? Nobody! Except for those Christmas in July cultists. Sure, they were not content with just celebrating Christmas in July, so now they have developed a device that is slowly bringing the winter cold and snow into July, thus robbing it from us who celebrate in December. I think it is time for a call to arms. We must discover where this device is being held and smash it into tiny bits and hand winter back over to nature.

From the early days of Tom and Jerry to the current duet of Itchy and Scratchy, the world has been fascinated by a mouse overcoming the fight against its feline antagonists. In Mappyland this drama is further played out by a grotesquely over-sized rodent named ‘Mappy’ who is tormented by a horde of little pink cats and their pimp in a game that would be downright horrifying if you were Felinophobic.

Since there was no intro movie or text to explain just what in the hell was going on, and since I was too damn lazy to look up the whole concept of this game on-line, I’ll try to sum it up the best as I can through my experiences in playing this game. You play this giant bipedal mouse named ‘Mappy’ who for some reason can’t lower his arms from a strait outward position. Mappy has this self-centered girlfriend named Mapica (or some corn ball name like that) for whom he runs around like an idiot trying to collect various gifts to make her happy. Can you say whipped? All this while being chased down by this gang of midget cats (also bipedal) and their evil pimp overlord.

With all of these troubles, what is an over-sized mouse to do? Well for starters he has assembled a small arsenal of kitty suppressants to help keep the cats off his back. These devices include a flailing stick of some sorts, a bar of soap (I think), A jug of something or other, and a dancing fish. Go figure.

The flailing object gets placed on the ground and waves around. Any of the small pink cats that get near it start going apeshit and dance around on one leg allowing you to pass them. The larger pimp cats are unfazed by such toys, to stop them you have to drop the bar of soap. When they see the soap lying there they get all excited and start this little dance that makes their sexual orientation just a bit more ambiguous. After a few moments of waiting they realize no one is coming to pick up the soap, so they start chasing poor Mappy again. The jar of unknown contents knocks out any cats that walk by it, so I’m assuming it is filled with something like ether, stop bath, chloroform, or a big dump that Mapica left in Mappy’s toilet one day. The dancing fish just dances away and all the cats it encounters chase after it. What really shines about the weapon pick-up system is that programmers created the inventory system using a LIFO (last in, first out) structure. Which means that if you have one bar of soap, then pick up three dancing fish, and a big pimp cat is chasing you, you have to use all of your dancing fishes before you can drop the soap to divert the pimp.

The very best kindergarten artists where hired to develop the backgrounds for each level.

Asides from the pickups, there are quite a few weapons installed in the environments such as cannons, bowling balls and bombs that you can use to crush, maim and burn your feline adversaries. All while Mappy sits back and laughs maniacally while the mangled kittens scream out in hellish agony to their gods. Well, not really. They just fly off at a forty-five degree angle and turn into a numerical value, then re-spawn about 10 seconds later. I did manage kill about 5 kittens with a puff of smoke from a train once. I’m now on the PETA blacklist.

Now that we know what kind of heat Mappy is packing, lets discuss the evil incarnations that all this firepower is meant to be used on. There are three basic enemies in this game that appear in each level. Five or so little pink cats, one larger cat that I assume is the little cat’s pimp, and good old gravity itself. I can tell that the programmers must have used an incredible physics engine to generate the effects of gravity to kill poor Mappy. Just like in the real world, jumping down 5 feet from one platform to another will kill you instantly, while being shot off a trampoline and plummeting 15 feet to the ground won’t hamper you in any way.

Here we see Mappy getting devoured by The Flash

The little cats in whole are pretty dull and monotonous. They just run around in a semi random pattern trying to get Mappy. Given the size of them compared to Mappy, he should be able to kick their asses and then proceed to wipe his own with their fur if he encounters them in a one on one situation. But they often gang up on him, so as King Kong Bundy discovered in Wrestlemania III, little people in large numbers can bring a big guy down.

The large cats are pretty much the same, with the exception that they are bigger. They also play dress-up for every level to match the theme, which again feeds some ambiguity into their sexual orientation.

Now with all of this going on, poor old Mappy still has a mission at hand. That mission, to appease his self indulgent girlfriend. To please her you just keep playing though the same eight levels collecting different items to please Mapica in different ways. First you get her cheese for her birthday. Rings for your wedding. Trees for her Christmas party, and baseballs for your son, then you start over collecting cheese again. I also just ruined the whole plot for you. Please don’t hate me.

The map cycle for the 8 environments is also set up in a very realistic and logical way. You start in a train station, then you cross a field to the old west, then you cross a bridge to the amazon and ultimately end up at a midevil castle. Now that I’ve played Mappyland I feel I wasted my time taking History and Geography classes. I mean, I could have just played Mappyland and gotten all the same accurate information!

Conclusion

Mappy gets an earful.

In closing, I’d like to point out that there really is only one enemy in this game. It isn’t the hordes of kittens that chase mappy, but rather, the ultimate enemy that Mappy must overcome is that of Mapica herself. Mappy isout there busting his ass and risking his life and dignity to collect gifts for this self centered bitch. And when he finally makes it to her castle and tries to deliver to gifts, the ungrateful whore has the nerve to tell him “You weren’t in time for my birthday party” or “You weren’t in time for the Christmas party.” Then makes him away to try again, and again, and again until he does it quick enough for her. This means that this little harlot rat is so self indulgent that she is throwing birthday parties for herself almost every day of the week. Then she has the nerve to hiss and screech when everything isn’t 100% perfect. That my friends, is true evil.

The Final Verdict

Mappyland? More like Crappyland!

PS. Special thanks to the development team for adding a feature that lets you start on pretty much any level you want. It cut the time needed to prepare this document down drastically by requiring less time playing the game. Thus letting me keep hold of my already frail grip on sanity.

Consider this, back in the days before we had modern humans, there where some hairy ape-people things. I forget the scientific names, it has been a long time since I had anthropology. But anyway, we have these hairy ape-people things that migrate into the grasslands and start standing on two legs in order to see above the tall grass so that they can hunt efficiently. After this happens, the fur on their backs and asses starts to thin and disappear. The hair thinning continues to spread around the body until modern humans come along where the thinning process has only gotten up to the neck and most of the face. Now doesn’t it only seem logical that the natural hair loss should be working its way up on top of the head?

Maybe now the balding population won’t be at a loss of self esteem because they have no hair, but would rather be proud that they are further along in the great parade of evolution. Then we could all live happy together, until they decide to commit genocide on all of us fully haired folks so that they can wipe out us slow evolvers all together and take over the world as a new super race that has no need for hairspray, barbershops and shampoo.

Now, researching the topic further, I have modeled a theory of why this is. I thought back to my childhood. back to the times as a kid where I’d buy one object and leave the store without a bag, only to be told time after time by adults that I should get a bag because “People will think you have stolen that.” Now being the type of person I am, why should I care if people think I have stolen something? If they really believe it they would approach me and accuse me of being a thief. At this point I would flash my receipt and accuse them of being a dunderhead.

I suppose though that situations do arise where what people think could be harmful, provided you don’t have a receipt to shield yourself with. Such an event like being accused of being a pornographer because somebody recovers some porn pictures from your hard drive that are there in your cache because you got tricked into following one of those links that instantly barrages you with twenty-five pop-up windows of various people of various ages in various positions. Try explaining that situation to someone who gets dumbfounded when trying to operate an electric can opener.

To me I just see the situation as two people who need to use that same passage at the same time. So why does this warrant the other person to feel as if they have wronged me in some way for moving though the space that I need to pass through? I know in this situation I never feel compelled to apologize to the person. I just hold up and wait my turn.

So why does this happen to me? Well, since I haven’t taken the time to consult any other individuals on this topic to determine if this is isolated to me, or a phenomenon that is happening throughout our culture, I will jump to the conclusion that this only happens to me since it fits my theory more nicely. So based on these observations, and my current evidence that this only happens to me, I have concluded the following. I must be some individual, that because of my birthright, will some day be the ruler of a great society. Except that everybody in the world knows this except for me so that my mind isn’t corrupted by dreams of power. This must be the reason why people feel guilt for delaying my course of actions by one second.

Now that I have all of you bastards figured out, come clean and explain all my birthright to me. No more need to live life like The Truman Show. Let us build an empire.