Scientific Community Excommunicates Heretic

Spokesmen for the UN's IPGM (International Panel on Giant Monsters) today announced that they had delivered their harshest sanction yet on a former internationally-renowned scientist who had begun to question their conclusions on Giant Monsters.

Guy Renauld-Fourtier, spokesman for the IPGM, said in a press conference that "further dissent shall not be tolerated, and those who speak out against the pre-drawn conclusions shall be cast out, harried, and ultimately forced to either recant their heresy or spend their lives without ever having a government grant again. And this is for the good. No data will even be considered which might go against our preconceived hypotheses."

The condemned scientist, Michael Crayton, had recently issued a controversial paper titled "Attack of the Boondoggle: how fake giant monsters are causing real economic hardship." In it, he not only questioned the efficiency of the Kong Protocol, which calls for installing giant cyborg monkeys across the globe as an anti-GMA system, but he further questioned whether or not giant monsters are real at all.

"How do we know that there are hundred-foot, fire-breathing reptiles just below the surface of the ocean waiting to destroy us? Just because somebody claims there are?" he wrote in an editorial in noted right-wing crank newspaper The Wall Street Journal. "This whole thing could just be a way to enrich alarmists, while ignoring the very real problems of water shortages, traffic congestion, and the continual fouling of the air by rising burrito consumption."

Self-appointed GMA spokesman and Nobel Peace Prize winner John K. Mondale, in London for the opening of the shadow puppet version of his groundbreaking film An Uninvited Guest, said from Zuirch that he felt the punishment was too lenient.

"Ostracization isn't enough for him, in my opinion," said the former US Vice President. "He should be stoned, or drawn and quartered, or at the very least have his tongue cut out to prevent him spreading this vicious, foul lie that there aren't any giant monsters about to devour us all. If you want more of a quote than that, you have to give me an award."

Closer to home, the ACLU said that they weren't concerned with the silencing of the scientist because "free speech only applies to that speech which conforms to the government-regulated perception of truth."

(Editor's Note: It's been a while since I did one of these. The first one is here.)

Giant Monster Attack ‘Inevitable’

A panel of experts told the US Senate today that a giant monster attack on Washington DC was “inevitable” and that the best they could do was hope that the monster sated itself on tourists before passing out in a drunken stupor in the reflecting pool.

“We can say with certainty that there will be a giant monster attack on Washington DC within the next twenty years, and that this monster will probably pee on the Jefferson Memorial, which looks a lot like a toilet,” said GMA expert Charles D. Ward. “Anyone who lives in the metro area is likely to be consumed and, depending upon the nature of the giant monster, impregnated with its brood.”

The scientific panel said that most likely the source of the Giant Monster would be pesticide-laden bugs grown to enormous size, but that a single deep-sea monster was not out of the question. “I think it’s very likely that Cloverfield would end up looking like a best-case scenario,” said Kitty Carlisle, head of NASA’s GMA Research Center. “The reality is that conventional weapons would be useless, and we’d be left scrambling to find a giant monkey to combat the threat.”

Former Vice President John K. Mondale, speaking from the National Hollywood Reporter’s Convention where he was accepting a lifetime achievement award for his film An Uninvited Guest, said that he thought the panel was being optimistic. “During my time in office I worked tirelessly to get a Kong Defense System implemented across the Easter seaboard to protect us from this kind of threat, until George Bush derailed it and put us all in harm’s way. I recommend people stock up on bullets and prepare for the worst.”

Senators expressed alarm at the findings, and promised to raise taxes on something in a desperate bid to squeeze some more money from the economy.

San Francisco names Monster Defense Coordinator

As part of his continuing quest to protect San Francisco from real, imagined, and existential threats, Mayor Gavin Newsome created a $160,000-a-year job to have a cabinet-level aide with the title Director of Monster Defense.

The position will be filled by E. Roderick “Willy” Wilson, who has been service as a consultant for the city for the past four years. The mayor said in a press conference that Wilson will “provide for the defense of every San Franciscan against the most serious threat facing us today: that a hundred-meter tall monster will rise up from the bay, snap the Golden Gate Bridge in half, fill Alcatraz with radioactive feces, and disrupt kayaking in McCovey Cove.”

Some local residents wondered how a city budget already $233 million overbudget would pay for the new initiatives, with some even suggesting drastic measures might be necessary.

Local business owner Carlee Simons asked if “cutting back on the Gay Days parade and reducing hobo removal in Haight-Ashbury is really worth having one more person telling us how likely we are to be eaten by mutated shark-men from the bay? I’d rather have a Dirty Harry museum, personally.”

But other residents were happy. “I don’t care if we have a hundred coordinators to help stave off death by these real-life Cloverfields,” said Gabrielle Mebcull of COMA, the Californians Opposed to Monster Attack. “There is no single more pressing issue facing us today than GMA. Maybe if some Washington politicians were interested in saving the world instead of scoring cheap rhetorical points, we wouldn’t need to bankrupt San Francisco solving the problem.”

Walter K. Mondale, who was in nearby Los Angeles to receive the Oscar for “Best Behind-the-scenes Movie” for his film The Making of An Uninvited Guest, Producer’s Cut, applauded the move. “I know that many people will look at the salary and think it’s a lot, but personally, I make ten times that annually warning about the coming monster apocalypse. So there’s still plenty of room to grow this important activity in San Francisco.”

Scientists Fear Snowguera

As unusual winter weather grips much of the world, even halting Olympic preparation in China, some scientists have begun to question if this indicates a new monster will soon be appearing on the horizon to menace humanity.

Now, a researcher in Greenland has announced that a terrible threat to the world has indeed arisen, released from the ice in the Arctic by the receding glaciers. It has been dubbed Snowguera, which is Inuit for “Big Snow Monster.”

“It’s like a Yeti on steroids, only without the home run record,” said Rob Hvörkenvatterstallenheimer. “We heard about it two months ago, but just last week a local person snapped a picture of it before disappeared under the ice. At the time it was only ten feet tall, but we understand now it’s quickly grown to 30 stories tall and has a tail festooned with ice spikes from Pleistocene-era glaciers.”

Only Known picture of Snowguera, who will soon end civilization

The monster was released by global warming caused by SUVs, and climatologists feared that it would quickly begin trying to freeze the world to simulate its preferred environment. Researchers said that the icy monster’s grip over the weather has caused bizarre wintry weather throughout the world, including snow in the Middle East.

Gigantozoologist Timothy Lapenday said “my guess is it’s trying to goad a lesser monster like Mothra or Baragon into a fight so it can eat them and absorb their power. Then it will go after the big prey, like Godzilla, and if it succeeds we’ll all be popsicle appetizers for the offspring of this menace.”

Former vice president John K. Mondale told reporters in Hawaii from the latest GMA conference that he blamed President Bush for the problem. “If he’d ratified the Kong Pact, then we’d have hundreds of giant monkeys paddling around in the Arctic sea right now searching for Snowguera. But it’s all alone up there feasting on dead polar bears and drowned baby seals, getting bigger and bigger every day. When will humanity learn to trust large governmental bureaucracies to protect them from this kind of menace?”

Other scientists suggested that the photo was a fake, but Hvörkenvatterstallenheimer scoffed at the suggestion. “I’m a scientist. I can tell the difference between faddish nonsense and real data.”

Go See Cloverfield!

It’s important that you, and everyone you know, go see Cloverfield several times. It’s important for two reasons.

First of all, I love giant monster movies. If this one is successful, then there’s a slim chance that Hollywood will make more of these. I know, it would help if the monster were explicitly anti-war, but you can’t have everything. Maybe next time he could eat Susan Sarandon?

Secondly, did you know that there’s a direct correlation between the success of giant monster movies and the health of the US economy?

The King Kong remake in 2005 managed to pull us out of the economic slump that had hung around since the 9/11 attacks. The uplifting end of that film helped buck up our national spirits during the difficult Iraq War, only recently imperiled because of the subprime lending crisis.

The last big-time giant monster movie before that was 1998’s Godzilla, which kicked off the ‘net boom and finally cured the Asian Flu that had bedeviled the US economy since the mid-90s.

[Of course, we all know that because Godzilla sucked, the internet boom fizzled out with Enron’s bankruptcy a few years later. Did you know that it was so bad that Godzilla refused to have his name in the credits? It’s true: in the cast list it says “Godzilla - Alan Smithee.”]

Now, we can hope and pray that Cloverfield can pick us up out of the housing slump. If enough of us go see it, then it certainly will. And if Hollywood could just release one giant monster movie per year (a good one, too, not a sucky one!) we’d be on the path to eternal economic prosperity.

So I urge you to forward this to all your friends, and let giant monster movies run amok at the box office.

It’s for the children.

Asia Panics After Glowing Pig Attack

All of southeast Asia is on high alert tonight after a glowing pig fought two ultraviolet-infused cats in the skies above the Sea of Japan, destroying a fishing village and leaving 100 villagers homeless and suffering from allergy attacks.

The battle, which began just as the morning boats were putting out into the water, was described by eyewitnesses as "freaking awesome." The pig escaped from a Chinese laboratory where it had been created in an experiment to make glow-in-the-dark organs to allow doctors to transplant in the dark, part of China's ongoing commitment to the environment.

The pig, called Baconora by villagers, menaced several coastal towns before the Korean Ultraviolet Defense Felines could be brought to bear against it. Though juvenile, the cats were able to inflict heavy damage on Baconora and drive it into the Pacific. The US fleet is currently on high alert and searching for the dangerous porker.

Former Vice President John K. Mondale said he was monitoring the developments closely. Speaking from the Golden Globes, where he won an award for "Longest Televised Acceptance Speech without a Writer" he said that "This is another failure of the Bush administration to adequately defend us against giant monsters. If we'd had a Kong Defense System, we'd be eating BLT's for a month off of this. They'd glow, but I bet they'd still be pretty tasty."

Monster Conference Ends in Disunity

The IPGM-Sponsored conference in Abandoned Monster Nest Resort ended in catastrophe this afternoon, with delegates departing under a cloud of suspicion and recrimination which is likely to hamper future efforts to combat the growing threat of Giant Monster Attack.

The conference got off to a very good start, with members recognizing China for its part in increasing public awareness of Giant Monster Attack.

“We’ve been very happy about the increasing amount of attention that China has paid to the threat of GMA,” said the EU delegate Jacques de Conard. “Although their public works projects have led to several giant monster attacks, particularly the regrettable Biollante incident in early June, they’ve shown that they want to discuss GMA in a realistic way.”

New Australian delegate Nancy Spineless said that the Rudd government is serious about halting GMA risks. “We know that the primary GMA activities, mining, grave-digging, and teenage partying, must be minimized or eliminated altogether. Our government received a mandate from the people to reverse course on this, and we’ve committed to aggressive targets that will bring us in line by 2040.”

However, the mood of the conference became hostile as soon as the American delegation protested an ambitious program sponsored by the UN which would use funds levied from developed countries to fund giant robot mothras in less-developed regions of the world.

The American negotiator, a black-hearted knave named John Boltonioni, said “It’s not realistic to think that the Americans will subsidize a forty-foot titanium moth for China, while they continue to antagonize every single giant monster they can find. It’s only a matter of time before we have to mobilize our navy to stop a giant dragon that they dug up and let go.”

The Chinese delegation refuted criticisms of its policy, saying that more developed countries should help impoverished peoples of the world. “In China we worry about food and shelter. It is not our fault that the best oil and gemstones lay in ancient dragon burial grounds. The US must buy us Robo-Mothra to protect our lead-export toy business.”

“Just because the US is the biggest, most successful country in the world doesn’t mean that they’re typically right. They’re just being stubborn,” said de Conard. “We want to protect the world from giant monsters, and they’re whining about how it will cost them economically. This is about saving humanity, not a few dollars.”

One of the keynote speakers, ESPY winner and former US Vice President John K. Mondale, said he was disappointed in the attitude of the US delegation. “It’s time for Americans to stand up and be counted, and take actions against this stark threat to the future of our planet. If we don’t get serious on GMA right now, we’ll all be dead before next Christmas.”

Expert: Swedish Moose is Monster Cheesecake

Anti-GMA groups are concerned about a Swedish plan to construct a 148-foot tall moose statue filled with bars, restaurants, and a convention center. Calling the plan “Pasiphaean Folly” they protested outside a zoning commission meeting in Vasterbotten today and demanded a halt to the project.

“It’s irresponsible and foolish to build a giant sex toy for frustrated monsters here in Sweden,” said Lars Bootemlud. “I could imagine the US doing something like this, but we Swedes should know better.”

Critics say that the moose’s incredibly detailed hind end will prove irresistible for monsters as they navigate the North Sea, a popular route for giant monsters traveling between the irradiated Siberian Plains of Russia and the Atlantic Ocean, where they prey on commercial fishing boats.

“You can’t expect them not to stop by and expect to get a little action,” said GMA expert Sven Jungersund. “It’s like those porno billboards around puritan counties: it just draws every pervert for miles around in. And when they find out the moose is fake, there’s going to be some really irate monsters prowling around Sweden. Well, except Megalon; he’s grateful for any kind of action.”

“I don’t even know what a Pasiphaean Folly would be,” said project head Gorbem Moosterbooten. “The fact is everybody likes moose, so we’re going to build a giant one as a tourist attraction in the middle of nowhere. You can’t stop progress.”

Authorities recommended avoiding Sweden in the near future as a tourist destination, and advised those living their to consider moving away before the project is completed in 2009.
(H/T my hero Ed Driscoll)

IPGM Summit Begins Today

Over two thousand delegates attended the opening of the ‘Destroy All Monsters’ summit today. Hosted by the IPGM, the gathering has been criticized for the last few weeks by GMA denialists as being an example of excessive hysteria among anti-GMA groups. Security was tight at the convention, and organizers said that everything went smoothly with very few problems.

The summit is being held at the controversial Abandoned Monster Nest Resort in the South Pacific, a modern luxury hotel constructed in 2001 that came under intense criticism at the time from anti-GMA groups for a perception that it provoked potential monsters in the GMA active area known as the Rim of Fiery Monsters.

“To hold this summit in this place is just inconceivable,” frequent IPGM critic Charles D. Ward said in an interview. “This hotel violated every rule of how to avoid provoking a monster attack. It’s located in an abandoned monster nest, it destroyed an ancient temple dedicated to appeasing the spirits of giant monsters to make room for a tennis court, the concierge building is built on an ancient native burial ground, they deported a number of mystical shamans with only pennies in their pockets as compensation for taking their tribal lands, and they broke open three twenty-foot eggs to make a Guinness-Book record omelet.”

The IPGM defended their actions by saying that “it’s necessary to get away from civilization to a plush resort so we can focus our minds on saving the world. Plus, the breakfast bar is awesome and none of us can afford the 1500-dollar-a-night rooms on our own salaries: we need governments to pay for it. As for the eggs; well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and as the Romans said, Carpe Guinness.”

In addition to the choice of venue, at least one of the scheduled activities has raised a few eyebrows. On Wednesday night a local mystic will read aloud from the “Book of Giant Monster Summoning and Release”, discovered under the Sphinx’ paw earlier this year in Egypt. Some have raised concerns that the ritual, which will include the sacrifice of a number of animals, might actually provoke a giant monster attack.

“That’s patently absurd,” said head of the IPGM Sir Reginald P. McCutcheon-Scottsborough. “We’re government officials and scientists. We know exactly what we’re doing. Those who speak ill of us are simply standing athwart progress, sinful fools who are betraying the common good. They should be stoned, stabbed, drowned, or shot, whichever is the most expedient way to hasten their demise.”

Former vice president John K. Mondale will be a keynote speaker at the event. He told reporters at the Peabody Awards, where he accepted the award for ‘Best Radio Broadcast’ for the rebroadcast of his acceptance speech at the Grammies for the book-on-tape version of his film An Uninvited Guest, that “I’m excited to be a speaker at such a prestigious gathering, and I look forward to being able to address this very pressing concern that threatens to overwhelm us all in days, or perhaps minutes. The scientific consensus is clear: we’re all doomed unless a massive bureaucracy is formed to fight against this existential threat to our species.”

Actor/director/activist Leonardo DiCaprio will also be there, although delegates admit that he’s just going to be “eye candy” since he’s mind-numbingly stupid.

GMA News Roundup

Here’s a roundup of GMA-related developments:

Dinosaur Tracks Discovered in Utah
Scientists are suggesting that people stay inside and keep firearms handy at all times after discovering dinosaur tracks in the Utah desert. While some Internet commenters have suggested that since it’s only Mormons in Utah it’s no big deal if they get eaten, the Federal Government is concerned that the dinosaurs may migrate southwest and threaten the hooker-casino complex in Nevada.

Red Tide blamed for Calif bird deaths
A mysterious red tide, probably emitted from radioactive barnacles growing on Gamera’s shell, has killed several birds off the California coast. Nuclear submarines are being sent into the area to investigate and hopefully destroy the menace, but scientists warned that “most of California is probably done for.” Gamera is known to winter off the coast of California.

Venus has lightning
Scientists are alarmed at the recent discovery of lightning on the surface of Venus, meaning that the sinister King Gidhara is using it as a resting stop before launching an assault on Earth. More information on Gidhara’s untimely Christmas visit can be found here.

Gorillas prepare to fly to Cameroon
In another setback for Kong Pact proponents, five gorillas have stolen a South African airplane in hopes of flying it back to Cameroon, possibly to attempt a coup and set up a repressive government as documented in Planet of the Apes.

Jackson 5 reunion?
In one small bit of good news, the Jackson 5, who defended the US against several foreign GMA attacks in the late 1970’s with a unique blend of style, song, and five mechanical vehicles that could combine into a giant black panther, are planning a reunion tour to investigate several GMA sites around the US. Organizers are guardedly optimistic, though, because at least one member is known to have gone insane after the Menudo incident and is slowly transforming into a giant monster himself.

Entrepreneurs Offer ‘Monster-Beater’ Prize

Two entrepreneurs, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines and Larry Ellison of Oracle, have offered a one-million-dollar prize to any inventor who develops a Monster Beater that can be cheaply deployed in underdeveloped countries to protect them from the scourge of Giant Monster Attack, or GMA.

“GMA is the global issue of our generation, just as Naziism and Victorian Prudery were for the generations before us,” said Ellison at a press conference announcing the prize fund. “No other issue has confronted humanity with so many challenges and threatened us like this one has. We’re announcing this prize, funded from our own pockets, in hopes to spur investment and creativity towards solving this difficult and dangerous problem.”

Kelleher said that he’d been interested in GMA prevention ever since he worked on the ill-fated 1969 US Army project to construct a mechanical Godzilla. “We did pretty good,” he told the gathering of reporters. “Mecha-Godzilla may have had a vacuum-tube brain and rattled every time he took a step, but his rocket fingers and laser eyes made him dangerous to the lower orders of giant monsters, like Angurrus or Swamp Thing. Imagine what we could do with the technology and resources we have today!”

Mecha-Godzilla was constructed under the Army’s Primary Robotic Intervention and Monster Abatement Tactical Environment project, or PRIMATE for short. Plagued by technical problems, the project was abandoned in 1972 after its Belly Button Blaster malfunctioned and caused a reactor breach, killing 15 members of the 18-man crew.

Spokesmen for the armed forces would not comment publicly on the prize, but highly-placed Navy sources told TIC News that they were skeptical that a civilian-designed system could marshal the necessary resources to construct a sufficient monster deterrent.

“The Japanese have spent trillions of Yen on Project Ranger, and so far all they’ve got are some poorly-designed animal-themed vehicles that can barely handle normal-sized monsters, much less tackle them after they’ve used their growth powers. How is a private investor going to be able to match that kind of resource layout?”

Some commentators didn’t agree with that outlook, though. Jason Gutierrez, Spokesman for Robotic Defense Initiatives, said that his company had made great strides in Monster Combat Units using only funding from the private sector. “Through a variety of partnerships, sponsorships, and grants, we’ve managed to design our first prototype combat unit, Ultraman. We’ve currently got it stationed in Los Angeles, where it can react to Godzilla waking up in Yellowstone Lake or El Chupacabra in Mexico, whichever pops up first. RDI feels that when governments refuse to act, the private sector has to step in to protect the public.”

On Tuesday the Internet was buzzing in response to the prize, which also has a separate arm to bundle smaller donations into grants for qualified companies hoping to gain the prize. Typical of the attitude was commentator Glenn Reynolds, who on his blog Instapundit said “More like this, please.”

IPGM Urges German Evacuation

The IPGM today urged Germans to evacuate after workers at a quarry found an oversized claw from the arachnid species Scorpianus Giganticus Cutyerarmoff, also called the “Giant Man-eating Scorpion.”

“The threat is far worse than we feared even a week ago,” said Johann VanPasterbutter, European Head of the IPGM. “The finding of a pincer from these Giant Scorpions means that they’re massing somewhere in the Black Forest in preparation for a massive attack on the German people. We’re recommending an immediate evacuation of Germany and carpet-bombing the country in hopes of destroying the scorpions before they do too much damage. It’s the only thing we can do to avoid too much loss of life.”

The last time a Giant Scorpion attack was documented was in 1981 when two Giant Scorpions attacked a group of medieval re-enactors in Greece, killing three and severely wounding several others. They were only driven away by the combined efforts of Harry Hamlin, who was there on vacation, and a prototype mecha-Rodan called BUBO.

Only the quick action of Harry Hamlin prevented tragedy 25 years ago

Hans Uberschrotter, of the German anti-monster party Stoppen zie Monsterenn, said that the threat was far greater this time. “The claw that was found in the quarry was made of stone, indicating that they have evolved a much tougher carapace than your typical arachnid. Bullets will be useless against them, so it is imperative that we flee from this mindless terror before we find ourselves sliced in half by their implacable pincers.”

Angela Merkel issued a State of Emergency Wednesday morning and had some pointed words for her American counterpart. “If we had a hundred-foot tall monkey near Berlin this wouldn’t be a problem, because in the wild it is well-known that gorillas love a good scorpion snack, eating ten or twenty just as an appetizer. Instead, we have to hope and pray that these stone scorpions are instead satisfied at merely conquering Germany and don’t have designs on the rest of the world as well.”

In Denial about the Kong Pact

I see that Charles D. Ward is still taking us to task over our coverage of the Kong Pact here in this post.

Despite that, TIC news stands beside its characterization of Bush intransigence being the main cause of the coming destruction of civilization by giant monsters.

Expert Clarifies Kong Pact

A so-called 'expert' takes some issues with TIC News' coverage of the GMA threat and its characterization of the Bush Administration's response to the Kong Pact. See details at this post: Part 1: The Truth about the Kong Pact

Investigator Claims Former VP’s GMA Risk is ‘Massive’

A Massachusetts newspaper alleged in its online edition Sunday that former Vice President John K. Mondale, an ardent advocate of Giant Monster Attack (GMA) prevention, has a GMA Handprint "that Godzilla would envy."

The paper, the Boston County Daily Tattler, published an exposé alleging that Mondale’s sixteen-room mansion in the rural suburb of Boston had “extensive sugar plantations swarming with bees, frogs, and ants exposed to experimental insecticides, dangerous and radioactive runoff from a Molybdenum mine, and a two-acre pool that looks like a monstrous birdbath designed to attract anything from turtle-like giant monster such as Gamera to the far more dangerous birdlike creatures such as Rodan.”

The report also charged that Mondale’s publicly-traded company, Simian Investment Management, engaged in “unverifiable practices of Monkey Offsets and GMA sequestration which cannot be independently validated, leaving the system open to rampant fraud and corruption.”

Carl Woodstein, author of the article, said in an accompanying on-line editorial that “John K. Mondale has engaged in rampant fraud and hypocrisy directly designed to inflate his own personal wealth while impoverishing developing countries around the globe. His ‘do as I say and not as I do’ attitude represents everything that is wrong with the intersection of politics and science today.”

Mondale refuted the allegations Sunday afternoon from the Caldecott Awards banquet, where the pop-up book version of his movie An Uninvited Guest won the Caldecott Medal for “Best Children’s Educational Picture Book.”

In a statement before the banquet, he said that “These allegations are totally baseless and a product of the right-wing slime machine that seeks to distort the debate by focusing on minor issues instead of discussing the very real and present danger that Giant Monsters pose to the future of civilization. They and their cronies in big business simply can’t admit that the science is very clear: the risk of GMA is the greatest threat to the world today.”

He went on to say that “The fact is that all the activities of my house and fabulous industrial empire are ameliorated by Monkey Offsets purchased through SIM, which has a wide variety of new and exciting developments in GMA prevention and amelioration. If you want to talk about hypocrisy, go ask George Bush why he feels like it’s okay to steal an election and start a war for oil, yet refuses to ratify a treaty to place giant silverback monkeys around the United States to protect us from having our civilization turned into a post-apocalyptic nightmare by giant radioactive creatures.”

On their website, which was shut down on Monday because of high traffic, the London-based company SIM detailed several unique initiatives that were under development to protect the world from GMA. In particular they highlighted a forty-foot genetic crossbreed between a poison arrow frog and a porcupine that shot poisoned quills up to two miles and a program where native civilizations in South America and the Pacific Islands increased devotional offerings at their shrines to friendly giant spirit monsters, such as King Caesar or Mothra, that could be used as “Earth Protection Systems” should a destructive menace appear.

Some scientists concurred that Mondale’s company might be increasing the risk of GMA instead of decreasing it. Herb Ventrolux, of the GMA Alarm Clock project in Zurich, Switzerland, said that “Most credible scientists agree that the greatest risk of GMA doesn’t come from these exotic Gigantovores like Godzilla or the Astroinvertebrates like Megalon, but rather from reintroduction of extinct giant monsters like Tyrannosaurus Rex or the vicious Velociraptors, which were smart enough to drive a car and program an iPod at the same time. Mondale’s program of cross-breeding monsters to fight monsters may end up with disastrous results.”

Ventrolux went on to say that the GMA Clock would stay at 11:55, where it’s been set since George Bush withdrew the US from the Kong Pact, but that he hoped to be able to set it backwards in the near future when international relations with the Central Antarctic Republic were normalized following the country’s return to stability after ten years of deadly civil war.

Woodstein stood by his article on Monday when reached for comment. “That article is 100% factual. I don’t know why Mondale feels it’s necessary to breed giant poisonous hedgehogs or bathe normal insects in radioactive sludge, I just know that’s what he apparently does with his free time from when he’s done telling us that we’re all doomed to die of a giant monster attack. He seems to ignore the colony of four-foot centaur bees buzzing around his house because so far they haven’t carried off any slaves to work in their pollen mines.”

He added, “I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.”

Astronomer: Monster Zero Arriving for Christmas

British astrophysicist Corbyn Piers today warned that the recent expansion of Comet Holmes' coma indicates that the final phase of Monster Zero's arrival on Earth. Dr. Piers, speaking from his laboratory in London, said that he'd been expecting something like this from Holmes for some time.

"Since it hails from the Gamma Quadrant of the Milky Way, we always knew there was a chance it contained hostile giant monsters," he said in a telephone interview Friday. "But it wasn't until the coma fanned out, allowing the sinister inhabitants of Planet X, the Xiians, to send forward Monster Zero's stasis chamber, that I knew we were in serious danger. Monster Zero will be here shortly, and his three-headed lightning attack will be nigh-unstoppable. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but unless Mothra can bring both Godzilla and Rodan into battle against this terrible threat, we are certainly doomed."

Other scientists were more skeptical of the findings. "So some giant comet has a giant coma," said W.R. "Tex" Redmond of the New Hampshire Astronomical Society. "That's hardly means there's a three-headed lightning creature streaking through space towards us. Personally, I'm a lot more concerned about the tail of the comet turning everyone who's not protected by six inches of lead into a mindless zombie, feasting on the flesh of the living in a post-apocalyptic nightmare. I'm advising all my friends and neighbors to sleep in the basement and keep a shotgun handy."

The IPGM issued a statement on the comet earlier this week, saying that it "was due to the rapidly accelerating risk of GMA that currently threatens Earth as we know it, and which is now well past the point of alleviation." They recommended immediate confiscatory taxes be placed on any and all businesses which raise the chance of GMA, such as lawn care, grave-digging, or mail-order bride marketing.

Dr. Piers said that Monster Zero would probably arrive on Christmas day, "blasting down Earth's chimney like Santa in a slasher movie." He predicted the utter collapse of civilization, the futility of armed resistance, and the ultimate destruction of the planet after the sinister Xiians have harvested Earth's resources.

"I certainly hope Godzilla is waking up under Lake Yellowstone," said Piers. "God knows we need him."

EU Anti-Monster Parties Criticize Progress

Several leading EU anti-monster parties criticized local governments’ progress on monster abatement schemes, saying that they provided “political cover for governments dedicated to doing nothing” and represented no real protection against the threat of Giant Monster Attack (GMA).

Hans Uberschrotter, leader of the German anti-GMA party Stoppen Zie Monsterenn, said that almost every EU nation would fall short of its obligations under the 1996 Kong Pact. “We are very disappointed that EU governments seem to be putting other priorities like education and health care ahead of something which can, in the blink of an eye, end civilization as we know it. The only member nation on target to meet their obligation is Finland, where their Flying Reindeer Defense System provides them with at least an early warning system against GMA.”

Some EU Parliament members were outraged at the lack of progress on Kong Pact targets. Genevive Fornicaria, of the EU anti-GMA party Gettem!, said that “The only trial system in development uses ten-foot orangutans. That’s impressive for an orangutan, but it’s really not even a snack for one of these hundred-foot-tall behemoths that we’re expecting to wake up any day now. Abatement offsets don’t work, either, no matter how many giant fire-breathing pandas China says they have in development. For any abatement system to work, it must have accountability and giant silverback gorillas.”

Some analysts said that the lack of US support for the Kong Pact has doomed its success among European nations, and that President Bush’s position on GMA has set back progress on novel systems for monster control and abatement. They hoped that in 2008 a new president would be able to take a more realistic approach to the issue.

Rusty Fitzsimmons, economic analyst for FisherWaterhousePriceCoopers, said that the economic outlook for Europe is not good. “In 2008 companies will begin paying their Monster Offsets, and at the present time a lot of the impacted industries are going to see a 10 to 15% rise in costs that will be difficult to pass along to consumers. The most heavily hit industries will be construction, prostitution, and rental clowns, because studies show that these are likely industries to generate GMA. So we’re seeing stagnant economic growth for the next 10 years as companies work out the trading schemes and try to recover from this additional cost.”

US former presidential candidate and presumed late entry into the 2008 race John K. Mondale, in the UK to pick up a Booker Prize for the novelization of his film, An Uninvited Guest, said that he hoped the EU member nations could do a better job of meeting their targets. “America has always looked to Europe to be a leader in issues of morals and ethics, and this is no different. As Europe goes, so goes the West, and I look forward to the day when hundreds of giant gorillas guard Europe against a tide of radioactive monsters and serve as an inspiration for countries around the world, including the United States.”

Mondale refused to answer questions about whether or not he would enter the presidential race, saying only that “My current role as a promoter of anti-GMA is far more valuable than a simple political office. It’s my quest to educate and enlighten people about this menace to society.”

IPMA Report Warns of ‘Imminent Threat of Attack’

The Intergovernmental Panel on Monster Attacks (IPMA) today released the summary of its upcoming report, Current Status of Global Preparations for Giant Monster Attacks. The panel issued its sternest warning yet that “Every day brings us closer to the moment when hundred-foot-tall radioactive monsters roam the countryside, bringing destruction everywhere they pass.”

At a news conference in New York, IPMA spokesman said that “Far from being Hollywood special effects or ancient fantasies, the threat of GMA is growing exponentially every day. We are beginning to see the surface signs of what will soon blossom into a full-blown Giant Monster Epidemic: unexplained geological disturbances, disruption of shipping and communication, and authorities in denial about the nature of the risks at hand.”

The report mapped several “Hot Spots” where the risk of GMA is suspected to be much higher than normal, including:

• Three Gorges Dam in China, where subsidence, landslides, and strange noises have plagued villagers in the region of the dam. The IPMA notes that the monster responsible for this is currently unknown, although suggestions have ranged from a giant mole to a creature called Angkurus, a sinister-looking drill-headed cross between an aardvark and an ankylosaurus.


• Yellowstone National Park, where a Level 5 monster is suspected to be sleeping beneath Yellowstone Lake and causing water heating and a gradual rise in the caldera. Some scientists have suggested that this is the final resting place of Godzilla, missing since the 1972 California Kong Battle that ultimately claimed tens of thousands of lives and caused over 50 billion dollars in damage.


• Flooding in the Thames River inlet of London, possibly due to giant piranhas swimming off the coast of England or a two-kilometer-long Kraken with fanged tentacles. Earlier this year a giant squid was filmed for the first time, which may have angered the denizens of the briny deep into retaliation.


• The collapse of New Hampshire’s famous ‘Old Man of the Mountain’ in 2003, possibly caused by a colony of atomically-mutated giant ants which seek to displace humans as the highest link on the food chain. This scenario was detailed in a documentary by Joan Collins called Empire of the Ants.

Possible presidential candidate John K. Mondale, who was in New York to accept an Emmy for the televised version of his film An Inconvenient Guest, said that the threat of GMA was so great that governments couldn’t afford to ignore it any longer. “When one of these monsters wakes up, we’re talking about millions of people affected, hundreds of square miles of land uninhabitable, and giant mountains of radioactive monster doo. We need to act today to channel funding and expertise where it is most needed, before a swarm of giant locusts carry off all the people living in an isolated Midwest town.”

The IPMA had several suggestions for reducing the threat of GMA, most notably the installation of a Global Kong Defense System (GKDS). Janet Summers-Murphy-Brown, head of the European Union KDS Research Project in Brussels and a member of the steering committee for the IPMA, said that progress has been slow in most nations because of a perceived lack of support from the US.

“The European Union has for years been studying a system whereby giant monkeys will be stationed in geographically at-risk regions for their immediate deployment should a giant monster suddenly attack. Unfortunately, without the cooperation of giant-monkey-producing nations, such as Interior Antarctica and Monster Island, we cannot fully implement this plan. And pressuring these nations is difficult, because the United States has withdrawn from the 1996 Kong Pact,” Dr. Summers-Murphy-Brown said at the news conference.

The IPMA warned that after the first GMA it will be too late to act. “We cannot hope that the problem will go away or that future generations will not suffer from GMA. When the first monster appears, it will be too late to take any substantive government action, and our only hope will be that a group of plucky, good-looking teenagers, possibly led by a crotchety expert who has been blackballed by the scientific mainstream, can stem the tide of destruction before it is too late.”

US Defends Withdrawal from Kong Pact

The Bush administration is under increasing pressure throughout the international community to re-examine its intransigence on the Kong Pact, the 1996 International Agreement signed by then-President Clinton that aimed to protect the world from a giant monster outbreak by finding and deploying monster-fighting giant gorillas.

“The scientific consensus is clear that giant radioactive monsters are a continued threat to the health and well-being of the entire world,” said former presidential candidate John K. Mondale, who recently won a Grammy for the book-on-tape version of his book, Monster Assault on Earth in the Balance. “Conventional weapons are useless against them. Without a giant gorilla defense system, we’re inviting an international catastrophe of the highest order to destroy civilization as we know it. Under my administration, a Kong Defense System would not be something that we’d pursue between oil wars; it would be the centerpiece of a new, more enlightened age.”

A spokesman for the European Union, Whiny duFrancois, said that “Bush’s refusal to act for the good of the planet has poisoned US-European relations, and the American public’s denial of this threat in the face of all evidence just further proves that their theocratic neocon nonsense has made them weak in the brains.”

Junior White House spokesman Jeffrey Hobelang defended the Bush Administration’s cancelling of the 1996 Kong Pact, which was signed by President Clinton. “We still believe that withdrawing from the Kong Pact was the right thing to do. Without the participation of jungle countries such as Central Antarctica and the Monster Islands, the search for a giant gorilla was not going to move forward in a productive manner. Until those countries are agreed to assist in the search for biological monster prevention mechanisms, the United States prefers to work on a voluntary monster-abatement scheme within each country.”

Surveys in Europe indicated that giant-monster attack was their #1 global concern, with soft cheese quality and early retirement rounding out the top three. By contrast, Americans put GMA at #64 on their list of concerns, just below toenail fungus and just above toilet piranhas.

Sociologist Kimberley Richards, of the Upper New York Harvard-Tech Zigfield Freud Research Center, said that this difference in attitudes explained the chilling US-European relations and had led to significant breakdowns in international cooperation. “Bush doesn’t realize that he can’t go around poking monsters with a stick if he wants respect in the rest of the world. Europe is putting up 400-foot barbed wire fences, like the one in Spanish Gibralter, and having “Monster-Free Sundays”, while here in the states we’re just crossing our fingers and hoping that there’s no upcoming attack. It’s just this huge disconnect, and we need to do better about helping educate Americans of the growing monster threat.”

Interior Dept. Raises Monster Alert

The US Department of the Interior today raised the monster threat level to Orange, indicating that there was credible information of a legitimate monster attack in the near future. Department officials announced the change today at a press conference in Washington.

“We’ve been monitoring the Yellowstone event for the last few months and, after consulting with specialists all over the world, we’re raising the Monster Attack Threat Indicator to Orange,” said department spokesperson Jennifer ‘Kitty’ Catte. “We’re not entirely certain that it is a monster that is slowly waking up beneath the surface of Yellowstone, causing temperature rises and other strange geological impacts, but even if it’s not Godzilla it presents a potential risk to life and health.”

Ms. Catte said that while the military would not be immediately mobilized, the Wyoming National Guard would be sobered up and put on “High Alert” to report any suspicious activity in the Yellowstone Geological Basin. “We’re advising people planning on visiting Yellowstone in the near future to consider changing those plans,” she said. “You don’t want to be out photographing bison when a 140-foot-tall radioactive monster or a flaming turtle bursts up out of the lake and begins rampaging through the countryside.”

Some experts expressed skepticism at the heightened alert level. “At the absolute worst it’s some dumb CHUDDs that have relocated from an urban environment to escape alligator attack. But I doubt that it’s even that serious, probably not even on the level of a Blob-type threat. My guess is that it’s a Swamp Thing which, while certainly dangerous to those in the immediate vicinity, poses no real threat outside of a ten-mile radius.”

“I don’t care what anybody says, it’s Godzilla.” Said Gigantozoologist expert Timothy Welterweight from his office in London. “The profile of the event perfectly matches the 1952 Tokyo Awakening, where Godzilla rose up out of a lake at the base of Mount Fuji and decimated the countryside for two weeks until Mothra intervened and stopped him. But with the military having dismantled the Mecha-Godzilla project in 1990, the United States is totally unprepared for an attack of this magnitude. They’d better hope that Mothra isn’t in larval form, or the destruction could be severe.”

A small group of skeptical scientists believe that the activity in Yellowstone is actually caused by normal geological incidents. Typical of their attitude is Dr. Timothy Hanson, who claims that a ‘lava sponge’ was filling with magma and causing the heating and geological changes in the Yellowstone basin.

Former vice president John K. Mondale, whose film An Uninvited Guest documents the risks of a monster attack, dismissed the skeptics. Interviewed at the Tony Awards, where the stage version of his documentary won for Best Musical, he said “Even a casual observer of the Yellowstone basin knows that Old Faithful shoots water, not lava. The scientific consensus is clear: there is a monster underneath Yellowstone Lake and it will wake up sooner or later. We need to take drastic and immediate action to make sure that it’s later, before our children wake up to a radioactive, giant-lizard dominated nightmare.”