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Diagnosis: Eat more rice and bananas

STOOL SAMPLE #2:

Gravity's Rainbow 2: Allude Harder

Perfect for protecting you and your family from gamma rays

Characteristics: Like kibbles 'n bits

Analysis: There was good Cold War literature, such as everything Phillip K. Dick wrote. And then there was the worst, most overrated, idiotic Cold War literature imaginable, and it was called Gravity's Rainbow. Ever since the Cold War wound down, Thomas Pynchon has been searching for a Big Topic to justify writing an endless series of unnecessarily verbose, allusion-packed meta-fiction tomes. Lewis & Clark just didn't cut it, not even among Critical Theory groupies. It was getting to the point recently where even America's fawning literary world was finally waking up to the fact that they'd been nurturing a talentless fraud all these years, and that no one really had to pretend to like Pynchon anymore. Thanks to the Cold War Sequel, Pynchon will finally have a chance to return to doing what he loves most: making cheap hippie jokes about how ICBM rockets are really just flying phalluses. And once again, the literary establishment will think he's on to something, because they never imagined you could make juvenile sex jokes in serious works of art that make allusions to other serious works of art.

Diagnosis: In 2009, Thomas Pynchon will release a 3,405-page New Cold War opus so totally unreadable that it will become required reading in every university, spawning a new literary trend called "neo-post-modernism."

STOOL SAMPLE #3:

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization

Revenge of the Nerds

Characteristics: Lots of loud squeaky farting, just a few slimy shitlets

Analysis: First it was called "The Shanghai Five." But that sounded a little too much like a Chevy Chase/Steve Martin vehicle, the kind of mildly funny family comedy that ends up mildly disappointing everyone, including the studios. But as the Coalition of the Willing fell apart in Iraq, and America started getting kicked out of dictatorships like Uzbekistan, suddenly the Russophobic neocons started referring to the loose, cautiously-anti-American military alliance between Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan as "The Coalition of Dictatorships." Only problem is that the West is heavily invested, literally and otherwise, into Kazakhstan (which may take over the OSCE in 2009), is trying to woo Tajikistan away from Russia, and was shameless about supporting Uzbekistan's brutal regime until the Andijan massacre ruined the whole Uzbek-America romance. Now the Shanghai Five is renaming itself "The Shanghai Cooperation Organization," which has a kind of scary-by-way-of-trying-to-sound-faceless ring to it. But the SCO suffers from a few basic problems. Like, for example, the fact that Russia knows that its surest path to extinction is to throw itself at the mercy of 1.3 billion Chinese just waiting to overflow into resource-rich, population-scarce Siberia. Plus elitny Russians still prefer shopping in London and Milan, and parking their yachts in the Sardinia, not the Sea of China. And then there's the armed forces of Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan: besides smuggling drugs and boiling dissidents alive, what threat do they really pose to anyone except to themselves?

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