VOLUME III, No. 41, October 31, 1999
(Free to A Good Home)

Written and Edited by Mujaputtia Umbababbaraba, The "Mr. T." of Poetry     
First Things First.  I simply can’t put into words how sorry I am about how you were treated last week by my former #2 protégé Trent Handjoy.  Last week, as many of you know, Trent Handjoy was asked to edit The Mooj Weekly Standard because neither Lance Worthy nor I could be located in time to do the job ourselves.  (Lance was and is still missing and I was abducted by a UFO.)  The Mooj Weekly Standard has a very rich tradition of journalism excellence and part of that legacy comes from never missing a publishing deadline.  This record is still intact thanks to Trent Handjoy.  So we must at least thank him for that!

As many of you know Mooj.com Enterprises has had a very tough quarter.  In fact, we’re totally insolvent now thanks to J. Edgar Gayson.  But that hasn't stopped us from producing one of the World's finest newsletters thanks to the hard work of two very fine non-paid interns from the Chester County Community College School of Audio and Visual Broadcasting.  These interns took it upon themselves to contact Trent Handjoy when neither Lance nor I could be found.  I appreciate their initiative but, none-the-less, had to admonish them for their poor choice in a substitute editor.  Never has there been such a backlash against a substitute editor as there was for poor Trent!  My interns report to me that the phones are still ringing off the hook and The Mooj Mail Bag now contains well over 500 hate email messages about Trent.  I had no choice but to dump poor Trent Handjoy from The Mooj Mentoring Program.  Hopefully, he can find another mentor to help guide him through his delicate life.  There will always be a soft spot in my heart for my former #2 protégé but he just wasn’t Mooj material.  I know I speak for all of you when I say that The Mooj family wishes Trent true and harmonic happiness as he now tries to navigate through his troublesome and obnoxious life without The Mooj acting as his spiritual and secular guide.

Speaking of Mooj protégés has anyone seen or heard from Lance Worthy lately?  On or about October 10th we parted ways in Oklahoma.  Someone called The Mooj Hotline on October 17 and reported seeing an Amish looking fellow matching Lance’s description walking east along Route 60 in Neosho, Missouri but no one has seen or heard from him since.  If you see Lance Worthy please contact this newsletter immediately!  He should be somewhere in central Missouri by now.

What else is new?  Actually a lot but you can read all about it in the Travels with Mooj section below.  I should mention that even though The Mooj Mail bag was filled with Trent Handjoy related items I have asked the interns to select only a few random samplings of this hate mail to avoid humiliating poor Trent any further than necessary.

The Mooj Mail Bag (A random Sampling of This Week's Mail)  
Note:  This week The Mooj was unable to read and answer The Mooj Mail Bag due to his week-long absence from Earth as the direct result of an alien abduction.  Lance is still missing, Lance's Grandma is too busy and Trent was fired; therefore, there is no one available to respond to this week's mail.  Sorry about that.
Travels with Mooj  
Part XI: Out of This World Adventures
 
The sun was yet to rise but the sky in the distant east was now beginning to turn bright purple.  Every soul in that rural Oklahoma village was still asleep and unthinkable horrors awaited them.  Never in my life had I been more worried than I was at that moment—I simply had to do something to stop the fake Mooj before he unleashed his unholy terror on that peaceful community.  As we approached several small houses the fake Mooj pointed to the closest one and said:

“We’ll do our killing there—at the house with the new Volvo parked in the driveway!”

He then started walking slowly toward the ill-fated house.  The dog and I followed close behind trying our best to think of something to save the poor family inside.  Finally the dog told me [telepathically]: “Just play along—I have a plan.”  He then started barking, howling and causing a genuine commotion.  The fake Mooj told me to shut the mutt up and so I screamed as loud as I could at the dog.  The plan worked!  Before we knew it porch lights were coming on and men dressed in bathrobes were running outside with their shotguns.

It was obvious to that peaceful law-abiding community that the fake Mooj and I were up to no good.  The dog then told me to tell all these people that we were members of a devil worshiping cult and that had come to town to rape and pillage.  So I did.  Then I asked them to bring their women and valuables outside so that we could begin our dirty work.  The fake Mooj couldn’t believe his ears and told me to pipe down before I got him into trouble.  But I didn’t.  I continued to describe other intended atrocities that we would do until just about every person in the neighborhood had a gun pointing at us and the local sheriff had been called.  Within an hour the fake Mooj, the dog and myself were sitting in the county jail.

The sheriff had no idea what to do with us but since his office was plastered with Mooj wanted posters he called the FBI.  He was told to hold us until someone could come and investigate.  I knew I was a goner once the FBI showed up but I also felt a touch of relief that my horrendous journey to freedom was finally over.  I also reflected on how noble I was to sacrifice my own freedom to save innocent people’s lives (since that really is what being holy and harmonious is all about).  The fake Mooj didn’t seem to share my sentiment; he was furious and told me he was going to fix my ass—but good—once he got free from that jail.  Luckily we were in different cells so he couldn’t hurt me.

The sheriff took a liking to our dog and so he let him sleep on the floor beside his desk.  He even fed the dog some of his breakfast.  After the sheriff finished eating he leaned back in his chair, put his boots up on his desk and lowered his cowboy hat down over his eyes.  Within minutes he was fast asleep and snoring.  My dog friend quickly jumped into action and took the jail keys from the sheriff’s desk and brought them to me.  The fake Mooj yelled at the dog to bring him the keys first but I told him to pipe down or he would wake up the sheriff.  He agreed and sat down and patiently waited his turn while the dog handed me the keys and I unlocked my cell door.  I then told the fake Mooj to sit tight until I could go out and get some heavy-duty weapons so that we could blast our way out of the jail.  He seemed to like that idea and sat back down and quietly watched the dog and I tiptoe from the jail house.  Once outside we used the sheriff’s keys to steal the sheriff’s car and drove straight out of town as fast as we could go.

Within a short time we came to the biggest truck stop we had ever seen.  The dog told me that this was the perfect place to ditch the police car and find another, less obvious, mode of transportation.  The dog and I quickly located a huge unlocked 18-wheeler in the parking lot.  We climbed inside the cab and waited for the driver.  In a short time the driver climbed into the cab and I hit him over the head with my caveman club.  I quickly changed clothes with him and pulled his unconscious body out of the cab and threw it in the trailer.  The big rig had just been fueled so we were quickly west bound, down, loaded up and trucking.

After traveling for about an hour I pulled over and let the poor driver out of the back (he had been pounding on the inside of the trailer for quite a while).  When I opened the trailer the poor fellow was so disoriented that he didn’t seem to care that the dog and I were going to leave him stranded in the middle of nowhere, dressed like a caveman.  We had no time to waste so we just cast him off into the great Oklahoma prairie and hoped he’d find his way back to civilization.

After growing weary of the tedium of interstate travel the dog suggested that we take a more scenic route since we really had nowhere to go or any time to get there.  “A splendid idea,” I replied to the mutt and so we turned off at the very next exit and continued along some old abandoned dirt road.  We both agreed there was no better way to see the great prairie than to actually be driving around in it.

Nothing stimulates conversation better than a scenic drive through a barren wilderness.  Although the dog and I had been traveling together for quite some time this was really the first time the two of us really had a chance to sit and talk.  The poor dog had no idea what his name was but had vague memories of another life, when he was more human than dog.  This former life seemed so recent but yet so far removed (especially now that he was measuring everything in dog years).  He told me sometimes he woke up in his little doghouse and thought that he was a young graduate student engaged in cutting edge brain transplant research.   But then he sadly remembered that he was only a dog and so he went back to sleep after fetching the morning paper for his master.  The longer we talked the more he seemed to piece together his former life.  He then came to the realization that something terrible must have happened to him because he could now visualize an explosion.  A big explosion that took place in a laboratory.  Yes, he now distinctly remembered his last human memory was that of being severely injured while at work in a top secret research facility—a genetic research facility, where he and his professor (a guy that looked surprisingly like his present master) were experimenting with dog brain transplants!  Could his brain have survived that horrible explosion and been transplanted into a dog?  He thought it was possible.  And so did I.  Before long my dog friend began to nod off and was soon fast asleep.

I grew bored without conversation and so I turned on the radio.  The big story that day was that a truck carrying plutonium warheads was hijacked somewhere between Oklahoma City and Amarillo.  According to the news reports roadblocks were now being set up all over Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas.  I reflected to myself that it was a good thing that we got off the main interstate or we’d be stuck in some pretty nasty traffic.  The other big story that day was that the FBI had finally captured “The Mooj.”  Of course I knew that it was the fake Mooj—not the real Mooj.  The fake Mooj's capture would undoubtedly buy me some valuable time and I was bound and determined to get as far away from Oklahoma as possible before [or even if] the FBI realized that they had the wrong Mooj.

As the day wore on we continued along on our our scenic drive up and over the rugged prairie.  Most of the roads were unmarked and so we had no idea where we had been or where we were going.  We saw a “Welcome to Texas” sign and that was followed a few hours later by a “Welcome to New Mexico” sign.  We seemed to be just about as far away from civilization as one could get and still be in America.  The news accounts of the hijacked nuclear warheads continued to flood the airwaves and every hour the situation seemed to become more and more desperate.  A state of emergency had now been declared and there was wide speculation that the stolen nuclear weapons were now in the hands of some evil 3rd world dictator.  Traffic was now stopped in all directions within 500 miles from where the original truck driver [of the hijacked rig] had been found wandering around in a dazed and confused condition dressed like a caveman.  I became concerned and woke the dog up so that he could try and find the truck's logbook just in case we were stopped.  Not knowing what we were hauling would be a sure-fire tip off to someone that we had stolen the truck and we didn’t need that kind of trouble.

Soon we realized that we might be in a bit of trouble.  It had been nearly five hours since we had seen any signs of civilization and it was now dusk and we were almost out of gas.  We found a gravel utility road and turned onto it, hoping that it would lead us to a gas station.  But it didn’t.  We were soon completely out of gas.  The mighty 18-wheeler was now useless to us (other than to provide us with shelter).  And shelter was what we were grateful to have because before long we encountered a severe storm.  The sky turned black in an instant and the wind began to swirl around us like a tornado.  The storm began to affect the truck’s electrical system and soon every light on our dashboard began to flash on and off.  The two of us then sat in utter disbelief as the truck began to lift off the ground and move backwards up into the sky!  We had no idea what was happening until we heard several harmonic tones and saw the bright lights of an alien space ship in our rearview mirror.

“Holy Cow!” I yelled, “we're being abducted by a UFO!”

And that's exactly what happened: we were abducted by a strange UFO.  I remember very little about what happened next.  I recall only that our alien abductors treated us kindly and did not hurt us very much.  They explained early on in the ordeal that they didn’t have enough room on their space ship to take both of us and so they needed to perform some experiments to determine which of us was more intelligent.  All space and time became distorted and what seemed like only a few hours was in reality several days or even weeks.  The only thing I remember clearly was that the alien commander told me that the dog was superior in intelligence than I and so he was selected for the voyage back to their home planet and I was dismissed.  The next thing I knew I was walking down a busy street in Sedona, AZ.

The Gaelic Versifier (by Paddy O' Keats—the Michael Flatley of Gaelic Poetry)
Toigh do chuideachta sula raghair ag ól!

An uair a bhíonn do lámh i mbéal an mhadra tarraing go réidh i
Cibé a théann as nó nach dtéann, ni théann fear na hidirghabhála
(A pint of Guinness, a loaf of rye)
 
Ní easpa go díth carad
Is cuma le fear na mbróg cá leagann sé a chos
(A pot with chickens and potatoes to fry)

Is beag an dealga sheanas sileadh
An té a bhfuil bólacht ar cnoc aige ní bhíonn suaimhneas ar sop aige
(I see Paddy, Seamus and Lady Di)

Bíonn an rath i mbun na ranna
Tús agus deireadh an duine tarringt ar an tine
(So really now, laddy, what was the deal with Frank McCourt's eye?)

Closing Thoughts 

Well that's it.  Nothing more.  I'll see you next week.
 
  

 

 Return to Archives Page
Go to Mooj Poems
Return to Mooj Homepage