Pictured: Giant African Snail (artist's rendering). Do not drink anything you find in this animal's sinuses.

GateHouse — To the best of my memory, I have not been in that many cults.

Yes, I’ve been drinking at the Knights of Columbus a few times. Yes, I apparently joined something during my brief internship in Eric Massa’s office, but I don’t remember anything about it except being chained to a water heater in a basement as part of my “purification.” Also, I spent most of 2007 totally into “The Secret,” which was a giant waste of time because you don’t see Naomi Watts here serving me pina coladas, now do you? Also, it is possible that I joined the Def Leppard Fan Club in 1988 but in my defense at the time I found “Hysteria” devastatingly awesome and they promised to send me a patch I could sew on my jean jacket, but they never did, which is why I hate Def Leppard to this day, that’s right, Joe Elliott, YOU ARE DEAD TO ME. Also, I briefly subscribed to O Magazine and own a Mac. But that’s it. With the cults, I mean.

This is not because of any objection to honoring false gods and icons — I am all for that. It’s more of a time-management situation. Most cults, at least from what I’ve learned from TV shows, are bigger drains on your personal time than having children; there are all these meetings and ceremonies and self-abusive albinos and every week you have to go see Tom Cruise and act all excited — oooooh, it’s Tom Maverick Cruise, 2001 Box Office Superstar, like he’s not here every Tuesday night. And that’s not even counting the expenses  of robes and vestments and hallucinogenic drugs, none of which, incidentally, can be written off, despite what all those quote-fingers professional tax preparers tell you (yeah, thanks again, Aaron).

Yet I do know this: If I were to join a cult, I would want it to be one of those awesome cults, one with snappy matching track suits and the promise of spaceships and some irrevocable invisible superbeing destroying anyone who disagrees with my opinions. I do not think I am a man whose belief structure is easily broken, but I will say that if my cult leader, for instance, told me that my path to eternal salvation lie in the purposeful ingestion of snail mucus, I would absolutely, positively, think about finding a new false idol in an entirely different poorly lit one-bedroom apartment.

.

• Def Leppard – Armageddon It

.

But indeed that is what happened to a cult in Florida, which is a phrase rife with redundancy but we only have room for one comic thesis. According to a particularly delicious story by the AP, “Devotees of a Miami man who claims to practice a traditional African religion say they were sickened when they drank the mucus of a giant African snail.” Really? That made you sick? The slurping down of the golden mucus produced an animal whose name includes the word “giant?”

First, the good news: When I first read this I thought the people had to use a spoon, so the drinking news seemed like a total time-saver. Also, the story says authorities raided Charles L. Stewart’s home after receiving complains about the practice, although it’s unclear as to whether the complaints came from the cult members or the snails. Probably both, now that I think about it, although one imagines the snails’ complaints probably took much longer to arrive.

But the news is all bad for people who enjoy swallowing snail mucus, whether as part of a cult ritual or for the flavor crystals, because it turns out the giant African snail is prohibited in the U.S. without special approval, like Roman Polanski or selling 50 Cent records at Wal-Mart. That is because the snail is apparently a fearsome and devastating predator, although not one that’s terribly difficult to beat in a foot race, and it has been known to grow up to 10 inches long, reproduce on its own (not requiring, one imagines, special approval from the U.S.) and eat plaster, all of which add up to make it both an ecosystem-ravaging disaster and also the most MOST AWESOME SNAIL IN THE WORLD. Seriously, I kind of want to pray to this thing a little bit now. (The snails I encountered growing up didn’t do anything nearly that awesome; they mostly sat there being slimy, and it took them forever to come inside when you took them out to play fetch.)

So, though I am not a terribly religious person and can only legally marry you in New Jersey or Turks and Caicos, I do have this small piece of advice: If your spiritual leader tries to involve you in a shady ritual regarding the things you find in the noses of plaster-eating-snails, you march right out of that repurposed movie theater and you go find your comfort in something more traditional and logical, like eating the body and blood of your resurrected Lord.

To stop those monsters, 1-2-3 / Here's a fresh new way that's trouble-free / It's got Paul Anka's guaranteeeeeee

Island Packet — So they opened a Dunkin’ Donuts in Beaufort. I know they opened a Dunkin’ Donuts in Beaufort because I have been pleading for it, because I have bothered the business reporter about it for months with the fierce relentlessness of the tiger, because I lived for a short while at the work site, having built a lean-to out of whatever discarded items I could scrounge up — tires, playground equipment, THANK YOU VERIZON FOR YOUR ROCK-SOLID SPONSORSHIP signs —  and waited patiently, living there for months, like the “Into The Wild” guy except less in search of pure personal revelation and more of things filled with jelly that leave your face a swamp of icing.

I did this not necessarily just for the donuts, but also for the majestic moment when I could walk through that door, into that breathtaking wonderland of dough and sprinkles and future heart concerns, and order a Large Coffee With Cream And Sugar, which represents the pinnacle of human achievement as it pertains to coffee and, as a bonus, arrives in a cup the approximate size of a container ship (with a Large Coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, one could, very easily, caffeinate a horse).

Now, I understand that some of you may be wondering what could possibly be worth getting this worked up about, but you are wondering this only if you’re the type for whom coffee is a fleeting pleasure, rather than something required by your addicted, shattered DNA if you hope to consider getting out of the bed in the morning. If this is the case, we have little in common.

.

• Ella Fitzgerald – Black Coffee

.

Anyway, you can imagine my wonder at how, for years, there had no been available Dunkin’ Donuts in our entire coastal region. None. Zero. Sure, we have 300 Wendy’s restaurants, a multitude of CVS pharmacies helpfully situated every 24 feet along the big roads, a major national golf tournament, an international film festival, two separate IHOPs, one giant empty proto-development, two inexplicable guard towers standing sentry before a giant empty proto-development and even a 3-D theater now, but no place to snag cheap donuts on a Sunday morning.

Being from the Midwest, I find this sort of omission inexplicable. To give you some illustration of the raucous, thrill-a-minute state of my mid-1990s social situation, friends and I would often drive 20 miles to neighboring Valparaiso, Ind., to obtain donuts and cigarettes in both mornings and evenings and lament the raucous, thrill-a-minute state of our social situation. Do you know how summer seems in Springsteen’s “4th Of July Asbury Park (Sandy),” all shot through with the idealistic nostalgia of teenage summer love? OK, imagine that, but take out the boardwalk, the sea, the waves, the girls and the shimmering sense of a world of discovery and replace it with a highway full of strip malls and furniture shops, a couple of dubbed Tesla cassettes and it’s basically like looking in a mirror. (Anyway, to this day I’ll plan my trips home to Indiana entirely around donut locations. If you are related to me and wondering why I never visit, it is because your house is not situated close enough to a Dunkin’ Donuts. See if you can’t fix that before the holidays, Grandma.)

.

RELATED, SORT OF

• Coffee makes you immortal, or Last Night A Decaf Saved My Life

.

So when the news broke that Dunkin’ had opened in Beaufort — announced, if I remember correctly, by Gazette reporter Juliann Vachon, who brought in a box of Munchkins for the newsroom and barely survived the ensuing riot, which grew so chaotic that I’m pretty sure I accidentally ate a reporter’s notebook — there was great joy, and by “joy” I mean “three hours of happy crying on the floor next to my desk.” I have spent most of my days since trying to invent reasons why I would need to be in Beaufort daily to obtain a large coffee and a chocolate frosted (“I told you, I’m doing a daily video diary with Pat Conroy and HE’S WAITING FOR ME”) but have so far failed. So if someone out there could please call daily with,  I don’t know, concert announcements, I’ll buy you a coffee.

Despite his prominent placement on this cover, DMC, sadly, appears on this record approximately as much as I do

PopDose — Let it first be proclaimed that talking the smack about Run-DMC pains me on a very deep and contemplative level; it feels much like punching my grandfather, or making fun of my son’s hair when he stumbles up in the morning (to be fair, though, he looks totally drunk, and it’s kind of hilarious).

But Raising Hell was the first real cassette I ever high-speed dubbed (though I made sure to awkwardly snip out the super-bad words), and my entry into not only hip-hop but the greater world in general, as at the time I was living in a one-stoplight whistle-stop called Upland, Ind., where it was generally accepted that the music world basically began and ended with Amy Grant. My devotion lasted through for years, too, through Tougher Than Leather, through Down with the King, and through the first seven seconds of Crown Royal, which immediately thereafter turned into a pretty shocking platter of comprehensive suck.

The complete deconstruction is over at PopDose.

Pictured: The Apple iPad, due April 3 (drives sold separately)

GateHouse — Well, as usual, my attempt to avoid coveting a sleek and impractical object produced by the nerd-leprechauns at Apple has lasted until the exact moment they showed a commercial for it on the TV. Thanks, Oscars, not only did you throw my spring budget into chaos with your deliciously tempting ad for an electronic device I couldn’t possibly need but would give me something do with my other hand while I’m futzing with the iPod during the commute, but also you gave Best Costume Design to “The Young Victoria?” Um, did I miss the part where you all became gravy-brained goat-people? Because the costume designs in “The Young Victoria” are a HUMILIATING JOKE WHEN COMPARED TO THE SHATTERING GRANDIOSITY OF THE COSTUME DESIGN OF “COCO BEFORE CHANEL.” This is why real America hates the Hollywood elite; go back to British Columbia and take your Neil Patrick Harris with you, appeasers.

Anyway, I was talking about Apple (for the purposes of finishing this piece I’m turning the Oscar broadcast off before they announce Best Documentary Short because if it isn’t “Music By Prudence” I am going to smash all the windows at the mall). We have all Apple products here at the house, for two very simple reasons:

1. We deeply enjoy feelings of smug superiority.
2. They work. Knock on wood, but in four years we haven’t had one notable thing go wrong with either, which, given the amount of illegal music and international pornography I download, is a miracle on par with that time I found the Virgin Mary’s profile in my yogurt swirls. And I really mean this, I’m not just saying it so Apple sees me on their Google Alerts and decides hey we should send this guy some free gear or something just for being so nice and complimentary to us and besides Apple Apple Apple Apple.

.

• Guns N’ Roses – Bad Apples

.

Pictured: My late '90s-vintage Micron PC, which ran Windows 98 until it one day burst spontaneously into flame

Now, contrast this with the eventual fate of my previous PCs, one of which was invaded by a virus so nefarious that it required a nerd friend of very specific talents to pull some crazy coding magick; I don’t think I ever saw his hands move, even when he opened a bag of Funions and a two-liter of Dr. Pepper with the same finger. Come to find out I had been infected by schpilkis in my home directory, which meant terrible things for the rootkit, caused an itchy rash in my defragmentation sector and, it goes without saying, permanently inflamed my mobile uplink frog exaggerator interocitor. Also the drive where you put in the floppy disks was producing its own oatmeal, which was something, incidentally, that the Customer Service people were completely helpless about.

That was then, this is now: About a month ago I attempted to accomplish the insanely convoluted task of moving pictures around a friend’s PC using the new Windows Laserbrain or whatever; the process was akin to waking up on a plane that has just landed in Bangladesh and being told that you had 25 minutes to board a second flight to a very specific portion of Nepal, were not allowed to use your mouth and were also exceedingly drunk (way drunk, like women’s hockey team drunk). The process proved literally so hair-pullingly frustrating that though not a religious person, I found myself praying fervently for some sort of horrific virus to infect the snot out of the offending computer, which, of course, took approximately eight seconds.

Anyway, my point to all this is: I like Macs. So now I am compelled to like the hilariously named iPad, which is basically an iPhone that has been flattened and which will be soon owned and proudly displayed by the biggest douchebags at your departure gate. The iPad has no practical purpose — unlike, say, the iPod, which finally allowed me to have 1500 Springsteen songs available at any time for me to drive away friends with — but in this context “practical purpose” is for jerk-losers, as the iPad is shiny and glistens in the sun and you can watch “Star Trek” on it and I WANTS IT.

Please note that I am speaking from experience here. The same shame spiral happened with my iPhone, which receives actual calls and is partially a lightsaber but which I am using mostly as a mobile device for playing Scrabble games with friends and one wife, both of whom are DESTROYING ME, mostly because iPhone Scrabble allows words which are ENTIRELY FICTIONAL, like “tare” (not a word), “liri” (fully not a word), “ods” (not a word even in scrambly Eastern European languages), “ana” (part of a word, but not a word), “tain” (would be a word if we were playing Scrabble: Medieval Poets Edition, which we are not) and “k i,” which my auto-spell corrector WILL NOT EVEN LET ME TYPE RIGHT NOW. So basically what I have is a $200 device for getting irrationally angry at distant board-game nemeses, AND NOW I WANT THE SAME OBJECT IN LARGER DIMENSIONS. I don’t think I’ve ever odsed my liri this much.

Do not let his blank-eyed smile and raised thumb fool you, this is a fiendish mousedemon

GateHouse – Due to the dark and vengeful nature of karma, I spent the better part of the weekend ensnared in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant.

It was a birthday celebration for a small and alarmingly adorable 5-year-old who I hope will one day have children of his own, so he can know exactly what it’s like to spend part of your weekend ensnared in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. Take it from Uncle Jeff, Junior: You’ll learn. One day, a day in the distant, misty future, you will learn.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been inside Chuck E. Cheese on a weekend afternoon, but it resembles what I imagine life is like if you are an atom: small people and fragile items bounding about with no clear direction or goal, but all crazed and all violent and all carrying juice. (OK, I don’t know if atoms actually transport juice, as I missed that day in Advanced Chem.)

They move simply to move; exist for the sake of existing, stop only when it becomes apparent that I’m walking DIRECTLY BEHIND A GROUP OF THEM, and then they slam on their brakes to ensure that I have to instantly readjust, which at my age is the sort of thing that can result in the disfigurement of a knee.

.

• Buckner and Garcia – Pac-Man Fever

.

So parents take these kids, and they cram them into a finite space that’s filled with whelping buzzes and screaming and video games about guns and dinosaurs, features a robot gorilla who sings “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” and subscribes to harsh anti-liquor laws for some reason and then — THEN — they corral the kids together and bestow upon them CAKE, which is made out of SUGAR, which makes children SHOOT FLAMES OUT OF THEIR EARS while they abandon whatever wafer-thin interest they ever had in your paternal authority.

I should, at this point, mention two things.

First, I actually had a fine time at this birthday party, mostly because it entertained my own son, which is something I can apparently no longer accomplish myself (“No Daddy, can you go in the other room?” he now asks up to 60 times a day).

But also, and I don’t want to gloat here, I unleashed the single best game of Ms. Pac-Man I ever played in my life.

When you’re a very small Ms. Pac-Man player, of course, you consider yourself lucky to get to the first movie-scene Interlude, where, as the game tells you with sweaty, barely containable anticipation, They Meet. (“They,” of course, meaning Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, in case you were worried that she was out hooking up with Q-Bert or something).

But at Chuck E. Cheese, I humbly submit that I rocked Ms. Pac-Man’s face off. I cleared boards with an awe-inspiring majesty. I gobbled pills like a right-wing radio talk show host. I got to boards I’ve never seen before, including one with a banana on it. A banana!

If I was 8 years old, I would have been more or less feeling like George Clooney; as it was I felt more like the 34-year-old that wouldn’t let the other children play Ms. Pac-Man and kind of ruined their birthday party. (And no, I didn’t realize they still had Ms. Pac-Man at arcades either; it was tucked away in the corner, lonely and abandoned, like Leno).

OK, second Thing (boy, that was a long Thing): I have nothing against the Chuck E. Cheese international empire, video arcades, skeeball, Mr. Cheese or even Munch’s Make Believe Band, an aging but not ineffective animatronic outfit that performs something like 70 shows a day and sounds not entirely displeasing, although I found their version of “Takin’ Care of Business” a little lacking in the rock department (I was much more impressed with their full-album performance of Slayer’s “Reign in Blood”).

I also understand perfectly well that children enjoy things that I might not, and that some of those things may include running around a dangerously overpopulated fun-tank that smells like afterthought-pizza in a mad, apoplectic pursuit of tokens, tickets and skeeball time. I would just like Mr. Cheese to know that though I’m not telling him how to take care of his business, it might not hurt to install, somewhere hidden but discoverable, a running fountain of whiskey.

Pictured: Possibly the most Canadian thing you will ever see in your life. (AP)

GateHouse — Canada scores, and my 6-year-old bursts into tears. “It’s not fair,” he burbles, bawling mucously into his sleeve and uncorking a surprisingly poignant reaction to a meaningful, history-rich sport that, until about 45 minutes prior, he had no idea existed whatsoever. (Also he had spent the previous 43 minutes watching roller coasters on the computer. Still, teachable moment.) Currently I am trying to guide him through this bruising early lesson about defeat and sportsmanship by letting him play iPhone bowling, which I am planning to use to help him navigate all of life’s disappointments for as many years as I can.

(Moments later, he announces, during the medal ceremony, “I wish we lived in Canada,” offering evidence that I am responding to history’s greatest running tribute to human achievement and cross-cultural fraternity by raising a son who will abandon his citizenship at the first sign of athletic disappointment, although in this instance it might also have something to do with the victor nation’s advances in the field of bacon. Still, if you have any advice on how to install sportsmanship into a kindergartner, e-mail me fast, because this kid breaks down after Battleship and I am petrified of what awaits us in public come soccer season.)

Other scribbles from the broadcast of an excellent Olympics, which I’m sad to see come to a close, except that we as Americans can now resume ignoring NBC entirely, although you would think if you were launching a show as awesome as “The Marriage Ref” you’d at least try to advertise it once in a while. (Readers, did I miss some sort of Jerry Seinfeld “I blew all my money MC Hammer-style” story? Was there some sort of tax fiasco, or extra children someplace? What is he doing there?)

.

• TV On The Radio – Crying

• “Weird Al” Yankovic – Canadian Idiot

.

• While we’re making fun of NBC: It is important, while showcasing the world’s most skilled and dedicated athletes, to also cram in several million ads for a contest in which a humiliatingly obese future cardiac patient rhythmically jiggles his pudding belly in a heartbreaking attempt to free a tennis ball from a Kleenex box and subsequently be famous. Seriously, right after the Olympics, it’s “Fat Guy Tennis Ball: The Game Show.” There’s no joke here. That’s the actual name. It’s like a two-week exhibition of peak physical performance being sponsored by McDonald’s or something.
• Well, it could be worse, at least NBC wasn’t dumb enough to bring Jay Leno back or anything. (Leno’s A-list comeback stars are the “Jersey Shore” rodents, Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Palin? Well, now it makes sense, what you were missing so much, Middle America.)
• Morgan Freeman represents the pinnacle of human speech patterns; basically everyone on the planet falls between that guy and Bobby Jindal, and I can prove it, with science. I find myself reading things in my head in Morgan Freeman’s voice. This morning he did the instructions to the coffee maker, and he COMPLETELY KILLED IT.
• Not much more needs to be said about the consistently awesome performances of our valuable television news reporters, but two female skiers can be good at the same Olympics without your relentlessly badgering each of them in the giddy hope that one will make an out-of-context sound bite that you can use to play up a fictitious blood-rivalry. You have also used up your allotment of sports cliches until the year 3050. If anyone else says the hockey game was a “nail-biter,” “one for the ages,” or “a game to be remembered,” I will beat you with a figure skater.
• YOU SUCK, RUSSIA.
• Is there some reason we’re paying tribute to the world’s finest athletes by offering downloads from the world’s six worst bands? No one had an e-mail address for anyone livelier than 3 Doors Down? Were you guys using Leno’s address book?
• “From the nation that gave us Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, here are Bryan Adams and Avril Lavigne.”
• Thanks to the nail-biting final rounds of the tournament for the ages to be remembered, I watched more hockey in the last 72 hours than in the past 34 years combined, and no I’m not going to start watching the NHL now, and neither is anyone, stop asking me on Facebook. But that said, to my brothers from the Slovak team, you have much to be proud of, and if you could send me a Satan jersey I would be forever grateful. To Finland, wherever you are, you got lucky, and if I knew anything about your nation I would make a small and petty joke here. And finally, to the Canadian team, run right now and thank the U.S. team because because the Slovaks would have destroyed y’all, I’m just saying, I’m a sore loser too, see you in 2014.

Pictured: Babe, age 54

Island Packet — We have had, it can be argued by most good people, a fairly colorful few months here in the swamps of Carolina. Our governor vanished for a week, another guy lost track of his Red Bull allowance and yelled something at President Kenya O’Islam on the TV, another dude and his grandma called poor people farm animals and then whined about being made fun of, some hilarious representative person introduced pointless nuisance legislation about banning paper money to make a point about small government and it’s still legal to marry your first cousin. There is also a story about a horse my editor won’t let me write about.

But even these many terrible people are mere hors d’oeuvres when compared with the greatest problem facing residents of South Carolina, which is that we are all going to be eaten and probably killed by feral wild pigs, which are running wild throughout the state and cannot be stopped at all, by anything, except maybe feral wild dragons, and I’m pretty sure we exported most of those already.

Indeed, according to a story right here in the Newspaper written by my cubicle-mate, Patrick Donohue, who spent all of Feral Pig Infestation Reporting Day growing increasingly unhinged by panic, “There may be no slowing the state’s booming wild hog population, experts say.” Moreover, it turns out our state is home to the nation’s sixth-largest population of wild hogs. (It is also home to the nation’s fourth-largest collection of owners of the DVD of “Wild Hogs,” which is equally troubling.)

.

• Bessie Smith – Gimme A Pigfoot

.

Many of the pigs, Donohue reported, and at this point during the afternoon he was sweating and repeatedly making sure all the doors in the buildings were locked, are hybrids of domestic pigs and Eurasian wild boars released by hunters in the early 1900s. All told, officials estimate there are somewhere between 90,000 and 280,000 hogs running wild throughout South Carolina, and I slept through most of my math classes but that seems to be a wildly imprecise figure; apparently we as a people cannot make a pig count with a margin of error less than 200,000. I, myself, would very much like a recount.

Yet a more official figure does not seem forthcoming. “We don’t have a good handle on the actual population,” said Jack Mayer, a feral-swine expert at the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken and a man who is a feral-swine expert so you don’t have to be. “We say that there are 2 to 6 million wild hogs nationally. That’s a pretty big spread. The truth is that we don’t really know how many of them there are.”

.

RELATED, SORT OF

• GET YOUR GOVERNMENT HANDS OFF MY GOVERNMENT-OVERTHROWING SEIZING ASSEMBLY

.

This whole shebang is troubling because the hogs carry disease, eat “pretty much anything” and tear up golf courses, which is like the vermin trifecta around here. But wait, there’s more good news, according to Donohue, who obtained this quote while sobbing quietly into his tie: “Feral swine have a very high reproductive rate and are very hearty animals. Controlling an animal like that is very difficult,” said Joseph Corn of the Southern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study at the University of Georgia.

See, it’s not like there aren’t people on the hog problem. I for one fully support throwing sackfuls of TARP money at the hog-control people; also let us know if you’d like us to fix up your Toyotas free of charge, because y’all are gonna need an effective escape vehicle when you are being chased by crackpot political people. And horses. And a wild boar.

Paste

.

• Stream “Have One On Me” — all of it, which will require some shuffling about of your day’s calendar — at NPR.

Slovakia's hockey team, pictured here immediately after making Russia look like a bunch of silly kindergarteners.

GateHouse — Ladies and gentlemen, if you are not on it already, it is time to join me on the Slovak Train to Olympic Glory, good seats still available, departing twice daily, choo choo.

There is always room, we are a welcoming if hirsute people and what we offer in warm greetings, a genial nature and gypsy-folk music will easily make up for the smell of much of what we are cooking. (Sorry about that, but you try to prepare dishes containing this volume of sauerkraut and not smell like the sweat-soaked inside of a snowboarders’ boot. Also, my cousin Kevin is going to try to get you to drink something called slivovica, do this only if you wish to spend the rest of your week powering your car with your breath.)

Indeed, I am flush with homeland pride this week because right now, for the first time in recorded Slovak history, which is almost eight years, we are melting faces at the Winter Olympics.

.

• Hockey – Song Away

.

One would think a burgeoning nation like Slovakia would be good at the winter sports anyway because, as even the most novice geography student knows, it’s not like Slovakia is known for its lush beach scene. Not true. For Slovakia is a cold land, a flinty land, a land that my great-grandfather Andras (Slovak for “gruff callous-handed butcher who came to America from Hamburg in steerage on a future World War I battleship so yeah why don’t you make fun, smart guy”), left to come work in the steel mills in pre-Depression America because he realized that such a life would basically be Margaritaville by comparison (and not just because of the mills’ famous sponge cake). Our particular parcel of this hard country is called Cierne Pole, which translates roughly into “black field,” which, I hardly need tell you, is not a place thick with elves and chipmunks. It is gray and foreboding and occasionally characters from “The Road” meander through, according to a combination of facts from Wikipedia and some that I just made up just now, sitting here in a bookstore, drinking a mocha that has whipped cream all over it.

Still, you may be asking, what is it that Slovakia is so good at anyway, and why haven’t I heard Bob Costas and Cris Collinsworth rhapsodizing at great length about Slovakia’s status as the world’s newest athletic superpower?

.

RELATED, SORT OF

• Slovakia 1, U.S. 0! Get used to this flag, World Cup suckas
• It’s the Grammys vs. the polka community, and no one can truly win
• “Hostel Part II”: The good people of Slovakia deserve better than this
  

.

First, Anastazia Kuzmina, ranked just 28th on the World Cup circuit, gave Slovakia its first-ever gold with her win in the women’s 7.5-kilometer biathlon sprint, an inexplicable combination of skiing and violence. How, you might ask, did Kuzmina celebrate such a feat of such national significance? “Now,” Kuzmina said to some other newspaper, because I don’t speak Slovak, “the expectation in Slovakia is that I will get another medal.” YEAH. Because who has time for slivovica when there’s more gold to claim? (Turns out Kuzmina took silver in the 10-km biathlon pursuit last week as well behind Germany’s Magdalena Neuner; shortly after, Slovakia’s Pavol Hurajt took bronze in Sunday’s mens’ biathlon.)

Meanwhile, and this is the crazy part, the Slovaks are killing it in near-shocking fashion in hockey (“SLOVAKIA GOES FROM DARK HORSE TO MEDAL THREAT,” screams a typically lively headline, which I have reprinted in all caps for extra awesomeness). Last week Slovakia throttled Russia, which has many citizens and is known to be decent at hockey, and they followed that up with a 6-0 humiliation of Latvia, about which I know almost nothing except that their beach scene probably sucks, too.

(UPDATE: I wrote this Latvia joke without bothering to fire up the Google Earth, and have been excellently corrected via email by Christina Manetti, Ph. D. at the University of Washington, who reports,”They have a beautiful coast on the Baltic. I’ve been to the beach just on the order, in Lithuania. Pines, clean sand dunes, wonderful air.” Thanks to Dr. Maretti for fact-checking this piece, because it means one of us actually did. She also, while we’re at it, fixed up an incorrect translation of Cierne Pole.)

“I think we are getting more confident and now we are starting to get good,” Slovakia’s Zigmund Palffy told Reuters (I’d use my own quotes, but these guys don’t return my calls, despite my repeatedly claiming to be Mike Vrabel). “We are playing a simple game and our game is getting better. Everything is working.”

See, that is how we do it in Slovakia: no flash, no pomp, no frizzy-haired redheads blasting themselves off the half-pipe, no soul-patched speed-skaters practicing when they’re not rigging up endorsement deals, just hard, gritty, pure performance and a workmanlike approach to occasional victory, the kind that you absorb when you hone your life skills in the Black Field, and the kind that, one day, we will apply to our approach to cooking, we promise.

This has nothing to do with anything, but is awesome.

GateHouse — Because Science is difficult and includes many absurd words and phrases with which I am not familiar, such as “continuum” and “polyphenols” and “mice,” I have a new personal rule in which I only read studies in the news that pertain directly, indisputably to me.

I am not interested in studies about “global warming,” or “people who have scurvy,” or “ways I can personally improve the greater good by changing a few minor, convenient personal habits, such as not driving a Nissan Armada or setting the thermostat lower than 82.” I am a very, very busy person, and Science is a large field that also apparently covers rocks and outer space, and I don’t know who has the time to keep up with all this flip-flopping — eggs are good for you, no they’re bad, and you should drink eight cups of water a day except that you shouldn’t, and you’re not supposed to eat walrus meat when you’re pregnant, etc. etc.

So unless Science can magic me up a helper monkey or something to take care of all this “reading,” I’m gonna just choose which studies to subscribe to (Note to Science: I would also accept a helper walrus, because I am not a picky man, and tusks are neat).

Anyway, shortly after enacting this new set of personal bylaws, I came across a study in the Newspaper — which is the weird, papery thing that will print tomorrow news that you read on the Internet an hour ago — that said that people who drink coffee may, in fact, live longer than those who do not.

This news caused my hands to begin shaking uncontrollably, although I don’t know if that was due to the study or caffeine, because on any given morning I put down enough coffee to kill anyone over the age of 55; enough coffee to, if distilled properly, actually power an oscillating fan; enough coffee that I would basically save tremendous time and effort by just chawing on beans. (Note: I am kidding; chawing on beans tends to make teeth the color and consistency of a saloon barrel, not that I’ve tried or anything).

.

• Bob Marley – One Cup of Coffee

.

Anyway, the study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a title that it’s very difficult to not make a childish joke about, involved two large studies that followed professionals for over two decades. And it found that people who drank at least five to seven cups of coffee a week — around here we call that “the crossword puzzle,” but whatever — had a significantly lower risk of dying from anything compared to those inexplicable freakshows who didn’t drink any at all. Those who drink four to five cups a day had even better protection, although it’s difficult to congratulate them on it, because they’re in the bathroom all the time.

.

RELATED, SORT OF

• My new coffee maker is totally going to score me $100,000
  
• The coffee maker is broken. Many dozens will be killed

.

(It also reported that those who drink decaf, which is utterly pointless but whatever, also enjoyed similar health benefits, indicating that there are greater forces at work in coffee besides the caffeine that is required to start your heart every morning.)

But after reading this story, something occurred to me, something that probably occurred to many of you pathetic caffeine obsessives as well: “My God, if coffee can make you live longer, there is a reasonable chance that I am FIERCE AND IMMORTAL!” and then you danced around for a while trying to shoot lasers out of your eyes and maybe lift up your washing machine, or, you know, whatever you do in your house.

Well, if you do find yourself thinking silly things like “I cannot be killed by conventional means,” here is my advice: Keep doing it, because it’s probably true. And celebrate too, because it is fantastic news, except for that when you become immortal I think you have to become some kind of costumed superhero, and maintain that nonsense about great power and great responsibility and using your powers for good, never evil, blah blah boring boring. Whatever, though. If it’s something that involves plenty of delicious coffee and possibly a cape, I am in for life.