Disruption Man was arrested peacefully at his home last Sunday, after what officials say was a 3 year investigation into allegations of fiscal misconduct and fucking over the working classes.

White collar crime is not real crime, argued Disruption Man's lawyer in court, but the socialists and anarchists presiding over the case disagreed.

Over the course of 3 years, less than 4,000 slack ass whiners and complainers, who had been putting food on their tables for years thanks to this generous man, were laid off while Disruption Man saw a measly 6,000% salary increase and paid negative personal and corporate income taxes, barely able to keep up with his executive peers who now have bigger spaceships and football teams than he does, thanks to the ungrateful socialists of this hard-hearted little town.

A rally and march in support of Disruption Man and the awesome Products he has given to this world out of the benevolence of his golden little heart, like the kind of benevolences that were given to the kakistocrat Edward IV, but modernised to benevolently benefit all of us, will be held on Wednesday outside the hospital at the ambulance entrance, to give the sick a chance to pay their wheezing dying respects to the suffering mogul.

A tin will be passed around at the rally to raise money for Disruption Man's legal fees and team of elite personal fluffers.

Disruption Man has been sentenced to 2 agonising hours of community service, serving a community that has never served him, as he singlehandedly built up his own empire from sweat and good business sense and knowing when to insert the blade to the hilt, and when to twist.

The worst crime this town has ever known, peeping through people's windows at poets working on their craft, has finally ended.

The Poetry Peepers, a black couple, were arrested Tuesday evening, while they were stationed outside the window of a newspaper building where the CEO was apparently scribbling stanzas. One of the Poetry Peepers, a scary looking black man, was shot repeatedly in the back of the head before he finally submitted to arrest.

This dark chapter in the history of humanity was brought to its ultimate, just conclusion Friday afternoon as Judge Clarence Emsworth sentenced the Poetry Peepers to 4 million years in solitary confinement.

Volent crime has been rising steadily in Fork in the Road for decades now.

This week, with the arrest of Disruption Man, the benevolent crime rate has plummeted.

With the arrest of the Poetry Peepers, the rate of anavolent crime continues to be a flat line with no squiggles.

Everyone look over your shoulder and stay in the suburbs, where there is no volent crime. The dowmtown bugbears, lurking in dark alleys with their glistening eyes and slurred words and the movies they remind you of, in a rare moment of imaginative inspiration, are coming for you.

Photos of kittens with their whiskers clipped and rings piercing their tails have flooded the internet.

In Didntweequiptheirarmyabad, ruled by Islam Terrorizing the Corporate Hegemony, the terrible law of Ijtihad has been declared.

For over two decades, the nation was ruled under Taqlid law. We sold them all kinds of neat plastic stuff, and bought their oil.

But now, all that has changed, as can be seen by all these photos on the internet of cats with rings through their tails.

Ijtihad is against everything we stand for. It is against our culture. It is against our beliefs. It is against our predatory economic policies. It is against cute, fluffy little kittens.

Think of all the plaintive mewing coming from that benighted town! Evil now rules Didntweequiptheirarmyabad.

Didntweequiptheirarmyabad was liberated from its previous generation of occupiers by Fork in the Road missiles of peace in 1995, and this is how the sanddiggers repay us.

We must Do Something. Doing Something is always better than standing by and letting well enough alone. Moral outrage requires action, even if if there is no sensible course of action to take. Fuck it, let's bomb them as usual, those pussy-mutilating bastards. We might as well be united in our hatred of Didntweequiptheirarmyabad since we sure as fuck can't agree on anything to fix our own problems here at home.

(Once the bombs start dropping you'll go back on your views and demand peace. But what the hell did you think would come of spreading fear and hatred of this city? Remember the cute kittens. Be strong and steadfast and stick to your moral outrage. It is the most effective tool you have in your arsenal of justifications for western brutality.)

After discovering how awful the swill from Zitzengunsten really is, Fitrians have set up their own stills and begun making gin in their bathtubs and exporting it to Zitzengunsten.

"Zitzengunsten really has no drinkable alcohol," said Bessie Starkman before she was gunned down in her garage, right before her husband's eyes, and promptly forgotten. "We are their only hope."

Prohibition took effect in Fork in the Road 2 weeks ago. Nobody remembers exactly why. Something about bug spray.

"Unemployment has hit 13%," sai Slurpee Gupta, an early investor in the rum running sub-industry, from the office of her quaint little newspaper. "Our food supply chains are held together by broken links. Everyone and their dog and their government is mired in debt. Private industry has set aside no reserves. The crisis we all thought started 6 weeks ago hasn't even started. In this kind of environment, the rule of law means nothing to anyone. Anarchy is the only means of survival."

Donut Disturb, on Strip Mall Avenue, has transformed its image from a chain of really awful cafes, owned by a sports star nobody remembers, into a speakeasy.

"If you want a beer," explained drive-through attendant Punky GenXer, "All you have to do is ask for an extra hot vanilla soy non-fat vegan non-GMO caramel cinnamon pumpkin lactiatto with chocolate sprinkles on top, and I'll pour you a musky stout instead because I have no idea what planet's language you're speaking."

The rum runners have raised tensions between Fork in the Road and Zitzengunsten, where Anhorthpith-Buth, the region's leading advertiser of scantily clad women and men watching football, complained to the Intercity Free Trade Board that competition is unfair.

The Zitzengunsten Coast Guard, meanwhile, shelled the Fork in the Road liquor boat I'm Alone, sinking it and widowing the spouse of one crew member.

Meanwhile, Stella Carroll, whose seedy empire runs the gamut from brothels to nudie magazines, stumped into Donut Disturb on her wooden leg, with Mayor S. Perkele in tow by his necktie.

Mayor Perkele cleared his throat and loosened his collar. "Hrrrmmm, hooom, ah, yes. Errrrm. Look, Ms. Carroll, liquor and loose women are bad."

"Do shut up, Saatana," said Ms. Carroll, thumping him on the behind with her wooden leg. "Get me a pint, I'm parched."

"Double mastectomiatto coconut whip frapvioloncello," Mayor Perkele corrected.

"Stop your doublespeak and do as I say."

"One of City Hall's industry partners," Mayor Perkele explained, before lining up on foot at the drive-through window to order.

The Fork in the Road Stock Exchange, Fork in the Road Securities Exchange and New Exchange Exchange all plummeted again this past Wednesday.

The Fork in the Road Cabbage Index was hit hardest, with the price of cabbage falling 90 points in 24 hours.

"People just want to get rid of cabbage," said Belinda McIncltd, economist at Pyramid Bank. "It's unprecedented. We need the Mayor to step in and lower interest rates and taxes while we weather this completely unpredictable storm."

Claudette Monet-Grüber, the Reader in Economics at Fork in the Road Private Academy, disagreed. "The government should stay out of the private market," Monet-Grüber said. "That's what they did in the Forgotten Depression of 1920 -- just let it pass, let the economy sink and companies fold. The Forgotten Depression passed quickly and led to years of booming prosperity and good times."

Mrs. McIncltd retorted: "Look how well that turned out, 9 years later!"

"Better than intervening to prop up a bogus economy built by poorly run corporations!" cried Ms. Monet-Grüber.

While the ladies proceeded to sneer at each other then tear at each other's hair and eyeballs, Punky GenXer, who was waiting for the brawl to end before setting down two super fat low sodium nycterine ramalamadingdong fructimezzilattes on the table, said that this spectacle occurred frequently.

"It happens all the time," he said. "Two impotent, stupid people with differing ideologies about how to make sure the economic lines keep pointing up all the time squabble and light fire to each other while history drives over their models and intellectual trash heap philosophies with an 18-wheeler."

Wednesday marks the fourth day of the week called "Black", after last Tuesday's and Thursday's crashes. Fork in the Road Tire has already started mailing out flyers declaring "Black Wednesday in July."

Mental health experts worried about the toll that this latest crash would exact from investors and fund bankers. Unconfirmed witness reports claim that droves of computer algorithms were seen jumping out of office buildings.

"When you're programmed to execute 1,000 transactions per second, and you still can't keep up, you might as well just join the queue to die," explained Bob McIncltd, who dabbles in the cabbage market, while his wife's vagina exploded into flames and she ran down the street screaming "I've got scabies! Save me! Save me!"

Mr. McInclt rolled his eyes, burped his baby bottle of Coke [tm], and leaned closer to say, in a conspiratorial whisper, "Buy red cabbage." He then winked and asked for his fructimezzilattes in a to-go cup in a paper bag.

Health Fork in the Road has set up emergency clinics to help distressed computer algorithms deal with anxiety, depression and null pointers.

All over Fork in the Road, a strange new breed of art has been popping up: Vandal Art.

"It's art created by people who don't think beauty follows boring, rigid prescriptions or bylaws," explained Mary Piddle, an independent fashion designer. "It's art by people who believe that freedom is beautiful, and beauty should be free."

Large canvases and statues have been appearing all over town, mounted to ugly grey buildings and blotting out "Private Property" and "No Tresspassing" signs and gaudy billboard advertisements.

"If you think this town is ugly," continued Mrs. Piddle, "then the Vandal Art motto is: get off your arse and do something about it."

While protesters continued to argue over whether the statue of Fufel outside City Hall should be destroyed, moved to a dark corner in the basement of City Hall, or placed in a storage container out in the suburbs, someone came along in the middle of the night and built another statue along side of it.

"It represents a new perspective on Fufel," explained Mrs. Piddle. "It's still a statue with a complex history. But now some of that complexity has been added to the beauty of the art, instead of tearing down every artwork in the city to turn our town into a barren wasteland of container ships, strip malls, abandoned dopamine refineries, and navy shipyards."

...Continued at the top of the next column...

...Continued from the previous column...

Controversy over the statue of Fufel erupted last summer when it was revealed that the eponymous fisherman from Fork in the Road's dark history had put a price on fishheads.

"Fishheads are a cultural tradition to my people," said Chief Bob Jones, owner of Teepee Video Lottery Terminals. "You can't put a price on fishheads. Tear the statue down!"

"But it's art!" cried Mrs. Piddle. "We need art. We need beauty. We need to talk and tell stories and not always tear down the ugly parts of our past, because it leaves us with only the ugly in our present."

"What we need," argued Chief Bob Jones, "Is a video lottery terminal in front of City Hall."

In his quest to attract Berkeley Cardinals to Fork in the Road, award-winning mathematician Ubertink Dweebat has built a tower out of very thin, fragile glass that now extends up past the exosphere.

"It's an elegant structure," Mr. Dweebat said. "A very true mathematical structure."

Air traffic control at the Intercity International Airport in neighbouring Zitzengunsten has threatened to bomb Mr. Dweebat back to the Stone Age if he doesn't take down his tower.

"It's lowering my property taxes," complained Mr. Dweebat's neighbour, Ahmooda Bahleefir.

Mr. Dweebat said that if he could just get one Berkeley cardinal to appear, everyone would realize that it's all been worthwhile.

Mr. Dweebat's current research project is calculating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

Biologicians fascinated by the sock-eating parasite mediis soccus comedenti have created a new strain of critters, using only CRISPR, 3D printers, and vomit-flavoured sports gel, that reliably eats only left-handed gloves.

A Big Pharma [tm] spokesperson said nobody knows why the parasite only eats left-handed gloves. "We just put left and right gloves in our pockets, and the left ones disappear."

Big Pharma [tm] hopes that the left-glove-eating monster will be released into this city sometime next week, causing a shortage of left-handed gloves, a surge in consumerism, and paving the way to a return to normalcy.

Despite what Ursula K. Le Guin said, naming things does not give us power over them. It gives them power over us.

Last week, Zing Dweebat, a PhD. student in Chemistry and Ultimate Frisbee at the University of Zitzengunsten, discovered the nomen molecule that controls our muscle movements, while trying to determine how to get people to crave dopamine more.

Ms. Dweebat published her "Effects of the Nomen Molecule on the Neuro-Muscular-Intellectual Cavity" in Nude Scientist last week, Stella Carroll's news and naked nerds journal.

"The nomen molecule," Ms. Dweebat's paper explains, "causes the rapid expansion and contraction of the 'Oh that must be what I have!' hemisphere of the brain. The brain then fills its empty space with imagined ailments and induces a flow of 'I must buy a special drug made by Big Pharma [tm] to cure what ails me' stimuli to the monetary gland."

Ms. Dweebat went on to explain that pediatricians also rely heavily on the nomen molecule. "Whenever a new article is published in Big Pharma Free Trips for You and Your Family to the Caribbean Monthly [tm], we see an uptick in the number of nomen molecules scooting around a physician's brain."

"The physician is impelled by these nomen molecules to lobby the public health authority to legalize whatever toxin was advertised this month, and then to prescribe tons of it to their neurotic patients, whose only imaginative feats since they were children have been finding justifications for why they are afflicted with newly named maladies."

Scientists and Big Pharma [tm] paid Ms. Dweebat an undisclosed amount of money for the data behind her research and a photo of her behind, which will appear in next month's Nude Scientist.

"We believe this will stimulate an ejaculation of new pharmaceuticals," an industry spokesperson said.

A new newspaper has set up operations in Fork in the Road, right across the street from The Nihilist Weekly.

The Daily Anarchist declares itself to be "Against the rules and the ruling class."

Aw, isn't that cute.

We reached CEO Slurpee Gupta for comment: "Our goal is to disrupt the newspaper industry. Nobody has ever done that before."

...Continued at the top of the next column...

...Continued from the previous column...

Editor-in-chief Andy Stablusman added, from outside his home in Fork in the Road Park, a fort made of Gravol bottles and 30 packs of toilet paper: "You know, I was one of the founding editors of The Nihilist Weekly. When we started that newspaper, we were all young, and we believed in nothing. But as time went by, the newspaper changed. It began to be about believing in things."

Mr. Stablusman is just bitter because he was fired from The Nihilist Weekly for his exposé on Big Pharma [tm], "The Status Quo: Is It Really As Good As It's Cracked Up To Be?", and for poking his nose into allegations of sexual misconduct among the executives of The Nihilist Weekly.

"We're going to disrupt not just the newspaper industry," Mr. Stablusman continued, "But everything. We are going to topple the powers that be and bring about a level playing field, a world built on merit rather than stagnation and inheritance. The disruption starts now!"

In a stunning revelation by Erogan Stink Software Lab this week, technologists showed that, contrary to longstanding theories, complexity does not induce glazed-over eyes and feelings of helplessness. Quite the contrary: stupidity and illiteracy lead straight to complexity.

...Continued at the top of the next column...

...Continued from the previous column...

Computer scientists at the Software Lab demonstrated the growth of complexity over a period of several decades by setting the Laziness factory L(f) to 7 and the retardation rate r to 0.9 and left the simulation model to run while they logged into World of Orcs MMPORPG and competed for top rankings in the Dwarf Slayer and Elven Massacre Badge categories.

"We now know," the press release from Erogan Stink Software Lab stated, "That the reason the world we live in is so specialized and needlessly complicated, to the point that we can't even converse with each other about what we do for work each day, is that we are stupider than any previous generation of the human race, and incapable of thinking clear, coherent, simple thoughts."

The pamphlet went on to say that this gives computer scientists hope for the future of artificial intelligence, which has long been plagued by the problem that it is so incedibly simple that it is too stupid to figure out how to drive a car without killing someone.

"If we just make artificial intelligence really, really complex," the press release predicted, "To the point that we don't understand what it does or why, then it will have achieved the same level of stupidity that we humans have attained, and we can call it a success and go play online video games."

The Software Lab is now working on a replacement to the Turing Test, which involves questions like: "What do you do for a living?" The computer scientists are hoping that artificial intelligence's answers will soon be as baffling as those of living human beings.

This will be my last column, as I am going to join the new Daily Anarchist and start my career there with in-depth reviews of the best smuggling apps on the market.

I was walking along the boardwalk the other day, slurping ocean bacon out through a squeeze tube, listening to the terns and the sibilant shushing of the sea, when it occurred to me: why am I out here? It's dirty and gross and I have shows to catch up on. Why live when I could get back to the gradual hopeless germ-free demise that cool people everywhere aspire to?

You see, dear reader, life is a choice between being inconsequential and bland or being inconsequential and hated by everyone. So why rock the boat?

It's already sinking anyway. Everybody knows that the captain lied. Suppress the urge to stand up. Go down with dignity, you castaway seamen, you. Spill your impotent spunk into the ocean quietly, and listen to the peaceful soundtrack as the shushing waves lap against the sandy shore, available at www.tunazon.forkintheroad.ca for $9.99 plus shipping (free shipping for those who subscribe to Tunazon Prone).

What a beautiful soundtrack. It's almost like going outside and listening to nature, except there's less bacteria and bird shit.

Did you know that 800 million viruses invade every square metre of the troposphere every day?

Stay inside, open that oversized box from Tunazon, and die silently in your bitter hopeless solitude. Even if nobody loves you, at least someone is getting rich off the rubbish you pour incessantly into the great gaping hole in your black empty heart. What a glorious accomplishment! Such an aspiration! To die lonely but surrounded by stuff.

...Continued at the top of the next column...

...Continued from the previous column...

Your friends and loved ones, if you only had any, would be envious of your stash. And since you're a good little consumer and you'll never stick a finger up anyone's nose, nobody will ever get in a fight over you. You'll die inconsequential and forgotten and cared for only by the steady stream of thank-you-for-your-order emails that have been your closest friends for all of your adult life.

Would you like to have a real friend? A creative one? No, you would not. Real affection, real friends, are messy. They hurt. You want to be cool, right? You certanily don't want blood and shit all over that nice new chrome whatever the fuck it is you just unwrapped, do you? Friends are for ugly people.

Hope is what you piss away, day after day; and imagination is the handle that flushes it, once and for all, down the drain. So don't use your mind, don't expend your creative energies. Stand there, watching the swirl in the bowland wondering why you let it out of you in the first place.

If you want hope, then suck it up. I want a pony, but because of Disruption Man's cutbacks, I can't have that and still retire with a Porsche. [tm] With unemployment in this town at 13.0%, the highest it's been for decades, you can't have hope.

But that doesn't mean you have to suffer. All you have to do is give up, stop being human once and for all. Accept mendacity into your heart as your one true god. Mendacity is the foundation of our society, and now, in these troubled times, it is more important than ever to cling to it as it drowns you.

You're almost all the way down as it is, you soulless braindead guppy, so why not take that plunge? Why not go down with the ship?

Let the loosers have great joy and great suffering. For you there is quiet, safe, emotionless, bland, tasteless existence, followed by a little "bloop!" noise, and a few final "glubs", barely discernible above the shushing of the ocean soundtrack.

Dying for what you believe in is noble. So go on, be a hero, preserve the status quo with your bravery; and die for nothing.

A conference to rub elbows with your favourite pandemicists, enemapidemiologists and germaphobes.