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The Funniest Book
of the 21st Century (So Far)!

128 pages of the best satire from 6 years of Magellan's Log. Well beyond chortles, Is It Empire Yet? verges on the downright hilarious. "Swiftian," says one reader. "Rib-splitting," says another. "Brilliantly, uproariously offensive to all right-thinking Republicans," says yet another. 128 pp. Paperback. 8.5" x 11". ISBN 0-9767821-3-8. $21.95:

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Is It Empire Yet?

Concentrate on whatever object, movie, book, TV show, or piece of music, art, or whatever you wish to rate. Then read each statement below and insert a number between 1 and 10 in the blank after each statement, where 1 means a strong NO!, and 10 means a strong YES!!!

The letter "X" in each statement refers to the name of whatever work it is that you're rating.

1. Would the late Michel Foucault have approved of X? ____

2.  If you published a paper in PMLA or Artforum about X would your salary increase? ____

3. Do you have great admiration for the creator of X and envy his/her ability to get enough funding to do it? ____

4. Does X re-affirm your belief in the wisdom of living an over-examined life based on the edicts of people with more money, power, celebrity, and larger vocabularies than you have? ____

5. Does X move humanity significantly closer to using every word in the Merriam-Webster 3rd International Dictionary along with quite a few that aren't? ____

6. Does X lend further support to the validity of the reductive analysis of cultural phenomena? ____

7. If Derrida could experience X, would he grin with approval? ____

8. Does your analysis of X significantly contribute to the discomfort of all scientists and produce public derision on those rare occasions when anyone in the public pays attention? ____

9. Does X make you feel even better about devoting your life to the pursuit of the destruction of verbal beauty through the creation of sentences containing a hundred words or more? ____

10. Does X help you avoid thinking about the one billion people in the world who are starving? ____

Scoring:

85-100. An intellectual breakthrough of great importance. A phallic-hegemony-dissolving re-distribution of neo-paradigmatic hyperbole for the ages.

70-84. A work of considerable value but probably to be understood only by the more mature members of your department.

Below 70. A dangerous and subversive, which is to say, trivial work. At best it should be destroyed. Certainly you want to protect most children and all graduate students from it.

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