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Is It Empire Yet?
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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WHOMPFF!

Introduction
If you can’t trust Stanley Kubrick, who can you trust? Alas, we’re close enough now to the magic year--out with the old, in with the new--that he promised us (2001 -- remember?) to see that we’re not going to make it.

Where is that slick, clean, lovely future with gliding Pan Am (Jeez! where is Pan Am?) space clippers, lovely circular space stations waltzing through the heavens to the rhythms of Strauss, vast subterranean moon towns, computers so much like people that they not only talk but think, plot, and murder to advance their own hidden agenda (remember HAL 9000?)? A long way off it would seem.

So what to do about the massive let-down we’re sure to feel when we wake up on January 1, 2001, turn on CNN, and it’s the same old same old? No Y2K collapse, just the same old commercials, same old dinosaur male leaders "running" the world, same old job, same old pollution, same old crime.

Many will no doubt opt for the same old solutions-that-are-not-solutions: sex, dope, jogging, rock n roll, golf, alcohol, idolatry in its various latter-day guises (religious, corporate, scientific), shopping, and the other pseudo-meaningful mind-numbers so popular in late-capitalist society.

A few thoughtful cynics will however have prepared themselves by taking a cold, analytical look at just where it is we have got to as the third millennium dawns. To that end, WHOMPFF! "The World-Historical Overview and Millennial Profile," an in-depth test to, if not end all tests, at least to end the millennium and to get you in some kind of near-balanced condition to deal with that terrible January 1 looming ever-nearer.

Materials
You will need additional hardware to take the M.A.T., namely, a pencil* and a piece of paper.**

*A primitive writing instrument (remember?) consisting of a tube of  often colorful plastic containing a slender rod of compressed graphite with a piece of really cheap rubber on one end designed to smudge what you write when you try to correct a mistake.
**A primitive but elegantly simiple writing (and reading) surface still widely available in office supply stores. Also found free of charge in the feed trays of printers.

Conditions
This is an honor exam. You are on your honor as a cyber-citizen not to click ahead and look at the answers.

However, If it takes you more than two minutes to figure out that this is not actually a real test but a piece of cultural satire, please turn off your computer and go drive your SUV a while, or hang out at the I.T.A.G. site.*
*International Trepanation Advocacy Group

When you are focused and ready, you may begin the test. There are 100 questions (hehe). Unlike life, this test has no time limit.

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