"To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the heel that crushes it," said the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. In the spirit of Halloween - a night traditionally ripe with pranks - I would like to tip my hat to those that would bring down Echelon, the reputed snooping network that sweeps personal e-mails, phone calls and other communication channels for "subversive" keywords, like "militia" and "bomb" and "Koresh" and "drug." Whoops, almost forgot "NASA" and "Hillary" and "Mossad!" Surely as the President of the United States of America, Bill Clinton, sits in his office considering the ATF's assault on Waco, The Passenger applauds the anti-Echelon revolution. It's terrorism, I tell ya. What would Malcolm X think?

The Passenger deliberated over making Leisure Town a Passenger Pick for nearly a year. I had several reasons for not linking to it, but chief among them was the adult language factor: the management prefers that I keep my picks and commentary in PG-13 territory, and Leisure Town is as NC-17 as NC-17 gets. In fact, if you're easily offended by profanity or frank talk of sexuality and psychological abuse, I strongly suggest you bypass this site. The funny part of all this? The cast of Tristan A. Farnon's illustrated short stories are all twistable animal dolls -giraffes, spacemen and spacewomen, wittle bunny wabbits. They have a vocabulary that would shame a truck driver (even I get a bit squeamish at Farnon's voluminous use of the pejorative term for male homosexuality), bleed like human beings, get drunk, engage in blurry sex. They also feel deeply, puzzle over the truth of their mortality ("Everything I do is just completely broken," laments the poodle coffeehouse waitress), rejoice in life's little pleasures (one character spends an entire strip smoking dope and refinishing a chair) and do other things that people do. But they're not people, and the surrealistic cast of the strip somehow makes it easier for the reader to absorb difficult subject matter. Start with "Winter Carnival" and work from there. If you can take its hard turns and rough surfaces, move on to "The Dog Messiah" and begin empathizing with the burdens these cute, wholly unsavory and all too human beasts have to bear.
 

What in the hell compels the 18-34 crowd to punch holes in, and draw ugly little pictures on, their Stairmaster-trained superbods? Yeah, I know - if I give you a buck, you might start to care. Well, Mr. And Mrs. American Nihilist, perhaps the Piercing Mildred will drive the seriousness of the matter home to you. On the surface a fun little web game, Piercing Mildred is a scorching indictment of the body modification trend. Pick your character - you get your choice of Mildred, Maurice or Melvin - and begin piercing and inking the bejeezus out of him or her. Do it right and you just might beat out all the other folks vying for the title of "Freak of the Week." Screw up, and you'll have an infection that you'll be applying antibiotics to as liberally as you do sunscreen. Sure, it sounds like a big joke, but that's how all the truly awful stuff starts. You know, like Echelon. The mutilation revolution is eternal.
 

Who took the nose off the Sphinx? Was it Napoleon's troops? The British? You, perhaps? (Well, come on ... how much do I really know about you? Really?) Or was it those avowed enemies of all of man's creation - time, weather and erosion? Whatever the case, it's a fun thing to consider, and Andrew Warriner's page weighs all the evidence carefully before sneezing off the Brits and Napoleon. Warriner also examines the falsehoods generated by the legendary "chicken cannon" and The Philadelphia Experiment - and if that's not enough for you, nosey reader, he provides a forum in which you can converse with the one and only Zippy the Pinhead. Yow! This site will stand the test of time with all its parts intact.
 

No Halloween night is complete without a listen of the Mercury Theater's classic October 30, 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Welles' "War of the Worlds." Not only does it stand unchallenged as the greatest prank of all time - panic, mass hysteria, let's see Warren Beatty's presidential bid top this one! - but it still sends a genuine chill down the spine some 60 years after its original broadcast date. The Mercury Theater production is just one of dozens of great, scary old time radio programs at Arnold Moy's OTR Moments in MP3 site. Here you'll find a classic Inner Sanctum acted by Peter Lorre, a few choice episodes of "Murder at Midnight" and perhaps most chilling of all, an episode of "Dragnet" in which the killer, corned by Our Man Friday, spends a good five minutes explaining his motives. ("She just had this way of smilin' at ya...") There are also episodes of "Our Miss Brooks," "Escape," "This Is Your FBI" and many others. Put aside that worn VHS copy of "Scream" and let the demons of your imagination play with you for a while.

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