April 15 delerium

Hi, I'm still alive. It's 11:00 p.m., I'm at the office, and I'm calling it a day.

Maybe I'm just punchy, but this cracked me up. It links most of the geography of my life -- Waukegan and Iowa -- to the latest world events.

WALCOTT, IOWA - Clad in civilian Reeboks and Gem sweaters, clutching pink gift bags filled with hot Maid Rites and souvenir Herky the Hawkeye Beanie Babies, over three dozen smiling British Royal Marines waved for cameras and boarded a London-bound RAF bus this morning in the parking lot of Walcott's sprawling Iowa 80 Truck Stop.

The surprise morning release of the 38 sailors and marines ended a tense three-day standoff between the British government and a breakaway Lutheran militia group that controls large swaths of the notorious "Manure Triangle" region spanning Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Maid Rites. That's a crime against humanity right there.

The former captives' ordeal began Tuesday, when the British destroyer HMS Chamberlain was conducting joint training exercises with the US Navy at Great Lakes Naval Training Station on Lake Michigan, just north of Chicago. According to insurgent naval commander Chuck Sorenson, the vessel strayed into Lutheran territorial waters.

"Oh yah, dey were totally on the Wisconsin side," said Sorenson. "I was tossin' some empty driveway patch cans out dere in my storage shed and I could see 'em out dere on da lake, big as day."

How did they get the accent so accurately?

What is not in dispute is that the Chamberlain was quickly surrounded by a flotilla of up to a dozen blown Hemi bass boats and party pontoons. Captain Colin Puddeley radioed several frantic distress calls to the MoD Mobile Command Centre in Waukegan, but the staff was away at a mandatory diversity training seminar. Surrounded, the crew surrendered. The Chamberlain was scuttled, but not before insurgents ransacked its stores of weapons and porn DVDs.

And there are deep insights into exotic cultures:

By the time a British support armada arrived on the scene, the ship's captive crew was already headed west on Highway 18 in a convoy of insurgent Camaros and 4x4s that was cheered by bloodthirsty and beerthirsty Lutheranist sympathizers at supper clubs and convenience stores from Waukesha to Prairie du Chein. After crossing the Mississippi into the danger-fraught hills of the Northeast Iowa dairy kush, they were whisked away to the heavily-fortified split level headquarters of Gunderson near Decorah.

And on it goes... it reminds me of my oldest brother's sitcom concept during the Cold War, "Mikhail's Navy," about the wacky adventures of the crew of a Soviet nuclear missile submarine that goes astray and ends up patrolling Lake Michigan, led by a constantantly exasperated captain with a birthmark on his forehead. Doug was just ahead of his time.

Anyway, regular programming will resume here in a few days.