Michael [High Praise!] sent in this little snippet:

“If I had a budget, it wouldn’t balance in the morning
It wouldn’t balance in the evening,
all over this land”

– Peter, Paul and Barry

You creative types can feel free to add more verses in the comments, if you’re so inclined.

I think that I have successfully cut everyone out of my life who likes raisins in their cinnamon roll.

— Fun_Beard (@Fun_Beard) March 13, 2013

Sadly, most alcoholic drinks refuse to admit they have a problem.

— Sixth Form Poet (@sixthformpoet) March 13, 2013

The new pope named himself after St Francis of Assisi, because he too had mastered Angry Birds.

— Konstantine Simakis (@MensHumidor) March 13, 2013

Has Obama congratulated the new Pope yet with a picture of himself?

— S.M (@redsteeze) March 13, 2013

THIS JUST IN: Black smoke was seen coming out of the White House chimney today…still no budget!!!

— Sheriff Jim Wilson (@sheriffjim) March 13, 2013

So I picked up Assassin’s Creed 2 a little while ago because Steam had it for like $5 and I never had played an Assassin’s Creed game and that was supposed to be the best of the series. Each time you start up the game, it has this assurance that the people involved came from a wide variety of religious faiths, which made me like, “Oh man; what are there going to do in this game?” But the plot is all conspiracies and stuff — mainly in Renaissance era Italy — and it’s all rather hard to take seriously enough to be offensive.

Anyway, I was ultimately disappointed in the game. When first playing the game, I was like, “This is the best game ever!” You hold two buttons down and then you go into “Free-Run” mode which means if the main character hits a building, he automatically finds hand holds and scrambles up it. So people will be chasing you on the ground and soon enough you’re leaping from rooftop to rooftop and it’s really cool. It’s a bit like Prince of Persia, but more automated in that he automatically finds the right place to leap to and grab — most of the time.

Anyway, the game is very sandbox, and I was just loving running around the city collecting items and finding new vantage points (towers you need to climb to get more view of the city and open up more of the map).

But ultimately the game broke down.

STUFF WRONG WITH ASSASSIN’S CREED 2

* The automated jumping around works most of the time, but it happened pretty often I thought I was jumping to safety but instead the game had me do a suicidal leap to my death. The most challenging parts in the game were timed events that had you doing acrobatics — mainly because he kept not jumping where I wanted him to.

* Traveling around the roofs is fun, but for some reason the game puts archers on the rooftops to yell at you and keep you from doing that. They very seldom add any actual challenge to the game and only seemed to keep me from having harmless fun moving around the city on the roofs.

* The combat is boring. Maybe I’m just spoiled by the Batman Arkham games. In those, you see a large group of enemies, and you’re like, “Oh! Joy! A bunch of enemies to beat up for fun!” In here, fighting a large group of enemies was tedious. They only ever attack you one at a time and aren’t very challenging (plus you have more healing items then you would ever actually need). And your attacks (other than the final kill) aren’t very satisfying as it’s usually just your sword clanging against their armor and not seeming like it’s doing much damage. It’s more fun and a challenge to run away and lose your pursuers, but you never actually need to do that because the enemies are never much of a threat.

* The assassinations are actually kind of boring. You run up and stab the guy most of the time. You pretty much are always going to cause a ruckus doing it (this isn’t Hitman with a variety of stealthy ways to kill — actually, you’re more of an assassin in Hitman while more of a hitman — killing people publicly and noisily — in Assassin’s Creed).

* There a notoriety rating based on being witnessed doing crimes and stuff that ended up being completely pointless.

* The main character in modern times looks like a model strutting down a runway when he walks.

Really, what I found most fun in this game was the sandbox stuff of running around the city collecting things, and I was only motivated to do the main quests to open up more of the map. And then I didn’t finish the game because the main quests got tedious to me and I was only going through them to say I finished the game (which I’ve vowed to stop doing as I don’t have enough video game time these days to spend it playing games I no longer find fun). And the story wasn’t interesting enough to make me wonder what happened in the end (it’s just guys being all shady with conspiracies but nothing really jumped out). Basically, I think the game overstayed its welcome as it didn’t have enough variety of gameplay for its length (I actually put like 30 hours in it). I probably would have liked it more if it were shorter. But now I’m so worn out from it I can’t even imagine picking up one of the sequels (the new one will have pirates, though…)

So Rand Paul has come out for getting the state out of marriage… which is what I just argued Monday. Do you think I’m influencing Rand Paul?

A lot of people are talking about him as a candidate in 2016, so if my own 2016 bid doesn’t work out, it will be good to at least have the ear of the president. Because people really need to listen to me more.

I mean, during the Obama presidency, we’ve made absolutely no progress on genetically resurrecting dinosaurs so we can put rocket launchers on them. None.

Now think of what will happen if Rand Paul combines his libertarian message with dinosaurs as cyborg killing machines — he’d basically win all the youth vote. And I don’t see how the dinosaurs clashes with his usual message as long as it’s well-defined when the dinosaurs get deployed, it’s never on American soil, and Congress gets a say.

And do you think his isolationists leanings means he’d be against starting a conflict with the moon? Hopefully not.

Well, I hope Rand Paul is reading and listening to me. Everybody learning from me is the only way to get our country out of this rut. Plus, the more people that buy my books, the better for the economy or something.

There’s a new pope! Pope Francis (that’s my name!). And he promises to lighten up.

Anyway, in a bid to stay relevant, I’ve decided to write some pope jokes.

POPE JOKES

Q. How many popes does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Hopefully only one as there is only one pope at a time. If there is a second, he’s the antipope, and he is unlikely to work with the pope on household chores.

Q. Why did the pope cross the road?
A. Because on the other side was the Sistine Chapel, the best know chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope.

The pope walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, “I’m going to leave as I’m the pope and people shouldn’t be seeing me at a bar.”

Nailed it!