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[Jeremiah Walgren]

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested for trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney General John Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-Gebra is a fearsome cult," Ashcroft said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as "unknowns", but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country."

"As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every triangle," Ashcroft declared.

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."

"I am gratified that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are willing to dis-integrate us with calculus disregard. Murky statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence," the President said, adding: "Under the circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make our point, and draw the line."

President Bush warned, "These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex."

Attorney General Ashcroft said, "As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is uncertainty of: though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks."

[Jedd]

Seen it before, but still funny

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A recent development in the case suggests that the Al-Gebra cult communicates through Tangent Inverse Graphing calculators. Although uncertain of how exactly this occurrs, it seems that the ammount of halvng caused by Al-Gebra's members is directly proportionate to the number of ASM programs on thier calculators. This has led to speculation that the letters ASM could be either "A secure Message" or "Augmented Scaleen Math." This type of thing with two meanings, often called a "solution set" can be very challenging to figure out, because of the potential of extraneous roots becoming involved. In this case, the word augmented suggests that the encryption makes it bigger, and math shows that it is a cult message. However, the word 'Scaleen' has long remained undefined by Counter-Instruction officials. "I still fail to see what fish have to do with math," one senior official commented.

It appears that Al-Gebra members show thier rank by what types of calculator they own. The highest Al-gebra members seem to be the Ca-alculous, although none of these have ever been captured. Below them are the Tri-genometry, who's name is believed to reflect thier role in graphing the human genome. However, it has been suggested that they actually hinder the people who try to solve everything unknown about these powerful molecules. In addition, the Ge-ometry, a group reputed to have developed the base for the metric system, remain persistent in thier attempts to derive answers from the system, and write more equations in this system, such as the well-known 100cm=1M. The most dangerous of these members, however, may be the imaginary numbers, a number of people who are impossible to learn about, due to the fact that they simply don't exist.

Despite this knowledge, it is unknown how this threat should be solved. Most members of this cult have postulates ready to tell law enforcement officials, who accept them without proof. Those who don't are often able to get off by making thier accusers, who don't know any of the theorems the cult uses, try to prove that they did anything wrong, and are acquitted when they are unable to supply reasons for thier statements. Using Einstein's theory of relativity, some members have supposedly escaped by going back in time. Critics, however, repute this claim, saying that it's not a good idea to believe that someone who'se surname can be translated from his native language to "one stone," could be right about something as complicated as energy equaling mass times the square of the velocity of light in centemeters per second. "'One stone' sounds like he was as dumb as a stone. I wouldn't trust a stone to come up with a good idea," said Bill Clinton. Of course, I wouldn't trust the ideas of someone who had sex in the oval office either.