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The debate rages on, here at the Dan & Steve Show about whether or not I should actually mention to you faithful readers that I have, in fact, actually made Soup-a-Joe when I was in college. Though the concoction did actually exist, we feel it is germane to the strip to say that it was more than slightly pyromaniacal in its genus. I was but a lad of eighteen and wanted desperately to set dried noodles on fire without using any actual fire. They call this “college alchemy” in the Dutch underground.

In court, however, they deemed it “manslaughter.” On a personal level, I found this odd because no one died, but it turned out I misheard and they called it “attempted manslaughter.” A disheartening but very necessary distinction in legal matters.

I swore, before the nailed god, which is the one they use in court or I would have forsworn myself to Ibis, that I had myself consumed the concoction in question before getting others to partake, and my lawyers said that would hold up in court.

However, after I was subjected to a battery of medical examinations, the prosecution made the argument that I was not, in fact, human but rather a robot sent from the future, where man is starving, and that my digestive tract is a time machine with a 2.5 gigawatt capacitor the ingenious design of which sends all that I eat to the future pre-chewed for maximum nourishment but undigested… also, for maximum nourishment.

My lawyers assured me that this new development, which they were unable to refute, would not affect our assured victory, but clearly they did not foresee the escalation of the charges to crimes against humanity. If I remember correctly, as I usually do, the prosecution’s assertion was that if it were my duty and programming to devour food for the good of the children of the future, then I have done humanity a grave disservice by sending ramen cooked with burnt coffee rather than water and am therefore not dissimilar to Hitler or Stalin.

And so it is that I have come to be the first person (modified or no) to serve out his sentence in terms of community service… which is why I’m here with the Dan & Steve Show.

It is agony.

I had toyed with the idea of eating myself in an attempt to actually travel to the future and then get sent back again, but, I decided it was to cliche.

-Ian K.

The children I support were very disappointed with me last month as I had nothing to give them. They begged and pleaded, and just as I was retrieving my personal ‘pacifier‘ from the face of the nearest orphan, I remembered, I had a crate of ’soup a joe’ in the car. They all sat down and gorged their hungry fat faces on the fetid ramen and charred beans that soup a joe provides. It was at this point that the weeping boys and girls realised what’s truly important in life. Sure enough, it wasn’t the momentary relief from hunger that the searing charcoal flavour soup brought, but the more permanent satiation that would come from the alleviation of diarrhea and fever symptoms, only to be found in the harsh jabbing embrace of a needle that contains the ‘antidote to soup a joe’. Unfortunately none of the children could afford the 1 million dollar price tag of the antidote, and as certain as my name is Michael McMichaelson, they were all dead before sundown the following day. It was a good day for science. It was a great day for soup a joe.

-Michael P