Florida just won the national championship in college football.  I feel a comic coming on, just not soon.

Agent Orange: Greetings, Mammal-Black! I require your expertise.

Agent Black: Tax trouble again?

Agent Orange: Indeed. Your former colleagues at the IRS persist in their shameless schemes to extort me.

Agent Black: And did this vendetta against you begin before or after you insisted on paying your income taxes in pennies?

Agent Orange: That wouldn’t have seemed unreasonable if they hadn’t demanded so much money!

Mike challenges Agent Black and Agent Orange to a game of Clue. Question: if the victim was killed by a noose, was it murder or assisted suicide?

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Agent Orange: Greetings, Mammal-Black! I have an excellent costume for our upcoming office Halloween party. It makes full use of my mammal-frightening teeth and reptilian horror factor and this pleases me.

Agent Black: Godzilla?

Agent Orange: IRS agent.

Agent Black: That’s a terrible costume.

Agent Orange: Don’t make me take 28% of your candy!

Agent Orange: Kids today are so hard to please.

Agent Black: I don’t even want to think about how you might know that.

Agent Orange: Yesterday…

Teacher: Class, today our guest speaker is Agent Orange.

Agent Orange: I’m a Special Investi-Gator.

Teacher: Could you explain what it is you do?

Agent Orange: Are you sure? There are kids here.

Student 1: Have you ever killed anyone?

Agent Orange: Laws need claws or they’d just be words.

Student 2: How many people have you killed?

Agent Orange: The confirmed score or a rough estimate?

Agent Black: …

Agent Black: Suddenly I have questions of my own.

Agent Orange: I have learned something important about mammals. Two quasi-mystical words will put a mammal into a hypnotic stupor that will force him to believe anything.

Agent Black: You’re crazy.

Agent Orange: I am prepared to demonstrate my new-found learning of mammalian psychology. First, I will greet a victim-mammal of your selection. Then you will make an outlandish statement. And I will administer the two word hypnotic spell.

Agent Black: Let’s see it.

Five minutes later.

Agent Orange: Greetings, Mammal-Darpa! We have learned something intriguing on our latest posting.

Dr. Darpa: What?

Agent Black: We were attacked by robotic, flesh-eating airplanes.

Agent Orange: IN JAPAN!

Agent Black: … !

Dr. Darpa: Egads! How did you survive?

Agent Black: …

Agent Black: NO!

[end] (If you’d be interested in reading a related article, “Stuff Mammals Like: Japan,” please see more.

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Agent Orange: Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Agent Black: If you’re about to ask a question that includes the word “alligators,” “mammals,” “conspiracy,” or any combination of those, no.

Agent Orange: …

Agent Orange: Have you developed psychic–

Agent Black: No.

Agent Orange: Are you posi–

Agent Black: Yes.

Agent Orange: So how–

Agent Black: Wily mammal tricks. I could tell you more, but then I’d have to make you into a suitcase.

Agent Orange: …!

At the Office of Special Investigations, March Madness can get heated pretty quickly.

Agent Black: Are you doing a bracket this year?

Agent Orange: I spit on your vile brackets. The NCAA was obviously embarrassed that the Florida Gators had humiliated the whole of mammal-kind two years in a row. And, last year, the Gators swept the national championships in football and basketball, so it was inevitable that the Vast Mammalian Conspiracy would keep us from the tournament.

Agent Black: It’s too bad you’re not doing a bracket. Guess who I’ve got winning it all.

Agent Orange: A wholly unqualified and helpless mammal team?

Agent Black: The Georgia Bulldogs!

Agent Orange: Gah! Mammal… conspiracy… vicious mammal conspiracy.

Agent Black: Hey, hey. Relax. Just because we had an “amazing run” and “reached heights no one could imagine” doesn’t mean you have to cry about it.

Agent Orange: Georgia’s presence is indisputable proof that gator-haters are conspiring against us. Georgia placed in the Western conference. Notre Dame, a team notoriously close to a mammal renowned for driving snakes and other innocent reptiles from Ireland, got into the Eastern conference. And Stanford, that crazy-eyed bastion of basketball-playing trees, got into the Southern conference. Portland—Portland!– made it into the Midwestern conference.

Agent Black: Portland played great basketball.

Agent Orange: That’s not the point. Portland is not in the Midwest, any more than Notre Dame is Eastern or Georgia is Western. The standings have been rigged by a bunch of deranged gator-haters to ensure that we will not be allowed to thrash their beloved trees and bulldogs.

Captain Carnage walks in.

Captain Carnage: Hey, Orange. I heard a joke today. What’s the difference between an alligator and a longhorn?

Agent Orange: One is a reptilian carnivore and the other goes great with tabasco sauce?

Captain Carnage: The Longhorns are in it to win it!

Agent Black: Ooh, nice one.

Agent Orange: …

Agent Orange: Mammals!

Agent Orange: Greetings, mammals! I have a question.

Captain Carnage: (Unfortunately, Agent Black, I have an alibi. Just now, I realized I was due at the Capitol two hours ago).

Agent Black: (I hate you).

Agent Orange: Yesterday, National Geographic claimed that grizzly bears can eat five times their own body weight. Is that true?

Agent Black: Why wouldn’t it be true?

Agent Orange: Frankly, it sounds like mammalian propaganda. Five times their own body weight? That would be like me suddenly eating a ton and a half: you, Captain Carnage, the Beatles, and a golf-cart.

Agent Black: I’m not supposed to tell this to non-mammals…

Agent Orange: No, I must know!

Agent Black: Grizzly bears can eat a hundred times their own body weight. National Geographic lied to you to lure you into a false sense of security.

Agent Orange: The fiends!

Agent Orange: …

Agent Orange: … but that would be like me eating 75,000 racks of ribs. Waitresses already give me weird looks when I order eight!

Agent Black: I’m not supposed to tell this to non-mammals, either… but all mammals can eat a hundred times their own weight.

*Agent Orange gasps*

Agent Black: So, if you’re 600 pounds, that means that any mammal that weighs six pounds could theoretically eat you.

Agent Orange: But, but I’ve seen rats in the basement that must have been six pounds heavy! The Gator Gods would curse me for all time if I allow one to devour me. I thank you for your assistance, mammal-Black.

Agent Orange stalks off.

Agent Black pulls out his cell-phone and calls Captain Carnage’s voice-mail.

“Black here. I think I just solved the rodent problem.”

Agent Orange: This has been troubling me for weeks: humans are obviously tail-deficient but claim to have a “tailbone.” Why is that?

Agent Black: Beats me. Whenever something about mutated alligators confuses me, it’s usually just because we’re hundreds of millions of years ahead of you evolutionarily.

Orange: …!

Orange: Tails are really useful. You’re jealous you don’t have one.

Black: Quoteth Calvin to Hobbes: they’re neckties for the ass.

Orange: Neckties that can strangle someone, an important distinction.

Black: I’m sure there’s scientists somewhere that deal with random shit like this. Just call one of them. And, while you’re at it, a psychiatrist.

The next day

Orange: Reptologists are friendly and helpful, like their area of research. They can answer any reptilian question, like why crocodiles are alligator-rejects.

Black: I thought your question was about humans.

Orange: I’m getting to that! I called several mammologists and I’ve concluded that mammologists are part of a vast conspiracy to conceal the truth about mammalian “tailbones” from reptiles.

Black: …

Black: They obviously didn’t do such a good job concealing the truth if you uncovered it anyway.

Orange: I was far too clever for them. I asked one what mammalogists were good for besides wasting oxygen and she blabbered about providing “mammo-grams.” That response was so inane that I knew right then it was an attempt at deception.

Black: Uhh, a mammogram is…

Orange: Not merely a unit of mass, it’s British mass. And the problem here is not that I have too little mammalian mass (British or otherwise) but rather that humans have a dishonestly marketed bone. Perhaps if y’all got a few repto-grams, you might have a real tailbone.

Captain Carnage walks in.

Captain Carnage: Am I interrupting something?

Black: No, I think it’s almost over.

Orange: Yours is a very wacky species.

Agent Orange: In Canada, keep your friends close and your automatic weaponry closer. The nation is a rabbit’s den of sinister plots and dark secrets.

Agent Black: Canada has dark secrets?

Agent Orange: The darkest!