Written and Edited by Mujaputtia Umbababbaraba (a.k.a., "Mr. DNA") 
The Mooj Weekly Standard is published weekly by The Friends of Mooj Society, West Chester, PA.  All material published in The Mooj Weekly Standard is the intellectual property of The Mooj and may not be reproduced in any manner, shape or form without the expressed written consent of The Mooj or one of his non-paid interns.  The Mooj is what he is.
Greetings beloved minions!  Hopefully, finally, your worries and concerns about my recent near death experience on the stormy Atlantic Ocean will be pacified as I finally relate to you all what happened to Lance, Trent and myself following our maritime mishap.  To make a long story short I will only tell you that for the time being we are finally on the island of Sao Miguel in the Azores and finally digging for our missing treasure.  You'll have to read the Travels with Mooj section below to get all the gory details.  If you have no idea what treasure I'm speaking of then read back through The Mooj Archives. If you have no idea who I am then you're probably reading the wrong Mooj Weekly Standard.

As usual we will begin this week's newsletter by taking a peek into the infamous ol' Mooj Mail Bag to see what your fellow minions thought worthy enough to send in for The Mooj's consideration.  Fewer mail items than usual appear this week because I have finally put my foot down and will no longer accept stuff that is obviously crap.  (So all you clowns out there who get your thrills by sending in stupid letters will now have to look elsewhere on the Internet for kicks.)

Long time Mooj Heads will notice a few other changes this week.  Not only am I cleaning up the Mooj Mail Bag but I'm also focusing more of my attention on self realization and/or karma improvement type topics.  How is that possible you ask?  Easy—I'm finally getting rid of those two non-paid Mooj.com interns Becky and Bonnie Yaksuba.  The Yaksuba twins have finally decided to call it quits so that they can devote more time to college applications and boys.  To fill in for the girls until a permanent replacement can be found is a cousin of the Yaksuba's named Yollanda Hollinsworth from Camden, New Jersey.  Yollanda is currently performing 300 hours of Community Service for some felonious thing or another and thought that enlightening her fellow humans via The Mooj Weekly Standard would be a good way to burn off restitution hours ( ... and somehow the Camden County DA's Office thought that was okay....?).  So far this Yollanda person hasn't done diddly-squat and has logged in 100 hours of service.  The Mooj senses that this Yollanda will earn her 300 hours rather quickly and so I urgently need your help.  If you have basic math and/or science skills and want to be the next non-paid Mooj.com intern, let me know ASAP.  All  female minions between the ages of 18 and 21 are eligible for the job.  The Mooj is even prepared to offer Mooj.com stock if the you're good looking and have a nice body.  Oh, did I also mention that all interns should also be well versed in manners, poise and charm?  Here's your chance gals to serve The Mooj in a way that only a handful of others have done in the past!

Since we're on the subject of needs I should point out that The Mooj is still looking for an official sports team to sponsor with my high energy poetry.  A few weeks ago I parted ways with my former ICHL hockey pals and still haven't found another team to share my poetry with.  I thought many of you out there would beat down my door for this opportunity of a lifetime but I guess I was wrong.  It seems a shame that I have all this poetic talent going to waste and no sports team to give it to.  Since The Mooj is a huge hockey fan I would prefer a hockey team but would pretty settle for anything at this point, even a Little League or women's NCAA basketball team.

Mooj Mail Bag       
Every week minions send me interesting letters.  This week was pretty much the same as any other week, except that I eliminated letters that appeared to be written by idiots.  (In truth, that included all the Mooj Mail so I had to go back and selected a handful of letters that were somewhat acceptable.)
Mooj Story Time   
How about another thrilling sea tale from our favorite ex navy pal Jules Vermilion of Odessa, TX?   

HONG KONG JOE

A long time ago my ship pulled into Hong Kong for a port call.  While "on the beach" my shipmates and I ran into another old pal of ours, a former shipmate that had been transferred to another ship.  It was great seeing our old pal and we went into the nearest bar to sit down and catch up on old times.  As we were being seated we noticed the notorious "Smoking Joe" sitting alone in the back of the bar.  He was sipping on a tall exotic looking drink.  Smoking Joe was a guy in our division, who was always up to no good.  The place was deserted except for Smoking Joe, two old ladies at the bar, and us.

We were sure that Smoking Joe hadn't seen us come in so we asked our waitress to bring him a drink and give him a note that we scribbled on a napkin.  It read: "Hey good looking, we want to party with you.  Come over here and we'll [omitted] your brains out! Love Agnes and Trudy."  We paid for a drink and asked the waitress to bring the drink and note to Joe and then point to the old ladies sitting at the bar.  We then hid in our booth and watched—thinking that what ever happened would be pretty darn funny.  Our joke backfired on us when the waitress (who as it turned out didn't speak a word of English) pointed to us after handing Joe the drink.  He came over and thanked us for the drink and then we couldn't get rid of him the rest of the night.  I guess it served us right.

Travels with Mooj 

-continued from two weeks ago-

I prefer not to spend too much time recounting our recent misadventures in the stormy Atlantic Ocean (and our subsequent rescue from certain death as the ship we stowed away on sunk) so I won't.  Lance Worthy has written up a few catchy narratives about this ordeal and he has posted them on his very own web site so I suggest you go there if that’s where your interests lie.  I will say, however, that after being plucked from the sea we were brought to the Azores, along with all the other survivors of the ill-fated ship.  Since Lance, Trent and I were obviously not on the official muster sheet we had to fake amnesia to avoid being questioned as to whom we were and how we happened to be floating about in the middle of the ocean with the others.  The real adventure began once we arrived in Sao Miguel and so that’s where I prefer to begin this week’s narrative.
 
As soon as we arrived in Sao Miguel we were taken to a small hospital and put into an isolation ward for observation.  We weren’t observed for long because within an hour we managed to escape and make our way across the small island to the general location of where Trent believed the buried treasure to be located.  To avoid suspicion we spent only a few minutes in the area and then checked into a small hotel located nearby [using our assumed Southern names and fake passports].  That evening we made several discrete trips to a nearby village to purchase dynamite, blasting caps, shape charges, metal detectors, canvas tarpaulins, lanterns, wood framing, picks, shovels, a wheel barrel and a gasoline powered auger.  Our treasure hunt was about to begin.

Early the next morning we returned to the site and found to our delight that the area was fairly secluded and hidden from general foot traffic.  According to Trent the treasure was located somewhere within this densely wooded area.  We followed Trent into the forest and came upon a clearing, where we noticed a large depression in the ground just below an old oak tree.  A branch from the ancient oak hung above this small depression and it was obvious that it had been “burned” by a rope long ago, as if a pulley had once been suspended from it to lower something very heavy into the ground.  There was no doubt in our minds that someone had dug a hole there and then filled it back in again.  We took a look around and saw that the coast was clear and then began digging.  When we were about four feet deep we found a layer of flagstones that were not native to the island.  Our excitement was beyond description and we continued to dig, expecting to find the treasure at any moment.  We dug another ten feet and found a platform made of oak logs, which were closely set together and embedded in the walls of the shaft.  At this point we were terribly excited and certain that the treasure was under these boards.  But, alas, below the oak platform we found more earth, which like that which was located above the platform, had obviously been dug before, as it was loose compared to the hard clay walls of the pit.   At a depth of 20 feet we encountered another oak platform.  By this time the pit was so deep that we could not easily remove the logs.  It was now sundown and we were discouraged by our full day of fruitless digging, so we decided to abandon the project until the next morning.  To disguise our efforts and prevent others from stumbling into our fortune we carried away the excavated dirt and dumped into a nearby lagoon.  We then covered the hole with boards and shrubbery.

Early the next morning we returned to the same spot and dug another 10 feet and found another oak platform, this one was sealed with putty and coconut fiber.  Traces of charcoal were also present.  We were totally baffled.

“What the hell is going on here?  Didn’t that f__n Swede say that his treasure was only 6 feet deep?” asked a very angry Lance Worthy.

“I’m sure that whoever buried this thing here didn’t want it easily found.  Keep digging, it can’t be much farther down,” said Trent.

So we kept digging and digging until we more than 50 feet deep.  It was then that we found a large flat stone with a mysterious message engraved upon it, apparently in a cipher.  We couldn’t tell what it said so Trent told Lance and I to keep digging while he utilized his boy genius skills to decipher it.  With great effort we lifted the stone to the surface and then left Trent to his thinking while Lance and I resumed digging.

Finally Trent called down to us that he figured out that the stone said: “Forty feet below two million pounds are buried.”  (It turned out to be a simple substitution cipher where each unique symbol corresponded to a unique letter in the alphabet.)

“Forty more feet! That’s ridiculous!” I thought but there was no point in stopping now, not when we were more than halfway there!

The next day we dug another fifteen feet or so and struck what sounded like another wooden platform.  As we removed these oak planks we noticed that the soil in the pit, which had been dry for days, was now slowly becoming waterlogged.  Our progress was then severely hampered because we had to raise one bucket of water for every two buckets of earth.  Finally we had to call it quits because darkness was upon us and we were too tired to continue.

When we returned the next morning we were stunned.  The pit was completely filled with water!  We tried to bail out the water but it had no effect.  The water stayed at the same level no matter what we did.  We were totally screwed!

It was then that Trent Handjoy remembered seeing something that had been scribbled in the margin of the original map.  It had something to do with a booby trap flooding channel.  Trent, unfortunately, discounted it as the ramblings of an idiot and now he was very sorry he didn't pay more attention to it.  It was apparent to all of us that we needed to see that original map again and that meant we would have to cut some kind of deal with Jeff W.  (Jeff W., you may recall, had purchased the original map from the grandnephew of Inge Svensson in late November 1999.  The original map was virtually useless to us because it was very high-level.  We used the original map to produce a more usable map with extensive research and probabilistic modeling.)

Jeff W., however, was sitting in jail.  After he double-crossed Lance, Trent and I and came to the Azores on his own he got busted and was now a permanent resident of the Sao Miguel Prison.  We were positive that Jeff still had the original map so we reluctantly paid him a call on visiting day.  Jeff was very happy to see us but had no intention of giving us his map unless we busted him out of jail first.  We had no choice but to put aside our ill feelings toward Jeff and agree to help him.  Sao Miguel Prison was a small jail but it was heavily fortified and guarded 24 hours a day.  Getting Jeff out was not going to be easy but what else could we do?  Our pit was filled with water and we simply had to see Inge Svensson’s hand-drawn map to figure out how he booby trapped the hole.

-continued next week-

Closing Thoughts 
That's all folks.  If you want more you'll have to wait until next week.  If you feel slighted because there was no poem or roster of new minions this week don't blame me, blame my new intern Yollanda Hollinsworth, who never showed up for work last week.