Ask General Kang: What if I don't give a crap about the last Harry Potter book?

Well, you’re out of luck for at least a couple more days.

Once the book has finally been released, then the news media will find another story to focus on, and babble on relentlessly about it for a while. Maybe it will be about a missing white woman from South Carolina, and maybe it will be about how John Travolta is breaking new artistic ground by dressing like a woman AND wearing foam-rubber fat suit.

Back on my home planet, Neecknaw, we had a similar problem with our Zimplavian Sewer Slugs. We use the simple life form to help keep our pipes clean — a necessary, important task without which Neecknabian society would quickly collapse — but every once in a while the Zimp Slugs would get a little obsessive about what disgusting refuse they would clean first.

For a while, they got intensely interested in discarded hats from our famous Gorriloids-with-Fezzes Brigade. (They always seemed to focus on “famous” primates.) But instead of consuming the rotting headgear, the Zimp Slugs started collecting the moldy fezzes, trading them back and forth — sometimes the same hat — for several weeks at a time. The sewers became clogged, and well, let’s just say that Neecknabian society was overly fragrant that summer.

Luckily we had a new shipment of reporters in town from Planet Ceenen, and they thought it was “the most important story about Neecknaw” in decades.

So we had them clean up while they were down there, taping actuality.

Next time: If the element of surprise is half the key to victory, what is the other half? It’s not spiders is it? Spiders freak me out!