Me first, ad infinitum

China now lays claim to being the discoverer of America, before Catalunya and Iceland.

This, while tests are being conducted throughout Catalunya to see if people with the last name Colom share DNA with Christopher Columbus.

Apparently, after fighting with the Generalitat de Catalunya against King John the Faithless Columbus had to obscure his past because he wanted a favor from King John’s son, Ferdinand (we all know what that was) - hence his renowned origins in Genova … hence Colon, Colom, Colombo - and, finally - Columbus.

Who the hell cares who really discovered America? 12,000 years ago Tok and Thwok probably dragged their hairy knuckles across the Bering Straight and began the descent down to what we now call La Tierra del Fuego, subsisting on wild berries, grizzly carrion, and the lice they picked out of each others’ hair. Many generations passed during this epic journey, and their horny slope-headed descendants proliferated throughout the vast continent of "America".

But, alas, poor Tok and Thwok are condemned to oblivion, as will be Christopher, Zheng, and Leif many millennia from now when self-aggrandizing nations ruled by the descendants of mutated cockroaches revise history according to their interests.

They will remember the dark days of La Cucaracha, when their ancestors battled giant, swaggering drunks wearing sombrereros; petrified roach motels will serve as poignant reminders of their mortality; and they will say their ancestors, indeed, were the first to discover that vast continent when one day a fortuitous current carried one of them on a large turd across a seemingly interminable stretch of gray ocean.

On the dawn of a dazzling new era one lone cockroach scurried up the stony shores of the ancient Indian island of Manhattan, and there he found savage cockroaches living in the ruins of a strange and tangled-up concrete jungle … and so on and so on …