Listen, I'm as patient as the next man. I wait in line at the grocery when Mama Cass pulls up with her cart full of cheez-whiz and Bacon bits pays the cashier in nickles from a stinky gym sock. I let the people at the MacDonalds drive-thru tell me to have a nice day before leaving them behind in a cloud of smoke. Hell, I even pause the car for suicide squirrels. But what I do not have patience for are peas.

Yeah -- you know what I'm talkin' about. You find them in your Indian somosas and your chicken noodle soup and your fried rice and (around my house) in your spaghetti. Why must peas so plague humanity? Is not famine and disease and destruction enough? Every single pea in existence is a little, green globe of misery waiting to ruin well-balanced dispositions everywhere. Those horrific little vegitables appear in everything, turning meals into minefields to be picked through with care. When people say something tastes like dirt they mean it tastes terrible -- well peas actually taste like dirt, like the brown loamy stuff I used to shovel into my mouth as a kid (leaving me with beetle-encrusted turdlips).

We've already got a war on poverty, a war on drugs, a war on AIDS, and a war on terrorism. Next time we go to war it should be a war on peas.