A wonderfully surreal press conference by the one and only Tom Waits for his upcoming “Glitter and Doom” tour, in which he pontificates on the act of planning, astrology, and the strange acronym PEHDSTCKJMBA.

Tom Waits Press Conference [YouTube] : grow-a-brain : Laughing Squid

Before the Allies stumbled upon a winning strategy of just dropping 8 million pounds of ordinance on his home city, we tried everything we could think of to kill Hitler. Needless to say, our history text-books don’t detail our many blunders, only our eventual triumph, but the secret histories of World War II are more illuminating. Air dropping B.J. Blazcowicz into Castle Wolfenstein? Check. League of Nations sanctioned genetic experiments aimed at breeding a race of Nigh-Indestructible Super Jews? Ross is descended from a particularly successful strain. A total trade embargo on pig iron? Yes. We even tried traveling back in time to kill Hitler before he rose to power, but due to a shoddy flux capacitor and a criminally desultory mission briefing to “Kill the guy with the Moustache,” we ended up assassinating Franz Ferdinand instead, ironically setting off a chain of events that would inexorably lead to Hitler’s rise to power in the first place. D’oh.

But perhaps the greatest unrecognized hero of World War II was The Modern Nostradamus himself, The Royal Astrologer Louis de Wohl, Captain of Her Majesty’s Army and self-proclaimed State Seer for the British Empire.

De Wohl — who fled from Berlin in 1935 to escape Jewish persecution — sprang to prominence when a Spanish duchess asked him to reveal Hitler’s horoscope to Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Hailifax. He impressed. Soon, de Wohl was heading up British Intelligence’s newly formed “Psychological Research Bureau,” dashing out horoscopes of Nazi leaders by the ream. In the late 30’s, he was dispatched to America to single-handedly thwart a conclave of pro-Nazi astrologers who predicted that Hitler would win the war and take over the world. He succeeded, stopping briefly in Washington to assure President Roosevelt that he had a “stunning horoscope.”

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