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In This Issue

• What To Do With Books
• Craigslist Finds New Ways to Disturb
• Ovary Mining: Profit In Your Pants
• Letters to the Feditors
• Experience? Uh, no
• Sitting On Babies?
• The Internet = Porn. Porn = The Fed. Logically...
• "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Dregs?"
• Hey, Athletes! Need a Team? Call Me Ishmael.
• Hot Sex? Meh. Mock Interviews? Ooo Yeah, Baby.
• Swipe, Suffer, Suffocate
• From The Desk of Lee "El Cuisinart" Bollinger
• Practice Protectionism in the Bedroom
• Living at the Speed of 2.99x10^8 m/s
• Sensitivity Training Averts Termination
• Congrats, You're Fucked
• The Hierarchy of Columbia
• THEY Watch

My name is Werner Thomas.  You don't know me, but you've heard me.  As a strapping young accordionist in 1950s Switzerland, I wrote the oom-pah song that ruled my life.  It is a rapacious melody you know as the "Chicken Dance."

    Of course, the song was initially harmless.  I'd go to a local pub and play, the men would drink, and the women would swoon at both the virtuosic composition and my rugged sexuality.  Just between you and me, my musical exhibitionism had been conceived almost purely as a vehicle for adventures in barroom sex.  The growing prominence of the then-untitled "Chicken Dance" fulfilled this mission admirably.  In my excitable youth, I took to calling the song "Werner Would Like to Have Sex with You."

 

     Every musician spends a few life-threatening years on the road, and for me those years made up the first decade of the song's life.  I played Zurich, Amsterdam, Paris, Havana, Lagos, and even a politically decisive show in a Moscow distillery.  I toured the nightlives of the world, and "Werner Would Like to Have Sex with You" became incidental to my drunkenness.  It was during this period that some friends christened the song the "Chicken Dance."  They derived the name from the inept gyrations of a one-legged prostitute during a lively show in Brussels.  As time wore on, it became impossible for me to play the song without at least one drunken friend rushing to the stage and mimicking that Belgian tramp.  I encouraged them, thinking it was humorous.  "Ha!" we would laugh, "You dance like the whore we knew in Belgium!  Yes, yes, hold your foot behind you as if you have just one leg.  Oh Dieter, you are so funny!"

    My life as a traveling troubadour came to an end as my drinking reached its nadir.  Listlessness took over, and "Werner Would Like to Have Sex with You" be damned, alcohol became my master.  Playing the accordion is difficult enough without vomit erupting from your mouth, so the touring and the playing ground to a halt as my performances devolved into opportunities for patrons to gamble about how long I'd go before dropping the instrument and soiling myself.

    I place the beginning of the end of my alcoholism on a hot July night in 1962 in Buenos Aires.  It was 2 A.M., and I had just finished my twelfth set of the night.  Sure, twelve sets in a night sounds ambitious, but they went quickly.  (Those audience members who bet on my pants staying clean for more than ten minutes at a time never went home with their money).  By that time, the audience had dwindled to a janitor and some neighborhood drug dealers.  I wandered offstage and sidled up to the bar as the next performer, a delusional midget prop comic/penis puppeteer, began his act.  When I called out my order to the bartender, the accordion slipped from my shoulder and fell squarely on the foot of a prominent local brothel-keeper and cocaine peddler named Baltasar.  

 

    He spun around to face me and slowly stood, revealing himself to be no less than seven meters tall.  His shirt was stained with the blood of past victims, and the room fell quiet to hear the lout yell, "Coja a su madre!"  I correctly assumed this was not some local pleasantry or perhaps an invitation to an upcoming block party.  Years on the road had hardened my nerves, and I drunkenly smashed a bottle and recommended that we assault one another.  With my broken Spanish, I had actually asked if he'd like to hold my breasts and talk about love, but he got the point.  None of his friends were there to help the great Baltasar, though, and it was too late that he realized his mistake.  He had failed to consider my experience in such scrapes.  It was long before that day that I had learned to carry a garotte wire with me at all times.  He charged at me. Through sheer drunken reflex, I deftly spun poor Baltasar and looped the length of piano wire around his neck.  I pulled it tight and felt him stiffen with the realization that all hope was lost.  

    After the giant went limp, I put the bloody wire back in my pocket and stumbled outside, past the unperturbed janitor.  I flopped down in a gutter on the other side of the city.  A little stream of water from the road pushed garbage and sediment into my hair.  I lay there for days, out of work and money, my hands caked in the blood of the man I'd killed.  Food and drink were to be found next to me on the street, a puddle of rainwater here, a piece of bread offered by a rat there.  Survival became inconsequential.  The days passed, I tracked the rotting of my teeth, let the maggots feast on my gangrenous legs, and thought back on the last breaths of Baltasar as he died in my clutches.  It was then that I started playing weddings.

    A kindly homeless man I met had a daughter with an upcoming wedding.  I heard him in an alleyway, telling a friend about his inability to pay for music at the reception for the nuptials.  He complained to his chum, "It's so hard to meet people when you're homeless!  Are there no musicians out there?"  Those words echoed across my ears, and I was shaken by a flood of memories from my days on the road.  Blood and pus spilled from my mouth as I opened it to moan, "I knew a musician once!  He was dashing and fair, people loved him.  Women trampled one another to be near him."  The father of the bride became inquisitive.  "How can I contact him?"  "He's dead!  He died with poor Baltasar!"  Tears streamed down my cheeks and I wrung my filthy beard in animalistic pain.

    Over the next few weeks, Faustino cared for me.  He taught me how to walk again and cleaned me up.  We would lie together in the park at night and cry (people have since told me that this was "pretty gay").  During the day, Faustino helped me practice the accordion on a model he'd procured from a junk heap on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.  By the time of his daughter's wedding, my drinking was under control, I was walking, and "Werner Would Like to Have Sex With You" was back in force.

    The reception hall was dingy, like the kind of place where a homeless man might host his daughter's wedding party.  That is to say, it was the long-abandoned local Chuck E. Cheese.  I took the stage around nine o'clock and presided over the sorry crowd of bums and their families.  As I launched into my signature melody, the crowd took to it and began dancing.  Of course, they didn't know the dance of the Belgian whore, but I taught it to them from the stage in a fit of nostalgic vigor.  Yes, they took to it like homeless people to the rhythm of a hooker from Brussels.

 

    With the success of that night, the bookings rolled in.  Weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthdays: nobody could get enough of the accordion-playing former wino and his asinine dance.  I became popular once again, and it was difficult to walk down the street without old women flapping their arms at me or holding them out wide, as if soaring at the song's interlude.  The fools.

    Today, I live quietly in Switzerland.  None in town know my saga.  To them, I am a retired Ricola pitchman and nothing more.  Many around the world, though, especially a Belgian whore, Faustino, and some poor bastard named Baltasar, know me as much more. 

---

The Accordion Throughout Time

    The accordion was invented by Chinese mystics in the Qin dynasty.  Marco Polo brought the accordion back to Europe in the 13th century.  It soon became popular in Scandanavia: an accordion filled with water was an effective firefighting tool.  Its so called "musical"  properties were discovered during a humorous accident involving a man named Hansel and his cat.

    The future of the accordion remains uncertain as an accordion cannot function in space.  Nonetheless, various space agencies have insisted that the future of mankind depends on our ability to play the accordion in space.  Who will be among the brave cosmocordionnauts who will take this magical squeezebox high into the heavens and bring its clarion melodies to the ear of god?

    Only time will tell.