hree masked bandits made off with the largest-ever collection of stolen sperm samples in a daring daylight heist of the McCullough Bank of Low-Grade Sperm in New York this week, amusing authorities and frightening one McCullough patron into premature donation.

Authorities believe they are dealing with extremely low-grade, and possibly mentally deficient, criminals, all likely the results of McCullough sperm in the first place. Common sense and eyewitness accounts point to the robbers mistaking the sperm bank for the usual money-filled kind, lured by the facility’s lax security and complete lack of the imposing 87-year-old security guards usually employed by banks in the movies. Even worse, the apparently dipshitted bandits also robbed the least desirable sperm bank in town, as McCullough has traditionally been a discount repository for the genetic material of over 5,000 winos, junkies, teenage heart-attack victims, the criminally obese and conservatives for the last 20 years.

“Yeah, this looks to be the work of some real gonads,” evaluated police captain Walter Diggs. “One of them even dropped his wallet at the scene, but since it was just full of coupons and a novelty driver’s license made out to Jesus H. Christ, this has been of little assistance in our investigation.”

The McCullough Bank of Low-Grade Sperm, known in the reproductive-assistance community as “The Island of Misfit Spank,” was created by wealthy thinker Nelson McCulloch in 1982 to counterbalance to the offensively Nazistic eugenics movement. McCullough hoped to counter the societal effects of eugenic tycoon Robert Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice, also known as the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, which aimed at improving society by giving more women access to high-grade spunk. The McCullough Bank went in the other direction, extending the reproductive power and reach of the very individuals who natural selection, and surely at least the Nazis, would likely have wiped out.

Authorities speculate that after McCullough’s long and proud history of creating the ugly, the short, the slothful and disinterested, the weak, the gene-poor, the flat-chested and the unlovable, the bank’s chickens may have come home to roost in the form of deficient McCullough alumni making off with millions of their potential siblings in a beige 1987 Chevy Nova with a “Big Johnson” bumper sticker.

Reproductive-assistance experts remain terrified at the thought of how the sperm samples might be used in the wrong hands, possibly as sandwich spread.

“I just wouldn’t want to be in that car when the skeet packet goes off,” chucked McCullough head Nigel Barmes, referring to the explosive packet of hot-pink dyed sperm that tellers mix in with stolen samples to foil robbers.

The McCullough incident marks the first occurrence of sperm bank violence in this country since 1991, when militant pro-choice activists blew up the Washington, D.C. Gentleben Sperm Repository in retaliation for several abortion clinic bombings nationwide.

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Apologies for the sudden end to last week’s column, communistas. The sheer epic scope of the commune’s tale got the better of me and I had to take three Excedrin Migraine and spend a few hours feeding the ducks behind the Shanesly Arby’s.

When I left you last, the Crochet! staffers had just packed up and left town like those front-running little bear assholes in The Lorax. I have to tell you, commune readers, this was a personal low point in the life of Emil Zender. However, that didn’t last long as the very next week there was the lawsuit, which made Crochet! jumping ship seem like a trip to Six Flags.

It turns out that all these years there was a website called The Onion that people tell me is quite popular. And apparently various individuals with law degrees felt that the commune’s brand of insouciant truth-telling was a bit too close to The Onion’s jam for comfort. I don’t see it personally, but that may be due in part to our lack of a working internet connection. For all I know they may have a Homer Brinks working there who tortures their downstairs neighbors at Sew What? magazine, that really would be weird and possibly actionable. But either way, there was a lawsuit, and it turned out that our "friends" at Hipsoda.com were just archiving our site for use as evidence in the trial, just like they had repeatedly told us they were doing. It even turned out they weren’t being sarcastic! Note to the world: We really need to develop a sarcasm font, pronto.

Before you get too excited however, the lawsuit turned out to be about 97% sizzle and only 3% steak-like polyurethane. It turns out they’d spent years carefully amassing evidence against the commune without bothering to check in on our assets, which turned out to total -$47.39. Yes, Kinkos, I got your collections call. After realizing that even recouping their legal expenses was an absurd pipe dream, the lawyers attempted to have our site shut down so as to cease and desist damaging The Onion’s reputation. However it was quickly uncovered that for most of the commune’s existence, due to various technical fuckups the site had only been accessible through off-brand love tester machines in various Southern California Pioneer Chicken locations, and had never actually been posted on the wider internet until Hipsoda.com started collecting evidence for the lawsuit. So by a strange twist of fate The Onion had damaged its own reputation, spreading the commune’s unique brand of verve to seven new fans in the intervening years.

This seemed to embarrass everyone into just dropping the whole thing, well that and the fact that Boris Utzov got confused and went home with The Onion’s lawyers at the end of our last meeting with them, and the last I heard they’ve been unable to get him to leave.

But sadly, the commune’s triumph was short-lived. Without their shared hatred of Crochet! or the law to rally around, the commune staffers soon began to splinter. Some followed Omar when he left to start a cult in Gambia. Some -shudder- got jobs at the Shanesly Department of Public Works. Some are employed at the local strip club, Twerks because they typed in "Works" wrong on the nav. Some, I am certain, were eaten by the Gnarlap living in the crawl space under the basement, after it ran out of regretted mail-order brides and Pomeranians to eat.

Raoul Dunkin left to start a new political news site, TwinkInc.com, a hopefully more palatably-named successor to his deeply mourned spankrag.com. Red Bagel did stop by briefly, dressed as Colonel Sanders and insisting that everyone refer to him as such for tax purposes, but he quickly lost interest and left to work on his "Donald Trump" character.

My most loyal boarder was of course Ivan Nacutchacokov, who stayed the longest due to his fierce love for the commune and deep fear of his ex-wife, in uncertain proportions. But even his ticket was punched one night a few months back when the NSA came for him, apparently after finally getting around to reading some long-forgotten commune article that laid their nefarious plans bare for all to see. I would suggest they were tapping our phones or internet, but we had neither, and I’m not sure they’ve learned how to intercept bulk Valpak coupon mailers marked RETURN TO SENDER, which had been our main means of economical correspondence.

After Ivan was dragged screaming out my front door, then calmed way down and went along happily after discovering it was the NSA and not goons hired by Ivana, I must admit I fell into a bit of a funk, commune readers. Was this all my grand plans had come to? A brief smattering of articles over the years, countless unexplainable holes in my walls, some kind of insatiable beast living under my basement and an attic that smells like a sanitarium for dogs? Sometimes I question if it was all worth it.

And then I remember that all those dolls in the attic still have little walkie talkies in them. And man if my mom’s boyfriend Doug isn’t afraid of those dolls.

The spirit of the commune lives on!

Zincerely,
Emil Zender

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I've been wicked lucky lately. Sorry if the column hasn't been regular enough for you, Child Star fans, but I've been working—the big "W." It does start with a W, right, it's not like a silent P? Those fucking French can really mess up the English language.

But I have been working, no matter how you spell it. Not all of it's great stuff. I sexed chickens for a while at a KFC-owned chicken house, that's interesting for about an hour, unless you really, really like chickens. I guessed on about half of them, but if we're going to eat them anyway I don't see why we need to know if it's a rooster or hen. It's not like you ever eat some chicken and say, "Tastes like a cock!" or anything. Well, I said that once, but it wasn't the same situation at all. That's why I'm not welcome at Denny's anymore.

That gig was only temporary while I lined up showbiz jobs—you know, paying off the legal bills and stuff. I modeled some, did a bulletproof bra commercial for a The Survivalists Network and worked as a stunt head in an Excedrin commercial. I would have had the lead, but they didn't like my liberal use of the word "mindfucked." I also filled in at a book store when author Kitty Kelley had to cancel a signing at the last minute, but I'm not supposed to tell anyone about that. Her picture's right on the back of the book, everybody had to know they were being fucked with, but it was cool, everybody just sort of kept the fantasy going.

Then I lucked into the pilot, which is my big news. Not that it will necessarily go to series, I've been burnt way too often to get my hopes up on that one, but it could happen. I went into the audition to deliver pizzas to the casting agency, and figured while I was there I would knock the out. The whole pizza gig was just a drug delivery front anyway, so I didn't even risk losing a real job.

And they loved me, no other way to say it. I didn't even list Who's Your Daddy? on my resume, it seems like I have a better shot at getting cast when I do that. They didn't recognize me either, so I got this one purely on talent, and maybe some of that free stuff I passed out before the audition. But they said I really knew the role, 'cause I faked it so well, and called me back a couple of times. Then I was cast.

It's called Ho's!, and it's being considered as a mid-season replacement for the WB. Just one of those excellent ideas. I've been in the business long enough to know gold when I hear it. There's the rich, snobby ho, the fat ho, the dumb ho, and the white ho—that's me. They were going to go with an Asian ho, but I didn't do a very believable accent, they said. They also have an old ho, and they were trying to get Della Reese, but they're going with an unknown instead because Reese called the script "insulting and degrading." I think she was just holding out for more money, though.

Seriously, the show will rock. It's about the four ho's and the pimp they work for, played by David Faustino. And the old ho rents the building to us. But we have arguments and funny disagreements and shit. Still, in the end, we always learn that we have to stick together, or we'll get turned out. I used to ask all the time why there weren't any shows about ho's, and my tutors could never say why. I think it's an idea whose time has come, and I'm psyched to be a part of it. Like I said, I'm not getting my hopes up—networks never have any real vision. But if the WB shoots us down, maybe we can take it to HBO. It would be like a funny Oz there. Funnier.

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