Bagel Posthumously Awarded "Yitmotty"

hiter-than-white white man Red Bagel, founder and sometime-Editor of the commune was awarded his own publication's "You the Man of the Year" Award for the sixth year in a row, to no one's surprise. Bagel has been missing and presumed paranoid since the November re-election of evil incarnate George W. Bush, and Bagel's brother Gay presented the award posthumously to his own brother at a ceremony at the commune offices in Flatbush, New Jersey, even as Bagel's Caucasian manservant Rascal insisted his "master" was alive and willing to accept the award behind closed doors.

Gay Bagel, a miserable shell of a man, praised his brother with backhanded compliments on Red's lifelong career of spending a lot of time on something never once profitable.

"What can we say about Red that has not already been said in the poetry of stoned hippies everywhere," said Gay Bagel, reading from a fill-in-the-blanks form eulogy he acquired from the Internet. "My brother waged a war against the mentally stable everywhere in his attempts to spread the word of liars and morons. Without him around, the world is a little less prone to idiocy. But I've come here to bury Red, not to praise him, if I could but find the body. If I found him alive, then I would have come to bathe him and get him a clean suit, or at least have him cut his fingernails and stop dragging the name Bagel down into the sewers he smells like. I suppose all I really want to say here is: Red, if you are alive, anywhere, there are a lot of bills that haven't been paid yet and nobody can figure out how to get into the commune lockbox. All you here are witnesses—the man is this much closer to being declared dead, and soon I will be the boss of all of you."

And for the first time, the entire commune staff burst into tears at the thought of Red's passing.

Despite the sombering moment at the event, things cheered up when Rascal, representing Red Bagel himself, took the stage and promised us all our fearless editor was in the best of health, and thankful for his sixth consecutive win, making him the only person ever to win the YTMOTY, or "Yitmotty."

"Crikey, don't it beat all?" rattled the Australian manservant, who wore his best T-shirt to the ceremony. "Red misses y'all, I can assure ya, and soon as he feels it's 'all clear' to return to the surface, he's gonna join us for a three-week binge party of nothin' but lager, mates! Now… what say we drink up, for Red's sake?" Rascal, already drinking heavily before the announcement, devolved into a parade of Australian caterwauling understandable to no one, Australian or otherwise.

The event continued on into early evening hours, until most of us had drunken ourselves into a haze and all efforts to keep Omar Bricks away from the stereo finally failed. As 1980s nostalgia bombarded us through twin speakers, a few reporters spoke well of Red Bagel and his missing ass.

"There will never be another like Red Bagel—a man entirely devoted to his vision of a better America," said former Acting Editor Ramrod Hurley, now acting like a drunk. "An America of tomorrow, without fear and prejudice, without the suffering of the common man, and with a government forthright and honest with its own people. And now that he's gone, I call dibs on the boss job."

Hurley was bound, gagged, and wrapped in garish paper. The stamp on his head ordered us not to open until X-Mas, and I had to heartily agree.

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Recently a famous musician friend of mine who will remain anonymous, his first name Beck, asked me, "Yo, Griswald—the guitar. What the dillio?" From these utterances I constructed a crude sentence asking me the history of the guitar, and it's a good one. For centuries no instrument has been strummed more by drunken frat boys to woo underage poontang to a house party. It is America's instrument.

The basic design came from an instrument in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages were so called namely because pretending you were smart would get your lights punched out by the unenlightened masses everywhere—it was like our modern-day Washington D.C., though the tie had yet to be created.

The original design is believed to be the creation of Johann Crunch, who later went on to invent a cereal while serving in the military. Crunch had kids that would not shut up, yet he found by pulling his wife's hair taut and plucking on it to make sounds he could lull them to sleep, and keep his wife in line. All this went in the crapper, however, when Crunch's wife died of a self-inflicted arrow wound. Not wanting to lose his ace in the hole with the kids, Crunch put her head on the end of a broom and tied the hair to the other end. This allowed him to create complicated chords with his left hand, like Gmaj7.

Upon his death, the guys who killed him made off with the strange instrument, which they called a lute, because they were uneducated and couldn't spell "loot" correctly. As one became more proficient with the lute, they formed the world's first modern band, though of course they could never find a reliable bass player.

The lute was mass-produced by monks, and the first design change was to start making it out of wood rather than maiden's skulls, a more cost-effective manner of production, and to use nylon and silk for the strings, for a more sensual plucking style.

The Dark Ages gave way to the Middle Ages, then a brief period called the So-So Ages, often unmentioned in history and a lot like our 1970s. As all this progressed, the lute became England's most popular instrument, and was also imported to Europe where it helped create primitive Goth Tech bands in Germany. By the time America had its independence from England and its natives, the lute had been extended and transformed into the guitar, so called just because lute sounded stupid. A modern descendant of the original Guitar family claims his six-times great-grandfather (though friends say he was only half as great as built up) is the one to have created the first guitar, because his long arms would get cramped trying to play "Love to Thee Maidens" on the lute and his frustrated picking style resulted in the frequent breaking of strings.

By the early twentieth century, the refinement process for steel had become so fluid they could make aluminum foil and guitar strings. Since they already made the strings, guitar players went ahead and decided to try putting steel strings on the guitar. Though they hurt like hell to play, the twangy-twang sound allowed the creation of country-western music, which is often referred to as "strike two" against steel strings.

In 1951, extremely bored with the Ozzie-&-Harriet world around him, musician Freddy Fender attempted to create the world's first electric guitar. It didn't necessarily sound like a good idea, but was part of Fender's ongoing attempt to make an electric everything. Though his electric shoes caused calluses and toe rot and his electric water balloons killed instantly, Fender had apparently found his niche and lodged himself quickly inside it with the electric guitar. He made a fortune selling pickups and amplifiers alone. He also opened the door to Peter Frampton and other musicians who couldn't play a regular guitar to any degree of interest.

Today, you'll find an unplayed guitar in nearly every closet across this great nation, and it's no secret why. I put them there.

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Johan Emmanuel Wiesel was an eccentric Hungarian immigrant who ran a pharmacy in New York in the 1830's. An amiable fellow with an impenetrable accent, Wiesel was fond of saying "Piss on Earth, and God wilt tard men!" which got him a lot of strange looks and the occasional thump on the head. When he wasn't busy "pepping up" the prescriptions he filled with copious amounts of cocaine, Wiesel occupied his spare time by inventing beverages. However, most of his inventions were completely impractical as beverages for actual humans, since they were all heinous in flavor and some ate through the bottle in less than a day's time.

But through some whim of serendipity, in 1845 one of his concoctions actually turned out to be fairly tasty, and only mildly corrosive. Wiesel was pissed, since he took this to mean that his arsenic had gone bad. But when he tested the drink on a young boy who he paid a quarter a year to do all the menial work in his pharmacy, he was surprised to find that the boy loved it. He burped until he threw up and suffered second-degree burns to his sinuses, but he loved it.

Wiesel decided to try selling his new beverage to customers in his pharmacy the very next day. He dusted off an old machine he had invented to dispense mustard into several pairs of shoes simultaneously, and in that moment the soda fountain was porn. Born.

The drink was a huge success, and before long his customers were demanding, sometimes at gunpoint, that Wiesel make his soda available to the wider market. Wiesel responded by buying a gigantic sack of empty beer bottles from a local orphanage, then filling them all with cole slaw. He was almost there. Realizing that this in no way addressed his soda-selling needs, Wiesel dumped out all of the cole slaw and filled the bottles with his sizzling new beverage instead. Despite the objections of absolutely everyone else involved, he insisted on naming his beverage Wiesel Piss, and it accordingly sold like sacks of dead leper babies.

Wiesel eventually went broke trying to sell Wiesel Piss, and died alone in the gutter after being stabbed in the ankle by a drunken orphan. His lone living relation sold the rights to the soda to a flim-flam man named Flannery McIntosh for one dollar. McIntosh renamed the drink Scrud and sold it as both a digestive aid and a carburetor cleaner. His memorable slogan, "Keeps your tummy firing on all cylinders," is still remembered to this day by people who are incredibly old and anal.

McIntosh built a modest empire around Scrud until 1892, when he was sued for being Irish and lost it all. The winners of that lawsuit, Daniel Freebanks and Benneton DuBois, renamed the drink Dope and sold it strictly as a new something called a "soft drink," a term of dubious legality that implied curative properties against erectile dysfunction. Their business grew hand over foot until 1910, when the US government cracked down on Dope since it contained cocaine, strychnine, absinthe, turpentine, a solution of fool's gold and high levels of cootineut, an imaginary ingredient that at the time was thought to quell dark humors in the pancreas.

Freebanks and DuBois went out of business faster than a pregnant hooker, and they were bought out by Farthington McIntosh, the grandson of Flannery. He promptly reformulated the drink in his bathtub, taking out the offending ingredients and replacing them with shitloads of sugar. But he was careful to also slyly rename the soda Coke, so that hipsters and conspiracy theorists would always think it still secretly contained cocaine, promoting sales.

McIntosh built Coke into an empire, branching out across the globe and fending off upstart sodas like Rammit, Jeez, and Wimpo. Though all of the sodas being produced were virtually the same in flavor, McIntosh retained his edge thanks to his uncanny knack for advertising. On top of plastering every vertical surface he could find with the Coke logo, McIntosh's true genius surfaced in his use of radio jingles touting the virtues of Coke. From early gems like…

Buy a Coke,
drink it up,
Buy another coke,
shut up, shut up.

to the legendary…

Buy a coke,
regret you won't,
you had a nickel,
and now you don't!

and finally the immortal…

Buy a Coke, it's nature's drink
Fizzy fizz that helps you think
You probably won't get cancer, too
Coca-Cola is the one for you!

…McIntosh's jingles were on the lips of every boob in the nation. Among other things, McIntosh is remembered for pioneering the practice of marketing frivolous items as if they were essential to the quality of life.

Unfortunately for McIntosh, all of the marketing genius in the world doesn't make you dagger-proof. He was later stabbed in the back by his own son, who sold the company for forty dollars and a magic talking mule.

The new owner of The Coca-Cola Company was Montgomery County shouting champion Eustace Turner, who ruled Coca-Cola with an iron fist for eight months before selling 40% of the company to L.P. Farnsworth, 40% to Jules Mather, 51% to Modest Cinderbrooke, and 117% to a very stupid man named Sty Covington. Turner then skipped town and laughed himself sick, which is more fun than it sounds.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, it's all history, if you want to get technical about it, but the rest of it is the kind of history you don't want to know about since it's is too long and boring to go into. Fear not, you got all the juicy bits. Nothing much else happens until the Cola Wars, and I'm saving that in case my book deal comes through.

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