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.

he pharmaceutical niche player Algor released startling fourth-quarter projections this week, a reversal of fortunes many in financial circles attribute to the company renaming many of its medications for the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. Realizing that social embarrassment may play a part in the afflicted avoiding treatment for their cursed states, Algor saw fourth-quarter sales of their best selling herpes treatment ClearVue skyrocket after the drug was changed from its longstanding name of HerpEase.

Finally bending to pressure from marketing experts, Algor has begun renaming its other not-quite-popular-enough drugs under the now commonplace industry practice of drug names that have nothing to do with a condition or its treatment. By the beginning of 2005, the company hopes to offer a complete line of attractively-named treatments for the unfortunately STDed.

GonorRid, the company's industry-standard drug for the treatment of puss-laden malcontents suffering from gonorrhea, will be shipped to pharmacies under its new label of SmoothOperator beginning in January.

A similar fate awaits the company's pride and joy, Crabex, Algor's floundering treatment for pubic lice. After months of focus group testing, Algor has recently decided to rename the drug PartyZone.

Last but not least is SyphiLess, the company's breakthrough treatment for syphilis sufferers. Though Algor has yet to make an official announcement on the renaming of this drug, early leaked reports indicate that the drug will be called either Blissex or PissFree in 2005.

But will Algor's new approach be a success? To answer that question, we went straight to STD sufferers for the real dirt.

"Oh yeah, I'd definitely buy more if it was named something like Smurfies or something, that would definitely boost sales," according to porn impresario Tori Anus, a frequent Crabex user. "Then I'd stop getting those dirty looks from the dried up old bags at the Wal-Mart pharmacy. They'd just think I'd been fucking Smurfs or something."

Determined to dig deeper into the beans of the story, this reporter conducted further research among the loose women of 1-900-HOT-DATE, likely to be experts on the treatment of cock-borne illness. In addition to providing hours or stimulating conversation, Misty and Chakra also provided great advice about writing off the cost of the toll call as a business expense.

"Algor definitely has a hot idea on their hands there," insisted Misty, a buxom brunette with smoldering green eyes. "You're getting me hot just talking about it."

"Hot and naughty," agreed Chakra, a Thai-Scottish delight who insisted on conducting the telephone interview in the nude.

No doubt the executives at Algor have done similar research, since it's loads more fun than the alternative of company execs experimentally contracting STDs themselves to see if they feel embarrassed about getting treatment. So the New Year looks to be a happy one for Algor shareholders, who haven't heard news this good since the company changed its name from Cock Rot Ltd. in 1999, amid reports that investors were too embarrassed to purchase their stock.

The history of video games thus far can be neatly divided into three eras: the Arcade Era, which was covered in part one of this series, spanned the rise of video gaming up from the primordial, pixilated ooze. Second was the Console Era, when gamers finally gained the opportunity to play lame, half-assed knockoffs of their arcade favorites at home, for the quarter-saving initial outlay of several hundred dollars. But it did mean less time spent developing cancer in the smoke-filled game room of the local bowling alley, so progress was progress. Thirdly came the No-Arcade Era, after home consoles got so good that there was no reason to go to the arcade any more, unless you were too broke to buy Camels and needed a fix of second-hand smoke, or you wanted to play that life-sized Stuck In Traffic driving game.

But forget about that third era for now, you'll just get confused since this column is all about the second one, the rise of the consoles. From the first, shitastic home Pong in 1972, through the Atari 2600, Colecovision, Intellivision and Chevy's little-known and ill-fated foray into the gaming business, Impallavision, home consoles have sprouted hair on the nads of an entire generation.

The very first home video game console was Magnavox's Odyssey in 1972, an impressive bit of engineering done in by the fact that they never made any games for it. This oversight on Maganvox's part quickly became apparent in 1973, when home gamers grew bored of playing with the console's menu screen and realized there were no games in this game console. Magnavox attempted to re-release the Odyssey as simply a "console" in 1974, hoping to profit on mystery alone, but this tactic soon proved as futile as their attempts a year earlier to convince gamers that the Odyssey was actually full of fun games, but that finding them was the most challenging game of all.

The Odyssey was soon superseded by Coleco's Telstar in 1976, a big oval box that put out more radiation than a Russian microwave. Coleco originally started out as the Connecticut Leather Company (I shit you not), which over the years had made leather craft kits for shoe makers and, just for the hell of it, plastic kiddie pools. Their experience with kiddie pools made them a natural to enter the highly competitive world of complex consumer electronics, but unfortunately a complete lack of engineering know-how left Coleco with a product more deadly than Hasbro's ill-fated "Exploding Porcupine" doll in the mid-70's. Coleco made one last stab at saving the Telstar with their "It glows in the dark!" ad campaign in 1977, but after a while the mounting death toll began to hurt the company's bottom line.

In spite of never having put out a home console, Atari was dominating the home console market by the mid-70's due in large part to the criminal ineptitude of their competitors. The company was started by a couple of computer science drop-outs, Noel Bushnell and Cole Dabney, who had both been kicked out of college for refusing to toe the party line about things like not making grilled cheese sandwiches on hot motherboards or obeying programming language syntax. Though they originally wanted to name their company Syzygy, for the sound a keyboard makes when you sit on it, that name was already being used by an Indiana roofing company. So the two had to settle for Atari, a Japanese chess term meaning "Eat shit and lose."

After the success of their initial run of arcade games, Atari decided to take the next logical step by opening a chain of restaurants featuring singing robot animals in 1977. Pizza Time Theater and its mascot, a terrifying man-sized rat named Chuck E. Cheese, was an instant success. But once he saw his vision in action, Bushnell, who'd thought of the concept while getting stoned at Disneyland the year before, was scared straight and immediately steered Atari's course toward the home console market.

Atari released the 2600 later that year, which was quickly followed by Bally's copycat console, the Bally Professional Arcade. Though Bally would not answer questions about who exactly these video gaming professionals were that the console was being marketed to, the system was a minor hit due to the workout provided by kids moving the unreasonably heavy console from TV to TV whenever they wanted to play the console's only game, Meathead.

Again boosted by the ineptitudes of their competitors, Atari made another bold move in 1978, releasing the Atari 400 to compete with Apple's line of home computers. Consumers, however, prefered the way Apple's computers went "boop" and did nothing useful, and Atari quickly withdrew from the shitty computer market. Magnavox would also briefly try to dethrone Apple with their Odyssey 2 home computer, which quickly failed due to a complete lack of software.

Sales of Atari's 2600 skyrocketed in 1980 with the release of the system's first game, Space Invaders. Finally finding the key to home console success through the synergistic combination of system hardware and games, Atari was quickly aped by toymaker Mattel with the release of the Intellivision later that year. Realizing Mattel's console wasn't selling well due to its association with intelligence, Coleco named their new console Colecovision in 1982 and cleaned up, in spite of the system's bizarre controllers that looked like some kind of garage door opener from hell.

Later that year, a Chicago man would drop dead of a heart attack while playing Atari's Berserk, sending video game sales through the roof.

That event was to be Atari's last hurrah for some time, however, since at around the same time Atari released their home port of Pac-Man for their 2600 console, in a version so stupefyingly shitty as to cause the infamous video game crash of 1982.

From late 1982 through 1985 the home video game market went down in heinous flames, due to the dozens of different consoles being released almost daily by anyone with a soldering kit and a bad idea. Consumers eventually grew confused, trying to play Danavision games on their Scatari console, or trying to plug Donkey Kong Jr. into their toasters. Soon gamers gave up and went back to playing Stratego and throwing rocks at squirrels, spelling death for the video game industry. And it wouldn't be until 1985 that a fat ethnic plumber would roust the industry from its watery grave and once again enslave the minds of a generation. But that's a sunshine story for another day.

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