CSW I

Dear Editor,

I’m writing to let you know that I’m absolutely furious about the error in last month’s story Behind the Sneaky Curtain: The Wizard’s Story. The wizard of Oz is a con artist who rules over the Emerald Kingdom. He is NOT Dr. Oz, a con artist who has a talk show and likes to tell other people what they should eat. They are different people. How am I supposed to trust your journalistic integrity now?

-Losing my Faith in Canker Sore Weekly

Dear LMFICSW,

First of all, I wanted to say that I love the acronym, it’s very clever. Anyway, on to your main point: that error was the fault of our previous editor, who we fired in front of all of her friends for her terrible mistake. Rest assured that henceforth the articles contained herewith shall be of the highest integrity, and contain only the loftiest of journalistic content.

Apologetically,

The Editor

Dear Editor,

I just loved last month’s piece regarding the great and terrible Dr. Oz! I had no idea that he was the inventor not just of green goggles and diet solutions, but also of 3-D glasses and yellow bricks. I just wanted to thank you for always being a trustworthy source, where I know I can come to learn new things, and challenge my previously held conceptions.

–Loving this Flypaper Content!

Dear LTFC,

Thank you so much for your feedback! We’re always happy to hear from our readers, and we love knowing that we’re able to teach people new things from time to time. Look forward to an upcoming feature story regarding the adventures of Go Ask Alice in Wonderland, the true story of a drug-addled 6 year old who cured mercury poisoning with the blood of a talking cat!

Jubilantly,

The Editor

Dear Editor,

I have been lying awake at night lately, wracked with the inner pain that only belies itself by the tear tracks left across my face. Canker Sore Weekly is my favorite monthly publication about anything except canker sores (although, I wouldn’t mind seeing some canker sore content), however, I am tormented by the guilt I feel for stealing it for free on the internet all of these years. How can I ever make it up to you?

-Tortured Soul Seeks Forgiveness

Dear TSSF,

You silly goose! Ever since its inaugural publication in 1941, Canker Sore Weekly has been available for free in any reputable internet newsstand, and even some disreputable ones. You needn’t worry about this transgression, but you should worry about the fact that you mentioned the C-S words in this publication. That is most emphatically NOT what we are about here at CSW. BEGONE, VILE SOUL!

Superstitiously,

The Editor

Subscription is Compulsory

Miranda

By Captain Heckalopter

If you’ve spent as much time on the internet as I have over the last 16 years, and you have even a passing interest in science in general and astronomy in particular, then you’ve probably run across NASA’s APOD site. If you’re not a big initialism guy, I’m talking about the National Air and Space Administration’s Astronomy Photo Of the Day website. I checked the site incessantly and eventually made it my homepage in order to simplify my daily routine. One of my earliest software downloads was the APOD desktop wallpaper editor, which updated my desktop with a new and usually stunning image each day. I can’t recall the day or even the year, but I know I was in my early teens when I first saw the photo.

Life with insomnia is mostly characterized by interminable periods of aching boredom, punctuated by the brief hours when the rest of the world is awake with you. The night drags on longer every day that you can’t sleep, and even the things you like to read or watch lose their hold. Breaking the monotony becomes nearly impossible; words on pages blend together until you’ve read the same line more times than you can count, but that’s not saying much because you lose your focus when you’re counting anyway. Refreshing websites and clicking between bookmarks is still better than lying in bed, so it becomes something to do every night. Some nights are different though; something grabs your interest and pulls you in so hard that you don’t even notice the sun is up until you start to hear birds and people, getting louder and louder as the hour is deemed more socially acceptable.

That particular night, what grabbed my attention was a photo of Miranda. She’s incredibly odd looking, but in a most beguiling way. She’s also a moon, of Saturn, to be a little clearer. If you’re accustomed to looking at planets and moons, you’re used to round bodies with their little geological quirks, maybe some oddly shaped continents, a funny gas cloud, a few craters, maybe even a supervolcano or two. Miranda’s appearance made me gasp out loud; she is utterly shattered, like a rock orb that’s been hit with a few sledgehammers and haphazardly glued back together. NASA’s website describes her as follows:

“Like Frankenstein’s monster, Miranda looks like it was pieced together from parts that didn’t quite merge properly. At about 500 km in diameter, it’s only one-seventh as large as Earth’s moon, a size that seems unlikely to

support much tectonic activity. Yet Miranda sports one of the strangest and most varied landscapes among extraterrestrial bodies, including three large features known as “coronae,” which are unique among known objects in our solar system.”

Maybe it’s because both of my parents are geologists, and growing up, an interesting rock outcropping was reason enough for our car to screech to a halt, my parents oohing and aahing over the glacial striations, or maybe it’s because I’ve read too much science fiction and mythology, but the puzzle of Miranda’s broken face was utterly captivating to me, like an unsolved historical mystery.

It’s always struck me as a little odd that as the arrow of time drives forward, we learn more and more about our past. Not just us as humans, but the history of our planet, our solar system, and even the entire universe. We can actually be even more certain about the geological age of our planet (measured in the billions, unless you hate science) than about political events that occurred just yesterday. Unlike human behavior, it’s not subjective or culturally determined;

while theories may vary about the rock we live on, there is an absolute truth regarding information such as its age, and it’s one that we grow continually closer to being certain of.

When plate tectonics (the motion of our continents across the planet) was first proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, he was dismissed as a crackpot and a fraud. How else though, could you explain the mystery of the exactly matching rock structures on the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America? It’s hard to believe that the state of science was so archaic merely a century ago, but so much of what we know to be true is such recently acquired knowledge in the span of our species, that it shouldn’t be surprising that our knowledge is still so incomplete. Yet, somehow, it is. When we have so many problems here at home on our own little rock, why should I be so captivated by our ignorance of the processes that formed a hunk of ice and stone so far away that human eyes may never see it outside of a photo?

I still look at photos of Miranda, usually late at night by myself. And maybe it’s crazy that her broken, mysterious face sends a little shiver down my spine, but I’m actually glad that I can still react so viscerally to something so abstract. The fact that I have an emotional response to a tiny exogeological mystery is why science is almost guaranteed to find out exactly what happened to Miranda, to solve the mystery of who shattered her – an event that occurred before humans were even a glint in some tiny mammal’s eye.

Ode to the Booger

By Dr. Chief Mastercaptain

Ode to the booger, let it be known, that I have a booger all of my own.

It glistens, it sparkles, it shines, and it gleams. It’s colored with beauty, in a cool dark green.

My booger has seen many troubles in life. I’ve tried to protect it, to hide it from strife. But sometimes this life grabs a hold of you tight, makes you catch your breath, makes you take a bite.

The beauty, the passion, the color, the taste, none of which I could ever replace. So give me my boogers, I’ll take yours as well.

I love them like children, I think they are swell.

Pizza

By Heckalopter

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pizza pizza pi

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pizza pizza pizza pi

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ANGST

By Heckalopter

do you even know

how much my fucking power bill is costing me?

AN EPIDEMIC

By Dr. Chief Mastercaptain

Since the winter of 2007, America has seen a rapid and troubling decline in our bat population. The cause of this immense tidal wave of death is none other than the fabled and dangerous White Nose Syndrome, Geomyces destructans.

WNS is a fungus that infects the skin and brains of hibernating bats and slaughters them before they have a chance to bid their families farewell. To find out if a bat is infected with this deadly fungus, Scientists are forced to touch the bats, even though many Scientists would rather not. They must then examine the bats so that they can find out whether they exhibit the characteristic pattern of skin erosion that is symptomatic of WNS.

There are currently two known causes for this dreadful disease: the first is a highly flammable substance known to Science as “cocaine” (benzoylmethylecgonine), and the second is a

recently evolved organic life-form with a similar genetic code to that of humans; Hipsters. You probably haven’t heard of them. 

However, because of the fact that Science has yet to discover any hipster bats, we have hypothesized that the first option (cocaine), is more likely to be the root of the problem.

Farmers in the tri-state area (Oregon, Washington & New York) have seen a huge increase in the insect population due to WNS, and so far in 2013 they haven’t had a single successful crop yield, which is due primarily to their inability to go outside to plant the crops without getting insect bites.

This coming September, the Farmers Against White Nose Syndrome And All Biting Insects Association (FAWNSAABIA), which is based in Detroit, will host a rally to raise money for bug spray, and also to raise some money for the sick bats (science is still unclear on why the bats would need the money).

Please contact the editor for more details on the rally.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GORDON: A TRAGEDY

By Devatron and Heckalopter

This story doesn’t have a happy ending. Actually, it doesn’t have a very happy beginning either. Gordon was born in Florida in 1902 (10 years before the sinking of the Titanic), to a young couple who had eagerly anticipated the birth of their firstborn. However, the reality proved somewhat anticlimactic for them. Rather than the perfect infant they’d expected, Gordon was born with 16 toes; a modest four toes on the left foot, an alarming twelve toes on the right. Perhaps it would be too harsh to judge his parents by modern standards for their actions (social mores were different, after all), but it was probably still pretty abhorrent that his parents quickly sold their newborn baby to the circus.

Gordon wasn’t aware of this for some time of course, babies aren’t very quick on the uptake. It’s sort of hard to tell what is “normal” when your family is a literal freakshow, oh, and none of them are actually related to you. Gordon’s earliest memories included a lot more elephants and monkeys than yours do, but his also included sitting on a stool in a dingy tent, wiggling his toes while families (families? Gordon didn’t remember when he figured out what that actually meant, if he ever did at all) pointed and laughed at his deformities. For some reason, the fact that he had less than the average number of toes on his left foot made it all the more hilarious that his right foot was so hideously rich in digits.

In movies, circus folk usually stick together and form an unlikely but vibrant and loving family. However, when you think about the fact that these businesses were willing to purchase deformed newborns to make a profit, it’s perhaps less surprising that Gordon’s childhood was quite bereft of affection and camaraderie. Gordon grew to hate himself with a quiet fury, especially his feet, which had landed him in the circus in the first place. He couldn’t imagine himself as part of a family, the idea was too foreign, but he knew that the people who came to laugh at him in the tent came from a world where they didn’t have to make themselves look and feel ridiculous to make a living.

His feet weren’t just funny looking, they were also uncomfortable. Gordon didn’t like anyone to see his feet, except when absolutely necessary (earning his living, for instance), which led to some serious problems. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find shoes when you have 12 toes on one foot and 4 on the other? Compound that with how quickly the feet of young boys grow, and Gordon spent a lot of time hobbling about in extremely ill-fitting footwear. The circus Gordon was a part of was a traveling circus, which meant that it was next to impossible for Gordon to meet cobblers who could ensure that he was correctly shod, so Gordon did his best to sew his own shoes from the odds and ends he could encounter from worn-out clown shoes and other circus wear. His feet resembled Joseph’s coat, a ridiculous patchwork of patterns and colors, sewn together sloppily by his inexpert hands.

By his early teens, Gordon took to drinking to dull the pain he felt from his poorly assembled shoes crushing his toes into the smallest space possible. The circus folk, many of whom had plenty of issues of their own, did not allow Gordon to skip out on his chores, so he spent a lot of time on his feet mucking out the elephant pens, or adjusting nets for the Amazing Nicola Trapezi Family. One day, while someone drunkenly cleaned up after Jumbo II, he made the mistake of stumbling too close to the young behemoth, and experienced a pain he had never even

imagined. When he woke up the next day, he discovered that his right foot had been amputated, after the elephant had crushed Gordon’s excess of bones beyond all hope of recovery. Oddly enough, Gordon, unlike a traditional amputee, felt oddly lighthearted at this turn of events. An amputee, while not normal or average, was still a common enough state of affairs that only innocent children or cruel-hearted adults would ever feel inclined to comment on his quantity of feet.

However, as I explained, this tale does not have a happy ending. Gordon’s circus owners (still his legal guardians) were quick to put his amputated foot on display in their freak tent, and demanded that Gordon show off his stump and his left foot during demonstrations. However, since this was less lucrative than a freak with a fully intact set of 16 toes, Gordon was put to work doing other circus acts. He turned out to be an incompetent juggler, a lousy sword swallower, and a frankly dangerous fire-breather. After they had made him complete the rounds and he’d demonstrated his lack of skills, he was put to work in a job that required none: the Human Cannonball. The cannon was operated by a wretched old woman of indistinct Eastern European descent. Her accent was obscured by the hideous wreckage of her voice that was nearly unintelligible after decades of heavy cigarette use. It’s unclear why, but she took an immediate dislike to Gordon. The last human cannonball

had been a fit, healthy young man who joined the circus to see the country, perhaps Olga resented the loss of her former eye candy when he returned to his farm in Kansas after a year of travel. Whatever the reason was, every day that went by, Olga hated Gordon a little bit more. Gordon, for his part, found the old woman repulsive and rude. Maybe it was his growing disdain that pushed her over the edge, but Olga maintained to the police that it was an accident, and when it came to cops interfering in circus matters, circus folks really did seem to stick together.

Six months after Gordon began his stint as the human cannonball, he felt exhausted. He still had to do his chores, which had become even more difficult with the loss of his foot, and as the human cannonball was the last act of the night, he had lost several precious hours of sleep each day. His tight-fitting stars spangled suit that he wore each night had ripped the day before, and Gordon had sloppily repaired it with a piece of corduroy, the only bit of fabric he could find lying around. As he climbed into the cannon on that muggy Georgia night, his frumpy patch caught on a piece of metal, and he squirmed around helplessly, trying to slide

the rest of the way into the barrel. The crowd responded with laughter at first, but they quickly turned hostile, jeering and throwing scraps and bottles into the ring. A greasy popcorn box hit Olga squarely in the nose, and she snapped. Creaking to her feet, she shouted angrily and incoherently as she grabbed Gordon by the shoulders, wrenching the cannon out of position in the process. Sitting back into her perch, she immediately lit the fuse, and fired Gordon straight into the apex of the tent, where the metal poles were joined to hold it up.

Maybe it’s not so bad that Gordon died that day, because in his final moments, he was totally free from the encumbrances of the ground that had caused his feet pain since the day he learned to walk. As he flew to the top of the tent, the silks lit brightly in the dark summer night, the crowd became utterly silent, staring rapt as he flew far from the obvious target. Maybe it was ok that he died, because for the first time, Gordon had the experience of a group of people seeing him as a person, someone who had a real life (albeit one that was about to end) and real feelings. For the first time, he wasn’t laughed, screamed or jeered at by the families and couples and drunken men; instead he inspired the parents to grab their children tight, and the couples to hold desperately to each other’s hands. Even the drunks clenched their bottles closely to their chests, and stood rapt in fear and anticipation. And maybe that’s alright, maybe that’s what they needed, what Gordon needed, because in that moment, they all felt more fear than Gordon himself. When his body dropped to the ground, rather than pandemonium, the crowd stayed silent. And as they walked out of that tent, across the broken peanut shells and broken helmet fragments, they had to go back to their lives. And maybe if one of those couples had a baby with some extra toes, maybe they kept him and raised him and bought him shoes, rubbed his sore feet, and made him feel safe. But if not, maybe they all just thought a little harder about what they paid for, and who it affected. Or maybe none of that happened. Maybe their lives were all the same, forever. But then again, maybe not.

The end.