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course,
his new offerings were brilliant and to this day, I use the front page
graphics that Dan sent me over the next few years.
At
the end of the first year's publication—we did 11 issues a year for the
first seven years—I was exhausted. As I contemplated the February
content, my
When
the idea of a LA.S.S.I re-birth first came to me in October, I checked
the archives to see when the last semi-nude/get weird issue ran. Maybe
it's too soon, I thought. It could generate mass hysteria and social
disorientation.
I
was shocked to realize that morphed scantily-clad images of Orrin Hatch
and Terry Tempest Williams had not seen the light of an alien sky in 11
years. ELEVEN YEARS.
Imagine
that...and what a simple, golden time it was, when our biggest worry
was the Monica Lewinsky affair. Bill Clinton was still president and
at the center of his own alien experience. In fact, it was February
12,1999, just days after the Lame Alien Swim-suit Issue bid its first
farewell, that Clinton was finally acquitted by the U.S. Senate. How I
miss those days.
Now
in the late winter of 2011, as we wrestle with issues and crises that
seem beyond our ability to fix, maybe it's time to pause and say, "what
the hell...let Spockfixit."
There
is still a great deal of serious content in this issue...well,
okay...some serious content and, in fact, the reader should keep in
mind that this is, above all, a 'lame' issue. The history behind that
title and its transmogrification follows. Really, it's all Dan
O'Connor's fault.
THE RETURN of the
LAME ALIEN SWIMSUIT ISSUE!
In
the early years of the second decade of the 21st Century, our species
is certainly on a roll. Our greed and avarice are consuming the rest of
the planet at an alarming rate, birds are falling out of the sky, frogs
are growing extra legs and weather patterns have become strange and
unpredictable. A few weeks ago it was warmer in Caribou, Maine than
Miami Beach.
The World is going to Hell...
Isn't it time for the return of
"THE LAME ALIEN
SWIMSUIT ISSUE?"
Origins of the LASSI...
When
I started the Zephyr in 1989,1 had no idea what I was doing and no
equipment not to do it with. I didn't even own a computer. I had to
carry hand-scribbled headline type to the Printing Place in Moab where
Marge Fleenor humored me and transferred my words to clean type in the
fonts and sizes I specified. But I had no graphic skills whatsoever
and made do with my cartoons to distract my readers from The Z's
decidedly amateurish look.
One
day, a couple years into this enterprise, I received a manila envelope
in the mail from reader/ subscriber Dan O'Connor in Leavenworth,
Washington. How he'd found The Zephyr was a mystery, but Dan—a
graphics designer—apparently either sensed my pain or my lack of shame
and created some new banners for the front page. He attached a note
that said something like, "Please consider using these in the
future...your banner sucks." He was right, of
Conservatives
hate Liberals, Liberals hate Conservatives, the Arabs hate the Jews
and the Jews hate the Arabs. It's a sure bet that of the almost 7
billion people who now inhabit Planet Earth, ALL of us hate SOMEBODY.
But what's important is that we keep buying products from China who are
about to have all of us for breakfast.
And
some mystics and prophets and even a few respected scientists think
we've already done enough harm to the planet to cook us to a Venus-like
hot cinder in a matter of a thousand years or so.
The World is going to Hell...
Isn't it time for the return of "THE LAME ALIEN SWIMSUIT ISSUE?"
heart
wasn't in it. I knew that whatever effort I made, the results would be
lame, and so it became the "First Annual Lame Issue."
I
got away with that for a couple years but my advertisers began to
grumble. Why are we paying you to produce something that, by your own
admission, is not worth looking at?
I
thought my candor alone would carry the day but clearly I was wrong. At
that moment, luck and Dan stepped in. A few months earlier, Dan had
again sent me one of his unsolicited contributions (seen here for the
first time in years). He rightly acknowledged
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