There's Always USENET

When I need a good dose of morons, mentally ill savants, and people with direct brain-rectum connections, I lurk on high-traffic usenet newsgroups. In this nook of cyberspace, most if not all NG subscribers form virtual communities, that is, they do not know each other personally (as opposed to low traffic niche interest-based NGs populated by festival goers, etc...these groups contain cyber-messaging emanating from real communities).

One group I enjoy in particular (in the rec. domain) is dedicated to discussion of classical music recordings. Much bandwidth is devoted to the statement of unshakable opinions and personal insults. When flame wars reach the sub-e.coli level, I post a parody of the discusion in the form of a satire employing the stilted, faux-academic prose found in "serious" music reference works or classical/jazz/audiophile aficionado magazines.

WHO WAS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL WIND PLAYER OF THE 20th CENTURY?
from Grove's...

Ivan Ivanovich Gletkin (Hero of the Soviet Union, Kennedy Center Awardee) is universally considered the most influential piccolo player of the 20th century. Although he had no students (ed. note: the remains of 311 bodies unearthed at his dacha near Odessa await identification), he has won great accolades as both a Soviet and American orchestral musician. After study at the Third Smolensk Institute for Piccolo Pedagogy, his first professional appointment was Domra Primo with the Samarkand Folkloric Ensemble. Upon auditioning for Mravinsky, he became a member of the Leningrad PO at the start of the Nazi siege. After Gletkin's first performance with the LPO (unedited Ilya Murometz Symphony by Gliere), Mravinsky convinced him to walk up and down Nevsky Prospect playing double high Db 24 hours a day at ffff for 900 days. His action broke the Nazi siege. After the war, he defected to the US ("more freedom...sex...turnips...play precious Bundy piccolo") and joined the National Symphony (DC) under Kindler. He served as associate principal off-stage flute and Union shop representative ("all-union", he liked to point out). Gletkin was a Kennedy Center Awardee, primarily for his annual ritual of piping the mice out of the Kennedy Center basement into the Potomac. Upon retirement, he became a Selmer clinician, and was featured soloist with numerous school bands playing "Flight of Bum Bee" on the "parallel tritone double piccolo", an instrument of his own design. He is buried in Brooklyn, near Sheepshead Bay. An inscription on his tombstone (in Russian) may be translated as "Death to Spies!" or "Why not pretty oboe player sit on face?"


WHY I DESIGNED THE BEST SAXOPHONE MOUTHPIECE
Interview from "jazz or jizz", New York, August 1991

joj: Tell us about your set-up.
Idris Abdul bin-Ahmed bin-Felaffel: Man, I used to use this old Brilhart on the alto...Bird's...there was enough smack in it that after two gigs, I was hooked...on the bari, Mattson refaced an old Ford exhaust manifold for me. Reeds were always Vandoren #5s. On the tenor, this dude named Porter machined a metal mouthpiece that he said was a control rod off a nuclear reactor at Brookhaven...man, my tone glowed...