Ah, yes, Kolocutus. No history of Dead Air Time would be complete without mentioning him. Chris K. was a student at E&H at the same time we were. His real last name was something unpronounceable and Polish with an obscene number of consonants, and there was great fun made finding more pronounceable versions. He ended up being called Katchakoldski, Kamikaze, Coca-Colaski, Kolostomy, Koalabearski, and assorted other things. It probably didn’t help that he looked like a Muppet.
That’s right, he looked like a Muppet. Chris had a really round head with fuzzy, curly hair like shag carpet, and big glasses with beady eyes behind them. He also had an unnaturally large mouth. Oh, Chris did talk a lot, but I mean he just had a really large mouth. When he talked, he looked like his entire head was flapping up and down, connected only by a thin bit of cloth at the back with someone’s hand inside his neck manipulating it.
I must stop describing him before I make a reference to Meet The Feebles. Nothing good ever came of Meet the Feebles.
Anyway, Kolostomy initially helped out with Dead Air Time, occasionally covering for me or Phil the Smelly Italian. He did the broadcasts of the college’s football games, and I guess Pete figured he might bring some prestige to the show. But we didn’t need prestige – we needed talent. Chris had one, but not the other. You can probably guess which.
Sometime later on, another nighttime slot came free, and Chris decided to try his own show. Rounding up a couple of other sports hosts, he started a skit comedy and eclectic music show. No resemblance there.
Unlike Dead Air Time, it wasn’t funny. It had a lot of what I call “simulated humor”: it looked like humor, and it sounded like humor – it just wasn’t funny. Consider it the Olestra of comedy, complete with irritable bowel syndrome. I don’t even remember the show’s name. I might say we had a rivalry going, but it didn’t last long enough for that.
Chris also “borrowed” one of our ideas, and pretty soon he was doing ‘traffic reports’ under the name Dr. Gridlock (which, if I remember correctly, was a name he “borrowedâ€? from somewhere else). This was too much to not retaliate.
First was a skit that involved a helicopter race between our then-current traffic reporter, who was named after a famous NASCAR driver. I’m not going to mention his name, because the obvious ending of the skit (remember what always happens to our traffic reporters) is in poor taste now that the real man has gone on to the Great Race in the Sky. I’d rather not have irritable NASCAR fans getting upset. The race ended with Dr. Gridlock not only losing, but crashing and dying horribly.
That wasn’t enough to stop him. In the next skit, he returned as a cyborg monstrosity known as Gridlockutus, who was determined to assimilate Dead Air Time into the Sports Department Collective. Star Trek: First Contact was then current, and being a bunch of uber-geeks, we couldn’t resist doing our own horrible spoof. This ended with Gridlockutus being hit by a train. I even mixed up a special Borgified version of the Patented Death effect that sounded something like the noise the Cyberdemon in Doom makes when you kill it.
Fortunately, Kormoborowski was a good sport about having a Borgified version of himself run over by a train, and didn’t hold it against us. All in all, he was a good sport about a lot of things. Even the Muppet jokes didn’t upset him.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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