Plumbing the
depths of dum for
just over a year!!!!

Welcome to Retard!

When the iditors of this zine aren't sitting in the bathroom yelling, "Mom! I'm done now! I'M DONE! Mom?!?" they're busy gathering together more of the shit you like (even if they have to make it themselves). Below, you'll find a sampling of our usual "strong as an ox, dumb as some rocks" features and a look at what's to come. We're up to our fifth issue now -- that's over one year of quality trademark Retard Riting, each piece "pantsfully" funny.

Some people think that anyone behind a zine called Retard has to be mean spirited and vicious. Mean spirited? Nah, not us! When was the last time you met a mean retard? We're gentle and fun loving, and the fact that we like to touch a lot of things with our tongues isn't necessarily a bad thing. Plus, we're always giving stray puppies a ride in our pants, and we're great for your self-esteem!

We are not! We're working on issue five and a compilation of the first four issues of Retard. Both should be available in about three months, provided we can keep hiding that Ritalin under our big, swollen tongues. We're always working on the zine you like, night and day, right through nap time, Mister Roger's, and the time when the ice cream truck comes. Now, if that's not dedication, I don't know what is.

Like hell. To prove it, we're going to give away some of what we work so hard to produce. The features below are excerpted from the first four issues, and represent only about a tenth of the hijinks and shenanigans present in each single issue. For three bucks, you can have a paper copy of the zine containing all ten tenths of the fun, and you can kiss it and hug it and stuff it in your pants (front or back, depending on what you like). Back issues are still available, but you better hurry if you want one. For ten bucks, you can have four Retards a year. We recommend it!

Well ... So far, we're available in a lot of book and record stores (links coming soon), but we don't have a distributor yet. We've been working on it, but it's much more complex than our feeble minds can handle quickly. We may be slow, but we are determined and even without a real distributor, copies of the zine are available in the UK, Denmark, France, and Spain, as well as here in the US. There are retards everywhere, and we plan to reach them, one at a time. Our bus may be short, but it does have that big door, and we'll manage to find a seat for you. Go read the stuff below now, and let us know what you think. After that, send us money and candy, or at least check out the retarded links to web pages that make us laugh like big goofy children.

Harmful if Swallowed, in every issue of the zine, details the experiences of our brave iditors as they eat things that ... well, things you probably shouldn't eat.

This episode of Harmful if Swallowed tackles some things deemed "nontoxic" as defined by the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. We took our lives in our hands (and mouths) to find out where the non stopped and the toxic began. The recipe for this one reads like a back-to-school shopping list, give or take a few items. Elmer's glue, Elmer's Sno- Drift Paste, Play-Doh, Elmer's Mucilage, Crayola Crayons, Crayola Markers, Silly Putty (doesn't melt in your mouth, your hands, or anywhere else), two kinds of paint (cake and jar), and a big pink bubble gum looking eraser that is manufactured by a company we can't remember, and since we ate it ... well. Prices vary, but a ten course meal for three should run you just over nine bucks.

We started this gustatory challenge with what we thought would be the easiest to consume -- Play-Biscuits. Take a can of Play-Doh, pick a color, split it into quarters, bake in a 350^o oven until warm, butter, and eat. We thought it would be the easiest to consume, because everyone that took part in the experiment remembers making Play-Doh in school with flour and water and food coloring and something else, we can't remember what (Tricia said it was gelatin, but that makes no sense to Casey or Kris). Well, you could taste the butter, you could taste the salt in the Play-Doh, you could taste that Play-Doh smell (heating it makes the whole house smell like play-time), and you could kind of taste the color a little (blue tastes sort of ... bluish, though Kris couldn't make out the difference between blue and red -- they tasted identical to him, as did white and yellow).

Play-Doh was not made to eat, and putting it in the oven doesn't do a damn thing for it's edibility. The taste is hard to describe, sort of like salty, flat, heavy-as-lead bread. The butter softens it a little, but this stuff isn't chewy as much as it is ... sort of clayey. Tricia gets extra points for bravery -- she segued us into our next test by combining the Play-Biscuits with something she called Elmer's Gravy -- a tablespoon of glue, a half a cup of water, and part of a bullion cube (she sort of smashed it in a spoon and used enough to make the mixture "go the right color"). She heated it over a medium-low flame, and it didn't taste all that bad -- though Kris and Casey had had quite enough Play-Biscuit by then.

We washed the biscuits down with Chocolate Glue. Chocolate Glue was pretty good, if you can get over what Case called "a real suspicious texture". Mix glue and water to get a milky sort of consistency, add Hershey's Cocoa powder or Drost (it's Dutch, it's good, it's snobbish and esoteric) and sugar (about a tablespoon of each) and mix until more-or-less combined (this part is pretty tough). Drink. Slowly. It's like drinking a thick shake, even at room temperature, but we think we may have let it sit a little too long. We followed it with many glasses of ice water, because the thought occurred to us -- oh shit, what if our bowels get all gluey?

On that note, we proceeded to eat Mucilage. God, is it disgusting. We originally thought we'd make Mucilage S'mores, but gluing those little puffed rice bastards together was tough, and the chocolate chips were kind of academic anyway, so we basically dripped a teaspoon of mucilage over a handful of Rice Krispies, added a few chocolate chips, and consumed. Mostly. Just fucking awful -- and trust me, you don't want to know what this tastes like.

More water, followed by the last intentionally sticky substance: Sno-Drift Paste. This is the stuff that smells a little like peppermint. Tricia and Kris didn't really like it, though the consistency is kind of like relay thick pudding when you first open the jar. It does taste faintly of peppermint, but more like ... well, paste. Casey liked it, though we were all phobic of gluey-bowel syndrome, so none of us over indulged.

Crayola Crayons taste like wax candles. Period. Nothing else can be said.

We had colored bread, next. Take a slice of Wonder Bread (what else would do?) color it with a marker (Casey picked a really pretty combination of red, orange, and pink, Tricia had black (art fag), and Komrade Kris was his usual predictable self and had Red Bread), and eat. Doesn't taste like much of anything except bread, really, and since it's nontoxic, why the hell not eat this stuff in abundance? It looks really cool, especially if you butter it and sprinkle it with sugar.

For dessert -- Silly Putty Turnovers. Actually, they were more like wrap-arounds (not, as Tricia first suggested, reach-arounds. That's something entirely different, which she agreed to after Kris volunteered to demonstrate for (and on) her). Take a good sized strawberry, pinch off a hunk of Silly Putty, and kind of wrap it around the strawberry. Dip the whole thing in sugar. Consume. Repeat. You could taste the strawberry, but sugar and Silly Putty sort of cancel each other out in a really weird way. Silly Putty, by the way, is very hard to chew.

We were pretty sick by this point, but the paint served as an apéritif -- the jar stuff tasted bloody fucking awful, it didn't matter what color you chose, and the cake stuff tasted just fucking awful, but was a lot cleaner, and a lot easier to get off your tongue. We ate the eraser because it was there. It wasn't terribly memorable, about what you'd expect.

We called a hospital and asked them what would happen if someone ate all of this stuff in combination. The nurse faltered, and said, "Well, if it's nontoxic, it shouldn't be ... bad, I don't guess." We pressed -- what if all of this had been eaten by the same person or persons through the course of one day? "Who," he asked, "Did this? A child?" No, we assured him. It was sort of a retard, actually. He sighed and said, "Well, he or she might experience a painful bowel movement, but nothing bad should happen." He gave us a poison control hotline number, and told us that this "mentally challenged person" should probably have had better supervision. We agreed completely.

This article appeared in Retard #2 -- back issues still available!

Mysteries of the Unknown, also in every issue, takes a dimwitted view of things like UFOs, The Bermuda Triangle ... and, as in the excerpt below, Bigfoot.

He's the reluctant celebrity with the 14+ shoe size. Seven feet tall, six hundred pounds and covered with thick hair, he's not going to win any beauty contests or be featured on the cover of Vanity Fair. He's Bigfoot, the most celebrated and sought after mystery man of the North American continent.

But it's a mistake to refer to Bigfoot exclusively as he. If the scientific evidence in the creature's favor is correct, then somewhere in the upper Northwest of America there exists a viable breeding population of perhaps up to one hundred such animals. The female Bigfoot is pictured in the art of many of the Indian tribes in the region from British Columbia to Northern California, always with gigantic brown breasts. This ape-like creature is prominent in many of the Indian legends originating from the Northwest. They call it "Sasquatch", and the moral of almost all of these legends seems to be, "Don't fuck with Bigfoot!" One of the first reported sightings of Bigfoot occurred in Victoria, British Columbia, on July 4th, 1884. A train crew on their normal Monday morning run noticed what looked like a man lying in the tracks. The engineer applied the brakes and blew his shrill whistle several times, awakening the "man" who turned out not be a "man" at all. The creature was frightened by all of the noise and tried to scramble up a steep embankment. The train's crew gave chase to what they believed was a demented Indian and ended up hitting it over the head with a rather large rock. "Jacko" as this creature was called turned out not to be a demented Indian but "half a man and half a beast". Four feet seven inches tall, weighing 127 pounds, Jacko demonstrated enormous strength. Unfortunately Jacko died on his way to England, where he was to have been featured as a permanent sideshow attraction. Jacko was buried quietly somewhere in the Canadian wilderness, and whether Jack was actually a young Bigfoot is a subject left to speculation.

Another notable reported sighting involved lumberjack Albert Osterman of Toba Inlet, British Columbia, who claimed to have been held captive by a family of Bigfeet for six days in 1924. he escaped only by poisoning the male leader of the clan with snuff tobacco.

Perhaps the most famous sighting of all was captured on film by former Rodeo Cowboy Roger Patterson in 1967 near Bluff Creek, CA. Patterson had been hunting the Bigfoot for more than a year when he captured this amazing footage in which a female Bigfoot lopes quickly into the forest, pausing for a moment to glance back at the camera. Patterson made casts of the tracks he found on the sight.

Does Bigfoot exist? There have been over two thousand reported sightings, at least half of which are known hoaxes. Whether he exists now or existed at one time is a question that may never be answered. Only time will tell if the mystery of Bigfoot is ever solved!

_{This article appeared in Retard #1 -- very few back issues still available, so order this classic now!}

My Brother's Yearbook, also in every issue of the zine, presents a few of the people our brother went to High School with (he's smarter, and he went to a regular school). Along with their pictures are a few of the things our brother remembered about them.

Ulf, the first guy, was from Holland. Or Austria, or something. He spoke English pretty well, and played clarinet and chess and futbol, which he was supposed to be really good at. When he said futbol, of course everyone assumed he meant football, so someone convinced him to try out for the team. He got pretty excited by that, and was always saying, "I cannot wait to play on an American team. This will be outstanding. Shit!" He never quite got swearing down right, either. So, he shows up at football tryouts wearing shorts and knee socks and cleats, carrying something that looked like a volleyball. A lot of the jock guys hadn't even really heard of soccer. Poor Ulf was so disappointed he cried, and everyone kind of felt bad for him.




The blonde girl -- no shit -- was named Inge. She was Swedish. All the guys were hot for her, of course. All the girls hated her. Her host family, the Jenkins, were kind of nuts anyway, but when Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins got divorced right before graduation, it surprised everyone. All the guys were trying to be sympathetic to Inge, saying it must be hard on her (though no one said anything to Susan Jenkins about how it must be hard on her). Inge just sort of nodded and didn't say much. When Mrs. Jenkins moved away, Inge went with her. No one talked about it after that.




I can't remember her name, that girl on the right. She was French, and kind of snotty, but would talk to anyone, and could be friendly, in a snotty sort of way. She could drink a hell of a lot, too. I went to a party with her once. It wasn't really a date, I guess mostly because she told me that as soon as she got in my car. At the end of the party, we were outside just hanging out. I was drunk out of my mind. She kept bumming cigarettes off me and talking about gangster movies. She seemed pretty sober, but then she got up and threw up in the bushes. She came back and sat down, said something like "Pardon, s'il vous plait," and went right back to drinking and talking about gangster movies.




Man, that girl. She started out really quiet, then a few of the cheerleaders got a hold of her, and she became wild as fuck. She had one of those Chinese names, you know ... Su Lin or something. No, I'm thinking of one of the redneck girls. Anyway, she had this Chinese name, but all the guys started calling her Cunni-Ling-Ling, because evidently she was really into that. She could get just shit-faced on like half a beer. I heard she was so bummed out about having to go home at the end of the summer that she got married to one of the vo-tech guys. I don't know, I was already at college by then, but I never heard anything else about her.




Jesus, the Musketeer. Look at that little goatee thing he had going on. This was like in '79, too. All the guys, I mean ALL the guys, hated him, even my crowd. He told all the girls he was related to Francisco Pizarro, which almost had to be a complete line of bullshit. His goatee was pretty scraggly, actually, and he used to sort of fill it out with eyebrow pencil. Sometimes he got a little carried away with that old pencil. Like the day this photograph was taken, for instance.





Katy O'Conner. If you cut her, she would have bled green beer -- she was that Irish. Cool as hell, though, and funny. Read a lot. Drank in school, too, sometimes in the cafeteria. She'd open this cheesy old tin lunch box and it would have like four bottles of beer in it. Her brother sent it over from Ireland. The staff left her alone after a while, and it was just too fucking cool. They had all these conferences with her host family, the Simons ... they just gave up after a while, I think. She said fuck a lot, too. All the time. She's the only one I really got to know well, and I would have asked her out, but ... it's fucked up. She was really, really sweet, and had a great body and everything else. And that accent ... just cute as hell. But her teeth ... man.

_{This feature appeared in Retard #3 -- back issues still available!}

The idea is straightforward enough. Call it a kind of cultural exchange, an enlightenment on our part of our newer countrymen who might not be familiar with esoteric American currency. Besides, the fucking post office stamp machines give them for change, and what the hell else are they good for?

The Susan B. Anthony dollar was a misguided effort on the part of this nation's treasury to pay homage to a woman who is now more famous for the stupid fucking quarter-sized coins she appears on than anything she did while she was alive. But when you hand on to your average immigrant gas station attendant, he really freaks out. The following is a verbatim transcript of an attempt to do nothing more than buy a pack of smokes ... with a little help from our friend Suzy.

Retard: Can I get a pack of Marlboros? Box.

Gas Station Guy: Two-oh-five.

[At this point, I hand him a dollar bill, a nickel, and a Susan B. Anthony dollar.]

Gas Station Guy [looks at the coin for a long time]: Two-oh-five.

Retard: That's what I gave you. Can I have my cigarettes now?

Gas Station Guy: No, two dollars and five cents. I need ... you need to give me two dollars and five cents.

Retard: That's what I gave you. Look at the bigger coin, the ... look, the other coin. No, that's a nickel. The other one. The big one. Right. See? It says "one dollar" right on it.

Gas Station Guy [Stares at the coin in question for a long time, again]: I can't take this. I need two dollars. And five cents. Two dollars.

Retard: Look, it's a dollar. It's the same thing. The bank will take it. You can deposit it in the bank. It's a dollar.

Gas Station Guy [pushing all of the money back through the slot]: No. Two dollars and five ... cents. Two oh five.

Retard [refusing to touch the money]: Look, that is two oh five.

Gas Station Guy: Next?

Retard [not moving]: Look, I just want my cigarettes, okay? That's two dollars and five cents.

Business Man Behind Me: What's the problem?

Retard: The guy's never seen a Susan B. Anthony before.

Business Man Behind Me: A What?

Retard: A Susan B. Anthony coin. You know, one of those dollar coins.

Business Man Behind Me: Oh.

Retard [addressing Gas Station Guy]: Come on, I'm not trying to cheat you. That's a dollar, I swear to god. Look at the dollar bill. It's the same word, see? Dollar bill, dollar coin. What's the difference?

Gas Station Guy [addressing Business Man Behind Me]: Sir?

Retard: Come on!

Business Man Behind Me: Uh, five on pump four.

Gas Station Guy [ignoring me and punching in the sale]: Next?

Shitty Buick Driver [pointing to me]: He's first.

Retard: Thanks, man. Come on, I just want the cigarettes. That's two dollars and five cents.

Gas Station Guy [ignoring me]: Sir?

Shitty Buick Driver: What's going on?

Retard: I'm just trying to get a pack of cigarettes. He won't take my money.

Shitty Buick Driver: What did you do to piss him off?

Retard: Gave him a Susan B. Anthony dollar.

Shitty Buick Driver: Oh.

Gas Station Guy [really losing it]: Look, you take your damn money and get off of my property!

Retard: No. I want my fucking cigarettes. And don't you fucking swear at me. I pay your salary!

Shitty Buick Driver [looking uncomfortable]: Look, I've got a dollar bill, I'll change it for the coin, all right?

Retard [to Shitty Buick Driver]: Thanks, man.

[At this point, I turned to the Gas Station Guy and said, "Watch this." I took the money from the drawer and made a big show of handing the Shitty Buick Driver the Susan B. Anthony coin. He handed me one dollar. I turned around and put the two dollar bills and the nickel in the drawer, snapping the bills as I laid them down.]

Retard: Pack of Marlboros, please. Box.

Gas Station Guy [stares at the money furiously, snatches it up, and throws a pack of smokes down]: Here. Leave.

Retard: I love you.

Gas Station Guy: Leave. [addressing Shitty Buick Driver] Sir?

Shitty Buick Driver [addressing me, because I'm still standing there]: Are you all right?

Retard [addressing Gas Station Guy]: Can I have some candy?

Shitty Buick Driver [backing away]: Are you all right?

Retard: Yeah, I'm just fucking with him.

_{This article appeared in Retard #4, on sale now!}

There's much more in each issue of Retard than just the above. Each issue also has Scary Fucking World, a collection of the nastiest, most horrible news stories we can find, Tales of Terror, scary tales that will keep you awake through nap-time, Ask a Stupid Question, presenting the results of a survey of questions only a retard could ask, History is Dum, detailing just how dimwitted some old dead guys could be, and much, much more (sometimes, even cookies and chocolate milk). If you want a copy ($3), or want to subscribe ($10), send checks and money orders payable to Menace Publishing & Manufacture at the address below.

We hope you enjoyed this sampling of Retard, and please, consider purchasing a copy or (better yet) a subscription. The janitor beats us if you don't!

Menace Publishing & Manufacture
Box 23151
Alexandria, VA 22304-9315

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