Hey Sean, I finished going through all the old issues looking for "best-of" material, and let me just say, first off, that my efforts have been nothing short of magnificent. A word like "scour" does not begin to describe the comprehensive nature of my meticulous efforts. No, my exploits are more deserving of praise and laudation centered around a word like "spelunk." I have read every word on every page of every Squelch ever printed. My thoroughness was beyond compare. I am Hercules.

Based on the (copious) notes I amassed during my comedy marathon, the following are my recommendations regarding content for the remainder of these 24 pages:

Kill me.

We are unoriginal, we are worthless, and if our magazine had ceased production four pages into the first issue, the world would be a much better place.

Example: in Volume 9, we run a fake ad reading "FREE MUMIA!" with smaller text underneath reading "With purchase of Gatorade at any federal prison." Get it? A clever pun on a well known slogan. Funny, right? Well, sort of. Funny in the way that the Squelch's Volume 6 "FREE TIBET (with purchase of a Tibet of equal or greater value)" fake ad is funny, which itself is funny in the same way that the Squelch's Volume 4 "FREE EL SALVADOR (while supplies last)" fake ad is funny, which, for whatever reason, seems not so unlike the Squelch's Volume 3 back page spread devoted to trite jokes written on bathroom stalls, one of which was...God, this stings. I can't continue. My soul can only turn to ash so many times before I start driving knives into my own heart just to get it over with.

That's not all, of course. Remember our fake Gap ad last December? Remember our oh-so-clever use of Joseph Stalin in graphical jokes all through out last year? Remember how original and witty we felt? Then you can imagine how emasculated I felt when I laid eyes on an old fake Gap ad, featuring Stalin himself. My self-esteem was shattered like an all-porcelain Whack-A-Mole. We may have well have saved ourselves some work by simply breaking out the Xerox machine.

Undoubtedly the worst of the worst, though, are the more personal tragedies. "Free Mumia," "Stalin + Gap" -- these are things we worked on as a whole, and while learning that the work was done before did hurt, it hurt us all in small and equal portions. Such was not the case when poor Boback found a Volume 3 feature called "The Story of Ethyl & Grignard" which, really, could just as easily have been called "O-Chem Erotica..." and been accompanied by a "Lady & the Tramp" parody graphic just like we did in, oh, October? Here's the truth, Sean: comedy is the Lady, we are the Tramps, and Boback -- Boback is the filthy, joke-scavenging Tramp-King. It hurt me deep down to see a grown man destroyed from the inside out like that, but it felt good knowing it wasn't me.

Jump forward to the read-through of Volume 4, where I am locked in fetal position on the floor after discovering that my "Rhesus Pieces" graphic from two issues ago was not a chucklesome masterpiece but an uninspired retread of a nearly identical graphic from six years earlier. How very, very easily pride transmutes to shame.

Oh, that reminds me of an idea for some back page material. You know that "Great Moments in Napster History" piece you did for the back cover of our May 2000 issue?