Wasteland-Blog

…Now it can be told…

Back in my early day on the internet some 11 years ago, I came across a website about a retarded punk rock band named “wonder bus” well here all these years later I came across this.

http://www.jeddavis.net/2005_08_01_archive.html

(The august 2^nd 2005 listing)

comes this confession:

Chris Radtke had graduated a semester before I did; he skipped Albany when I moved into his old room at 10-11 Madison. He left behind two condoms as a housewarming gift. I never used them.

Radtke was third man on the Mike and Paul show, screening phone calls and working in clever quips - another vacancy I filled when he split. Radtke was a lot better at it than I because he's pretty much the funniest person who ever lived.

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Trapped indoors by the Blizzard (and stoned silly), Radtke and his pal Richard Ackermann spent a week mastering Adobe Photoshop by altering pictures of themselves to look retarded. Not "retarded" like the euphemism; retarded like mongoloid. Corky retarded. They shrank faces while leaving head-size intact, elongated chins and craniums, and taffy-pulled features into Sloth-like deformation.

Radtke and Rich found the resultant images so funny, they crafted a backstory and put the photos up on a Web site - which they promoted in alt.music newsgroups with the following announcement:

For those of you who do not know, Wonderbus Is the greatest thing to hit the music world in America since Jimi Hendrix. Wonderbus is made up of 5 Retarded idividuals who play Hard Rock Originals with their very own retarded twist. This is the grimmest side of mental retardation, as the muscians are mere pawns in a game controlled by the money hungry management currently known as Gythyanki Entertainment. The five muscians, prone to mistakes because of their mental conditions, are often punsihed with harsh physical abuse on stage, ranging from beatings with lead pipes to torture through the many devices the management has invented (The Hamster Wheel, The Retard Vice, etc.) Crowd reactions were so positive to the onstage sadism, it has become a regular part of the Wonderbus show and lifestyle. Beatings have been incorporated into hilarious skits which the band members participating in willingly, fearing harsher punishment after the show. It is not uncommon for Wonderbus members to be forced offstage into the pit, where they ride the crowd untill audience members take over the managements' job, and dish out their own crude versions of abuse. When available, additional Down's Syndrome suffers who have no musical talent are often bound, gagged, and thrown in scores into a blood hungry audience where their only defense is to cover their eyes. Wonderbus has been received quite well by the public, and a full length cd on a somewhat major label will be released shortly. For more information, check out the Wonderbus Webpage which is still under construction at http://fourier.bme.med.ualberta.ca/~adam/wonderbus or the official Wonderbus Homepage at http://pantless.com/~infection/

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The five fictional members of Wonderbus - vocalist Len Lovejoy, guitarist Wayne Mooney, bassist Midge Ort, keyboardist Dewey Simms, and drummer Sticks Johnson - had individual Web pages with biographical and medical information, including tested IQ, and lists of likes, dislikes, and things that scared them.

The online community's reaction was immediate and overwhelming. "The Management" received an avalanche of e-mail; respondents were split roughly 50/50 between those who thought arrests should be made (mostly from alt.music.tori-amos) and those who thought it was the most hilarious thing they'd ever seen in their lives (mostly from alt.music.gwar).

Gythyanki Entertainment (by then Radtke had adopted the nom de Web Pulaski Rhodes) maintained that what they were doing was in fact beneficial to disabled people everywhere: they "discovered" talent that would otherwise have been overlooked (Len Lovejoy, for example, had allegedly been found pushing shopping carts and exposing himself to kids in a supermarket parking lot) and gave these people a new lease on life, something to do besides "sit in the shower and eat with a bib."

In those early days of the Web, nobody could tell if Wonderbus was a hoax. The first site got complained right off its server; a new host was found but Radtke and Rich were forced to move the site again soon enough. The vitriol only fed Wonderbus's growing notoriety; soon the Church of the Subgenius contacted Radtke and offered to partner up, and someone from the Rancid camp, upon reading in a fake online review that Wonderbus covered "Ruby Soho" live, contacted Rich for a tape. Wonderbus was an overnight Internet sensation, one of the very first…

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To read the rest Go to the site!

-Wasteland Man

I know this is been around fer a while but....

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/badgers.php

Its still funny & a bit trippy, if not addictive.

-Wasteland Man.