Don't know if anybody else has noticed the lurid cover of this week's UC Review, which, since it was forced by vigorous neighborhood protests to cease publishing advertisements for sex toys has resorted to fronting stories from the Christian Science Monitor or, as in this case, really outrageous color cartoons of organ harvesting in China.
Of course, what the article doesn't get into, probably because the editor is afraid he'll wake up some morning with a dead horse in his bed, is the REAL neighborhood scandal, which is obviously the unsanctionable harvesting of organs going on in the local Abbraccio restaurant, if you can call it a restaurant. The other week after a wild orgy following the Cassidy "Art" opening, I myself woke up with a fresh scar across my belly and a hollow feeling where my gall bladder used to be. I don't remember much about the occasion, just that the nice old Mennonite ladies had brought me home in a buggy after somebody apparently slipped me a mickey in my Shirley Temple. I immediately suspected what had happened, and I marched right over to Abbraccio and confronted Roger, in a nice Mennonite sort of way, about my suspicion. "Dude, where's my gall bladder?" I asked in as civil a manner as possible under the circumstances. Roger merely sneered in that supercilious way of his, passed me a plate of Portobello shrooms, and remarked "The chef says the 'goose' liver pate is particularly tasty tonight." Now, my lawyer has advised me that as I don't have *definitive* evidence as to where my gall bladder has wound up I probably shouldn't be too public with my wild accusations, at least until a little more detective work has been done and all the necessary paperwork for the civil suit has been assembled, but I will say this -- if you're going to the pre-preview meetup before Hitchhiker's Guide tomorrow evening, be sure to check that you've still got all your vital organs before checking out of the Abbraccio. -- Ross Bender http://rossbender.org/happyhour.html
