A History of Treachery

The Chef

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 “borrowed” 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.

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