Old Hat from 1997 & Beyond
Winter 1997/1998: The alt.fan.frank-zappa Bootleg FAQ Pages
make way for the Son of the alt.fan.frank-zappa Bootleg FAQ at http://home5.swipnet.se/~w-59501/bootlegs/, maintained by
Bossk (R), which is soon accompanied at by the Return of the Son of the
alt.fan.frank-zappa Vinyl vs CDs FAQ at http://home5.swipnet.se/~w-59501/vinylvscds/,
maintained by That Guy from KUNG FU CULT MASTER 
.
Winter 1997: The webmaster attacked by locust!
Between Christmas 1997 & New Year's Eve 1997/1998: Mr Battu is
hospitalised after a leg-breaking fall from an improvised silver-screen rig in a leper
colony, but his employees continue to tour his cinema bus through northern India in
ceaseless pursuit of Mr Battu's long-time dream: to show films for tribal people who don't
even know what films are. Way out in the suburbs of Stockholm, the webmaster sips Monkey
King brand jasmine tea and watches the best film ever made, Lau
Kar-Leung's 
& Jackie Chan's 
DRUNKEN MASTER II 
(1994), for the very
first time. It is an original Hong Kong 
rental laserdisc - gold; this was
expensive - and the webmaster passes out a few minutes into the end
fight against Ken Lo 
, because it is SO GOOD. Chiefinspector,
present at the screening, opines that not only is it the best film ever made, it is the
best film it is possible to make; not only did he have the time of his
life watching it, but the best time it is possible to have, which can not be had any other
way than watching that film, and nothing else comes close. Knees kick and elbows
whirl, holding jar with drunken gait!
November 1997: The alt.fan.frank-zappa Bootleg FAQ Pages appear on the web at http://home5.swipnet.se/~w-59501/. Experiments with a frames interface are shut down by the great Vladimir Sovetov.
September 1997: Last plain text version of the alt.fan.frank-zappa Bootleg FAQ is completed. Soon after this, St. Alfonzo's Pancake Homepage, which used to host all the various alt.fan.frank-zappa FAQs, comes to a full stop as Robbert Heederik leaves the University of Amsterdam. (As of November 1999, St Alfonzo's is still on-line, just like when Robbert left it in 1997, including the old text version of the bootleg FAQ.)
1996: Cory Ferber takes over the alt.fan.frank-zappa Bootleg FAQ, and soon passes it on to Johan Wikberg.
April 1995: Rykodisc starts re-releasing what is practically the entire Zappa catalogue, often in slightly new versions, in their line of 1995 CDs, which fucks up the 1995 plain text version of the alt.fan.frank-zappa Vinyl vs CDs FAQ for good.
April 1 1994: Last plain text version of the alt.fan.frank-zappa Singles FAQ is completed.
1987, circa: Scott Morrisson compiles the first Frank Zappa bootleg discography on the internet. alt.fan.frank-zappa hasn't been invented yet, so he posts it to rec.music.misc.
July 22 1981: The Arlington Medical Center announces AIDS. (Thanks to Rolf Maurer for a copy of the press release.)
1975:
NEW PECCARY! Scientists discover a new species of peccary, the Chacoan Peccary, Catagonus
wagneri, in the Gran Chaco region of Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina, only a
few months after Frank Zappa records "The Adventures of Greggery
Peccary" in December 1974. Sadly, this peccary is now endangered.* Näpet
tryne!
KONRAD: I think I get it: the scientists, who were big Mothers fans, didn't announce the discovery until later, after they told Zappa about it. Because they had heard the peccary orchestral stuff and knew Zappa was working on a studio recording of it, and didn't want the kind of bad blood that went on between the Velvet Underground and the Mothers for so long after Freak Out! [the idea being that Zappa and Herb Cohen blocked the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico so Freak Out! could come out first, and be remembered as the first "weird" album in rock history - Ed], they deferred to the Zappa release date.
JOHN HENLEY: Yeah, that must be it.
Chris Ekman provides another interesting insight:
Anybody here ever hear of a comic book called Panic? Way back in the '50s, when Mad hadn't yet become a magazine, it was being imitated by all sorts of other comic books. Therefore, the company that sold Mad decided to put out their own "official" Mad imitation, with a lot of the same artists (and jokes). That was Panic.
The complete run of Panic was recently reprinted, and in #9, in a spoof of some Marlin Perkins wildlife program, one critter is described as "a Russian Greggary Peccary." Could this be the secret origin of the gregarious wild swine? Frank would have been around 14 when this issue came out, and I'd bet anything that he was reading Mad and its clones ...
*) Must quote more on the peccary! From Mapinguari and Giant Ground Sloth Stamps by Pib Burns:
In the early 1970s Ralph M Wetzel and co-workers from the University of Connecticut discovered living specimens of the Chacoan Peccary, which he named Catagonus wagneri. Peccaries are close relatives of pigs and boars. Prior to Wetzel's find this type of peccary was known only from fossils and had been thought to have died out ten thousand years ago. Wetzel found the living specimens in Patagonia after hearing native stories. The natives called it the tagua. The Chacoan Peccary is the largest of the three known living species of peccary. There are significant differences in the chromosome numbers of the Chacoan peccary and the other two species, indicating they are not closely related. Very little is yet known of the Chacoan peccary's life cycle. It is considered to be an endangered species.