People often explain things as the weirdest, funniest, saddest, or most absurd thing they’ve ever seen in their lives. However, this over-used and hollow expression usually describes things like a bird stealing an ice-cream cone from a screaming infant, or an elderly man roller-skating down a crowded street dressed only in undies. But my discovery on June 22^nd, 1985 was bar none the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I will surely have difficulty presenting it you!

          At first, that fateful June morning seemed like any other fateful morning. There was quiet all around, and the air was thick with fog. In fact, the morning was so cliché in its ominous atmosphere that I actually expected something life-changing to occur. And sure enough, as I walked outside my house to pick up the daily Bladaford Syndicate, I tripped over what appeared to be a giant blintz. And on closer inspection, I found that this blubbery 19-foot crepe had eyes!

          As you can imagine, this object confused me. So, thinking it was perhaps a beached beluga whale (though my street is not an ocean, and my driveway has no sand), I called the nearest lifeguard station. But because I live miles from the beach, they transferred my call to animal control.

          When the animal control officer arrived, he told me that the creature was, unfortunately, dead. He also said that he could not dispose of its body because it was not an animal known to science.

            That’s when I telephoned my good friend Dr. Peter Albritton, the man the Architeuthis Weekly recently called “this century’s greatest para-cryptozoologist”. (Incidentally, last year Dr Albritton and I were awarded the prestigious Charles P. Van der Van Award for our joint research into dowsing for water). He immediately left his offices in Del Mar, Ca., and helicoptered to my driveway. And without hesitation, he began performing a meticulous autopsy on the creature - right in front of my house! (Luckily, that morning’s ominous fog was so thick that the neighbors did not notice).

          Strangely, when Dr. Albritton cut into the monstrous blob, it did not bleed. Instead, its anatomy resembled that of a cold water mammal, and a luscious layer of fat separated its skin from blood filled innards. Needless to say, this procedure was rather grotesque, and I had to go inside the house to avoid vomiting.  So I sat in my favorite chair and read a fascinating article in the Bladaford Syndicate about a group of apes that performed cosmetic surgery on each other.

          A few hours passed, and Dr. Albritton walked into my house with a psychotic grin on his face. He told me that the mysterious creature was an amorphous blob consisting of cartilage, tissue, and fat rolled up inside a thick layer of skin (like a biological blintz). And while he admitted that he could not determine the creature’s origin, he did mention that “the most logical conclusion is that it came from the most illogical place in the galaxy: the Zeta-Reticuli Star System”.

          For those of you unfamiliar with cosmological affairs, Zeta-Reticuli is where the Roswell aliens came from, and the alleged home of this galaxy’s strangest entities. Apparently, the planets of that system orbit very closely to their sun, thereby creating a plethora of radioactively deformed beings. Indeed, when I was researching for my best-selling expose entitled Those Little Green Fellas from Zeta-Reticuli: How the Roswell Crash Made A Splash, I saw many accounts of strange creatures. But what Albritton told me next was truly shocking. He explained that buried inside the creature under pounds of mutated flesh was a 3-foot-tall robot, and that this robot had a functional audiocassette player imbedded in its belly region!

          I decided to name this lovable machine Le Robot Fantastique, and began exploiting its unique personality. For instance, I used him as my mascot when I ran for the Long Beach city council in 1986 (and lost by a hair!), and paraded him as my adopted son (which was shocking in the 80s as single males could not adopt children). But the most infamous way I utilized Le Robot was when I promoted him as a member of the Rabbinical School Dropouts. And there were numerous occasions when the robot was the only member of the band.

          It should be noted that during the mid-80s, some members of the RSDO expressed creative differences. I wanted the band to embody the ideals of the pseudo-scientific community (i.e. speculation, imagination, and persistence), while certain other members wanted us to conform to the mainstream watered-down spiritual tendencies of the time (i.e. the Jewish camp movement). So as the RSDO debated over how to present ourselves, Le Robot made appearances at our concerts (instead of the band) and played our audiocassette from his internalized tape deck.

          At first, Le Robot Fantastique was a success, and prominent avant-garde magazines (such as The Verbal Hemorrhoid and Folliculitus Monthly) praised Le Robot as a daring alternative to live music. And respected New York art critic Beverly Vee called the machine “an entertaining band-in-a-box-in-a-robot” (Venusian Gazette, March 1987).

          In retrospect, the robot’s success can be attributed to the general popularity of ‘art bands’ at the time. Many “hipsters” dove into this bogus genre and convinced themselves that the non-commercial was not only commercial, but also enlightening. As such, fans of the style saw Le Robot as the perfect performance artist. After all, he was a non-human, non-musician, industrial machine. In other words, he was completely non-commercial, and therefore commercial!

          Unfortunately, unlike many art circles, the Jewish brunch crowd did not take kindly to Le Robot’s tape-playing performances. And after his third gig for the Southern California Society of Senior Jews, the robot was completely destroyed.

          Apparently, an aged activist named Howard Bermberm was so infuriated by what he called ‘anti-klezmer’ that he invited other brunch-goers to toss their matzo ball soup on Le Robot. This caused him to short-circuit, and ended his reign as the mechanical king of the Jewish avant-garde.

And there is one interesting footnote to this admittedly unbelievable tale. It turns out that when Dr. Albritton took the body of the blintz monster to his lab, he noticed that the entity was pregnant. And inside the fetus, Dr. Albritton found a smaller robot!

Incidentally, he used the small robot as the prototype for a tape-playing teddy bear that was popular at the time.