From L'Assiette au Beurre, 1904.

Here's an alcoholic monkey and parrot from c. 1890 ad for luncheon meat.

Here's an alcoholic monkey and parrot from a c. 1890 ad for luncheon meat.

Monkey versus parrot: which would you wager to win?  Plus, here's some maledicta from a c. 1890 ad for luncheon meat.

They say that everybody has a novel inside them, but that's patently false.  If you don't have a novel inside you, there may at least be an article that inspires someone else's novel.

We're gobsmacked that our groundbreaking research into the relationship between pirates and parrots ("Buccaneer Birds and Parrots of the Caribbean," first published in Amercian Cage-Bird Magazine, March 1993) went on to be an inspiration for acclaimed author Gary Barwin's novel that's narrated by a parrot pirate, Yiddish for Pirates.  This qualifies as a Retroactive Lifetime Goal (phrase used courtesy of literary humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt).

Unrelated except in the sense of the Barwinism that underlies all that we see and hear, Gary Barwin has dreamily transformed our recording for the Poet Laureate of Calgary, in which we set to clockwork music the punctuation of an otherwise-erased page from Andy Warhol's a: A Novel.  Here's an mp3 of the otherworldly Barwinian transformation:

From The Cub yearbook of New Bern High School, 1921.