I attended Bumbershoot only the once, back in 1983, when I mistakenly assumed it was some sort of a traveling discount-umbrella sale—"Never let a Gypsy caravan of bargains pass you by," my beloved Auntie Clytemnestra used to say, and that advice has saved me a fortune in wallets, neckties, and manservants. What I saw in that godforsaken five minutes was far, far more than enough—the smell of narcotics rendered the air unbreathable, and herds of immense families wandered to and fro, gnawing at their fistfuls of still-bubbling-hot balls of deep-fat-fried flour, all to the sloppy drumbeating of un-American hippies and the flailings of unitard-wearing performance artists. I vowed never to return.

And I urge you, gentle reader, not to attend this year's Bumbershoot goings-on, either. You will find no deeply discounted weather accoutrements here. Instead, you will see a "Literary Festival" that considers a mawkish scienti-fictionary television show to be the height of Shakespearean drama; a series of awful, caterwauling musicians who would be unable to locate a chord on a guitar even with the assistance of a miraculously revived Franz Xaver Gruber; and enough carcinogenic "food" to fatally clog the arteries of a prizewinning high-school football team.

But if you must go, I urge you at the very least not to bother reading The Stranger's Bumbershoot guide.

After all, consider the horrors that those homosexual atheist drug addicts at The Stranger have decided to highlight: DAVE SEGAL waxes nostalgic about a musical group with an unprintable name (if you are curious, it is something like Holy [Procreation], only even more low-minded); a cub reporter by the name of CHRIS ESTEY—probably lured into The Stranger's web with false promises of journalistic glory—extols a musical group by the name of the [Prostitute] Moans; JEN GRAVES puts her mealy mouth to the service of faint praise for some sort of artistic commune named "Dada Economics," and though I have read the piece and I still do not understand what Dada Economics is actually about, I can assure you that it is not about either financial matters or fatherhood; and professional race-baiter CHARLES MUDEDE profiles the author of some immoral electronic web-net page entitled Stuff White People Like (speaking as a Caucasian, Mr. Mudede: We are not especially fond of you).

Further, if the enclosed map of the artistic abattoir that Seattle Center will become over Labor Day weekend was designed by AARON HUFFMAN and the other artistic "geniuses" behind The Stranger's usual shoddy, confusing layout, I urge you to ignore it; the damned thing will purposefully mislead you into dark alleys where fingersmiths and rapists will have their way with you before slitting your throat from ear to ear. Need I say more? This "Bumbershoot," like The Stranger, can only provide solace to the artless and ignorant. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.