When the phase of the moon progresses from croissant to crinoline -- that is, when its night sky contour resembles a horsehair hoop skirt more than, say, a crockpotful of blancmange recently expelled from a very large herbivore's digestive tract -- Skull of Montovani myth maintains that Weasel Slayer festoons his propagational organs with briar garland, then lavishly inscribes a sand painting with Algonquin High Doggerel. If anyone other than the bi-nosal former warrior reads the text, that person breaks out in hives, then has to flee from hundreds of bees seeking accommodations. In the natural world, the crinoline moon occurs only once a year, in August, and signifies increased pollination activity between laurel and hurdy-gurdies. In the unnatural world, it is when Beano Bengaze is traditionally short of clientele and open to any job offer. It was at such a fortuitous time that Trowler the Trencherman at last broke through the transcendental office barrier and made real dewlap-to-dewlap contact with the musical shaman.

Beano gestured for his peruked visitor to sit down, a motion that stirred the office fogdogs to indeterminate life. The limpet, too, suddenly assumed an obstreperous comportment, banging its comical shell ad nauseum on the linoleum sideboard. And the Trencherman -- even before his pelvic area made acquaintance with the taxidermied porcupine that passed as trendy office furniture -- launched into a maddeningly bifurcated tale bereft of sensible punctuation. Fortunately, Phobos and Deimos were in declination, and Trowler was able to curtail his more gibberical outbreaks. A fit of blepharospasms, however, momentarily stopped his disjointed discourse, the false eyelash attached to the left contact lens effecting a kind of cilium fandango.

Beano pulled a Zippo lighter from behind the ear of one of the fogdogs -- one of his more mundane acts of magic -- and kindled his prayer pipe. As the room filled with the aroma of Anbesol enjoying a not too shabby tax refund, Trowler gradually stopped chattering, the fogdogs retired to their temporal kennels, even the limpet settled down.

Regaining his composure, the Trencherman began again to speak.

   Long ago, the ambidextrous Ambassador of Ambrosia, ambivalently embroiled in embouchure embezzlement and about to embark on an embarrassingly emblematic embargo that embodied the ambiguity of ambiance, ambled to the embassy ambulance emblazoned with ambergris. As he neared the rear of the car, the door suddenly opened and out sprang a short marine mollusk that looked a lot like this creature here" -- and he gestured towards the limpet, now cooing a gastropodic love song to the sideboard.

A tiny burp in the time-space continuum abruptly altered the clarity with which Beano could understand Trowler and also sent the fogdogs into paroxysms of howling and chasing after invisible cars -- Hudson Wingbacks, probably. The Trencherman continued to speak, but his words began to pile atop one another, all ajumble and without regard for subject-predicate order. Trowler, too, started to condense into a geometric pattern better suited to a Mobius strip universe. He reached out to Beano, but instead bumped into the retrograde inversion of himself. To compound matters, the declination of Mars abruptly shifted slightly to the south, causing the Trencherman to lapse into a narrative lucid only to himself, while at the same time plunging the moon into an eclipsical orbit, where it did the nonluminous celestial body rendition of a Klingon cloaking device. Before Beano could use the mystical powers of his pipe to assuage the situation, his office -- and, by extension, Beano -- vanished into the Pluperfect Zone.

Bewildered but otherwise unscathed, the limpet got to its feet, adjusted its shell, and headed for the space formerly occupied by the office door, now the outline of a crinoline oriange, an outline much like what is employed on Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar. The outline for the 169th episode, for example, goes like this: opening, middle, station ID, false ending, closing. And here to bridge the gap between the false opening and the real opening is Kalvos.