After further reflection (and more beer) I have realized that I have beat Robyn and sA on, not one, but two counts.

One: Fearing hellfire and damnation (and feeling a bit destructive—and handy), I backmasked Def Leppard’s Hysteria myself.  Just to check. (No red lights, sorry.)

Two: For my eighth grade Honors Biology science fair project I secured two jars of fruit flies.  One jar listened to a loop of Def Leppard’s Hysteria, the other to Stryper’s To Hell With the Devil.  (On alternating days because I only had one walkman.)  Before the end of week two all of them died, perhaps because I didn’t know how to take care of them, or perhaps because my mother made me keep them in the garage in winter.  I made up some numbers showing that the Def Leppard fruit flies had produced more because they were listening to music about, um, peaches and cream and stuff.  Natch.  Because my teacher graduated from Southern Nazarene University, I passed with that little ideological-fiasco-cum-cutting-board-poster.

C’mon, Steve, kick it.

The thing is, I don’t know which is worse—that I killed my biology teacher’s fruit flies with devil music (the Stryper, I mean) or that I poked his chinchilla with my mechanical pencil.  (Because chinchillas puff up and stuff when you do that, you know, because of science.  Wanna see?)

So turn the reverb all the way up on that Junior High dance and smoke it, huh?