April, 1988: Victor Herbert Goes Rogue

LeRoy and Schiing testing fake Remo conga skins at our facility in the Dolomite Mountains

The inventor Paul LeRoy (28 at this time and, therefore, currently unaware of his own death), met up with our percussionist Schiing the other day. They discussed, amongst other things, the incident that shook the time-travelling community last month (or, last month thirty-five years ago, to be precise), when a young and out-of-time Victor Herbert somehow managed to delay David Mamet’s play Speed-the-Plow.

It was rescheduled from April 13 to May 3, 1988, and it caused all kinds of havoc in the time-space continuum. Safe to say, Herbert is not a popular man at this particular moment in time. Everyone involved in the business knows that if you reschedule a Mamet play by a certain amount of days, all his other plays will be rescheduled accordingly. This interferes with the actors’ schedules, and, because these are often big names involved in a variety of projects, important movies and plays will be moved or cancelled.

Indeed, Mamet wrote Our American Cousin under his Tom Taylor pseudonym in 1857, and as a consequence this episode reintroduced the 1865 Abraham Lincoln assassination to history. This hasn’t occurred since the George VI tea incident.

One can only speculate what was on Herbert’s mind, but it is well known that since learning about his fate and reputation post-Eileen (1917) when he was forced to compose in a simpler style in a misguided attempt to pander to newer musical sensibilities, he has become a bitter man, and many believe that he was also responsible for the recent HarperCollins Bridgerton misprint scandal.

LeRoy and Schiing also discussed the impact of fake Remo conga skins in the broader context of pop and easy listening, and how this might have affected the popularity of Peter Allen’s classic live version of I Go to Rio across the different time rifts.

We hope to bring you a YouTube video of the entire discussion soon.

Update 2018: A Letter from the Staff

It’s been a few years since our last post. You may remember Paul LeRoy (arrow) from our first article back in 2011? It turns out he was right about time travel all along, and as a result of our journalistic investigations into the area, we’ve been going back and forth through history during the past couple of years.

All our correspondents have been busy in alternate realities, and all this time our editor, Ted Mountainé, has been churning out mediocre synth music to redirect the attention of the general public and stay out of view from suspicious governmental bodies.

We will go into all of this in greater detail if time permits. Before any of that, though, we want to take the opportunity to apologize about Donald Trump. You see, that was our fault – it turns out that Ted Lewis’ Hat experimented with some probability theory events in what he thought to be a dummy universe – it wasn’t

It is an easy mistake to make, so we hope you’ll forgive him, as we have.

We hope to bring you an interview with Paul LeRoy himself in the near future. He’s currently busy playing lead clarinet in the 1973 incarnation of Raymond Lefèvre’s orchestra, but we should be able to lure him out. It’s an incredibly boring job – Lefèvre is, after all, all about the string section.

LeRoy: I Am From the Future

As a self-proclaimed inventor focusing on time/space issues, Paul LeRoy (36) has a dubious record. Following his amazing discovery that it is possible to move chromium through time,  further research has provided little insight — and it has indeed been claimed that the spectacle surrounding his Cr24 AnaChrom experiments was never anything but a carefully considered marketing plan masterminded by his sponsors, and that the entire project was a hoax. When LeRoy’s book “Time As I See It” was released three years ago, he was written off as a hack and a madman by peers in the National Society of Inventors.

His reputation is not going to be redeemed by the astonishing statement he made in Bern yesterday. At a press conference at Hotel Bellevue Palace, he claimed that the Paul LeRoy of our time was murdered a couple of weeks ago. As luck would have it, the 2013 version of LeRoy found out about his 2011 fate, and survived his own death by traveling back in time to a point where he was actually still alive. Had he not made it back in time, he says, his 2013 self would apparently have been killed off along with his current — or perhaps we should say his former — self.

These claims are of course contrary to most popular theories about time travel, according to which his future self would have evaporated the instant he was killed in the present, but then again, all of these theories are entirely based on fiction. LeRoy says popular belief surrounding time travel is based on an essential scientific misconception about the nature of time: Time, he says, is not chronological and, thus, not consequential.

The implications of this idea would be overwhelming, to say the least. Unsurprisingly, however, leading psychiatrists state that there is no doubt LeRoy is suffering from severe mental illness, and colleagues tell us that he has been under a lot of pressure in the last couple of years, following negative publicity and the loss of several important sponsors. So far, the Swiss police has not investigated LeRoy’s murder allegations.