I sometimes play with a big band in the northwest Chicago Suburbs. Think of me as the second or third “chair” for rhythm guitar. Anyhow, they’re putting up a new website and requested short music bios from everyone. When I started writing one up, I couldn’t help but make smart-ass comments about myself. Quickly it just turned into a complete joke that is included below. I went back eventually and put together a good one for them to use. However, I figured the “original” should be preserved. So here it is, my music bio :


Michael Pierce, Guitar

Michael Pierce is not a professional musician and never should be. Despite attempting to learn the guitar from an early age, his development was slowed by an interest in rather poor "music." During his late teens he grudgingly admitted that jazz was in fact cool and began playing in small combos. After high-school he enrolled at the University of North Texas to study music. The music world is thankful that he promptly dropped out without ever completing a single music class at UNT. Today his sound can best be described as "howling cats" and may in fact be a criminal offense in several states. By some miracle he is capable of providing a steady rhythm and a couple of chords. He is currently working hard to learn a third chord, but this is hampered by his inability to properly fret any notes. In order to spare the audience, the rest of the rhythm section will unplug his amplifier prior to any performance. Thankfully he is unaware of this trick and utterly incapable of reading this text.

I saw this today posted on someone’s door and thought it was too funny to pass up. After looking on the web a bit it seems that some of the popular understanding of this letter is that it’s with regards to a physics journal. In fact, that’s the impression I came away with after seeing it posted in our hallway in the Materials Science Division. However, the author is a real person, Roy F. Baumeister, and is not in physical science at all, but rather in psychology. There’s also a follow-up response from the editor below.

Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions
by Roy F. Baumeister
Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:

Enclosed is our latest version of Ms # 85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamn running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over helpless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers' comments we couldn't do anything about. For example, if (as review C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn't, or wouldn't, have done it without your input.

Sincerely,

----------------




To: Authors, MS #85-02-22-RRRRRR

From: Editor, Journal of Educational Psychology

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my decision letter concerning the above-referenced piece of excrement.

I have asked several experts who specialize in the area of research in which you dabble to have a look at your pathetic little submission, and their reviews are enclosed. I shall not waste my LaserJet ink reiterating the details of their reviews, but please allow me to highlight some of the more urgent points of contention they raise:

1. Reviewer A has asked me to inform you that, as his suggestions were not mentioned in my previous decision letter, he resents you calling him sadistic and imbecilic. He has no quarrell with arbitrarily tyrannical.
2. Reviewer B suggests that you cite his work EXCLUSIVELY in the introduction. He has asked me to remind you that he spells his name with a final "e" (i.e., Scumbage), not as you have referenced him in the last version.
3. Reviewer C indicates that the discussion can be shortened by at least 5 pages. Given the fact that the present Discussion is only three pages long, I am not certain how to advise you. Perhaps you might consider eliminating all speculation and original ideas.
4. Reviewer D has asked that you consider adding her as a coauthor. Although she has not directly contributed to the manuscript, she has made numerous comments that have, in her view, significantly improved the paper. Specifically, she believes that her suggestions concerning the reorganization of the acknowledgments paragraph were especially important. Please note that she spells her name with an em-dash, and not with the customary hyphen.
5. My own reading of the manuscript indicates that the following problems remain:
* By "running head," we do not mean a picture of your son's face with legs attached. Please provide a four- or five-word title for the paper that summarizes the report's most important point. May I suggest, "Much Ado About Nothing"?
* Please make certain that you have adhered to APA stylebook guidelines for publication format. Please direct your attention to the section entitled, "Proper Format for an Insignificant Paper" (2001, p. 46).
* Please submit any revision of the paper on plain, blank stationery. Submitting the article on Stanford letterhead will not increase your chances of having the article accepted for publication.
* Please doublecheck the manuscript for spelling and grammatical errors. Our experience at the Archives is that "cycle-logical" slips through most spellcheck programs undetected.
* Although I am not an expert in quantitative methodology, it is my understanding that the "F" in F-test does not stand for "f___ing". Please conduct a word search and correct the manuscript accordingly.

Yours sincerely,


Editor, Journal of Educational Psychology

p.s. - If your original submission had been as articulate as your most recent letter, we might have avoided this interchange. It is too bad that tenure and promotion committees at your university do not have access to authors' correspondence with editors, for it is clear that you would be promoted on the basis of your wit alone. Unfortunately, it's the publications that count, and I'm sorry to say that JEdP is not prepared to accept this revision. We would be perfectly ambivalent about receiving a seventh revision from you.

I have become, understandably, cautious when exiting the APS. Tonight was no exception. I made lots of noise on my way out to my car and looked very carefully for my attacker from the previous night. Yet there was no sign of him and I made it to the car... However, as I pulled out of the parking lot, there he sat on the path I had just walked. He waited a second, watching me (as I stared in horror). He then turned and hopped off back into the grass.

In all likelihood the little guy has probably taken up residence in one of the drain pipe holes or somewhere around that exit to the building. Perhaps being a bit nocturnal he comes out to investigate and chase off anyone that ventures too close to his new lair.

One benefit of being at the beamline by myself is getting to listen to music. At the moment I seem to be leaning towards Kenny Burrell, in particular the album Midnight Blue.


Coming from Texas there’s a ready connection to how I first managed to get introduced to Burrell’s music (through this particular album). Stevie Ray Vaughn made a great recording of “Chitlins con Carne” that I listened to quite often as a kid. It’s a great song to play by yourself too. You can add the melody and the 8th notes from the bass line together, toss in a couple of chords in places and you get a really smooth stream of notes out; Melody, rhythm, and harmony all together. It was only one step from the liner notes of that album to Burrell’s music. This has got to be one of the best blues-jazz albums ever. Good stuff.

We’ve seen some interesting features with Zinc oxide, but it’s way too early to tell if they’re meaningful or not. We’ve had a small issue with some of the ZnO samples and while those are being reprepared we’ll switch back to Au for a bit longer. There’s hope that maybe we can get something from it. I wish I could be more descriptive about what’s going on, but I’m more than just a little tired at the moment.