"July 4" by Mark Bastable (markb@aboy.demon.co.uk). The British are civilized people. If you ever visit a Civil War battlefield in the United States, you have to be careful how you use the words "enemy," "loser," and "bad guys." You see, the South lost the Civil War, but they're still pissed about it; and almost all the battlefields are in the South. The British, on the other hand, lost the Revolutionary War; and what do they do? They have fireworks on the 4th of July.

When I was in the eighth grade, a hormonally imbalanced boy who was considered sexy, sat down next to me at lunch and asked me, "Do they have a 4th of July in England?" Sexy boys did not usually talk to me, and so I was taken aback. I tried to think quickly, but all I could manage was the notion that since the British had LOST the war that the 4th of July seemed to have started, then they'd have to be damned fools to celebrate it; and I told him so. "Well what do they do, then?" he answered. "Go straight from the 3rd to the 5th?" He laughed uproariously. Still thinking that this joke had to have something to do with sex, I was thoroughly confused.

This review may seem disjointed, but that's because so is this story. All that matters is light and sound. The rest is just details. That's the conclusion the narrator drew when he acted as a beard for his lesbian friend at a 4th of July party at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square and an unknown assailant from behind pulled his dick out of his pants while he fondled her clit and the fireworks exploded overhead.

The important thing to remember is when a Brit says he's pissed, it means he's drunk. When an American is pissed, he's mad. Thus, the saying, "'Tis better to be pissed off than pissed on" is more likely to be meaningful to an American than to our friends across the Pond.