Letters to the Editor
-
Alien Intelligence
So…does this mean that the Men In Black have lost their most reliable source of information on the movement and activities of visiting extraterrestrials?
-
This is a reprint from the backpage of Time Magazine two weeks ago
Cmon, dudes/dudettes try harder.
-
Dang...
Buying the Weekly World News was always a guilty pleasure for me... but worth it when I brought it around the office for fun.
-
What's the world coming to!
Ah, we won't get to see Bat Boy anymore? Oh, lord, stop the presses!
The rag was quite amusing-even more so than it's competitors, because at least it showed some imagination at creative fiction.
I don't know who read it, but I bet they were part of the Bush cadre; sounds about like their mindset. I still can't believe that anyone actually believed half of it..but I'm sure there were some.
Back to the trashy celeb shit.
-
Sorry to see it go...
The last thing the supermarket checkout line needs is another celebrity weekly.
Remember when Princess Diana died and everyone claimed it would change the papparazzi and the clamor for celeb-hunting news? Yeah, I know, ten years later and there is more celeb gossip than ever, counting the gossip sites. And I like celebrity gossip, I think there's nothing wrong with it -- to a point. We're now at that point.
Good call on repositioning the paper a la the Onion.
-
A treasure is lost
I'll miss the WWN. I used it to teach my kids to read, on those long car trips across country. The world was a little brighter, with the weekly weird news along for the ride.
-
Ah, the Weekly World News!
I used to love reading WWN. It, along with the other tabloids, kept me going through my high school job as a cashier in a small-town drug store. I had a reputation as a serious student, so as a joke I chose as my candid senior yearbook photo a picture of me sitting by the cash register, reading a copy of WWN with the headline "Tot's Ghost Lives With Grieving Mom".
-
Mourning Edition
Never was a big fan of checkout mags. I really discovered the WWN in... the blogosphere, namely, multi-medium.net, which does regular "Why I Love The Weekly World News" postings. I started buying the thing, reading parts of it aloud to my fella, usually hysterically. It was always fun to leave lying out on a coffee table, too.
What sad, strange days these are. And what a grand writing gig I missed once upon a time. Damn.
-
What will 7th graders use for research now?
When I was in 7th grade, a girl in science class used the WWN as the "source" for her report on Atlantis. It don't know what was funnier, her standing up there talking about aliens and underwater pyramids, or my science teacher explaining to her that the Weekly World News didn't actually count as a source for a research paper.
-
Please don't leave us alone with the celebrity cellulite pics!
The WWN is the comic relief that makes the horrid WalMart check-out lines bearable. When one son is begging for candy, the other has blown out his diaper, and my daughter suddenly decides she has to go REALLY BAD, I desperately need to see Hilary Clinton with her alien lover.
Writing for the WWN has to have been one of the best jobs in the world--the literary references, the puns, the goofiness! And yes, I can report that, at a high school slumber party in 1982, I heard a girl declare her unquestioning belief in a modern-day 100+ yr old couple finding themselves pregnant . So yeah, at least one person believed
Leah
-
A Hole
Scientists say: there is a hole in the Universe. Torus. D'oh! Mmmm donuts.
-
I always wondered what the editorial meetings were like
...and now I know. I loved this article. What a hoot. Sometimes, if you wait long enough, answers to deep questions sneak up on you on little rabbit feet.
WWN was at its finest when it combined trends. I remember seeing the following headline in the early 80s: VAMPIRE ATTACKS DROP DUE TO AIDS SCARE. Sheer genius. Thanks, Stan.
-
When I grow up, I wanna be a writer for MAD or the WWN
Dear Mr. Sinberg,
I'd like to thank you and the rest of your colleagues at WWN and MAD. I still love them both as an adult, but they were two of my all-time favorite publications when I was a kid.
On many long, tense, crappy family Saturday afternoons, MAD in particular transported me to a funny, warm, world of play. Really, when I think of it, perhaps my life-long love of cultural and literary theory and criticism was born reading some of the film send-ups. (I remember being particularly captivated by the spoof of Rocky, for some reason.) If a popular comic can be said to capture some of the spirit of Derrida's "freeplay, I vote for MAD.
Similarly, the WWN, with its extraordinary lies, put a spell of wonder on me and cracked me up, distracting me from the imaginative desert of grocery shopping while my parents fought. 'Could they be true?' I wondered, 'Could they be lies? Were grownups really allowed to just make things up and write them in newspapers?'
I thought that the grownups who got paid to write for MAD and WWN had to be the absolutely luckiest people in the world. As a grownup-ish now, on bad work days, I still daydream about it sometimes.
Thanks for years of the joy of goofball intellectual play.
-
The MainStream Media co-opted this rag.
Take a look at the general interest magazines at the supermarket. Hell, take a look at Time or Newsweek. They aren't far off from what Weekly World News printed.
Some people would say "it's the general intelligence of the American people that's dropped so low, this stuff is popular." I rather think that it's the magazine publishers that estimate our intelligence is so low. They refuse to challenge the reader with material to make them think.
-
A loss, but good riddance given the times
Thanks for your article; I guess I'm left a little let down after reading your words. Sort of like when the WWN changed Ed Anger from a Ted-Nugent type over-the-top conservative nutcase to a sort of liberal smirker; I think you all were trying to be too clever for your own good.
Hey, times change; the WWN changed. I never went for the newer stuff you & the later staff did - the puns & turns of phrase. You didn't invent Batboy - an earlier person did - as well as the aliens backing Bill Clinton, monster rabbits, babies smuggled out of the country inside WATERMELONS(!!!) -- that was genius absurdity. I always appreciated the quotes in the articles from "a famous scientist in Sweden says that..." or other misplaced unattributable statements. Plus - a scientist 'quoted' was often the same photo of the same delusional guy - often two pix of him in the same issue for different articles; sweet! You call it right in your article when you mention our current media gets perilously close to the same kind of crap.
So Goodbye to you all, I think the WWN was a surprising success of creativity for years. Your recent years dropped way off on the laugh scale (or, tear-off-and-post-at-work-scale), but hey, look at where the US is now. Not so much to laugh or imagine about these days.
ER