Letters to the Editor
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Brangelina adopts Batboy!!!
I first saw the WWN when I was about 9 years old in a checkout counter. It had a wolfman on the cover (I don't remember the headline) and I was afraid it was true. My mother had to reassure me that it wasn't and I couldn't figure out who would buy a paper that wasn't true. After eight years of the Bush adminstration, with many still willing to defend his policies, I now have a general idea. It doesn't surprise me that the website is full of right wing ads, these people know who their audience is.
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I have to agree with ER
Toward the end, the writers were getting a little too clever for their own good, and seemed too readily to opt for the turn-of-phrase, or tongue-in-cheek statement. Also, about a year ago, I ran across an ancient edition of WWN, and my suspicions about the change in tone of Ed Anger's columns was confirmed.
Even so, I do miss the time (perhaps imagined) when it was possible to distinguish between real news and outrageous fabrication (I promise I won't name any names, Mr. Murdoch).
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old school photo doctoring
One of the things I used to love about the WWN was the fact that, even after Photoshop was widely available for the forging of fraudulent news documents, WWN steadfastly stood by the old school cut-n-paste method-- even going so far as keeping the edges visible where the scissors cut the original image. You won't find old-world craftsmanship like that anymore...
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WWN
"Lastly: Where the f*** were all you people who claim to have loved the WWN so much, when we needed you to buy the frickin' paper and maybe save our jobs?"
Oh, I never bought it, I just read it when the checkout line was long ;)
Actually, I did buy the one that had the cover story about Hilary Clinton having an affair with a space alien.
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I never knew my mom was so hip.
"His one near-accident occurred because the other driver was deaf, and couldn't hear him honk."
Classic.
My early memories of this (magazine? newspaper?) is of that of myself as young boy on line with my mother at the checkout at the local Pathmark. She would pick it up, read a few lines, and throw it in the shopping cart. Just looking at the cover as she read was enough to hook me.
Later, mom would fall asleep on the couch, with that same copy of the WWN on the floor next to her as she fell asleep. I would pick it up, mesmerized by the nonsensical yet fascinating stories. Being a young child who had difficulty separating reality from fantasy as it was, this newspaper had me enthralled. Could these stories really be true? I mean, if we really had found Noah's Ark, why hadn’t I heard about this from Roger Grimsby's trusting monotone?
My favorite read was Ed Anger. As a child, I had always read to escape from my difficulties, so I was pretty worldly for my age. However, I could never understand how a kook like this could have his own column. He was always madder than this, or angrier than that, and yet he seemed to say the things that everyone always wanted to say, but never would in polite company. The WWN was not a rag in my eyes, but a revelation. Each week, as mom seemed to stretch a few of her hard earned dollars into a banquet of white packaged generic food into a banquet for my sister and I, she would always have enough change to spare for the latest copy of the WWN. Besides a few boxes labeled simply "macaroni and cheese", this was my favorite of her purchases.
Now I am 40 years old. I still devour words like a hungry lion. The difference is, I have a family of my own, and we thankfully don't have the monetary worries that I did when I was a child. My kids watch premium cable and play video games. They order their reading material from Amazon, not Pathmark. As for myself, I have a love of satire, and above all else, I love a sharp wit, or a finely written op-ed piece. As I read this article, I had a revelation: Mom was into satire as well. We were closer than I thought.
As I read The Onion, or McSweeneys.net, or Fox News for a laugh, Mom read the Weekly World News. We may not have had much as we were growing up, but Mom kept a sense of humor about things. Sure, the WWN was absurd, but it helped Mom keep it together through the hard times. It also not only fascinated me, but gave me a lifelong love of the abstract, and a sense of comfort. Things may get rough, and trouble may lie ahead. However, if Bat Boy can overcome all obstacles and end up on Broadway, well, shit, we'll be OK.
Thanks for everything, Weekly World News. You were obscure, absurd, and ridiculous. You also gave one naive reader a sense of curiosity, and more importantly, a sense of humor.
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There's Still Hope for Oprah
I, too, loved the "news" covered in WWN and I miss seeing it on the newstand. I was pleased to find, in its absence, another tabloid (the name escapes me) with the headline "Shocking News! Oprah Has Only Six Years to Live!" ( with "expert predicts" in fine print). Wow! Usually, people are given 3 months to live, following a grim diagnosis, but 6 years? I did read the article, of course, and the gist of it was that if Oprah keeps up her current lifestyle, she MAY only live 6 years longer. That was comforting, indeed.
Let's face it- the rubes will prevail.
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Poor guy...
Now you'll have to "work" for Republicans instead.
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@ER
I totally disagree with you. Given the way the country's gone lately and our standing in the world, we need laughter (like that provided by WWN) more that we have in quite some time.
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ER is right on
The last few years of WWN it really had lost its appeal. Its cancellation was really just a matter of putting it out of its misery. They replaced most of the veteran writers, who had actual newswriting backgrounds, with professional comedy writers, who had no sense of narrative. Gag writers, not storytellers.
You're also right about Ed Anger. And I'm madder than an ice salesman in a snowstorm about how he changed.