Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Ed Anger, Bat Boy trade dead trees for new cyberlife

Peter Carlson has a long and excellent piece in today's Washington Post (“All the News That Seemed Unfit to Print”) on the demise of the Weekly World News, supermarket tabloid par excellence.
It all began in Lantana, Fla., in 1979, when the National Enquirer, America’s premier tabloid, bought new color presses to replace its old black-and-white presses. The Enquirer's owner, a former CIA agent named Generoso Pope, couldn't bear to leave the old presses idle, so he founded Weekly World News as a sort of poor man’s Enquirer, running celebrity gossip and UFO sightings that didn't quite meet the Enquirer's high standards.

Fortunately, WWN will continue as an online-only publication, highlighting such improbably-overlooked stories as “WHY MOSES WANDERED IN THE DESERT FOR FORTY YEARS: He Lost the Map!
”

“A parchment map was found in a sealed urn not far from the remains of an Egyptian chariot,” said Rabbi Schmotkin-Fisher. “We surmise that Moses dropped it in the rush to get across the Red Sea before the parted waters came back together.

“It was etched by I Am’s own flaming finger, plainly mapping the way to the Promised Land. Remarkably, had they followed the Lord’s route, the trek would have taken the Israelites about a month, tops.”

More faith-based journalism next time....

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