How bout I pick up where I left off: three foot long corn snake in a toilet.
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| Mine was a little *ahem* darker hued. |
True to their unflagging journalistic integrity, Gothamist won't let a good story die. Turns out, not only did the snake end up in a toilet, but it ended up on a toilet on the 19th floor of an apartment building. While very well might have been a released pet that just crawled in through a hole in the wall, I like to think that there are big, ol' snakes all over NYC that are more than happy to crawl through hundreds of feet of vertical, water filled pipe with the sole intention of biting you on the taint. Takes my mind off the impending bedbug apocalypse.
As banal as this "news" might be, Gothamist did do me a favor of unprecedented magnitude by revealing to me that "The World's Only Reliable News" source lives on into the digital age. Yes, Weekly World News lives! I was under the impression that when this venerable rag ceased printing hardcopy a few years back, that America had lost one of it's truly bat(boy)shit crazy national treasures forever. Now it seems that the paper most famous for pictures of Elvis' face on Mars and babies found in watermelons has found it's natural place in the order of things: teh interwebs. Emblazoned with the image of junk media's patron saint, Batboy, WWN's front page has all the usual quicktabs you would expect from any fine online media source: Headlines, Politics, Sports and Mutants. While the composition of their reporting seems to have taken a hit in the move online (less old school BLAM-O style hyperbole, more grammatical errors) their photography department can only be described as "top notch":
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| Their tagline for this is "Beck: Only Bat Boy Can Save Us". Seriously. |
While the WWN is clearly utter horseshit from front to back, I think it provides a rather interesting picture of what is happening to American's critical thinking. Sure, you might look at WWN and easily dismiss such obviously made up headlines as "Chinese Release iPhone 8" or "Bigfoot Hunts Ted Nugent", but you will notice something strange if you actually read the articles. A shockingly large number of their stories are rooted in some kind of truth. For example, a Chinese company is really making knock-off apple products and the reason for Bigfoot's supposed vendetta against his closest rival for the title of Ugliest, Hairiest Thing Lurking in the Woods actually happened. This is where the secret to WWN's continued success lies. Rarely do they make up anything out of whole cloth, but rather pick the most polarizing things they can find in the 24 hour news cycle and spice it up with a demon from hell or a government conspiracy or the ghost of Glenn Shadix.
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| "I know just as much about the supernatural as I do about interior design" |
And before you take a sophisticated, city-slicker corn snake all over the notion that anyone could ever take any of those stories seriously, I would like to point out that there is another, much better funded news source that uses the exact same tactic every, single day. Have you figured it out? If you guessed "Fox Fucking News" you are correct.
Sure they're a little light on alligator men and poop monsters (Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck aside), but that doesn't stop them from spinning and twisting every story they report beyond it's original form. They have taken the great art of journalism as sideshow from the capable hands of the Weekly World News and all it's tabloid brethren and made it the face of the modern 24 hour news cycle.
And at last we come to rest at the feet of what is now America's journalistic monolith. No one in this country, from the far left to the hard right, is paying attention to unbiased news. Traditional bastions of journalistic integrity are closing their doors and slashing their payrolls every month. Even the Old Grey Lady is losing employees to the siren call of pundit- and opinion-based online journalism. In the meantime we are deafened by talking heads and blinded by three paragraph news condensations that are fueling everyone's suspicions that the guys on the other side of the issue are evil fucks hell bent on nothing less than the eternal rape and pillage of all we hold dear. None of this was unavoidable but the sad fact is that our nation's abiding legacy is that we are a bunch lazy, credulous rubes who would rather swallow anything said by someone in a nice suit and tall hair than do a little research on the greatest repository of information the world has ever known: The Internet. It's rather ironic that all of this information, be it biased, baseless screeching or sober, unvarnished facts is all available through the exact same technology that churns out roughly two stupid LOLcats pictures per every man, woman and child on the planet. It takes literally no extra physical effort to type in a google search on any given topic and click through the top five hits. Are they all saying the same thing? Well you might have the truth on your hands, although it's far more likely that you got bored with all that fancy readin', did a second google search and you now have cum on your hands.
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| And this woman would like to talk to you about that. |
This is shift toward letting the news be dictated to us by people whose only thought is to better serve their own agendas, in my opinion, the single biggest threat to this nation as well as the world as a whole. How can we, as the last remaining superpower, be expected to conduct ourselves on the global stage with the same respect and integrity we claim to expect from everyone else, when our leaders are being chosen by a mass of willfully ignorant asshats?
For christ sake, think things through, do your own research and stop listening to the Batboys on cable news because if we don't WWN's claim to be "The World's Only Reliable News" might not be a joke anymore.
Boy can you tell I'm a pastor's kid, or what? Instead of leaving you with a jock strap full of fire and brimstone, I'm going to sign off with this recent stat from FiveThirtyEight. In the gathering darkness, it's nice knowing that a guy who famously predicted the entire 2008 elections with a staggering 98% accuracy says Christine O'Donnell has a handjob's chance in Iran of winning. Now THAT'S news that's fit to print.
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