WWN, RIP

It's the end of an era, as the Weekly World News goes belly up:

Weekly World News, the tabloid that for 28 years has chronicled sightings of Elvis, extraterrestrial activity and the exploits of Bat Boy, is no more. Its publisher said Tuesday it would put out its last issue next month, maintaining only a Web presence. What does it mean for a black-and-white staple that has delivered news of such historical proportions as Bigfoot's capture of a lumberjack he kept as his love slave and the merman found in the South Pacific? Stay tuned. One thing's for sure: Americans' waits in supermarket checkouts will forever be changed.

The tabloid's publisher, American Media Inc., issued a brief statement that announced the Aug. 27 issue would be Weekly World News' last. It called the closure necessary "due to the challenges in the retail and wholesale magazine marketplace that have impacted the newsstand."

**Sniff**

Back in the day at The People's Glorious Soviet of Middletown, my roommate and I used to await each new edition of the WWN with eager, baited breath. Upon its publication, we would buy up a couple copies and then merrily cut out and re-arrange the headlines, posting our creations on the door for the amusement of our hall. I can't recollect any of the lines we came up with, except that it was from this exercise that I coined the expression "screaming with glee", a phrase I still use.

Most of the denizens of my hall thought that I was a stuck-up, anal, dead white male fascist pig. (To this day I can't for the life of me understand where they'd get such an idea.) That our door was covered floor to ceiling with an ever changing potpourri of mangled WWN headlines never ceased to amaze them, although rayther than "challenging their prejudices" regarding self (as they might say), I believe most of them simply assumed it was all my roommate's doing. To his credit, my roommate always denied this, although I'm not sure they ever really believed him.

Yep, good times. Good times.

UPDATE: BTW, we Llamas own the google search for "People's Glorious Soviet of Middletown" except that somehow the school's own website pops up as a result, too. Does this mean that somebody there finally noticed this particular piece of chain-jerking and shoved the term into the coding somewhere?

Orgle! from Gary: Durnit Robbo, ya deleted my Yips!