Tuesday, October 24, 2006

I Remember

When I was living in Wisconsin during the early 90s there was a funny little paper called The Onion. You could pick it up all over the University of Wisconsin’s Campus and in various shops around Madison. It was (and still is) a total spoof. I remember how one grad student, from China, thought the paper was real. After a while she started to clue in, but she never tired of admitting her mistake.

One of my favorite articles was about how during construction of the Monona Terrace the lake bed was punctured, draining the lake. Various objects were found including Otis Redding’s plane that crashed there on December 10, 1967. The accompanying picture was lovingly faked to show the drained lake bed. Larry remembers one picture about Jesus attending a kegger. In the photo he could just pick out one of his students.

The best part of the paper was the movie reviews. At the time actors and directors were identified by the worst movie they were ever in. The reviews themselves were brutally frank and spot on.

Since then the paper has moved on to be an online entity. Occasionally I would take a peak, but it wasn’t nearly as funny. Then today over at Dave Barry’s blog there was a link to a great article “Mars Rover Beginning to Hate Mars.”

Now that’s The Onion I know and love.

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