The Day the Bat Boy Died
Poor but Honest, Sad but True, Losing a Shoe and a Button or Two.
A staple of grocery store filth goes down... 28 years after it's founding, the Weekly World News folds. Truly, the end of an era. Or the end of a something.
sigh
It's a sad day for freaks and weirdoes the world over. The Weekly World News, in print for 28 years, older than I, is no more. No more Returning Hitler, no more Fat Cats and Their Fat Owners, no more Presidential Alien.
No more Ed Angry.
No more Dear Dottie.
No more Countess Serena, the World's Sexiest Psychic and her twin sister, Selena (who wasn't psychic OR sexy).
siiiiiiiiiiiiigh
I imagine toward the end there it was pretty much just me with a subscription. I've been picking up the Weekly World News since I was 15 years old, on the behest of Almost Live alumni, Pat Cashman. Back in the late 90s, Pat had his own radio show, and one of the key parts of it was reading, verbatim, the best articles of the week out of it, in his inimitable baritone. Pat would occasionally have listener parties, he is not exactly a famous man, but he's always been a bit of a hero of mine. His sheer silliness and lack of comedic guile always amused me. At one of these parties, I won a free subscription to WWN, and I have kept it going since then.
siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh
We'll miss you, Bat Boy.
Here we have Bat Boy's origin story. This foundling half-bat-half-boy creature was either an alien or an example of government genetics mutations or possibly a love crime of some sort. They kept it vague.
Bat Boy ran afoul of the MAN. God knows what they did to him. Is it child abuse if it's only a half-child?
Somehow, some way, Bat Boy escaped. And learned to drive. And ACTUAL PHOTOS were taken.
It all went downhill after 9/11. Bat Boy's patriotic furor after the turrists bombed turned him from a misunderstood renegade into a representative of This Man's Military. We don't know if he ever made it out of Afghanistan alive. We can presume not.
siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh
They never even resolved the Monster Truck That Orbited The Moon. Let's all pause momentarily and ponder one of the great maxims of Ed Anger: "Let's pave over the rainforests and give stun guns to schoolteachers."
Amen, brother.
Amen.
What say you?!