Human Head Kept Alive Six Days! (11/26/85)
Salt Lake Shocker: 3-Legged Skater Banned! (2/12/02)
My Steamy Nights With Hillary In UFO Love Nest! (8/5/03)
World's Fattest Cat Has World's Fattest Kittens! (10/28/03)
Sneezing Increases Your Bust Size! (3/8/88)
Salt Lake Shocker: 3-Legged Skater Banned! (2/12/02)
My Steamy Nights With Hillary In UFO Love Nest! (8/5/03)
World's Fattest Cat Has World's Fattest Kittens! (10/28/03)
Sneezing Increases Your Bust Size! (3/8/88)
When stuck in supermarket checkout lines, I miss the WEEKLY WORLD NEWS, which ceased printing in 2007. Sure they keep an updated website, but it's just not the same as ruffling through those black and white pages, passing time as the woman in front of you hands the checker a stack of coupons and then pays in small change. The constant end-of-the-world stories, the First Lady lesbian love affairs with aliens, the bizarre medical conditions... it was always a great browse, even if it did leave me with inky fingers.
A new Weekly World News application has just been released for the iPhone, but you don't need one of those fancy devices to browse old issues and find your favorite headlines again. Twenty years of the Weekly World News are available through Google Books, which makes me insanely happy. Not only can I read all the "World's Fattest Cat" stories again, I can finally get a copy of my favorite WWN cover ever (well, with the help of the PrtScrn key and some some simple photo editing - you can't print out or save the WWN images from Google Books). No longer do I have to mentally kick myself for not picking this issue up six years ago.
I vividly remember when I saw the August 12, 2003 issue of the Weekly World News. It was in a Walgreens drugstore in Chicago, near Union Station. I had just gotten off a 45-hour train trip from Portland with the Mediageek and LN. It had been an arduous journey, not nearly as pleasant as the trip out to PDX. There were scary passengers, blocked toilets that required the services of a pumper truck (which had painted on its side - no lie - "The Turd Hauler") in the middle of the night at the Minot ND stop, screaming kids, and terrible coffee. I was in a bit of a daze as we wandered around Chicago during the short layover (there was still a train ride down to Champaign IL that night), and we stopped in Walgreens for snacks. I saw the cover of this Weekly World News and just lost it, laughing hysterically at the cover story. The subtitle, "He seems to have just wandered off" tipped it over the edge for me.
To this day, I regret not buying that issue. But now at least I can read it forever online.
1 comments:
I'm partial to "Osama & Saddam- Banjo Buddies" which had a photo of Osama Bin Laden playing the banjo while Saddam Hussein played a saw with a violin bow.
Towards the end of it's run it lost something- you became aware that they were in on the joke as opposed when they would just run the stories with a relatively straight face.
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