Bat Boy Lives!

I confess that one of my guilty pleasures is scanning the Weekly World News while waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store. You may remember the WWN from that great cinematic masterpiece Men in Black when Will Smith is stunned that Tommy Lee Jones refers to a copy as a "hot sheet" for keeping track of aliens on the planet.

Jay: These are the hot sheets?
Agent K: Best investigative reporting on the planet. But go ahead, read the New York Times if you want. They get lucky sometimes.
-- IMDB

Bat Boy Lives, "the Weekly World News guide to politics, culture, celebrities, alien abductions, and the mutant freaks that shape our world," captures the essence of the WWN. Sample headlines include:

• Scientists figures out why old people smell! Over-ripe pheromones!
  
• Apollo 11 photographed beer cans on the moon!
• Four people vanish without a trace in Portable Toliet!
• Karl Marx was one of the Marx Brothers!
• 12 senators are from outer space!

It's obvious, from this list, that the WWN is one of the heaviest users of exclamation marks in the known universe. In a 1993 Smithsonian article entitled "Rare glimpse inside tabloid world reveals editor is mad dog!" Sue Hubble wrote

Salaries for established reporters are $75,000 and more. A recent hire, with no tabloid experience, has started at $53,000, and editors make salaries well into the comfortable six figures. In an unguarded moment, Eddie, himself a tenth-grade dropout and former wire editor at the St. Petersburg Times and the Evening Independent, once confessed, "We have to pay them a lot because we are, in effect, asking them to end their careers. . . . We're the French Foreign Legion of journalism."

Unfortunately, it appears the WWN has fallen on hard times. The 25 February 2006 edition of The Economist noted that American Media, the WWN's publisher

continues to sell millions of copies, but the numbers are contracting. The National Enquirer lost more than 20% of its circulation between 2003 and the middle of last year. . . . a possible conclusion is that the industry now faces the consequences of its own genius. Half-a-dozen publications now use exclamation marks on their covers to describe the divorces, pregnancies, affairs, eating disorders and assorted depravities of the same small group of celebrities. . .

We wish the Weekly World News the best. After all, few other publications have the courage to report that George Bush tried to enroll in the Electoral College.

Links:
Weekly World News web site
Weekly World News on Wikipedia. (It just seems appropriate that the most extensive article about the WWN on the internet is on Wikipedia.)

Embrace the Suck

Sure, everyone knows what an IED is. But how about a POG or a PUC or a TCP? Every war generates its own slang, and Austin Bay, a retired Colonel who served in Iraq, has complied a little guide entitled "Embrace the Suck": A Pocket Guide to Milspeak.

Bay writes, "At its core, warrior slang is a language of discipline and shared suffering, experiences that produce a tough human epoxy: the industrial strength social and emotional glue binding military comrades and building military units."

Some examples:

• All-American Decoy: A guard posted out in the open.
• Embrace the suck: The situation is bad, but deal with it.
• FOB: Forward Operations Base
• Fobbits: Derogatory term for soldiers who never leave a FOB.
• Hooah: U.S. Army slang. Actually a shout. Signals approval or solidarity. Means most anything except "no."
• Turkey peek: To glance around or over an object or surface, such as a corner or wall.

Additional links:

• 'Embrace the Suck' and More Military Speak from NPR
• Slang from Operation Iraqi Freedom
• Understanding Milspeak
• Origins of Hooah
  

The Ad Generator

Alexis Lloyd created The Ad Generator as part of his MFA thesis at Parsons The New School for Design. The generator mixes random phrases from corporate slogans with random images pulled from Flickr. Lloyd writes,

By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

The results are fascinating, thought provoking, and disquieting by turns.