In the News

Scott Hardie | June 2, 2002
If any old visitors of my home page recall, I used to have a page called "In the News" which was inspired by The Onion. I created fake news stories, with fake pictures, to satirize politics and culture. I did maybe seven or eight of these, and gave up because of laziness and other reasons. Digging through my notes, I just enearthed a small cache of ideas for "In the News" that I never used. Some are dumb, but here they are...

"Foosball Parent Beaten to Death" - a parody of the murdered hockey dad

"Bill Gates Gives All His Money to College Student" - I would write an article about Bill Gates giving all of his money to me, and write it as though it really happened but make it clearly some kind of fantasy or wish, and the last paragraph would just read, "Sigh."

"Car Owner Seeks Repairs After Hearing Radio Station Commercial" - annoyed by all the futuristic sound effects on commercials for Peoria rock stations ("zoom! flash! pyew pyew! You're listening to Rock 103!"), I thought this would be funny, but I was probably wrong

"ESPN2 Announces New Sport: On-Campus Hunting" - this came right after one of the deadly shooting sprees in a middle school that rocked the nation... I thought xtreme sports might be involved somehow

"Nintendo Execs Testify Before Congress: Tetris is Non-Addictive" - this was probably my favorite idea... I wanted to have a company whistleblower who worked on Tetris years ago testify that the game was 'a delivery system for bright, flashy colors and hypnotically repetitive music'

"'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' to Do Special 'Ordinary People' Edition" - I got sick of hearing about all manner of celebrity editions of the show, and wanted to blast it

"Jerusalem Explodes" - no nuclear bomb or anything, just the entire town blows up