Timor-Leste

Thursday, August 14, 2008

As my time at The Onion is in its final weeks, so nears the end of the Heckler summer blog. Will we continue into the school year? I'd like to, because there are always campus issues and news items I want us to satirize that can't make it into the regular paper. However, considering our track record, it is unlikely.


This week in The Onion I wrote the Jackie Chan op-ed that I pitched as a headline a couple weeks ago. I watched all of Chan's movies in junior high, and I think my love of him comes through between the fun being poked.


Here's a graf that got cut that may have just been funny to me because I took Chinese Religious Thought for my second theology course:

There is an old Chinese fable I always tell these kids. One day, a peasant came up to Confucius. “I am sick of wearing my black vestment,” the peasant said. “It has been a whole week since the emperor’s concubine died. Who made you the vestment boss?” This angered Confucius; however, Confucius backed down from fighting him. “I will let you wear whatever vestment you want from now on,” he said. The peasant was stunned. Confucius had never let anyone break one of his analects before. The peasant went happily back to his family and put on a red vestment. The next day, however, Confucius told the emperor that he had seen a peasant undermining the emperor’s authority by not wearing a black vestment. The emperor sent for the peasant and had him tortured and killed in front of his troops, giving them the pride and morale to defeat a rival army and win the emperor and his advisor Confucius all the land and riches of the region.

Also, we've officially started the new content I mentioned a few weeks back, web-only War For The White House news briefs. I will continue to be part of this project after I return to Georgetown. You can see our first item here. That's my headline, and the article was written by the (acting) editor-in-chief Joe Randazzo. He originally put my last name in there for the Georgetown professor, but I had him change it to Sam DeCanio, a professor I took last semester, who was fitting considering the satire of the article. Take him if you get a chance.