9/04/2007

Final issue of "World's most reliable newspaper" hits the stands

The dreaded moment has arrived. The final issue of the Weekly World News hit the supermarket checkout lanes last week.

Readers – that means my wife when I remind her that I have a blog and maybe my mother-in-law, my sister in Wyoming, my cousin in South Carolina and a couple of pals in Florida – will recall that I lamented the passing of the WWN a few weeks ago. I noted that I’d miss the tabloid’s total indifference to celebrity journalism and its devotion to chronicling the, um, far-fetched events of our world.

Well, the WWN went out in style in its final issue. A sampling of the stories included these:The capture of a hairy lobster as big as a Buick. Global warming is thought to have had something to do with the creature’s immense size.
An infant born in Iowa with fragmented eyes like those of a fly. Doctors say that, in this age of iPods, PCs, cell phones, HDTV and “every other light source today’s generation stares into for hours at a stretch,” it was inevitable that this phenomenon would happen sooner or later.

Live puppies found living in the sunken wreck of the HMS Titanic. The puppies are descendants of two dogs that found a large air bubble when the ship went down in 1912.

A half-man, half-alligator creature found in the Florida Everglades. The creature apparently was biologically engineered by a rogue geneticist who is on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

WWN editors billed the final issue as a “collector’s item” and suggested that readers “Buy now, sell on eBay tomorrow!”

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