News of the Week™

Oh dear. Searching through old papers, I ran across some News of the Week™ stories I wrote up, must've been back around 1990 when I was living in North Carolina.

You know, News of the Week™. Those stock, painfully predictable storylines you can count on finding, any time you read the newspaper. Storylines that are repeated over and over and over again, in one minor variation or another, without ever varying in their essential details.

And did I say, painfully predictable?

* * *

A plane crashed in Indiana. Some people were killed. Many survived. Some are "still missing." The black box flight recorder has been recovered. The Governor toured the crash site.

A committee has been formed to study the crash. After two years of dull, dry-dust committee hearings, they will issue twelve thousand pages of findings (printed at government expense) which no one will ever read.

Boeing, which cut corners in designing the DC-10, disavows all responsibility. The pilot is a hero, but will be fired as a scapegoat.

* * *

Congressman Larry "Buzz" Wallace attempted today to answer the latest charges in the mushrooming ethics scandal which has engulfed him. In the wake of the charges of four parking tickets in the past month, it has emerged that five years ago Congressman Wallace's car was towed for illegal parking.

Denying all wrongdoing, he faced an angry pack of reporters baying like wolves and wanting to know if he will resign now or what?!

* * *

A humorless feminist spokesperoffspring for NOW (National Organization of Woperoffspring) announced the formation of a mass political party with a platform urging the following amendments to the Bill of Rights:

• Immediate implementation of utopia here and now
  

• Granola nuts (not a chicken) in every pot
  

• The right to do everything that NOW doesn't disagree with, even if it would give Great-Aunt Tilda a fit.
  

• Prohibition of anything NOW disapproves of.

[It has to be "spokesperoffspring," because "spokesperson" would be sexist]

* * *

President [George H.W.] Bush responded nervously to charges that he is just as hateful as President Reagan because he is for only $53.6 billion for the new National Nose-Wiping Federal Socialization of Medicine program, whereas Democratic congressional leaders are for at least $74.3 billion of entitlement funding.

"He's an unfeeling monster," said House speaker Tom Foley. Bush said that he is not.

Charges include that Bush does not support Democratic-sponsored mandatory weekly medical checkups for all, or mandatory confinement of patients in an intensive care unit of a hospital hooked up to catheters and electronic monitors whenever they come down with a cold. Bush favors letting such persons make up their own minds.

"This just shows how callously insensitive he is to the needs of women, minorities, and left-handers," said an angry Democratic spokesperson.

* * *

A spokesperson for a Wheeling (W.Va.) chemical plant blandly denied assertions that his company's Wheeling (W.Va.) plant is dumping up to 5,000 tons of toxic xylene, toluene, benzine, and dithiophosphates into the Ohio River every day.

"We would never do anything wrong," smirked the spokesperson. "What we're dumping in the river is just... is just... uh, water with food coloring in it, yeah, that's what it is."

When asked by accommodating reporters if he would drink a glass of water from the river, the spokesperson said yes, though, he noted with a wink, "not just right now."