Good around twoish in the morning. I’m Joey H. M. S. Fishlips and this is OMG’s Not Really News: gathered, semidigested, and regurgitated to the viewer with all the love of a mother seagull.
Our headliner tonight is not so enormously huge, gargantuan, gigantically jumbo-sized large that we’re going to drag it out to the last possible second. Don’t say we don’t do anything for you, loyal viewers. In the meantime, content yourself with the knowledge that you do not share the same fate as congressman Herman Bach, who yesterday threw out his entirely fictitious back in a staggeringly bad case of pun-related injury. “I’ll never be able to look the public in the eye again,” mourned the ironically named and newly hunched Bach, who was promptly booed off the podium by humour critics.
A triumphant conspiracy hasn’t been revealed, and we’re the first on the scene: NASA has admitted that it did, in fact, fake the lunar landing conspiracy theories.
“It was just for a bit of a laugh,” claimed former astronaut Buzz Aldrin. “We all had a few brews after the medals were handed out, I mentioned we couldn’t believe we’d done it, and then Neil said “Yeah, who would?” and the whole idea just spun itself out from there. We were going to stage this big prank on April Fool’s day where we sent in a truckload of faked-up mail claiming the whole thing was a hoax, and we were about halfway there when some clerk found all the letters in the storeroom we were using and sent them all at once five months early. We figured it’d blow over fast – it was too ridiculous to believe. I didn’t expect it to get so out of hand. I ended up having to punch a guy who took the whole thing seriously, for chrissakes.” Buzz, who did not conduct this interview, then punched our reporter Jerry McMahon in the face, although he apologized afterwards, claiming it was “instinct.” Jerry said it was all right, or possibly swore eternal vengeance; it was hard to tell given that he was now missing 83% of his teeth.
A sports article: the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games will apparently radically reformat the Games’ traditional setup. Rather than opt for the “ancient and decrepit” method of running many singular events for different sports and skills, the Olympic officials have decided to simply place every contestant in a very large varied-terrain arena with all of their equipment and give the gold, silver, and bronze medals to “Whoever comes out on top.” Critics have noted several flaws with this dynamic, such as potentially reducing the actual games to being three times as brief as the opening ceremony (rather than the current twice as brief) and granting unfair advantages to certain competitors, citing such hypothetical examples as an entire national hockey team clashing with a single snowboarder. The committee’s response has been to “grow some balls already and go for the gold,” as well as the encouraging reminder that the minimum requirements to snowboard are one leg and half an arm.
Turmoil has struck Hollywood, as five separate celebrity couples announced sudden marriage on the same day, dividing the attention of the tabloids so deeply that many of them split down the center and reproduced via cellular mitosis, creating “daughter cells” that are only half the size but can still support a camera and microphone while yammering intrusive questions. Still, this was a stopgap measure at best, and all five couples immediately annulled in disgust at the poor press coverage. Two of the women involved have been rendered pregnant by each other’s former husbands, in a twist so staggeringly contrived that they have admitted to planning the whole thing out beforehand as a script pitch. None of this actually happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
The world completely fails to reel in fear at the news of yet another fictional and potentially deadly virus – North American snorkle-fever. Perhaps this one will succeed at becoming an actual pandemic where SARS, the Asian bird flu, and swine flu have all failed. Pathologist Doctor Dirk Diddler hypothesizes that the previous epidemic hopefuls became unsuccessful shut-ins due to a severe lack of “badass” in their naming. Citing the “black death” and “scarlet fever” as his examples, Dr. Diddler forcefully encourages the importance of strong PR in any deadly pathogen’s success. When asked about the remarkable historical success of the diminutively titled “smallpox,” Dr. Diddler ate his own beard in a paroxysm of rage and grief before committing honourable suicide with his PhD on global television, a move that was widely approved of by his proud parents. “We always knew he would go far,” claimed Theresa Diddler, looking fondly upon the eviscerated remains of her eldest son and ruffling his bloodsoaked hair. “And what a way to go.” Theresa’s other children, Llyod and Doberman Diddler, are a famous tree bark salesman and an anti-animal-rights activist respectively. Doberman himself hasn’t made news with his declaration to hunt whales “Solely out of pure spite” and armed with firehoses filled with maple syrup, intending to clog the whale’s blowholes with the delicious liquid. Failure was attained immediately after the pre-launch pancake breakfast, during which the entire ammunition supply and one crewmember’s turtleneck sweater were consumed inadvertantly. Doberman, when asked for comment, belched forth a hairball the size of an infant’s head.
A substance has been discovered that could revolutionize the global economy by replacing silly putty, experts in Los Alamos claim. The semisolid, termed “Mucusplex” by its creators, is more than twice as elastic, packs four hundred percent more snugly into a plastic eggshell, and has the exciting and new trait of tending to violently explode when compressed above a certain arbitrary and constantly fluctuating limit. The research team was scheduled for an interview, but this is invalidated by our next news item, which is the mysterious vapourization of all of Los Alamos. A exhaustive CIA investigation successfully concluded that this incident was, in fact, under the jurisdiction of the FBI, who subsequently arrested and convicted a nearby local farmer for excessive belching. He was executed four seconds ago, and his last words were reportedly a heartfelt confession of his illicit and passionate lust for herpes-afflicted carp.
And now our colossal, epic, mega-sized, absolutely false towering news item: France, Belgium, and Rhodesia have fused into a single collective mass of sentient matter, transforming into a five-dimensional shape so elaborate that to look at it unscrews your eyeballs from your sockets and places them delicately in your underwear. Though rendered above the scope of mortal thought, the entity was still able to communicate in five brief skits of “charades,” each beautiful enough to send hardened tobacco-chewers into sobbing, spitting fits of joy. Roughly translated, it is currently tapping into the alleged “life-soul” of the entire planet, which it will use to “bring the death of a thousand camemberts upon the false-planet, the asteroid, the contemptible lesser” in a manner deemed so complete and utter that “he will have never existed nor un-existed.” Earth’s first reaction has been to mourn the overpoweringly sorrowful loss of chocolate and cheese that has stricken us today.
This has been OMG’s Not Really News. I’m Joey Fishlips, and if you or anyone you love should suffer a tragedy, I will be happy to point and laugh at you if it is sufficiently entertaining.
Copyright 2009, Jamie Proctor.