Entertainment within walking distance: The Onion

This is a little late, and I've got a couple more coming up but I wanted to get the backlog out before tonight's meeting. ISU Lectures hosted two writers from The Onion, "America's Finest News Source" Wednesday night. It was a fun way to spend an evening; as a regular reader of the Onion the retrospective on the articles was mostly a nostalgia trip -- a lot of the humor of the Onion loses its punch the second time around, especially since it is news satire, and funniest when it's fresh. For someone unfamiliar with the Onion itself, it's the newspaper equivalent to The Daily Show's take on the nightly news; and if you're completely unfamiliar with news satire, the lecture probably wouldn't have been for you. In my opinion the media benefits from being skewered in this fashion (and it makes for great entertainment) and The Onion does a great job of stepping outside of and then capturing the national zeitgeist.

There's no print edition for central Iowa, although I imagine we'd have enough readers to support one; I get physical copies whenever I visit family in Boulder CO so I have seen it in print. Occasionally I run into people who are faithful readers of the online edition and have no idea it started as a college humor newspaper (sort of like the Green Gander was here 50 years ago) in Madison in 1988 and print editions can be found in dozens of cities, serving not only to deliver headlines such as "Kitten thinks of nothing but murder all day" but also the "AV Club", a serious look at local entertainment with reviews and listings for live acts, comedy, and movies.

For the lecture itself: as I said, the retrospective was good for some laughs but all quite familiar territory for me. The Q&A covered some pretty generic topics, and the answers I was largely familiar with thanks to an episode of "This American Life" (weekends on NPR) which covered their creative process. There was a book signing afterward but we didn't stick around.