Professor Crazyhate or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the PWNAGE

Billy was driving down to the city at the buttcrack of dawn and he stops at Wawa for coffee and a bagel. Glancing over at the newspaper rack, as he is wont to do, he notices a young man of asian descent brandishing various glocks on all the local dailies, except for the Inquirer (who wisely kept such images below the fold).

That is fucking awesome, he thinks.

Upon return to work, the news editor has worked himself in a none-too-rare rage because 30 or so subscribers, mostly mouth-breathing members of the moral majority, have called him to express their displeasure over this editorial choice.

"Well now you know what the victims saw!" he says into the phone, slamming down the receiver.

"People called in to bitch about the front!" he says like Billy and everyone within earshot has something to do with the choice of photographs. They did not.

Then the crusty alcoholic night editor comes wobbling in still drunk at 3 pm, brandishing the NY Daily News like a club.


"The fuck they did," he says, "Those fuckers need to get with the damn program."

Billy quickly turns back to his computer, so as not to engage the alky in one of his rambling, incoherent monologues about the black arts (of journalism) in the good old days (the 70s).

He sits at his desk, staring at his monitor, zoning out. He's not doing anything, but it looks like he's working. This is the worst reader outrage there has been since Barbaro's death, so it's best to lay low.

Maybe the protesters will show up, he thinks. That would be nice. But tis not to be, the protesters are a story for another day.

The immediate danger passes when the editors head into the conference room for a meeting, so Billy gets up to take a lap around the newsroom. He stops behind the resident ambulance-chasing photographer, who is looking over various front pages at newseum.com.

"The photoshop winner is The Detroit News," the photog says.


Billy heads back to his desk, wondering what it all means. Maybe Richard McBeef, Cho's poorly written one act play will shed some light.

It doesn't. Cho still comes across as a fucking psycho.

"How the hell was this guy allowed to purchase guns?" he says to himself while contemplating how to get a gun of his own. Probably a revolver or shotgun.

But there is no time for idle thoughts -- there are pages to lay out, web sites to update and news stories to write, as Billy's corporate overlords have balanced many golden eggs on his lumpy, misshapen head.