The Onion

The rise of the internet is directly responsible for the astounding critical (and presumably, commercial) success of The Onion today. As soon as they got a website, those in the know who read the print version started spamming copy-and-pasted articles from the site all over Usenet.

In 1999, the Onion released one of the best history books of all time, Our Dumb Century, which collected fictional front pages of the paper from the years 1900 to 2000. They have also published other work of more dubious quality, such as reporter Mike Leow's book Tough Call, and the Not for Broadcast album, in which the writers attempt to record audio sketch comedy.

In Q1 2000, CNN.com reported that The Onion has moved its main office from Madison, WI to New York City.

The Onion's website is at http://www.theonion.com
It is updated every Wednesday.

It's disturbing how many people overlook this, and as a result, look at me incredulously when I say, "Oh, yeah, The Onion gave that movie a great review," or "Yeah, I heard about that book... The Onion's reviewer didn't think too highly of it though."

I guess this is one of those things - there can be a whole bunch of layers, and even so, people assume that something's the same on the inside as on the surface, and so most people don't bother to go deep. Just like an onion - people just assume it's the bitter flesh, not realizing that some life may have sprouted inside.

The Onion

The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. 'Come,' said he, 'catch hold and I'll pull you out.' he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. 'I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours.' As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day. So the angel wept and went away.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky(1821-1881)

The Brothers Karamazov (Chapter 3)

Dostoevsky, at 28 years old was sentenced to hard labor spending four years in Siberia then served as a common soldier afterward. So stressful was this period of his life that it brought on epilepsy from which he suffered for the rest of his life. His reading, limited to the Bible, led him to reject the Western inspired atheistic socialism of his youth and Christ's teachings became for him a supreme affirmation of the ethical ideal and of the possibility of redemption through suffering. Profoundly affected by the prison brutality of hardened criminals alternating with displays of courage, sensitivity and generosity awakened Dostoevsky to insights into the deepest complexities of human behavior.

Resuming his literary career after imprisonment, Dostoevsky wrote several novels whereby he created symbolic worlds of heroes infused with a tragic sense of life, a search for truth and self fulfillment. Anticipating modern psychology he explored the hidden motives and intuitive understanding of the unconscious through his characters preparing the way for the subjective approach of much 20the century literature and for surrealitic and existentialist writing.

The Onion is a good example of how he used three protagonists --metaphysical symbols of body, mind and spirit of the modern human being and engaged these in passionate debate, revolving around his earlier works by using the expiation of sin through suffering, the need for a moral force in an irrational universe, the struggle between good and evil, and the enduring value of freedom and individual. With compelling images and a meagerness of words, this great storyteller layers a striking portrayal of greed and poverty, hope and grace, and the fallenness of humanity. The rich woman of the story, protecting the material while she yearns for the spiritual, mired in a need for control and a hope for redemption. The ultimate question is poised to the reader as to how to live and what one is to live by--to which Dostoevsky provides only fragmentary answers.

Sources:

Bram, Robert Philips, Norma H. Dicky, "Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich," Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia , 1988.

Public domain text taken from Book VII: 3. An Onion Page 4:
www.freebooks.biz/Classics/Dostoevsky/ Karamazov/Karamazov_VII03_4.htm

Columnists for The Onion

The satirical newspaper The Onion's columnists are intended to parody their counterparts in more, um, serious media, as well as various "types" one tends to encounter.

They are:

• Jean Teasdale - A white trash woman in her 30s, she writes A Room of Jean's Own, in which she details her life in the manner of a number of syndicated female columnists; I think she's supposed to be a stand-in for Erma Bombeck. If she's not a Pink Hat in name, she's one in spirit.
• Jim Anchower - A stoner kid who writes The Cruise. The print equivalent of Jason Mewes's Jay. He seems to suffer more hardship than the others, except Jean or, I suppose, Smoove B.
• Herbert Kornfeld - The Accounts Receivable supervisor at Midstate Office Supply, he writes in a self-consciously black dialect that in younger people is referred to as "whigger." It's been suggested that the column is where a meek accountant's fantasies get free rein.
• Smoove B - The Love Man's oeuvre consists of truly impassioned pleas to a woman or women to join him for various sensual delights, culminating in incongruously described sex acts
• Jackie Harvey - The Hollywood Outsider's column parodies gossip columns, with their useless tidbits about celebrities' lives and careers. The difference is primarily that Harvey's are inaccurate, out of date, and, in some cases, misspelled. He also misunderstands a lot of what he does learn.

The columns appear in a complicated pattern, and not necessarily in a fixed order. Jean Teasdale and Jackie Harvey may be the least frequent; Jim Anchower appears to be among the most. That may be my perception, since I don't particularly like Jim Anchower.