Merry Pranksters

April Fool's Day parodies of Salon are sort of a proud web tradition. Our pals at Teevee.org put up a great one two weeks ago, which I'm sorry I didn't spot at the time. Highlights include a Tom Tomorrow takeoff, the anonymous "Confessions of a Semi-Successful Fanfic Writer," and, inevitably, "How George W. Bush Ruined Television." Not everything's fall-down funny, but it's an unusually deep parody—they even take off Salon's Table Talk discussions ("…having a Canadian actress play the star of an American TV show is just a perfect example of how the Bush administration is letting outsourcing and NAFTA get out of hand"). Good stuff.

Comments

[Dave Weigel]

The Tom Tomorrow bit is spot on. He's batting .100 these days, at most, when it comes to actual jokes.

[Jean Bart]

Amazing!

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ARKANSAS CITY (EAP) -- A Little Rock woman was killed yesterday after leaping through her moving car's sunroof during an incident best described as a "mistaken rapture" by dozens of eye-witnesses.

Thirteen other people were injured after a twenty-car pile-up resulted from people trying to avoid hitting the woman, who was apparently convinced that the rapture was occurring when she saw twelve people floating up into the air, and then passed a man on the side of the road who she believed was Jesus.

"She started screaming `He's back! He's back!' and climbed out through the sunroof and jumped off the roof of the car," said Everet Williams, husband of 28-year-old Georgann Williams who was pronounced dead at the scene.

"I was slowing down but she wouldn't wait till I stopped," Willams said. She thought the rapture was happening and was convinced that Jesus was gonna lift her up into the sky," he went on to say.

"This is the strangest thing I've seen since I've been on the force," said Paul Madison, first officer on the scene.

Madison questioned the man who looked like Jesus and discovered that he was on his way to a toga costume party, when the tarp covering the bed of his pickup truck came loose and released twelve blow-up sex dolls filled with helium, which then floated up into the sky.

Ernie Jenkins, 32, of Fort Smith, who's been told by several of his friends that he looks like Jesus, pulled over and lifted his arms into the air in frustration and said "Come back," just as the Williams' car passed him, and Mrs. Williams was sure that it was Jesus lifting people up into heaven as they drove by him.

"I think my wife loved Jesus more than she loved me," the widower said when asked why his wife would do such a thing.

When asked for comments about the twelve sex dolls, Jenkins replied "This is all just too weird for me. I never expected anything like this to happen."

[Russ]

Hey, J-B - Ya just can't tell when it comes to Arkansas. Next thing you know, some joker will post that our attorney general actually once lost an election to some dead guy.

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- With her 14 children in tow and pregnant with her 15th, Michelle Duggar waddled into Arkansas' Capitol on Wednesday to accept the state's Young Mother award.

"We're going from diapers right up to driver's ed," she said with a smile.

Duggar, 37, who home schools her children and is helping to build a new home from the ground up, started having her babies when she was 21, four years after she married former state Rep. Jim Bob Duggar.

"We're letting the Lord give us the gifts that he wants to give us and I'm open to more gifts," she said. "I'll take them one at a time or two at a time."

The offspring include two sets of twins, and the parents have stuck to the letter "J" when it comes picking names. There is Joshua, 16; Jana and John-David, 14; Jill, 12; Jessa, 11; Jinger, 10; Joseph, 9; Josiah, 7; Joy-Anna, 6; Jeremiah and Jedidiah, 5; Jason, 3; James, 2 and Justin, 1.

The new baby is due in two months and is most likely a boy. They plan to name him Jackson.

That child won't know the sometimes-crowded life his siblings now have in their small home with two bathrooms in Springdale.

"There's usually a pretty good line in front of each one of them," Jim Bob Duggar said.

For the past two years the family has been building their own home in Tontitown, just seven miles from where they now live in northwest Arkansas.

"Our house is like a giant Cracker Barrel," Michelle Duggar said. "It's got this huge porch it goes on forever. We may get lost in the middle of it all."

The 7,000-square-foot family project will have 10 bathrooms, master and guest bedrooms, a laundry room with four washers and eight dryers and two dormitory-style bedrooms, one for the boys and one for the girls. Those rooms will have bunk beds, Jim Bob Duggar said, easily added for any new children.

"We've done the work from the foundation up," he said. "We're building it debt- free. We're doing it as we can afford it."

There will be two closets on either side of the laundry, one with boys clothes and one with things for the girls. The children put on whatever clothing fits.

This weekend, Duggar, a real estate businessman, plans to put up the siding and windows with some of his sons. They hope to move in this summer.

Wednesday, the brood drove down from Springdale in the family bus to watch mom receive her award from Gov. Mike Huckabee. The girls and their mother dressed in matching red and blue plaid jumpers. The boys each wore the same navy blue suit with a red bow tie, their hair neatly combed to the side.

When the family approached Huckabee, the governor bent down to shake each child's hand, repeating the names they shyly whispered to him.

"You guys are amazing. You really are," Huckabee told the family.

The clan is very close. During their father's failed U.S. Senate bid, six of the Duggars sang the official campaign theme song: "Won't You Please Vote For My Daddy."

The couple married when Jim Bob was 19 and Michelle was 17 and had no children for the first four years they were together.

"We were using birth-control pills," Jim Bob Duggar said. "Then we ended up giving this area of our life to God."

Duggar said the family stopped the birth control when it came to their understanding that the pills could cause a woman to miscarry.

"I've always left it up to her and she's always wanted more children," Jim Bob Duggar said. "I knew she was a mother of the year all along, but she really deserves wife of the year."

[Senescent]

Impressive. Loyal Salon subscriber that I am, I'm starting to root for John Kerry if only so that I can find a story worth reading through to the end anymore.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Have they turned that thing into a porn site yet?