Wednesday, October 25, 2006

The screaming 13 year-old girl to their Beatles



Why is it that whenever you're in the presence of someone you truly respect, it is so very hard not to reduce whatever you have to say to the kinds of fawning questions a prepubescent girl would shout at a pop star?

Case in point, I went to a book-discussion/signing of "Destined for Destiny," the new George W. Bush autobiography, written with help from Scott Rikkers, Editor-in-Chief of the Onion and creative force behind weeklyradioaddress.com. It was a good and very entertaining presentation and a nice insight into what's undoubtedly the best printed satire of our time, the Onion.

However, when it came to the quesiton and answer session, I (as always) completely lost the ability to make an intelligent point. For example, one could have probed their decision to add a sports section, which like all good parody, requires a fairly deep understanding of the subject matter. Given that the Onion is read primarily by hipsters, punks, and bourgeois intellectuals (all of whom disdain sports), it seems like a pretty risky venture. But it's clearly done quite well by a writing staff that obviously pays a great deal of attention to developments in the sporting world. It'd be really interesting to hear the impetus for such a creation.

But instead, the best I could muster was some variation of "Man, you guys are so funny. How come you're so funny?" or something like that, to which he could only ackwardly mumble something and move on to the next person.

Sigh...

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