Dear Reader(s):
Over a lunch of pizza bagels, a fan of this very paper was asked to explain the Nass 100. “The Nass 100 is this thing that the Nass does every year where they like list one hundred things they never want to see again and like 33.3% of them are super funny.” Well, we are pleased to announce a full 67 (round up!) percent of this year’s list is top-form humour! Incremental progress, folks. It’s how nations are built. And to make this game even more fun, we’ve spread the keepers out –yes, right up to the electrifying number 100! All you clever kids who thought you’d just read up to number sixty-seven. Where is your God now?
But wait, this fun-train is running local! We’re making stops every which-where. Saba, Patricia, Ray: why, the gang’s all here and they have brought their guns and their guns are their words and their collective passion for the craft of writing. Do not put down this paper without reading Masha’s account of her foray into feces. Talk about shits and giggles! And just for S and G, why don’t you ponder the luminous, trenchant prose of David Foster Wallace with Rob Madole on page 3? Wacky!
Literature not your bag? Don’t worry, it isn’t ours either. We don’t even really know Literature, it just tagged along, per usual. There are plenty of other kids at this party: music, tee-vee, nine year old hookers. The like.
But back to the namesake of this fair issue: The 100. There was only one thing left out of this year’s list, and we discuss it here because it deserves a bit more room. We know we may be a little bit to blame for the state of things. The time we called you tubby, or fatso, or Tubby Mc Faterson. To be honest, it wasn’t so much the fat peeking out from beneath the belly-hem of your extra-small (really?) tank; it was the top itself. It was always the top itself. But listen, we get it. You misunderstood. We’re just here to say officially, you should really have something to eat now.
Yes, we were impressed when you came back from your summer staycation all sleek and what-not–but now your tan is fading, and we’re starting to remember you once had flesh. This past week one of the celeb-tabloid jizz rags had the headline splayed on the cover, “TOO SKINNY FOR TV?”
How dare you force Us Weekly to radically and comically interrogate its internal ethos? You know it isn’t ready for this kind of introspection. Do you know what else they had on the cover this week? A radiant picture of J. Lo in the bottom left-corner with a headline proclaiming that Jenny from the Block had completed a triatholon! They were cheering her personal accomplishment, reader. They were showing genuine and poignant support for a celebrity in her life journey. It was disturbing. Do you see what you have wrought?
Now everything is going to shit, reader. We looked through Gawker today and didn’t even flinch. It is because of your disturbing spiral into terrifyingly destructive neurosis and the manner in which this neurosis has manifested itself in your self-flaggellating eating patterns that the syndicates of the mainstream media have become weak-willed and nice, and we have had it up to here [points to chin]. So please, enjoy this Nass 100 over a meal. And no, our witticisms, sweet as they are, do not count as dessert.
–The Eds.