A Little Help from the Audience

As you may very well imagine, a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears goes into the production of this miserable little “weblog.” We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” take our jobs very seriously, and this often entails a little elbow grease on our part.

To this end, dear reader, a small part of the crack young staff spends its time eagerly hunting through various other “websites,” in search of interesting material for our sagacious lucubrations. Just the other day, in fact, this small part of the crack young staff found itself taking in James Taranto’s heralded Best of the Web column, found on The Wall Street Journal’s “website.”

We simply can’t get enough of this column. Ageless ad hominem attacks at John Kerry, copious use of the word “kerfuffle”—what’s not to love?

Anyway, upon inspecting one particular installment of the Best of the Web, something collectively struck our fearless e-searchers. Mr. Taranto offers a kind of Internet tip-line. If you have an interesting story, a humorous note, or an important fact under your belt, you are encouraged to send it in to Mr. Taranto, who will presumably make great use of it.

Frankly, dear reader, this left us aghast. The Wall Street Journal is cheating! Rather than wasting precious time hunting for clever tidbits for readers, the folks at the Best of the Web are letting their readers do the work for them.

Oh, for crying out loud! Does this mean that we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have been troubling ourselves with oodles of extra work for no reason? Does this mean that our days of drudging up uninspired, hackneyed ideas will soon be a distant memory? Does this mean that we can lay off large parts of the staff?

Well, we’re not sure. In the past, we have been sufficiently fortunate to receive a number of tips from savvy readers. “Links” to humorous articles, academic conferences, and dimwitted professors have abounded. Naturally, we fully appreciate such efforts.

But we’ve yet to pander to our readership shamelessly, asking that it do our work for us, whilst we play a few holes of golf. If personal-responsibility-loving conservatives like Mr. Taranto can do it, why can’t we?

Accordingly, dear reader, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” want you to know that we are in desperate straits. As you can tell from today’s humble “post,” we’re running out of ideas faster than you can say “‘Twin Peaks’ season three.”

And that’s where you come in. We humbly exhort you to send us anything you think that we may be able to use for our usual shlocky comedy. We’ll mine your genius, figuratively sucking you in and spitting you out. Like Phyllis Diller, we may even take credit for your inspired hijinks ourselves.

So, you may be wondering, what do you get out of the arrangement? Well, we suppose there’s always the satisfaction that you’ve helped the crack young staff. That ought to be worth something—albeit not a tax break. And, to make matters better, if you beg us, we’ll promise not to mention your name on our “weblog.”

If you ask us, this is what business types call a win-win situation. So, dear reader, send in those humorous “links” and suggestions today. We’ll be busy drinking mint juleps.