The Third Annual Week of Loathing (Day The First): Sarah Vowell

It’s hard to believe, dear reader, but it’s true. Having spent over two full years on Al Gore’s World-Wide Web, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” must now offer our Third Annual Week of Loathing.

As longtime devotees of this humble “weblog” will inform you, the Week of Loathing has been the source of all manner of knee-slapping “posts.” In our first installment, for example, we ridiculed Gillette, the razor manufacturers who can’t stop condescending to their customers with inane sloganeering.

And it’s no wonder that the Week of Loathing has traditionally been an annual highpoint for us. After all, it was established in order for us to demonstrate our bona fides. Having first joined the community of “webloggers,” we wanted to justify our rather truculent title, and show the world that we fully deserve the “Hatemonger” sobriquet.

As such, it is with great anticipation and a few other Dickens novels that we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” inaugurate the Third Annual Week of Loathing (April 10-April 14)—a carnival of contumely that will take aim at all and sundry. Or perhaps just sundry. We haven’t figured that out yet.

Right now, dear reader, all the fixings for our special week are here: Third Annual Week of Loathing Balloons; a Third Annual Week of Loathing Goodyear Blimp; oregano. Indeed, we are really excited for the week to come.

Of course, we require an object of scorn for today’s humble “post”—an irritant positively itching for a drubbing. And we think we’ve come up with a darned good one.

In the original installment of the Week of Loathing, we took aim at Charlie Rose, the self-indulgent pinhead who hosts a talk show on PBS. Keeping with this public media theme, we are delighted to inform you that the inaugural target of the Third Annual Week of Loathing is none other than Sarah Vowell.

So, who is Sarah Vowell? Essentially, she’s the manly version of Garrison Keillor. Author, journalist, and humorist, Ms. Vowell is a contributor to “This American Life” on public radio.

Admittedly, dear reader, we don’t know that much about her. And for good reason: She’s so infuriatingly irksome that we immediately turn off our radio or television the moment we note her presence.

Why? Well, Ms. Vowell possesses a voice so aggravating that you’d simply pine to hear Rita Cosby sing Wagner’s Ring Cycle by comparison. As far as we can determine, this nitwit doesn’t even speak with her mouth; everything she says comes directly out of her nose. She sounds like a mix between a Minnesotan, Urkel, and a bottle of nasal spray.

As if this weren’t sufficiently bothersome, Ms. Vowell styles herself a humorist. Naturally, she’s a “humorist” in the NPR mode—reflexively left-wing and nerdy. Although apparently she’s a scream to the tofu and soymilk crowd, we think she’s about as clever as a severely retarded field mouse.

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have long believed that there are three great injustices in the world: Third World poverty; AIDS; and American taxpayers being forced to flip the bill for Sarah Vowell.