Broken News: Bloggers missing, presumed dead, after extensive journey up their own asses

PITTSBURGH—Local and state police, as well as Pennsylvania national parks authorities began what they deemed an "extensive search” for two area bloggers reported missing after what readers characterized as unprecedented journey up their own asses. While the search is only in its preliminary stages, privately law enforcement officials aren’t optimistic that the two self-styled satirists will be found alive, given the amount of time they’ve spent up their own asses, as well as the sheer rectal depths to which they have spelunked.

"At seven AM EST, local authorities, in conjunction with park personnel, have commenced a search for the two individuals known as 'Matthew' and 'Sean' of TheseBastards,” announced Allegheny Country Sheriff John Garrett. “While no one can be exactly sure how long these two men have been up their own asses, we do know they first ventured into the terrain over a year ago and have been making trips of increasing length and distance ever since. At this time we would like to assure the public and whatever friends or family member might still be speaking to these two that we will exhaust every resource in bringing them, or their twisted corpses, back in as few pieces as possible.”

While sources differ as to the exact moment the two verbal vagrants became ensconced in their rectal caverns, most of the dozen fans of their juvenile blog place the moment somewhere around the increased discussion of the health care debate in Washington and Ted Kennedy’s death. Supposedly this is when Matthew and Sean ventured so far up into their anuses that they became disoriented and have since been unable to find their way back out.

“I became concerned after their ‘Broken in Brief' piece on Ted Kennedy marked the third time in recent months that they had tastelessly mocked a celebrity on the very day of their death,” observed TheseBastards historian David Parkinson, referring to the duo’s short-form satirical news pieces to which site readers are regularly subjected after accidental Google mis-clicks during extensive searches for hermaphrodite midget amputee pornography. “After I perused some of their political opinions on the issues of the day I knew that they were irrevocably stuck in their own asses and so I placed the call to local wildlife and game wardens.”

It was at this point that officials from the Allegheny Sheriff’s Department were brought in. Maps were quickly drawn up and search teams were organized to look for the duo’s whose website reaches a total audience numbering in the hundreds per day, with committed readership reaching into the low thirties.

“Thankfully, the sheer size and vastness of their rectal cavities have assured us we will be able to bring in the requisite manpower and equipment,” observed Erin Winston, herself a warden for Pennsylvania’s Department of Parks, Recreation, Fisheries, and Esoteric Anal Substrata. “Luckily, the blogging revolution has given us plenty of experience with these sort of self-aggrandizing ‘my opinions are so important’, ‘aren’t I so clever’ types who go missing in their own keister.”

Indeed, after reading the first page of the duo’s missives local authorities were quick to declare a Level 7 National Review Rectal Event after Sullivan Levels proved to be off the charts. Much of the challenge of the next few days will be field testing advanced experimental equipment, such as rectal excavators, posterior terrain vehicles, gas masks, and aerial support vehicles modified to fly in such harsh environments, most of which was never bench tested after being rushed through development when rumors that Sean Hannity was going to start a daily blog began circulating earlier this year.

“But this is only the beginning. We also have to prepare for what happens if they’re found alive,” observed Dr. Heinrich Otto, Director of the Center for the Study of Internet Delusion at the University of Pittsburgh. “We have to engage in an intense deprogramming regimen so that they never again venture this far up their own asses. For Matthew and Sean, I suspect this will involve charts showing the various web traffic of sites they view and link to as compared to their own, a series of pieces from The Onion and Recoil that are objectively much funnier and more creative than anything on TheseBastards, and, if needed, a thorough dressing-down of all the childish political beliefs they hold, the impotency of their rage, and the mean-spiritedness of their observations. With extra emphasis on grammar, diction and spelling, of course.”

“That is...” Otto shrugged. “If they’re even alive. A cursory glance at the blog, which is all I could stomach, suggests they might well be all the way up their own asses. Perhaps even lodged in an intestine. We may never find them.”

For now, the search continues, with teams massing at the base of Matthew and Sean’s rectums and entering every hour, on the hour, to search their assigned anal grids.

“I just hope this serves as a warning to all you potential bloggers out there,” an angry Sheriff Garrett said. “Have some sense and go outside. Talk to another flesh-and-blood person. Smell a fucking flower or something. Most importantly, ask yourself, ‘does the world really need one more self-conscious political commentary blog with ham-handed satire?’ before you start traipsing around the outer border of your sphincter. It just might save your life.”

Obama calls snarky assholes to arms

Yesterday the President actually spent time talking to bloggers. Apparently there was some mix-up and instead of calling over to the State Department to discuss the situation in Iran, Obama accidentally dialed into a conference call where progressive bloggers were trying to organize a group session on World of Warcraft. After realizing the horrible mistake he had made by accidentally acknowledging the concerns of people to the left of him, he cracked a joke about dwarven mages and then lied to the group, telling them they were the key to keeping pressure on lawmakers to pass health care reforms. He implored them to stop bitching about what he was doing and for God's sake put on some pants and clean up a little, so they could turn their rage, snarky cat pictures, ill-written satire, grandiose notions of inflated self-importance, and rage onto those who were standing in the way of reform.

"It is important just to keep the pressure on members of Congress because what happens is there is a default position of inertia here in Washington," the president said during an invitation-only conference call. "And pushing against that, making sure that people feel that the desperation that ordinary families are feeling all across the country, every single day, when they are worrying about whether they can pay their premiums or not... People have to feel that in a visceral way. And you guys can help deliver that better than just about anybody."

In a roughly 25-minute session with a handful of prominent progressive bloggers, the president also asked for help combating disinformation about his health care plan.

"I know the blogs are best at debunking myths that can slip through a lot of the traditional media outlets," he said. "And that is why you are going to play such an important role in our success in the weeks to come."

After he assured the bloggers that the noises they heard in the background certainly wasn't Rahm Emanuel stifling laughter at the preceding statement the President had made, he implored them to get out there and start debunking. Really, I do think logic is really going to get through to Bill Kristol. Same with Glen Beck and his latest deranged rant. Bloggers are also going to convince Max Baucus that the $1.5 million he gets from health-related companies isn't as important as listening to a bunch of left-wing bloggers who don't live in his conservative state. Yeah. It was nice of Barry to pretend though.

Still, if he wants there to be pressure on lawmakers...shouldn't the White House be the one pushing the message and the importance of a public plan instead of sitting back and letting Congress *shudder* hash it out? Flip the switch from 'passive' to 'active'. Maybe that would be a better strategy than patting bloggers on the back for pointing out that the Senate is comprised of idiots, health care needs to be passed, and that Glen Beck might just be retarded.

Broken News: Archaeologists discover evidence of first blog

Above: Paintings depicting exploits on the battlefield and in the bedroom

ULM, GERMANY--A team of archaeologists from Arizona State University has unearthed what it believes to be mankind's first blog, a series of cave paintings depicting critiques of other cave paintings made by more virile, popular cavemen. The discovery was made during a routine survey of the Hohle Fels caves in southern Germany, and promises to revolutionize theories on the earliest days of human communication.

"I've never seen anything like this," declared expedition leader Dr. Timothy Frick. "This is an unprecedented collection of hamhanded social commentary mixed with clearly exaggerated claims of achievement.

Discovered by a handful of graduate students and faculty, the paintings depict, among other things, the daily adventures of an unusually creative hunter-gatherer from the Upper Paleolithic era, or about 40,000-10,000 years B.C.E. What separated this discovery from others is the nearly exclusive self-aggrandizing nature of the artwork.

One set of paintings depicts the artist, distinguished in all representations by his elevated stature and elongated phallus, atop a pile of roughly two dozen presumably female figures with long, flowing hair and physically improbable breasts. Another shows the same figure slaying several beasts, including a mastodon, lion, giant centipede, and what appears to be a winged dragon with two-headed sharks for feet.

Several experts, having examined photographs of the cave, were quick to vouch for both their authenticity and importance. Lars Brackbun, chief archaeologist at the University of Bonn, explained the community's enthusiasm.

"History is replete with lords, kings and holy men eager to record their exploits for posterity. Traditionally, this has been an effort to solidify their reputations as demigods or instruments of the divine. However, to find evidence of what appears to be as common a human as you might find at the time engaged in the same activity, well, that's something else entirely. And that is before one takes into account the childish criticism of other cave paintings and the ignorant etchings about the decisions of the tribal elders."

"Look here, this appears to be some sort of prehistoric feline playing a musical instrument in a fashion meant to be mocking this secondary depiction of a caveman who has seemingly fallen down," an excited Brackbun pointed out. "Simply fascinating!"

Indeed, based on previous excavations and fossil research, most of the slain animals in the paintings didn't exist in this region at the time, while others were blatant fabrications. Additionally, the team found no evidence of any of the large beasts having been consumed in the cave.

"If he'd actually killed and eaten any of these things, we'd have found the bones," explained Dr. Frick. "We found plenty of rabbit skulls and a few calcified snake carcasses, not to mention what must have been an unhealthy number of acorns smothered in a primitive cheese curd, but not much else. Nor was there any evidence of the tool-making prowess that would have been required to kill anything larger than the common household dogs of today."

One significant oddity was a large pile of what initial testing has determined is a pile of wadded up leaves with approximately 5 milliliters of solidified protein deposits at the center. While Frick has yet to determine what was contained at the center of these deposits, he ventured the guess that, "Our subject most likely spent a great deal of time in the cave. Alone. In fact, near as I can tell, this area of the cave seems to be in the back section of a larger dwelling populated by what evidence leads us to believe were normal, more productive members of the epoch."

These paintings are just one of the many new and startling discoveries to be found in the caves. In an adjacent cave, a team of researchers from MIT found what they believed to be a community set of paintings depicting a first-person narrative in which various tribal members would paint depictions of themselves singing songs poorly, playing musical instruments poorly, and other various situations in which they were generally made to look like asses.

In an area to the north, teams from Stanford unearthed small, short-form paintings of what team members called, "the most banal and mundane activities one could imagine, depicted in the most artless and boring way possible. We were given the impression that these were painted and exhibited almost as soon as these trite, uninteresting events happened."

"What we are seeing here is some of man's most primitive forms of this species' need to embarrass, brag, boast, and publicize the most basic details, thoughts, and opinions that occurred in their tiny, unimportant, brutally short lives," explained Dr. Brackbun.

"It seems that some of our most cherished internet applications are just the most technologically advanced method of expressing these primal inklings that evolution lodged in our reptilian brains for some reason. What an exciting development."

"Well, maybe not exciting," Brackbun corrected himself. "But it's a development and you can't deny that. Is it our fault all the good discoveries were made decades ago? No. Fuck off if you don't like it then."

Quote of the day

Brit Hume, warning that he doesn't want the news to be so damn partisan....it's just that those damned blaggers and their blagmidifying machines are making things so toxic.

HUME: What are we getting?…We’re getting bloggers and websites and all sorts of individual entrepreneurs, and we have a vaster menu of choices today than we’ve ever had. But I think that we also have the danger that everything will be presented from one political viewpoint or the other, and that the media that confront us are going to be more partisan than ever — which means that the Media Research Center will have a mission for many years to come, and a good thing that is.

Of course this is Brit Hume of Fox News and he was speaking at the Media Research Council gala slamming the "liberal media" and getting a journalism award named after William Buckley (what's that Irony, you can't stop throwing up in your mouth?). So when he means 'danger' and 'partisanship' he's talking about the danger/partisanship posed by those dirty liberals. What he does over at Fox is fair and balanced and other various slogans that appear in their ads.

Maybe if Brit spent more time working on the partisan news problem instead of giving partisan speeches at partisan events, receiving partisan awards for partisan journalism, he'd find a solution. But he's just worrying about the other side doing it too. In any event, like everything, it's all the fault of bloggers.

58 degrees in New York City today

Hitlerblog

When most scholars pontificate about the causes of World War II and the rise of Hitler some lay the blame at the feet of the Versailles treaty and others at a Europe to willing to appease a dictator. Nobel literature prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has decided to go in another direction: not enough bloggers in the 1930's.

In his Nobel lecture to the Swedish Academy, the 68-year-old Frenchman said an earlier introduction of information technology could even have prevented World War II.

"Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded - ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day," he said.

Ah yes, an army of bloggers giving Hitler the "Heh, indeed" treatment, followed by a timely LolHitler surely could have averted the world's biggest war. That said, if you have that "time travel back in time to kill Hitler" book raring to go, how about replacing killing his parents, killing him as a baby, stepping on a butterfly in the Mesozoic, or making Hitler a famous artist with disseminating a devastatingly snarky blog post from Humphrey Bogart on the 1934 Das Huffington Posten.

We all look forward to Le Clezio's next work "What if Genghis Khan had a bomber wing".