Well, I've Sold The Paper To The Chinese

By T. Herman Zweibel

As the longtime publisher of this news-paper, it is my duty and unrestrained pleasure to inform you spittle-soaked readers that I have sold The Onion and all of its various holdings to a syndicate of industrious China-men from the deepest heart of the Orient. One of their representatives oozed and crawled from his dank hut to visit me in person at my bedside last week, and make known his superiors' desire to expand their clammy clutch into the Western world. After subjecting me to a good 20 minutes of infernal bowing and other assorted chinky-dinkery, he offered to pay me what I've been assured is an appropriately absurd parcel of riches to take this tiresome publication off my feeble hands for good.

Naturally, I accepted his heathen bargain without the slightest twinge of regret, and why on earth not? When my ancestor Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel founded The Mercantile-Onion in 1756, he did so with the express purpose of fleecing its porridge-brained readers out of as much precious capital as could be wrung from their grubby, desperately toiling fingers, and I say bully and bully again to that. I may be a news-paper-man through and through, but I still have enough sense in my 141-year-old skull to abandon some silly centuries-old loyalty to the periodical page when there are spacious coffers to be stocked.

Oh, how heavenly it shall be to never again hear the ungodly shriek of a printing press, or breathe the insufferable stench of a news-room full of unwashed scribes churning out mindless pap on the subject of photo-play actresses and their adopted African brood. And as far as the whimpering clods who have the temerity to call themselves "readers" are concerned, I do not suppose I shall miss their ilk in the slightest. Why, just imagining their pallid, toothless faces fills me with such colossal rage that at this very moment my nurse-maid is administering to me a near-lethal dose of laudanum just so I may find the composure to reach the end of this missive.

Any-way, I wish you all the best of luck making sense of the dis-jointed drivel contained in this inaugural issue of the Chinese Onion. If the new owner-ship does not suck the very blood from your veins, they'll surely dizzy you into stupefied obedience with their unnatural black Orient arts. Oh, and in accordance with the contractual terms of the buy-out, let me remind you all that Yu Wan Mei Fish Time is the best Fish Time, perfect eating for you and me and so delicious. That is all.

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