Weekly World News XVI

Here’s a quartet of Weekly World News shorts I wrote for the paper in 2007. The first article is previously unpublished.

Breaking News: CRIME DOES PAY ... FABULOUSLY!

© Paul Kupperberg

CANNES, France – Interpol today announced the first in a series of arrests across Europe that will, according to Inspector Niles ‘Butch’ Bottomswale, “break the back of one of the world’s cruelest crime syndicates.

“After a six-year long investigation by Interpol and the police of eight nations,” the British-born Inspector Bottomswale announced, “we have begun to make arrests and tighten the net around the big fish at the top of the Gay Mafia.”

Arrested at Cannes was alleged le grande dame d’crime Andre ‘Coteur’ LeBustier, his trusted lieutenant and stylist, Toulouse ‘Le Pantalon’ Pantalon, and consigliore Dexter ‘Four-Eyes’ Kugelman, along with a dozen lesser figures.

“These brutes have their fingers in everything,” Inspector Bottomswale told Weekly World News. “Fashion, art, music, dance, haute cuisine, you name it, these deuced-dandies take a hefty share of the pie, driving up prices everywhere.

“Believe me, it’s their corruption that’s behind the $100-plus Broadway theater ticket and $18 compact disc!”

"Monsieur LeBustier is a businessman, nothing more or less,” insists Nigel Snigglesworth, attorney for LeBustier. “He is being persecuted for possessing impeccable taste! This outrage will not stand!”

But Interpol believes it has a solid case against LeBustier and the others. “We have witnesses to all their outrages, including one hundred and seventy-two counts of ‘aggravated fashion critiquing,’ seventeen of ‘felony furniture rearrangement,’ and we’re still coming up daily with new cases of ‘drive-by makeovers.’”

Perhaps the most damning witness for the prosecution is Serge ‘Frosted Tips’ Rinsesocovitch, one-time enforcer for the Gay Mafia. “Cement shoes are so last century,” the self-esteem-killing hit man told authorities. “They clash with practically everything.

“And why kill your rivals when it’s much more painful to ostracize and mercilessly mock them until they wish they were dead.”

“Our Nana is Patient Zero!” Boy Cries: SENIORS STRUCK BY MYSTERY AILMENT!

© Weekly World News

ATLANTA, Ga. – An epidemic in retirement communities and nursing homes around the country had the National Institute for Disease Control concerned.

“We saw the first cases in the residents of La Boca Vista Retirement Village in Florida,” said the NIDC’s Dr. Shiela Purvis. “The outbreak struck during the shuffleboard season, when seniors were constantly moving between communities for tournaments.”

The disease caused a mysterious reaction that made anyone near the sufferer run away screaming. By the end of the first week, cases began popping up in Arizona, New Mexico, Skokie, Illinois, and Long Island, New York.

“It took a month of round the clock effort to finally isolate the infectious agent,” Dr. Purvis told Weekly World News. “What we discovered is it’s a virus that mutated from one that usually affects children only. The first senior to contract the disease, our ‘Patient Zero,’ was an eighty-year-old grandmother who had recently been visited by her family from New York.

“We tested the family and found that just prior to the visit, her eleven-year old grandson, had been suffering from a severe case of cooteonerdomitis -- more commonly known as ‘the cooties.’

“Usually, when adolescents hit puberty the increase in hormones eradicates the cooteovirus from their systems. We believe the mutated cooteovirus, dubbed codgervirus, is able to take advantage of the decreased hormone levels in the elderly to gain hold and cause infection.

“Fortunately, we’ve developed a vaccine to stop the spread of codgervirus,” Dr. Purvis added.

In an unrelated story, the NIDC has identified a chronic problem among post-menopausal seniors.

“Their fuzzy cheeks are actually a form of acne,” she said. “We are presently looking for a way to treat these ‘knitz.’”

BELLYBUTTON RING TONES

© Weekly World News

SAN DIEGO, Calif. – The beeping, chirping, and musical notes of ringing cell phones have become a part of the background noise of everyday life. Now, however, a new company is adding electronic sounds to the mix with the introduction of Bellybutton RingTones.

“Everyone’s getting their bellybuttons pierced, but other than another place to hang cheap jewelry, so what?” said seventeen year-old Hedda Audi, inventor of the Bellybutton RingTones.

“I thought, shouldn’t these things do something? Wouldn’t it be cool if they could talk to one another? So I came up with this really tiny infra-red sensor. Actually, my dad did. I told him it was for a school project. Anyway, whenever one Bellybutton RingTone gets close to another, they both beep with any one of thousands of downloadable sounds or songs available at our website, UmbilicalChord.com.”

The RingTones were an instant sales success, much to the distress of her school principal. “I’ve had to ban the things,” said a harried Dr. Horace Bookman. “We had classrooms with dozens of those things going off all the same time. Very disruptive.”

“That ban is the best publicity we could’ve gotten,” Audi said as the theme from Aqua Teen Hunger Force played from her navel. “We’ve tripled sales since the ban and plan to expand our business. People pierce all sorts of places, so there’re millions of holes we can fill!”

JEWELRY FOR JESUS

© Weekly World News

JERUSALEM, Israel – The discovery twenty-seven years ago of six limestone bone boxes, or ossuaries, inscribed with the names ‘Jesus,’ ‘Joseph,’ ‘Mary,’ ‘Matthew,’ ‘Mary Magdalene,’ and ‘Judah Son of Jesus,’ have lead many biblical scholars to believe, after decades of study, that the Jesus family tomb has been discovered.

However, one overlooked artifact was a smaller carved cedar box with a hinged top that was dug up only a few yards from the Jesus family tomb. On its lid was carved the initial ‘J,’ and it held a single item: a wooden bracelet, hand-carved, and inscribed with four Aramaic characters.

“I’m amazed that no one ever bothered having the Aramaic letters translated before,” said Chaim DeBunco, chairman of the University of Lamden’s Biblical Studies department. “It would have solved this mystery years ago. This box belonged to, indeed may have been made, by Jesus himself. The bracelet confirms it: the letters translate to the initials ‘W.W.I.D.?’ which stands for What Would I Do?

“Who else would have owned a little bauble like that?”

It’s Still the Same Old Story…

An excerpt from a work in progress, Same Old Story, a murder mystery set in the early 1950s world of the comic book business. Guy Dooley and the narrator, Max Wiser, are writers who have just learned the several of the publishers they write for are going under and have hit the streets in search of new work. Here, they run into one of their more successful colleagues. I love the Pincus the ribbon salesman joke beyond all rational explanation:

THE SAME OLD STORY

©2008 Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 3/ REAL CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Deciding that being only half-drunk after receiving the news from Murray was worse than being sober, Guy was desperate for coffee. We stopped at the Automat on 44th Street, feeding enough nickels into the slots for a couple of cups of joe and a matching set of doughnuts.

Guy was lighting a cigarette when Robert Konigsberg sauntered up to the table. Tall and handsome in a rugged Robert Taylor sort of way, Bob had been an editor at National before leaving to write freelance. He was, for all intents and purposes, the top writer at the top company, responsible for a large chunk of their super-hero and romance lines. And he knew exactly where he stood in the pecking order, too. In a brushed camel hair coat and always freshly blocked Homburg, a bright and natty ascot as a dashing alternative to a tie, Bob was a fashion-plate, a teller of self-aggrandizing tall tales, a playboy, an often surprisingly good and creative writer, and a certified lunatic. There were too many Bob Konigsberg stories to tell, but the least bizarre of his traits included his habit, while writing during his lunch hours when he was still on staff, of suddenly leaping up on his desk, brandishing an umbrella or cane as a sword and sprouting ersatz Shakespearean dialogue at the top of his lungs, then calmly climbing back down to his seat and resuming his typing. His office mates thought he was eccentric. The head-shrinkers at a psychiatric facility in Valley Stream thought he was a danger to himself or others. Twice. Once for sixty days, then again for five months.

He was, by all reports, not currently crazy, making me wonder how crazy you had to be to qualify for crazy. I thought the guy was a fruitcake, but at least he was nuts in a way that made him interesting.

“Gentlemen,” he sniffed at us in his bored, affected nasal tone. “What’s the good word?”

“Down here on earth,” said Dooley, ”or up there on Olympus where you reside?”

“Jealousy of his betters aside,” Bob said, directing his question to me, “what’s his problem?”

“Pincus,” said Dooley, suddenly and apropos of nothing at all, “was the best ribbon salesman in New York. You ever hear this one, Bob? About Pincus, the ribbon salesman?”

Bob sighed theatrically. Konigsberg had several talents, but humor wasn’t one of them. The man was incapable of understanding funny in any form but the dry, smile provoking bon mot, which only he thought was humorous to begin with. Laughter was unknown to that sad, dark heart of his. So Guy liked to tell him jokes.

“He sold Woolworth’s, Gimbels, B. Altman’s, everywhere. But he could never sell to Macy’s. The ribbon buyer refused to change ribbon suppliers, but Pincus kept badgering him until, finally, one day, the buyer says, ‘Pincus, I'm in a bind. I need a piece of ribbon exactly two and six-sixteenths inches wide, of the exact red of a perfect sunset, with a texture like a baby’s behind, and as long as from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis. I need it tomorrow by noon. Find it for me and from now on, I’ll buy all my ribbon from you.’ Pincus agrees to the terms and off he goes.”

Bob tapped his foot on the Automat’s scarred linoleum floor, waiting with undisguised impatience.

“The next day, at exactly noon, the phone in the buyer’s office rings and it’s Pincus. ‘I got your ribbon,’ he says. ‘Meet me outside.’ So outside the buyer goes and there’s Pincus...with ten big trucks full of ribbon! ‘Pincus,’ the buyer says, ‘the width is dead-on, the color is absolutely perfect, the texture so soft you could cry. But, Pincus, I said I wanted a piece only as long as from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis!’

“’So?’ says Pincus. ‘The tip of my penis is back in Poland!’”

I laughed. Bob didn’t.

“You were saying?” Bob prompted me, as though Guy hadn’t spoken.

“Worldwide Distribution’s gone down the tubes and they’re taking Blue Chip and Feature, that we know of, with them,” I said.

Bob blinked. He stepped back. “When,” he said, “when did this happen?”

“Today. This afternoon,” I said. “You okay, Bob?”

I don’t think he heard me, just nodded out of reflex.

“Don’t set sail for Cloud Cuckoo-land on us now, Bob,” Guy said. “Remember, the guys you work own their own distribution company. They’re the only ones don’t have to worry.”

“Were you doing anything for one of them?” I knew Konigsberg drew a nice salary writing exclusively for National, but I’d also heard the rumors that he wrote secretly, under a variety of pseudonyms, for other publishers.

“Hmm?” Bob shook his head and focused his gaze on me once again. He managed a smile, but it never quite reached his eyes. “Actually, between you, me, and the lamppost,” he said, nodding in Guy’s direction, “I did provide some unsigned material on the side for some of their adventure and romance titles. Adventures Beneath the Earth, My Strangest Journey, Young and in Love, First Dates and so forth.” He waved his hand. “Strictly for income my wife was unaware of, a little extra cash to keep a certain someone in the style to which I’ve made her accustomed.”

Guy drained his coffee and rose to go after a refill. “Oh, Bob, you dog,” he said, deadpan, and left.

Bob shot his cuff and checked his wristwatch, making sure I got a gander at the gold band and jeweled face. “Well,” he said. “Speaking of which, I’d best be off. Don’t want to keep the lady waiting.”

I didn’t ask if he meant his wife or his girlfriend. I just said good-bye and returned to my doughnut.

Knowing that guys like Konigsberg would sail right through the current troubles with little more than an interruption in the quality of their adultery made me feel even worse for guys like me and Dooley. His kids could go hungry, I might have to live off my widowed mother or get a real job...but Bob Konigsberg might not be able to pay the rent on his floozy’s apartment.

At the moment, I couldn’t imagine a reason I could ever feel sorry for either Konigsberg or his floozy.

That would change soon enough.