In your alluring Tuesday media column: An emerging catalogue of WaPo Styles fuckery, Russia has this whole "journalism" thing nailed, nothing about The Onion is funny except the actual words, and "Twenty ten" means you're gay.

Gene Weingarten's nomination for Worst WaPo Styles Piece of All Time: This thing. "The Light and the Labyrinth." I read it but do not understand it? It has to do with a labyrinth *apparently*. Full analysis in the comments, please. And the conceptually worst Styles story of today is "Rich Kids Like Heroin, Surprisingly."


How is the media in Russia making money, these days? Sexy nude women and bloody murder. They've surpassed us already.


Hey, it is a story about The Onion, in the New York Times. The funny thing about The Onion is how boring its writing process is: "It's a very specific, regimented format...We spend hundreds of hours in the room deconstructing the jokes. I don't think there's anything comparable to the amount of material we generate and reject just to come up with the week's headlines." Actually that's the unfunny thing about The Onion.


The most important issue currently facing television viewers: Whether voiceovers in commercials next year will say "Two thousand ten" or "Twenty ten." Or maybe "Two thousand and ten." Regardless, as long as they remember to say "no homo" afterwards they'll be okay.