Austin cartoonist Ethan Persoff is posting complete issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s pioneering (founded 1958) magazine of committed satire and radical thought.

Krassner was one of the progenitors of hippie-era ribald masculine humor (despite having been born way back in 1932). Much of the Realist material has been anthologized in book form, but to really “get” it you need to see it in its Persoff-provided original context (32-page newsprint magazines with few pictures and no ads).

One just-posted 1961 issue contains the following unsigned one-liner within its back-page filler column: “Ever wonder if some of the pious souls who talk about exporting democracy really just want to get it the hell out of this country?”

That’s at least one potential explanation why his occasional public remarks are sounding less like the sayings of a Zen master and more like those of Yogi Berra.

…this report, the Weekly World News is shutting down. Unlike most of my readers, I won’t miss it.

WWN, that most beloved of all periodicals by the would-be hipsters and the easily amused everywhere, began in 1980 as a spinoff of the National Enquirer. The Enquirer was morphing from its previous weird-news format into the highly successful celeb-gossip sheet it is now. The WWN was created to service fans of the material the Enquirer would no longer emphasize.

The rag found its market niche among all the kids who bought it to sneer at all the other people who supposedly bought it. By 1985, it was being written and edited by hip young adults for hip young adults, but still pretending to be targeted at the mouth-breathers out in flyover country.

It traded on its outrageousness. But that’s difficult to maintain. Every year the WWN became more over-the-top, more ridiculous. Its fake news evolved into a house of mirrors–they knew it was fake, you knew it was fake, they knew you knew, but they pretended they didn’t know you knew, and you pretended they didn’t know you knew.

It’s amazing they kept it up this long.

The beginning of WWN’s end may have come when it hired my ol’ acquaintance, cartoonist Peter Bagge, to create a weekly comic strip based on “Bat Boy,” a character whose airbrush-created face made the paper’s cover at least once a year. The pretense had ended with Bagge’s arrival. The editors had included true urban-hipster material.

American Media, current owners of the Enquirer and WWN, apparently turned down at least one offer to buy the publication, for reasons unknown.

…might not have an answer for the future of the Viaduct or for unaffordable housing, but it’s ready to take one really serious move–banning microwave popcorn from municipal offices.

Don’t drive nude. You could break your foot making a sudden stop; at least wear shoes.

…appeared on The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart, that belovedly shameless punster, just had to open with a wisecrack (that fell flat with the studio audience) about the candidate’s “lovely wife and her delicious fishsticks.”

While Rep. Paul is not related to Mrs. Paul’s (which was founded by two guys, natch), our own state does have an ex-politician from the frozen-seafood biz.

…the only prior time I’ve mentioned Paris Hilton. It was a brief aside, pondering whether Hilton would have grown up to be a classier person if Elizabeth Taylor had remained part of the family.

Now, it turns out, Hilton and I have read the same book! (Or at least we’ve both been seen in public with the same book.)

In a papparazi shot earlier this week, a pre-jail Hilton was photographed carrying (1) a Bible and (2) the self-help tome The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

Tolle, 59, was born in Germany under the name Ulrich Tolle, and now lives in Vancouver. He apparently changed his first name in honor of 13th-century German mystic Johannes “Meister” Echkhart.

Tolle has written four books and released dozens of audio books and lectures, all of which are narrated in a very calming, softly accented voice. He borrows ideas from a lot of Eastern and Western sources, but his central thesis is a simple one.

Many modern humans, Tolle asserts, are crippled by their own “mental noise,” or obsessive-compulsive thoughts. Regrets about the past, worries about the future, self-condemnations about one’s physical appearance or social status–they’re all symptoms of the mental noise. The noise, in turn, is tied into the “pain body,” a mental state in which all someone can feel is pain (physical, mental, emotional), and all someone wants to do is to spread that pain to others.

Tolle’s prescription: Become aware of the true self behind the false identity of your thinking mind. Become more acutely aware of your body and of the world surrounding you. Accept the present moment. Learn to live in the stillness. Develop an awareness that goes beyond the “egoic mind.”

Some of you are already scoffing that you never perceived Paris Hilton as much of a left-brain thinker.

But a mental-noise victim doesn’t have to be a tech nerd, a video-game geek, or even a language nut such as myself.

Let’s armchair-analyze our poor little rich girl here.

If she’s like some ultra-fashion-conscious women, she’d be prone to constant fretting about every minute aspect of the way she looks.

If she’s like some professional “celebrities,” she’d be constantly calculating how best to keep her name and image in the public eye, even if it’s in the form of a self-deprecating “dumb blonde” role on a staged reality show.

And if she’s like some Hollywood types, she’d search for an apparently simple short cut to spiritual growth, preferably one that didn’t expect her to renounce her material wealth.

But Tolle’s path isn’t as easy as he initially makes it out to be. It requires one to give up things more valuable to a celebrity than money. It requires one to give up one’s ego, one’s fully-constructed but false sense of self.

It’s giving up everything that makes someone a professional “celebrity.” And if Hilton’s ready to do that, more power to her.

…the link below, you’ll love Slate’s semi-comprehensive, “Illustrated Guide to Republican Scandals.”

…keeping track of all the DC corruption, graft, and assorted sleaze? Just consult the handy-dandy “Bush/Cheney Scandalist.”

…has resigned in the wake of a secret gay romance becoming public. Insert your own jokes about hoses, pumpers, nozzles, octane ratings, pipelines, etc.

The official MLB.com baseball scoreboard page lists completed games as “Final,” except for the game today involving the Nintendo-affiliated Mariners (who won, yay!). A completed Mariners game is denoted with “Game Over.”

…got hounded off the air due to a particularly dumb racist “joke,” some of us wondered if other hate talkers would get the spotlight shone on their own dubious antics. Sure enough, the king of haters himself, Mr. Limbaugh, is drawing attention for airing a Barack Obama minstrel song, performed by a white guy impersonating Al Sharpton.

Somebody’s made a snarky/poignant collage music video to the Kingston Trio’s 1958 cold-war burlesque, “The Merry Minuet.” (Hard to believe, but the song was written by Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick.)

…playoffs begin with Seattle fans once again relegated to spectator status, Danny Westneat suggests a simple, elegant solution. If the Sonics/Storm owners put up as much money as they would have put up for a new suburban arena, let’s get the state and/or county to front the remainder of what it’d take to fix up KeyArena (hey–remember that joint?) with a bigger food court and a few more tiers of seating. The teams not only stay in Seattle, they stay in Seattle. Everybody’s happy except the sports-hating hippies (and the owners, if they were really only looking for an excuse to move the franchise).

…so darned inconvenient to not be a conspiracy freak. ‘Cause if I were (and I’m not), I’d be all over the news that FBI resources are now so heavily devoted to the “war on terror,” including assorted authoritarian dirty tricks, that the bureau conveniently can’t do much to fight “white collar crime”—you know, the high-level fraud and corporate shenanigans that are the beloved hobby of so many big GOP campaign contributors.

I’m sure it’s all just a big coindicence. Really.

No, really.

THE MAILBAG: Anne Silberman liked my rather less-than-reverent remembrance of B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart:

“Hooray Clark!I’m proud of you for telling the truth about Johnny Hart and his B.C. strip!

May I just add that this man was a raging misogynist. The only two female characters in his strip were gross characterizations of female physical traits and they didn’t even have names!!! They were called “the fat broad” and the “cute chick”!!!!

May this dinosaur and his cave man ideology never grace the planet again!

Elsewhere in troglodite-land:

HELLO, IMUS BE GOING: So the original “shock jock” (on the air almost continuously since 1971) has been sacked from his MSNBC cable gig, and might lose his syndicated radio gig as well.

Over the years, Mr. Imus has “refreshed” his on-air schtick, and kept his share of the angry-white-male audience segment, by “borrowing” the most effective (i.e., loudest and dumbest) aspects of other talk hosts’ acts. Thus, he long ago embraced sexist, racist, and homophobic “jokes.” In pure macho-coward fashion, he often left the worst remarks to be spoken by his team of co-hosts, allowing himself plausible deniability.

He not only got away with this kind of “extreme” nonsense for so long, he was courted and sucked-up to by politicians and political operatives of all stripes, eager to get access to Mr. Imus’s “guy” audience. The “mainstream” media also loved the guy, or at least respected his ability to stay at the top of a volatile market.

But now, with one unfunny “joke” comparing a college women’s basketball team to common street prostitutes, he’s apparently on his way out of the bigtime. Will any of his many fellow airwave bigots follow?