Greetings from the great beyond, heathens! It's me, A. Birch Steen, writing to you from my fluffy cloud in heaven, and good God, did I shuffle off this mortal coil at the right time. Since my departure, you water-pipe-huffing excrement burglars have all but taken over. Every day I look down at your toil and strife—now openly reeking of lawful pot smoke and peppered with "same" "sex" "spouses"—and I want my vomit to rain down upon you like so much hellfire and brimstone. But your stupid world is just a distraction, with the meat of my days devoted to browsing a lifetime of memories (available on microfiche) and awaiting the arrival of my beloved wife. (Don't dawdle, Rita!)

But for now, I must muck once more through the weekly contents of The Stranger. And not just any issue—the Regrets issue, the annual tradition of devoting an entire "newspaper" to things Stranger "journalists" regret doing, saying, paying for, stealing, and setting afire. Year after year, this is precisely as boring as it sounds. It's not that The Stranger and its writers have nothing to regret—indeed, they're all walking sacks of regret, or should be. But instead of dealing with what should be their actual regrets—Why did I get my degree in theater? Why can't I control my alcoholism? Why did I consume so much semen?—the Stranger staff trots out cutesy, vain regrets like "I regret not drinking more alcohol and semen!"

The worst are the alleged "celebrity" regrets, wherein Stranger writers shove their inane views into the mouths of the year's newsmakers, like Mitt Romney and cancer. Speaking on behalf of cancer does no one any favors. But that's the least of The Stranger's offenses. Even a cursory glance through the main Regrets feature confirms what you already know, which is that Stranger staffers are semi-illiterate perverts with personality disorders. In one entry, music editor Emily Nokes regrets her inability to ask her new coworkers about the location of the bathroom. What kind of socialist pansexual utopia is populated by people who can't help each other find the bathroom? One that smells like urine, that's what kind!

Elsewhere, there is a factual correction regarding the published assertion that a bee ate a corned beef sandwich—because bees are vegetarian! This is so absurd I don't know what to say. Later, a Stranger employee "regrets Pizza Hut perfume." Do you think this Stranger employee has actually smelled Pizza Hut perfume? Or do you think they're just heaping disdain on a commercial product that they've preemptively deemed "unhip"? (Personally, I love Pizza Hut perfume. That Latina pop star who got here the other week wears it all the time, and she smells delicious.)

What else is there to say? Thank you for making me exceedingly glad to be dead, Stranger. recommended