Sometimes the unintentional irony around The Stranger offices gets so thick one could slice it into Sheetrock-sized pieces, cart it home, and line his panic room with it—if one weren't already locked inside his panic room trying to wait out the limp-wristed fury of certain editors who took exception to his laceration of last week's "Strangercrombie" scam. (A scam that I understand is set to continue through this Friday, December 12, unless, of course, that good man Patrick Fitzgerald receives my sealed testimony before then. One can only hope.)
Here in the panic room, I have, somewhat regrettably, installed a telefax so that I can receive copies of the paper even in tense moments such as this, and it's quite a ghastly display: two stories by ELI SANDERS, who I'm sure is quite pleased with himself for writing them, though he may not realize that they exhibit the two sad reportorial poles between which he oscillates.
Story one, in the "news" section, finds Mr. Sanders trying to pick on a person he assumes is an easy target, my former intern Sarah Jeglum, now editor of the University of Washington Daily (where, as I understand it, she is doing her damnedest to right that left-lurching ship). He will find, I am sure, that Miss Jeglum is not his usual weak prey. Story two, apparently a "feature," shows Mr. Sanders lapping at the feet of a degenerate, some disc jockey named Luke Burbank—a man who, if the annual checks from my silent partnership in the company that owns Mr. Burbank's radio station are any indication, is not quite the smashing success Mr. Sanders believes him to be. In any case, ladies and gentlemen, the two poles that mark the boundaries of Mr. Sanders's limited abilities: picking on kids and sucking-up to asses. Way to go, sir.
But all this bullying and sycophancy has distracted me. Where was I? Ah, yes: Unintentional irony. Let's speak of unintentional irony, shall we? The latest occasion: BRENDAN KILEY, reviewing a painfully long book by a Latin American drug addict. The nut of Mr. Kiley's review is that the book is so overlong and rambling and vague that the author has to explain to his own readers how to enjoy his book. If you were to strike every reference to the book's title from this review and insert "The Stranger" in its place, you would find that the meth-infused Mr. Kiley has written a review of his own work, and that of his peers, in one fell swoop.
The only benefit to Mr. Kiley's blathering tirade is that it has pushed books editor PAUL CONSTANT out of his own section, which has increasingly become an exercise in masturbatory self-praise. Instead, Mr. Constant has drunkenly stumbled over to the food section, where he berates a restaurant for putting up a shoddy and quite tasteless facade in the face of brutal financial constraints. As a quite fetching Canadian poetess once put it: "Isn't it ironic?" 
