“I have no idea how to make the plastic milk jug look gay,” Bellisle said. “I don’t want to make him a bottle of water, for obvious reasons. Maybe I’ll use a soy-milk container when I draw the gay jug. Or maybe they’ll let me switch him with the Chicano, this tin can here. I wasn’t too pleased with the Chicano tin can to begin with, especially because my first instinct was to put tomatoes or beans on the can. Not because he’s Chicano, but because he’s a can.”Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables (The Onion)

The Onion brilliantly satirizes political correctness… but beyond that, it also makes a painfully funny joke that goes beyond ridiculing racial hypersensitivity, and instead emphasizes the need for the very self-awareness lampooned in this short piece (I’m referring to the final quote about the thumbs-up soda can). [Update: Jim sends me a link to “How to do Deconstruction,” which is of course what The Onion is doing.]

But I’m annoyed…

Has The Onion gone through a recent re-design by someone who doesn’t understand web links? The URL for this story is http://www.theonion.com/current_news2.html, which means the content of this link is obviously going to change with the next issue. I’ve gotten used to the fact that The Onion gradually moves stories out of its archives in order to create a market for its books… and I’ve gotten used to the fact that Pathetic Geek Stories is nearly unfindable and unlinkable — they want to force you to go through the far less interesting and far more conventional content in the AV Club. And now I’ve spent five minutes on the site looking for a link to this stupid ethnic anthropomorphism story, which is amusing, but really not worth that much effort.

I continue to think The Onion is hilarious and and important source of social commentary. The same issue of The Onion has a pretty humorous article on a mad scientist whose plans are thwarted by budget cuts. I’ve blogged a few of these over the years, but since the old links to The Onion all die, and this link will be dead in a week, I don’t see much point in blogging it.

Oh, boo hoo, The Onion will be so crushed that Jerz isn’t blogging it anymore. Okay. But I’ve seen plenty of websites that hide their permalinks out of ignorance (posting new contentent in a “current issue” directory that keeps changing, and only archiving that content when a new issue is created, thereby breaking any links that people have created). The Onion used to do its links right, and left its content online long enough that I felt it was worth blogging. Oh, well…

Update, 06 Sep: This is hard to belive. The file that used to be called “current_news2.html” has been renamed “previous_news2.html”, and there is still no sign of this article in the permanent archives. I can only conclude that The Onion doesn’t want any more permanent links to its articles.