I like reading the news in pretty much every shape and size I can get it. I like the traditional, high-quality journalism of The New York Times. I like the sensationalized drudge of CNN.com. But I especially like the fake, satirical news I find on The Onion.

I used to read The Onion regularly when I was in college. They made fun of recent, real news stories and had little regard for political correctness. Finally, I had found a group of writers as cynical as myself! However, since graduating nearly four years ago, I decided I needed to refine my tastes a bit more and replaced my daily dose of that pungent vegetable with an equally bitter, yet slightly more sophisticated, sampling of Maureen Dowd.

This morning, I stumbled upon The Onion again and remembered what I had been missing! I also remembered a particularly funny tale from college that I thought I would share here (as I have been laughing about it all morning):

During our junior year, my college roommate found herself the romantic interest of a markedly unappealing boy. My girlfriends and I teased her endlessly about this (since we were clearly very kind individuals) until my roommate felt quite uncomfortable being in this boy’s presence.

One day, the ex and I were perusing The Onion and came across a story entitled, “Would You Care to Join Me for an Unbelievably Awkward Dinner Sometime?” The story is basically a mock-dinner date invitation from a very unappealing man depicting an even more unappealing date. Well, my industrious ex and I figured out a way to mask an email address so that it appeared to be coming from a different one. We could send email that seemed to be from someone else! I am sure you know by now where this story is headed…

We changed the ex’s email address to look like Mr. Unappealing’s. Then we pasted the text of this glorious Onion invite into the email body and - whoosh! - off went the email to my roommate. Pleased with our prank, we went to sleep.

The next morning, we were playing around with our new hacking skills and came to discover, to our horror, that not only did the masked email look like the fake address, but any replies to it actually went to the fake address! Like a bat out of hell, I flew out of the ex’s room and raced back to my place. I threw the open the door to find my roommate hunched over her computer, looking miserable, with the email open.

“Don’t respond to it!” I cried.

It turns out, she had been just seconds from clicking the send button on the response she had written - a response which would have gone directly to Mr. Unappealing, original email and all. When I blurted out what the ex and I had done, my roommate was initially pretty angry. Eventually, she came to see the humor in it, but swore she would get back at us. To this day, though, she never has - probably because she’s terrified of my prank-playing retaliation.

Anyway, it’s safe to say I’m back to reading The Onion.

In a speech from the Rose Garden this morning, the continual embarrassment that is our President chastised Congress for not doing enough to assuage Americans’ financial worries.

“I repeatedly submitted proposals to help address the problems. Time after time, Congress chose to block them,” Sir Incompetence said.

You mean kinda like the proposals to keep funding the war in Iraq? It is currently estimated that the war in Iraq has cost American taxpayers over $515 billion. $515 billion could go a long way to alleviating the problems Americans face regarding the housing market and student loan availability. To make this number even more real, $515 billion equates to approximately $4,700 per household. Your family has paid $4,700 in real dollars to support the war. Take a moment and think of what you could do with $4,700. Doesn’t it make you angry?

However, instead of admitting mistake and ending a purposeless war that will bleed the pockets of Americans for years to come, President Bush carries on arrogantly as usual and selectively ignores information. Instead of acknowledging the billions of dollars we have been shredding since 2003, he attacks Congress for not doing enough to fix the economic mess our country is in.

Now, I’m not saying the recession was caused by the war in Iraq. Nor am I saying that we could have avoided the mortgage mess if not for the war. What I am saying, though, is that Congress would have a lot more room to fix it with that $515 billion in the bank.

If Bush wants to point fingers, he ought to start by pointing at himself.

Yes, I am. I’m talking about it because, after my initial post on the topic, this uptight, misophobic prepster went!

I did some research on the topic and learned about the people who get by via dumpster diving (and similar pursuits). What I found remarkably interesting is that most of these people, who are called “freegans,” do not need to dumpster dive but actually do it as part of a greater lifestyle choice. According to that venerable reference site, Wikipedia, freeganism is “an anti-consumerism lifestyle whereby people employ alternative living strategies based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed. The lifestyle involves salvaging discarded, unspoiled food from supermarket dumpsters that have passed, or in some cases haven’t even passed, their sell by date, but are still edible and nutritious. They salvage the food not because they are poor or homeless, but as a political statement.”

Freeganism was something I could support wholeheartedly (even if I did not become a freegan myself) and I wanted to see it in action. I coaxed my friend into going dumpster diving again.

After a few drinks - c’mon, you really didn’t expect me to climb into a dumpster stone cold sober, did you? - we arrived out back behind the yuppie bakery where our infamous diving was to occur. I zipped my Northface jacket and threw my hair into a ponytail, certain my sporty look would blend nicely with any freegans we might meet.

A quick survey of the area told me I was wrong. There were three people there hunting for bread. Two had arrived on bicycle and the third in a small, old sedan. They all looked extremely crunchy but none appeared homeless or anything close. One guy looked slightly dirty, but in a very deliberate, I-could-shower-if-I-wanted-but-I-prefer-to-conserve-water type of way.

“What are you waiting for?” my friend said. “Hop in!”

I took a deep breath and hoisted myself over the side and into the dumpster. To my indescribable relief, I found that the dumpster contained bread - and only bread. There was no garbage in sight. In fact, every loaf of bread was wrapped in the bakery’s fancy signature bag. It was dumpster diving for snobs! All of a sudden, my adrenaline kicked into high gear and the allure of free food overcame me. I began scavenging through the mountain of bread like a ravenous animal.

When all was said and done, I wound up with 10 gourmet loaves of bread and 5 bags of rolls in the trunk of my car. The excitement was still pulsing through my veins as I headed home. By the time I reached my apartment, however, my adrenaline died down and my rational neuroticism had returned. With the exception of the rolls, the bread was in unsealed bags. What if rodents had crawled into the dumpster? What if someone’s shoes that touched the bread? Unable to shake my general craziness, I would up discarding the 10 unsealed loaves in the dumpster in my apartment building. I kept the 5 bags of rolls, since I decided they were safe to eat.

The next morning, my ex came over.

“Where did all of these rolls come from?” he asked, eyeing the bags on my counter.

I paused. I couldn’t bring myself to admit I was now eating from a dumpster, no matter how socially conscious it made me.

“They were on sale,” I said.

Of course, my ex occasionally reads my blog and he will find out where the rolls actually came from. It’s easier to say it in writing than verbally. Also, my friend took a picture of me in the dumpster which I will begrudgingly share on here once we upload it off her camera phone.