Ed Anger is dead.

In my hipper, younger days, I would keep a couple of copies of the Weekly World News lying around my dingy bachelor apartment. It was a cool tabloid; it avoided celebrity journalism and focused on poorly researched stories (well, not researched at all, evidently) about the bizarre and paranormal. It also had two strange columnists: Dear Dotti, an advice column that insulted its petitioners, and Ed Anger, a hyperbolicly non-PC red-blooded American. The paper was a tremendous bargain at only sixty cents an issue.

I was saddened to learn the other day that Eddie Clontz, the editor and visionary behind the paper has died at the age of 56. The obituary for him in the Economist reveals that Clontz wrote the Ed Anger columns. What will the world be like without Ed Anger? We'll just have to find a way to go on living.