For someone like yours truly, who is actively trying to get sentences published on paper in the real world (Believe it or not, my written work is not solely in the “hey, what’s Lindsay Lohan doing today?” genre), the death of print media is a double-edged sword (See, that’s called “imagery;” very literary).

On the one hand, I have to watch a field I am deeply interested in shrivel and wither like an eighty-year stop motion movie of my penis (That one’s called a “simile”).

On the other hand, the low standards of decency on the web allow me to project the image of my withered penis into the minds of thousands of readers, whereas in the pre-web days such a wonderful bond would not, yea, could not have been forged.

But come on, print media: though your long reign may be approaching its end, let’s die with some dignity shall we? The specific embarrassing death throes I’m referring to are the increasingly frequent misattributions of the title “memoir” or “true story” to straight up Fiction. Or, as we call it at our weekly writer’s meetings, “Lies.”

You probably remember James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces being unmasked as fraud, especially because that particular unmasking made Oprah look like a tool, which is always fun. But recently, this sort of thing has started to happen with absurd regularity.

Take Misha, the inspiring memoir of a young girl traversing the European wilderness to escape the Nazis and being raised along the way by a family of wolves. It was recently proven to be totally fraudulent. The woman who wrote it escaped from the Nazis the normal, boring way: by jetpack.

In the book, she lied about most every detail of her life, including being Jewish, presumably because she thought the whole “Holocaust thing” had been done and needed spicing up with some Romulus and Remus allusions. If there’s any justice, Elie Wiesel’s on his way to her house right now with a lead pipe.

But even more insidious, if not as blasphemously twisted, is the recently debunked “memoir” Love and Consequences, the stirring first-person narrative of a young half-Native American woman’s ordeal growing up in a black foster home, running drugs for L.A. street gangs, and seeing her brother get shot down by the Crips.

The author, a white woman raised by wealthy parents and living in Oregon, has canceled all promotional tours through Los Angeles, I’m guessing because she would be instantly swarmed by literate gang members who want to gun her down for cheapening their noble way of life.

I can see why publishers allow this to happen. No one buys new Fiction nowadays, so call it a stirring personal ordeal and watch it climb to the Best Seller List on the back of Oprah’s Book Club. But, seriously, let’s get on this. It’s not worth the humiliation anymore.

You’re dying, print media; accept it and try not to soil yourself in your last moments. That’s how my Grandpa went, and now at Thanksgiving it’s the only time he comes up in conversation.

On a related note, call your nearest Barnes and Noble today and reserve your own copy of my upcoming memoir, Doing Coke with Heidi Klum While Inside of a Tiger: The Michael Swaim Story (Book I: Mission to Mars)!

When not blogging for Cracked, Michael constructs a far more interesting life than his own as head writer and co-founder of Those Aren’t Muskets!

Do you love to read books but hate reading books? Amazon.com finally has the answer for you.

It’s called Kindle
and it’s described as a “wireless portable reading device,” where the screen is so realistic and glare-free, it’s almost like reading a book. You can bring Kindle with you on long train rides, to class, the library, and anywhere else you can take an actual book. At $400, the Kindle is perfect for someone desperate to live out that book-reading adventure they could only fantasize about for years.

The Kindle, which Amazon scientists have been working on for the last three years, boasts the following characteristics:

You know what else feels like real paper and doesn’t require cables or monthly bills? Fucking books.

It’s also worth mentioning that you can’t obviously directly upload books that you already own onto the Kindle; you’d have to acquire them from Amazon. So if I desperately wanted to re-read The Novelization of Judge Dredd,, I’d have to pay for it again despite the fact that a perfectly good copy exists on my bookshelf.

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The wordsmiths over at Entertainment Weekly just published this glittering narrative description of a recent J.K. Rowling reading and Q and A session. The article joyously depicts the breadth of the evening and the bustle and merriment of the crowd of scrub-faced youth, all sweepstakes winners, who turned out to applaud the author and ask probing questions about their favorite members of the wizarding world. Fortunately, you don’t have to read any of that shit, because the important information is in the article’s headline: DUMBLEDORE IS GAY.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just because the elderly wizard who shepherded young waif Harry Potter from tender boyhood into manhood is a homosexual doesn’t mean he was necessarily molesting him. It just gives a million slashfic writers justification for assuming so. It also opens the door for a staggering array of inappropriate uses of the word “wand.”

But when all is said and done, does it really change anything if Dumbledore’s beard is white for a reason? YES, J.K. Rowling, it does! Now I’m probably not qualified to tell a billion-copy selling author how to do her job, but here I go: Dumbledore is in the Harry Potter stories for one purpose and one purpose only. Namely, to be the elderly wizard/father figure. He’s a goddamned ARCHETYPE.

He’s not a person; he’s a character, and there’s a big difference between the two. It was bad enough he got a back-story; making us imagine him in any kind of sexual situation is like writing in a scene where Voldemort goes to a magical burrito place (it’s called El Wizardito’s) and has diarrhea all night. Sure, it could happen, but it completely undermines his image.

Although to be fair, at least Rowling set us up for this revelation. If you reread some of those early books, the clues abound:

Of course I thought nothing of any of this at first, but now that Rowling’s confirmed the wizard’s sexual orientation, it’s hard not to see the signs, subtle though they may be.

Rosie O’Donnell’s book, Celebrity Detox, comes out this week.  Hoping to conquer the important and elusive People-Who-Need-Help-Throwing-Up demographic, O’Donnell manages to cram childhood molestation, her bowel peculiarities, her hatred for Donald Trump, and the details of the insemination process of her partner into just 209 pages.
Is it possible to come up with a celebrity that’s even more irritating than Rosie O’Donnell coming out with a book that’s more conducive to vomiting? It’s tough, but not impossible, and I just wouldn’t be doing my job as a CRACKED blogger if I didn’t at least try.