I would like to take this opportunity to announce the retirement of Hobart Meade, HowdyLand's longest-serving intern. At 92, Hobart has played many non-crucial roles here among the rambling office suites and interconnecting studios he has called his "second time-share." Though he is nearly out the door, we hope to continue overlooking Hobart's many contributions to The News From The Great Re-Depression for many years to come.

Having come through the Great Depression of the 1930s, Hobart soon became an indispensable sounding board within months of his arrival here from his previous internship in the break room at Netscape. When a story was pure crap, Hobart was always ready to look back upon his lifetime of unpaid employment and give our coverage the kind of authenticity we so often failed to summon from our focus groups, marketing people, and the Lehman Brother who mops our floors.

Indeed, we will miss the wide-ranging lack of expertise he brought to his non-job, not to mention all those whimsically eccentric mustaches he could apparently grow overnight. I am compelled here to note his many inspirational asides, like what he said just moments ago while handing over his keys: "Mr. Douglas," he said. "Greatness lurks beneath your very shoes."

You just can't pay a man to say those kinds of things.

Here at The News From The Great Re-Depression we have felt for the longest time like a lonely cliff awaiting a faraway herd, but today we hear the distant slap of cheaply manufactured footwear approaching. But as always, I have gotten ahead of myself.

Is it a weary habit of mind that leads to Huffington Post for daily updates about designer sand? Have we stayed and Gawked too long at too little for no reason? Do cats that look like Hitler ever start looking enough like Hitler to scare the holy crap out of you? Will I, Stan Douglas, dump the internet for that soon-to-be-famous girl who ended up with Chaz Bono's tits? Not likely.

No, we will remain right here, bringing you the latest cheerful news about the coming end of every trend and a new kind of meat people will grow in hampers. After all, it's the medium that's exhausted, not the message.

This reporter, however, will remain hunkered and bunkered away from all that for now. I am old and was gassed forty years ago for differing with our government over the slaughter of an Asian people I have yet to meet. Nothing I did could save those folks from the same people whose sons and daughters carried on to bring about this Great Re-Depression. And I tremble at the savagery uncoiling and sliding this very moment toward all those kids with drums and signs. I really do.

After all, I remember what they did to orderly people in suits and ties who rode against old Jim Crow. The Freedom Riders were treated like terrorists, and today, an entirely different kind of orderly people in suits and ties bet against the lot of us, shorting reality itself.

Irony will only get you so far before things turn ugly and you can Google them.