“Where are we going Rather?” asked Couric, slinking into the passenger door of my black Hudson.
“Townhall. We’ve got a surprise date with Cleveland Huey and his crew.” I packed my Sony FV-100 noise canceller mic into its holster in case of trouble.
A few minutes later we arrived at the nondescript hall deep in the Blogosphere Bowery. We pushed through the filthy padded door and made our way to a smoky backroom. Huey was seated at a card table, around which sat a rogue’s gallery of sleazy online opinion slingers: Beantown Barney, the head of the Boston family; Mongo Steyn, the hulking French Canadian punditry thug; Duffer Hitchens, the East End goon with a taste for brutal polemics; and Jimmie Fargo, capo of the Twin Cities blog syndicate.
Jackpot, I thought. I knew they were up to their fedoras in some kind of audience heist. Trouble was, it would be next to impossible extracting information out of them. Hewitt and his gang were notoriously tight-lipped, and were blood-sworn to the Blogosphere code of silence. Getting two words out of this bunch of mutes would be harder than getting a proportional font out of a ’68 IBM Selectric.
“Nice little hideout you got here Huey,” I said sauntering up to the table. Couric’s fingers clutched my arm tightly. “There’s probably enough room here to stash a million or two missing TV news viewers.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, pally,” said Huey, tossing cards around the green felt. “This joint here is a, whattayacallit…”
“Social club,” offered Mongo, discarding a pair.
“Yeah yeah, social club. That’s it. Place for me and the boys to get away from the wives. Play some cards, talk about the weather. How’s the weather in Minneapolis these days, Jimmy?”
“The usual,” said Fargo, shooting me a straight razor glare.
“See what I mean, Rather? Strictly small talk.”
“Yeah yeah, boss, small talk,” said Beantown.
“Shaddup, stupid!” he glared. “Just play your hand, real easy-like.”
“That’s not the word on the street, Huey,” said Couric, angrily. “Word is you and your pals are packing microphones and rolling up a lot of hit counts.”
“Oh sure, doll, we do a little radio, and blog once in a while,” said Huey. “Just a little fun. But I ain’t touched a TV studio ever since I left PBS. Ain’t dat right, Hitchens?”
“I don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’,” said the menacing Limey, slamming back a shot of Yoo Hoo chocolate beverage. “Gimme three.”
“If I were you, Rather, I’d go snoopin’ out in L.A.,” said Hewitt. “That’s where all the action is. Any of you mugs got an 8?”
“Go fish!” snapped Gnat, Jimmy Fargo’s pint sized gun moll.
Please take special notice how he refers to five of the internet’s most infamous bigmouths as “notoriously tight-lipped” and “a gang of mutes.” That, my friends, was funny. Read the whole thing, as the man known for taking constitutional on his autogiro pad is known to say.
(By the way, the image at the top of this post is of a real HDNet promotion for Rather. Who needs PhotoShop!)