Prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome by screaming at baby every five minutes, "Are you okay, baby?!"
Hey, if I was stuck after college with no job and no prospects and living in Milwaukee, maybe I'd become a mean-spirited, acidic comedian, too. But damn, those Onion writers were a cruel-funny bunch in the mid-1990's.
This 1997 list of tips for new parents is shot through with the sadistic, one-upping humor of people who knew they were years away from any actual spawning themselves. Fortunately, there's no greater prophylactic than being a zine-publishing nerd in Laverne & Shirley-land.
Baby-Care Tips For First-Time Parents [theonion's newly opened archives]
5 Comments
Love it! But just to prove I lived in the Midwest for years: I'm pretty sure those Onion writers live in Madison, not Milwaukee. Or at least they did in 1997: http://flakmag.com/jim/resume/onion.pdf
Isn't the funiest part that you are supposed to call your baby "baby"? That's what made me laugh.
Definitely Madison. I live in Milwaukee, went to college at UW-Madison. It was standard that freshmen found the Onion hilarious, and by senior year you complained it wasn't funny anymore.
We talked to an Onion employee a couple of weeks ago. It turns out they're in New York.
[yeah, and aren't they much mellower now? They moved a few years ago, but in 1997, they were still in Wisconsin. -ed.]
Also in the archive, and far meaner --
"Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Linked To Bad Parents Who Could have Done Something" link
I heard an interview with the current editor who mentioned this piece as something that caused a lot of commotion: people stumbled across while searching the web for SIDS information and took it seriously.
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