UPDATED 9:40am: I've been punked. Update below.
I've been quietly following the satirical stylings of anonymous Shandaken blogger Helena Handbasket (er, that's a pseudonym) for months now. Her blog, All That is Wrong With Shandaken, is a sort of local Onion, with more profanity. (Helena seems to be part of a cohort of disgruntled Shandaken residents who vent their gripes about the town online. Shandaken Truth, a blog penned by someone named Fluffy Ghostbuster, is along the same lines, but angrier and more prone to personal attacks.)
Helena has a way with words, but also tends to have a hard, nasty edge that curdles a lot of her satire. I've been waiting for her to find the right mix of funny to caustic in one of her posts, and was rewarded last week with a Jonathan Swiftian news story about the town's residents all fleeing at once:
Three Thousand Shandakites Suddenly Realize Shandaken A Horrible Place To Live
'We're Getting The Hell Out Of This Sewer,' Entire Populace Reports
SHANDAKEN—At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday, every single resident of the Town of Shandaken decided to evacuate the famed vacation land, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, tree-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.
The trees, it seems, are making people crazy -- as are the lack of cell phone service and of a sewer:
Other incidents that prompted citizens to pick up and leave included the sight of flower barrels on the sidewalk; the realization that being alone among hundreds of anonymous people is actually quite horrifying; the constant bickering over who should pay for the sewer; the plethora of flags on the telephone poles and grave sites; sunburned tubers leaving actual crap in the Esopus; muddy, leaf-filled puddles that have inexplicably not dried in three years ... and all the goddamn trees.
But worry not -- Shandaken has a future:
By Tuesday night, Shandaken was completely abandoned. At press time, however, some six thousand Woodstock residents, tired of their self-centered, laid-back culture and lack of distinct reason, and yearning for a town with no cell service, had already begun repopulating Shandaken.
UPDATED 9:40am: The reason why this particular All That is Wrong With Shandaken post was notably good was because it was plagiarized almost word-for-word from an Onion article about New York City, also published last week. Helena did add a little local flair by substituting local Shandaken regionalisms for some NYC details, but that's her only contribution. So much for a promising local satire scene.
