A Much Better Declaration of Principles

It has been discreetly brought to our attention that some of the content in our most recent post, “A Declaration of Principles,” may bear a passing and wholly accidental resemblance to a vaguely similar declaration from an obscure, poorly-publicized pre–World War II film.

Bowling in the Dark’s Department of Integrity, Fact-Checking, and Cover-ups would like to assure our readers that any resemblance between the lines from this movie—which, incidentally, was too lame to even be filmed in color—and the declaration we earlier claimed as our own is pure coincidence, utterly inadvertent, and almost certainly somebody else’s fault. We’re pretty sure we can pin it all on the current or former American president—each of them, of course, worse than Hitler—provided either we or our readers have had enough to drink.

We would also like to point out that borrowing other people’s work to make ourselves look smarter, clever, or more relevant—while frowned upon in some circles, particularly snooty academics and navel-gazers who value hilariously outdated notions like “truth” and “honesty”—is well within the bounds of our established principles.

Nevertheless, to minimize the odds of our being investigated by a feeble and toothless panel of Boulderite academics or, worse yet, of being pursued to the ends of the Earth by Orson Welles’s vengeful zombie, we have assembled a fresh set of principles, which follow below. For your reading pleasure we have arranged them in order from the most modest, personal, and humble to the most pompous, self-aggrandizing, and possibly delusional, with some smatterings of snottiness scattered throughout:

I.To make ourselves (and, if possible, our readers) laugh, when we’re trying to be funny.


II.To occasionally provoke a thought or two, and possibly even generate some lively discussion, when we’re not trying to be funny.


III.To never be—whether we have two readers or two hundred (or, more likely, eight)—a waste of our readers’ time.¹


IV.To write about whatever we darn well please, even if that means 152 consecutive columns on, for example, salary cap issues in major league baseball or mockery of folks who think the Apocalypse is right around the corner.


V.To eventually, somehow, introduce ourselves to readers who aren’t family members or close personal friends.


VI.To listen respectfully to, thoughtfully address, and then promptly disregard any and all criticism, no matter how legitimate, insightful, or beneficial.


VII.To turn Bowling in the Dark into an obscenely lucrative media empire so that we, Squid Bandit and Some Guy, can achieve our simple, humble childhood dreams of racing across the United States in solid gold Ferraris to see our faces added to Mount Rushmore.


VIII.To ruin Citizen Kane for everybody who reads this by explaining “Rosebud,” the movie’s central mystery, to our readers.²

SQUID BANDIT and SOME GUY
THE PUBLISHERS
Bowling in the Dark

NOTES
1. It’s hard for us to believe that any free internet content truly can be a waste of time, but it’s impossible to deny that it can be found if you know where to look.
2. “Rosebud” is the last word that Charles Foster Kane (played by Orson Welles) whispers on his deathbed. Nobody has ever found out what it means, which is why Citizen Kane is universally regarded as a shitty movie.