#28 | February 12 - 19, 1998  

There's no such thing as a live broadcast in the newspaper business, and thank God. That's because most of our material-particularly our practical jokes-didn't work. If the eXile had been a live two-hour Thursday afternoon performance, instead of the barely coherent remains of an edited biweekly, we would have sunk in the first ten minutes- our whole staff sweating bullets in front of a mute crowd, nervously tightening our bowties, tapping the microphone and saying, "Is this thing on?"

The eXile office is a pretty cozy place. There are no real authority figures and no mechanisms for keeping the staff in regular contact with reality. Stuff which seems funny at four in the morning on production night can still seem funny days later, because no one's around to tell us that it isn't. So in our first year we ended up wasting a lot of time on pranks that even firees from the Moscow Tribune marketing department would know better than to pursue.

On the face of it, for instance, it sounded like a good idea to try to convince the editors of Pravda that their newspaper had been bought by a blind, Jewish dwarf from Orlando, Florida, as we did this summer. And as it turned out, we were partially right-it wasn't that hard to pull off. The only problem was getting anyone to care. That was the angle we hadn't thought of. We were always forgetting something.

Not that we didn't work hard. The fictional dwarf-imperialist came to town with a finely-crafted biography. Through the miracle of the internet, we located an actual Orlando resident named Barry Apfelbaum to play the part of the ex-personal injury-attorney-turned-Sears-Roebuck-franchise-king. We figured that if we could get a groundswell started in the news, we could add some real veracity to the story by forcing an unsuspecting real person to deny everything when his phone started ringing off the hook with journalists' inquiries. Denying something to a journalist is like macing a rapist-it only makes him angrier. Particularly if the story is supposed to be a secret, like the Apfelbaum-Pravda deal.

So we called media critics from Russian newspapers like Izvestia and Moskovsky Komsomolets for comment on the story, then sent them phony American news clippings to bring them up to speed on Apfelbaum. A St. Petersburg (Florida) Times brief headlined "Dwarf to Buy Pravda" pretty much summed things up: "How low can the once-mighty communist daily Pravda sink? To about four-foot two, according to the Tampa Bay Register Bulletin."

Register-Bulletin reporter "Hugh Jassets" filled in the gaps in Apfelbaum's biography:
"Apfelbaum, who is congenitally blind and a dwarf, won a cult following as a fiery courtroom orator who frequently won huge settlements for blue-collar workers and victims of accidents on Disneyland rides. He was later hired by the company to defend against similar suits."

Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, nominated Apfelbaum's plans to rename the paper the "Sears and Roebuck Pravda" as its weekly Sign That The Apocalypse Is Upon Us.

All of which we thought was pretty convincing-until we started calling in the results. The chief of administration at Pravda, a gruff sovok of a woman who refused to give her name even when we said we were from the New York Times, was totally unimpressed by the news:

eXile: So, what's the reaction there to the sale?
Pravda: I told you, we don't know anything about it. We never hear anything. What they do in Greece [Pravda is currently owned by a Greek businessman named Christos Yiannikos] is their problem.
eXile: Does it bother you personally, working for an American?
Pravda: They're all the same, Greek, American.
eXile: Do you know he's a blind dwarf?
Pravda: That sounds like a joke.
eXile: No, it's true. I work for the New York Times. I should know.
Pravda: Well, we haven't heard anything. It doesn't matter.

We tried to sell a half-dozen Russian newspapers on the story, but nobody bit. Two weeks down the drain. We'd rather not try to remember what came out in the paper in its place.

No sooner had one of our wheeler-dealer fictional Jews bit the dust, though, than Bennie Schwartz, a Dairy Queen franchiser from Moose Jaw, Sasketchewan, shown up in town to open up a McDonald's in the State Duma. But he went down in flames faster than the blind Apfelbaum, unaided even by a news article endowing him with the likeness of B-circuit comedian Al Franken. An LDPR Duma press secretary confronted with the article-we had sent it to him as a Canadian Broadcasting Company reporter seeking commentÑ quashed the rumor before we could even try to plant it:

LDPR: It won't happen. The story is a lie.
eXile: But it's a done deal, according to this newspaper...
LDPR: Forget about it. Work on something else.
eXile: But the article said he'd struck the deal with the NDR. Maybe you just haven't heard about it.
LDPR: The story is false and you are wasting your time and mine.

Duma reporters from Moskovsky Komsomolets and Komsomolskaya Pravda agreed, and Scwartz was consigned to the eXile injured list. He later came back to make a key pinch hit in a recent phone prank involving talking head Rory MacFarquahar.

The best method for killing our jokes turned out to be simply not answering our telephone calls. When we represented ourselves as "Maria Huan" from "International Mao" magazine and tried to schedule an interview with Independent Media chief and avowed ex-Maoist Derk Sauer, we got nowhere. Nice work by Sauer's secretary prevented the eXile from getting answers to questions like, "How does Independent Media plan on carrying on the cultural revolution?" and "Does Mr. Sauer plan to realize Mao's dream of publishing a men's monthly?"

The United States embassy was similarly stealthy on the phone when we called as representatives of Boris Berezovsky's LogoVAZ, asking if we could rent the embassy grounds for the company's 6th anniversary party.

eXile: Hello, is this the public relations department?
USA: Yes.
eXile: Hello, this is Aleksei Mikhailov of the public relations department of the company "LogoVAZ." We have a question for you. We're planning on holding our sixth anniversary party on February 23, and we wanted to inquire as to the possibility of renting your space, especially the swimming pool. The only thing we would insist on is the use of our own security people. Of course, all of your employees, and the ambassador, would be invited...
USA: What space are you talking about?
eXile: The embassy.
USA: The embassy! What part of the embassy?
eXile: The whole embassy. But particularly the swimming pool.
USA: Uh...we're going to have call you back on that. I'm not at liberty to say anything. May I have your number?
eXile: Yes, certainly. (Gives number of Moscow Times newsroom).
USA: Thank you. We'll call you.
eXile: Of course.

They didn't call, as far as we know. When we called back again, they just took our number again. They must train for this kind of crap at Quantico. Not everybody got off scot free, though. When we tricked the p.r. firm Burson-Marsteller into agreeing to a phony proposal to help the city of St. Petersburg whitewash its police brutality problem, a lot of our readers thought we'd made the whole story up. That was because we didn't have documentary proof until a few hours after we went to press. We didn't think we'd ever get a chance to vidicate ourselves on that one, but now we do. So in case her superiors missed it, here is B-M employee Jennifer Galenkamp's letter to our fictional employee "Alexander Rublev," confirming her interest in our proposal. Most touching is the notation that "we were expecting you at 3 p.m. to discuss possible public relations support..." All alone in the office, with no one to help cops beat up Caucasians with...

But seriously, folks, it wasn't such a bad first year. After all,it isn't whether you win our lose, it's how you play the...hey, is this thing on?