Editor’s note: This article appeared in the Jan. 3 print edition of the Mountain Xpress Humor Issue. It presents a lighter, satirical take on local topics and personalities. It is not news.
Top five names for Asheville babies
1. Vijay
2. Peace-Flower
3. Not-Wanda
4. Pilsner
5. Let baby choose own name after he/she/they have discovered
their identity
Top 10 local phenomena
1. Mission Health will not get in any more fights with Blue Cross and Blue Shield now that it realizes it can’t win anyway.
2. Omni Grove Park Inn will make its presidential suite more presidential by adding a carved marble toilet, gold fixtures and a life-size statue of former Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe. The move is a direct response to Donald Trump’s comment card.
3. Wicked Weed will buy itself back from InBev but immediately resell itself to Apple as part of a deal to become the the largest tech/social media/adult beverage company in the world and thereby rule us all.
4. All the bars will create super-secret cocktail menus, with drinks starting at a mere $23.
5. The Asheville Buskers Collective will strive to attract more mimes to help balance out the
amplified acts.
6. Malaprop’s Bookstore, understanding that no one reads anymore, will offer a livestreaming service of your mother reading to you.
7. The Pubcycle will change its music playlist to keep its guides from getting murdered by the downtown employees who are gripped by bloodlust every time they hear “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.”
8. The Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority will buy a giant “laser” so it can write “Visit Asheville” on the moon.
9. New Belgium and Sierra Nevada will continue to fight over who gets to be “beer-Disneyland” and who has to be “beer-Universal Studios.”
10. Asheville Independent Restaurants will announce locals-only nights on every fifth Feb. 29 that also falls on a Tuesday.
Top five Asheville food trends
1. Locally made canned meat products. Look for Asheville-made Vienna sausages, deviled ham, Spam and other nostalgia-rich canned meat varieties from favorite hometown businesses like Hickory Nut Gap Farm, Foothills Meats and The American Pig. Great for hiking and picnics.
2. Taco shops for dogs. We all saw this coming, right?
3. Campfire pop-up restaurants. Ingenious Asheville chefs are taking wood-fired cooking to the next level with a new restaurant pop-up concept featuring actual campfires built right on sidewalks from river stones and hand-hewn logs. (Xpress predicts numerous city and county permitting kerfuffles.)
4. Local aerosol cheese products. Riding the popularity of locally produced canned meats, WNC Cheese Trail member creameries will create their own canned sensation with local versions of Cheez Whiz. Expect goat, cow and even sheep variations.
5. Bark. No, not the noise coming from all those doggie taco shops — tree bark. With the rise of edible flowers and foraged plants and mushrooms on Asheville menus, it’s natural that sustainably harvested tree bark will be the next product of the local mountains and forests to find its way onto restaurant tables.
Top five Asheville beer styles
1. Avocado Toast Gose
2. Dog-friendly
3. Mesopotamian-style (authentically served in bowls with straws to cut through the floating malt)
4. Cracker Barrel-aged
5. Child-friendly
Top 10 goals for local government
1. Replace Brownie Newman with Newman from Seinfeld.
2. Solve parking issue by banning locals from downtown in order to free up spaces.
3. Begin outreach efforts to assist straight, white, cis-gender men who might like to run for Asheville City Council.
4. Build a wall on the southern border to keep Hendersonvillians at bay.
5. Install fully automated robotic care system to round out the new cold, unfriendly Buncombe County Department of Health and Human Services building on Coxe Avenue.
6. Find a way to sell processed wastewater to other cities while Asheville keeps all the good water for itself.
7. Get “one of those flashy-memory-erasy-things from Men in Black” so the county can finally put this whole Wanda Greene thing behind us.
8. Leverage “Beer City USA” status into corporate sponsorship.
9. Open a City of Asheville Hotel in hopes of finally, actually getting our hands on some of those fabled tourist dollars that are supposed to be boosting the economy and supporting the city.
10. Combine city and county services so that everything can take a long time and still stay expensive.
Top 15 New Year’s resolutions from local media institutions
1. Mountain Xpress resolves to speed up its breaking news response time from 13 days to 12.
2. Asheville Citizen-Times resolves try to justify all the national AP and USA Today network stories it uses by enterprising a local story that didn’t just come from the corporate overlords at Gannett.
3. WLOS resolves to find a way to include puppies in its weather forecasts.
4. Asheville Tribune resolves to drum up 100 percent more conspiracy theories about local corruption but keep on top of the beauty pageant beat to make sure it preserves its credibility.
5. Asheville Blade resolves to at least occasionally get to the point in fewer than 12,000 words.
6. Ashvegas resolves to report even faster on the rumors and hearsay regarding what quasi-celebrity took a whiz at which brewery.
7. Blue Ridge Public Radio resolves to add new stations for people who don’t like classical music or news, furthering its takeover of all your car radio’s preset buttons.
8. La Voz resolves to include a job listing service for — your job, that’s right, yours.
9. Urban News resolves to start giving free ads to the 27 different factions of the local Black Lives Matter movement.
10. Capital at Play resolves that it might start accepting subscription requests from people who wear shoes worth less than a 2003 Hyundai Sonata or who have never bought anyone a pony.
11. The Laurel of Asheville resolves to feature paint-by-numbers covers so readers can create their very own soothing watercolors.
12. Edible Asheville resolves to drop the editorial content and just go straight to the food porn — after all, who reads Playboy for the articles?
13. WNC Woman resolves to provide tissues with every issue so you’re prepared when you read a heartbreaking story of a lady who reminds you of your mom finding redemption from her hard life through gardening.
14. Smoky Mountain News resolves to take a few brief breaks from straight-up killing it all the time and give some other media
a chance.
15. AshevilleFM resolves to randomly interrupt the music you’ve never heard of to have people you’ve never heard of talk about things you’ve never thought of.
Meee-yow!
11. Chuck McGrady will chain himself to the gate in front of Asheville’s reservoir and swear, “If I can’t have it, no one will!”
What, no predictions about “Sophie” magazine? Or are you afraid of the backlash from picking on women who are still feminine (as opposed to feminist)?
You must have missed them “picking on” WNC Woman magazine (#13). Nice try.
No, I did not miss that MtnX has no problem picking on the “homely feminist” women’s mag (WNC Woman) while very conveniently avoiding offending the “pretty, popular girls” at Sophie.
We could have picked on other media outlets as well (for example, Carolina Public Press, Blue Ridge Outdoors, Carolina Home & Garden, WNC Magazine and multiple radio stations, among others). The included media institutions represent what came to mind as our staff wrote the jokes, nothing more.
This was great! Love the balanced fun assault on everything and everyone sacred.