As citizens of the Internet, we at Wag’s Revue are no strangers to sass and vitriol. Recall that our founding manifesto states: “The countless blogs and Web-based literary reviews are brimming with unexceptional content.” Like how totally rude, right? In our years, we’ve lampooned such indispensable fixtures of modern life as  Google, The New York Times, even Seinfeld. Some have in turn complained about us, mostly about our fussy website or bizarre name. Once our own blog even reviewed us; we did not ask it to do so again.

The day after Christmas, we sent out an email to our subscribers announcing the winners of last Summer’s Contest. “Get in the ring, it’s Boxing Day!” it began, and went on to jest like Boxing Day was a celebration of the sport of boxing. The next day, an Irish blogger—we don’t know him, but he comes across as a second-rate offspring of the Underground Literary Review, that bilious beast so deftly harpooned by Tom Bissell in The Believer back in 2003—wrote: “I received the following unintentionally hilarious email from hip on-line literary magazine Wag’s Revue. Pity no one told them the origins of ‘Boxing Day,’ which has definitely nothing to do with people punching each other.”

See what happened there? Our blogger got the joke but failed to get that we got the joke, (because we made the joke…) and declared our hilariousness to be unintentional. At first we were like, what a dumbass. But then we were like, is this genius? Has this person unintentionally created a new kind of criticism? One wherein a critic notices something obvious about something and then declares that obvious quality to be an accident, as in Little did Mr. Seinfeld realize that his own show was a show about nothing…

We were all set to praise this unintentional brilliance in this very editor’s statement, when weeks later, he put up this “review” of Roxane Gay’s wonderful flash fiction “Satellites, Rain” which we published in our last issue. Apparently this several-month-old, one-page work of fiction—which, let us reiterate, is literally full of wonders—prompted this blogger to complain about us, Facebook, and nepotism, all while one would guess poorly imitating the piece itself, which is the single lamest thing a critic can do. He also sneeringly referred to us as the Shag’s Veneer, when clearly the superior joke would have been to call us the Gag’s Ensue.