The Luxembourg Wurst
I am the creator of the satirical news blog the Luxembourg Wurst, which I launched in 2017 after collecting ideas in a little pocket in my brain for 10 years. The nearly one thousand pieces I have written and published since then poke fun at the Grand Duchy and its people – expats, long-time residents, and locals alike. Since 2018, the Wurst also has been a weekly feature on RTL Today. Occasionally, I write about topics beyond Luxembourg such as this piece about Irish English becoming the new official English of the EU. Much to my joy, the story was covered and gleefully debunked by the Irish press including the Journal.
Wurst News: an animated series coming soon
Written by John-Paul Gomez and produced by Fireflies
Wurst News is an animated news series produced by Fireflies under the direction of creative duo Jacopo and Barbara Armani with artist Valère Lommel creating the distinctive characters and look. It is currently under development with the support of RTL Lëtzebeurg and the Luxembourg Film Fund. Press release here. Logo by Valère Lommel
The Dandy Goat
An earnest attempt to encourage freethinking and foster cross-partisan self-deprecation via creative contrarianism, intelligent silliness, and devil’s advocacy
In the early 2010s when everyone was feeling quite optimistic about the future of the U.S. and had settled into comfortable seats of cultural, moral, and political superiority, I developed the sudden urge to go against the grain. Thus, the Dandy Goat blog was born.
From 2013 until early 2017, I wrote and published around 800 satirical news stories and think pieces that I imagined were like boogers flicked at smugness, groupthink, political idolatry, and of course the rich, powerful, and famous who use their influence like nice-smelling farts to lure the public into adopting certain beliefs just because they can. I hoped that the blog would be widely read by people of every political persuasion and make me rich, famous, and influential – basically, like those whom the blog ruthlessly mocked.
Along the way I got some help from contributors, among them an English friend as well an academic from the U.S. I’d never met in person. I was occasionally contacted by guest contributors whose clever work I shared and whose wit I tried to match with passable photoshopping.
Despite a viral piece about Hillary Clinton going goth to appeal to youth (you can google it) and another successful one that was debunked by Snopes about Starbucks trying to lure customers into Satanism, the blog struggled to get visitors. I’ve written an insightful but somewhat whiny piece about this which I may post at some point. One big issue was that while the blog was mostly about American politics and culture, I was living in Luxembourg. Perhaps I was too far removed from my audience and too reliant on news headlines and hot-button issues that were quickly forgotten like the above-mentioned farts. Maybe, just maybe, a Luxembourg-themed blog would make more sense, I began to wonder…