At CP it was all like this: CPCN.com! The City Paper City Net! This clunky li'l acronym was the freaking future, man! Screw AOL and Prodigy — this service was the only tool you'd need to connect with the city, the country, the world! It was our electronic newspaper! You could send electronic mail on it! It gave you access to things called usenets and BBSes! Holy fuck! We ran full-page ads — City Paper Interactive we called it — where we, get this, listed everyone's cute little idiosyncratic e-mail addresses. Seems like a century ago.

But as we forged into the crisp electronic unknown, we also burrowed deeper into the festering sludge that is Philadelphia politics. In the very first issue of 1995, an unassuming gray box with bold names appeared in the news section. Political Notebook by the Mary Patel formerly known as Mary Frangipanni had arrived, keeping tabs on which politicos showed up where. We also hired a feisty pit bull of a reporter named Scott Farmelant who made things like the Pat's/Geno's cheesesteak wars and voter fraud his business. He also interviewed Richie Ashburn, who died two years later.

We sent a girl, Jennifer Linden, to review the food at Hooters and got a nasty letter about it. Neil Gladstone reported that one-Trick hip-hop heroes The Goats were being forced by their label to downplay drug references in "Wake and Bake." Rumors of Brad Pitt and a cougar being in town warranted cover treatment. Clark DeLeon, recently exiled from the Inky, was watching a lot of daytime TV, so we let him do a cover story on that. Margit Detweiler featured Kim Montenegro's designs in the style issue; Gina Bittner wrote about Bardo Pond, Daisy Fried interviewed Rennie Harris and Howard Altman coined the term "Teal Fiefdom" for the Center City District. We put Laris Kreslins on the cover (below). Future arts editor Lori Hill spent the summer as an intern, and future special-projects editor Brian Howard debuted as an ... art intern?

Regrettably, it was the dawn of the bronze age of pun headlines. From the Oct. 6 news section: "Crook Shields" (about criminals using lost police badges), "Ballpark Frank" (a guy named Frank working to reform baseball) and "Zoot Suit" (about a club called Zoot that was being sued). It only gets worse, people.