• After many trials and tribulations, we’ve got our News Askew Poll Topic back and coded here at the site! Yes, this long-lost feature has now returned, and will be a regular part of your daily visits. The poll will live on your left sidebar, where we’ll change the topic at intervals decided by us (might be weekly, or longer, depending on the topic, alternate topics, number of votes, etc).

We’ve tried to keep it as fair as possible, so users should only be able to vote once per topic. We’re also going to be rehashing some older topics from years back, as we figure there’s a lot of new users here who never voted, new flicks and actors to add into the mix and, well, we just plain forgot some that we used before.

Of course, like all else, we thrive on YOUR participation. So please vote, but ALSO — Send us your topic ideas! If we use your poll topic, we’ll of course give you a mention on the front page when it goes live, and you’ll have the joy of knowing that your question is being pondered by the heaps of fans worldwide.

So, enjoy our latest feature addition — The poll topic! More new features to come during our big Spring cleaning event. Stay tuned.

• Spring cleaning events at News Askew continue, as we’re happy to re-introduce a Sunday Night feature – News Askew Retro! Retro brings back stories from the past, interesting tidbits that we dig up from the library here at News Askew that may have been forgotten, fun reads, or just plain bizarre. Every Sunday night, we’ll select an item from the archives to share. For some of you, possibly for the first time.

To celebreate the re-emergence of this feature, though, we’re going to be doing something a bit different for a while. We’ve dug into the tape archives and dug up some audio material of never-before-heard stuff on the web, back from the very early days of View Askew. Some will be quick, some more lengthy, but all come to us from View Askew’s own collection of appearances. We’re talking days before News Askew existed, so most of this stuff will take you back to the Clerks and Mallrats days. All clips are in MP3 format.

Our first is just a quick taste — A small bumper from a Boston radio station on a class appearance Kevin was making back in 1996. Hear Kevin from back when Clerks and Mallrats were still in their infancy stages! We’ll see you every week with more Retro action. More to come!