Many readers have written in to ask why am I so hostile towards The Onion in these pages. It's because the founders of The Onion are incredibly wealthy, whereas I am merely moderately well off. It's inflation-adjusted class warfare!
Link found via Dog Bites Dog, which I can't tell from one minute to the other whether or not it needs to have its algorithm rewritten for more yuks per headline.
Mon Sep 27 2004 17:26 PST:
Man, whatever its flaws, I gotta admit that The Weekly World News has managed to do The Onion better than The Onion. It achieves this by walking a tightrope, setting up dumb jokes and deliberately ruining them: that beautiful girl of comedic tropes that The Onion wants to approach, someday, but never has the guts. The great advantage of the WWN, I'm beginning to realize, is that it doesn't care about anything, and that can be liberating. Unfortunately, it usually means setting up the dumb joke and then going through with it.
But wait! Surely the fact that it's such an old joke is the key to how best to use it. In this computerized age, can we not automate the rituals that, while not actually giving us satisfaction, give a sort of second-order satisfaction when we see that others still perform them? Do we dare treat a running gag not with the deference due to age but with the surgeon's eye of the seasoned refactorer?
Indeed we do. Now that I [still Seth] use Leonard's NewsBruiser weblog software, all sorts of crazy plugins are within my reach. If only Leonard would write a NewsBruiser plugin that implemented this bizarre in-joke! Then my [Seth's] birthday would be complete!
Well, far be it from me [Leonard] to interfere with the completeness of Seth's birthday. The Birthday Incompleteness Theorem notwithstanding, I present NB-SethDavidSchoen, the most useless NewsBruiser plugin ever, and the first to come in a standalone package (the two are related). Furthermore, I've flipped the switch on my own weblog for the remainder of Seth's birthday.
As are we all, I'm Seth David Schoen. ![[Comments]](/nb//themes/Default/comments.png "3 comments")
(3) Mon Sep 27 2004 18:23 PST:
Hi, I'm Seth David Schoen. Not really, but let's say I was. Today would be my birthday! And my friend Leonard would be racking his brain trying to think of a gift that would top 2002's floating-head-fest ksethdavidschoen. And failing, because he totally forgot until the last moment that he needed to think of a present for Seth. Yes, the same problem that befalls people who buy presents also lies in wait for those who write pieces of software to use as presents. He'd have to fall back on the old "I'm Seth David Schoen" gag, that tired prune of a joke.
