Slashdot Mirror
The Onion to buy the New York Times
According to an UpsideToday article, everyone's favorite "free registration required" news source is to be acquired by the online satirical paper The Onion. It's a clever little piece about all the mergers floating
around these days.
The article mentions the publisher of The Onion is a Mr. Peter K. Haise. Everyone knows the publisher really is T. Herman Zweibel, son of the paper's founder, Herman Ulysses Zweibel.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Has anyone else noticed that the last 10 weeks or so have been pretty poor? Even the What Do You Think? bits have been poor. I have to wonder whether they're so busy with other projects that either they're slipping, or they're saving their "A" material for something more lucrative...
>Has anyone else noticed that the last 10 weeks or so [of The Onion] have been pretty poor?
...
Frankly, the quality of the posts at Slashdot has been declining lately. Everything was fine in the Good Old Days, but we all know those ended around 10 o'clock this morning. Around noon the decline became precipitous, with a spate of Phirst Posts and Natalie Portman headlines, and at 2pm pure spam began to arrive by the bucketful. At this point, slightly past midnight Sunday, any astute person can see that post quality has reached a new all-time low.
Actually, it's decliend even as I'm writing this p0st. First post! Natalie Portman! It's reaching another new low right now. <a href="http://www.regisphilbin.com/">click here to win a million bucks!</a>
Fortunately, I've recognized this trend and halted it. By posting substantively I believe I can tip the balance. This post already has some pretty stupid things in it, though; I think I can save things if I don't submit it
Too late.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
The good thing about The Onion before they went online (and before the paper went to color) was that not only were the headlines funny, but the articles were as well.
Perhaps I'm just being nostalgic, but some of my favorite articles were "Reincarnation of Jesus Christ Adds Excitement to Kegger" and "Super Monkey Collider Loses Funding". The names don't do much, but the articles were hilarious.
Another thing that is disapointing are some of the changes they've made. The "What Do You Think?" section used to have the same pictures of the same people in it every week, but the names were different, and one was always a Systems Analyst. It was almost like a running joke, that for some unknown reason they pulled.
Other thing they pulled (for better known reasons) was the "Drunk of the Week" section in the back on the paper. Every weekend they'd go out and find some drunk in Madison give them a sign, take their picture and give them like 2 bucks. Hilarious.
I miss the old days.
...will be tomorrow's headline I'm sure.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
When I was at UW Madison (I'm an alum), I used to love reading the Onion while waiting for classes on (I think) Tuesday mornings. That was by far the best thing delivered on any campus I've ever been. My faves headlines were:
1. Jesus takes on the NBA with his ascention dunk. (picture Jesus with is mouth hanging open like michael jordan just about to slam a ball over a bunch of other players).
2. Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin's governer) changes name to the Sexecutioner. (Picture of tommy thompson's head -he's very boyish- on top of the body of a some buff S+M leather dude).
3. Pope admits "God ain't said sh*t to me".
4. Pure silk to spew from Cindy Crawford's ass.
5. Oh and it goes on....
-- Moondog
Instead of taking an opportunity to discuss the actual implications of the AOL-Time Warner merger (which bears satire and attack, as AOL wants to apply shody journalistic standards to their online properties), this piece focuses on satiring stock based mergers.
While stock mergers are neat because they trade paper money for new paper money, they seem reasonable for a merger.
Instead of tackling the REAL problems (although alluded to by discussing ways to drop NYTs costs 80% by creating sources), it focuses on the uninteresting side of the merger.
This was a silly piece, not worthy of a post.
However, the old story of a Catholic Church-Microsoft Merger with other church based mergers was entertaining... I could go for running that again.
Feel free to mark down.
Alex
... if you access the site via partners.nytimes.com instead of www.nytimes.com cheerio, rs