Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

• Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit: People who won’t link because they don’t want to lose traffic to another page are operating on the Ted Baxter model. Ted didn’t want them to hire a replacement newscaster while he went on vacation in case people might like the replacement better. “Aw c’mon, just do reruns of my old shows, the news doesn’t change that much.”
• Josh Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo: When you have a story as a journalist, you’re waiting for approval to publish it, then somebody else scoops you, by getting the same story out before you do.
• Scott Rosenberg, Salon: They can no longer have a “closed” meeting of shareholders with no press–because every shareholder could be a blogger. They can’t close down the news from Iraq because Salam Pax is there.
• Ed Cone, EdCone.com: If you’re a journalist with a blog, how do you make sure your blog doesn’t cannibalize your day job. How do you make sure your mistress isn’t getting all your best stuff, with your wife getting what’s left over?
• Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit: As long as you don’t get paid for what you write, you can get libel coverage on your homeowner’s policy.
• Ed Cone, EdCone.com: I do feel that Ziff Davis owns that little bit of my soul–or at least rents it.
• Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit: I think you have a responsibility to opine honestly–I don’t think you have a responsibility to have an opinion.
• Ed Cone, EdCone.com: It’s not the nineties, so I won’t phrase the question as “How do you plan to monetize those eyeballs?”
• Lis Riba: We’re seeing a bunch of people used to writing monologues trying to have a dialogue…
• Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit: I think there’s a critical level after which comments don’t work very well–it deteriorates into a chat board or UseNet.
• Kevin Marks, Epeus Epigone: The question is who can speak when. With weblogs, everyone can speak at once, in parallel. Prisoner’s dilemma–the weblog gives you a motive to be trustworthy.*
• Jay Rosen, PressThink, chair of journalism dept at NYU. Readers, or people we call readers–are now writers. When I click on the source of a comment on my weblog, I end up in a website. I don’t think we know what journalism is going to be like in a world where readers are also writers.
• Ed Cone, EdCone.com: I think today is going to be the ultimate Rashomon experience. I think we’re goin g to find out when we get back to our hotel rooms that we all felt the elephant.

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* A special huge thank you to Kevin Marks, who did what Harvard University could not–got us a working WiFi connection.

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Big room in Harvard law school. Picture on the wall of Rosa Parks integrating that bus.

Forgive me for this comparison, but–we aim at our own small upset of the balance of power here. In a world where web publishing is easy, fast, and widespread–in a world of weblogs–the big guys lose the power to decide which stories get spread around and which get buried.

OK, I admit it, probably too much coffee this morning.

I love sitting here looking at people whose lives I know from their weblogs.

Inside gossip, you heard it here first:

• Dave Winer has a great haircut–one of the few beard-trims I’ve ever seen that doesn’t make the wearer look like one of those cute little furry Star Wars creatures.
• Scott Johnson is running Linux and performing prodigies of high-tech stuff as we wait for the main event.
• Frank Paynter is snapping still photos.
• Wow, Oliver Willis just showed up! He looks like his pictures.

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You read it here first–oh, no, wait, you probably didn’t, because the web connection busted for a while.

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Sherman Adams?” you say. In a couple of weeks, the name will be everywhere, folks.

Sherman Adams, a trusted and powerful top aide to President Eisenhower, left the White House only after a massive and long-running scandal about his misuse of power had deeply embarassed the administration.

The Sherman Adams story has everything. The Republican President widely perceived as a likeable guy, too much in the sway of an aide. The right-hand-man who abused enormous power–not for personal gain, he always maintained, but to help a personal friend. The slow public road of revelation, with President and his party taking enormous damage because the President couldn’t bring himself to ask his old friend to resign. The final, humiliating, much too late departure.

As everyone scrambles to get the names of the Wilsongate leakers–is anybody watching the magician’s other hand? Somehow, the other Bush-crony scandal has disappeared from the headlines.

You remember, the story about
contracts to rebuild Iraq, and the way Bush cronies are openly peddling their influence to US companies greedy for a piece of that multi-billion dollar pie.

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Insisting that he was not peddling influence, Adams conceded “mistakes of judgment and not of intent” – a point that President Eisenhower emphasized. Ike conceded that his right-hand man had lacked “careful prudence” in “this incident” but added that Adams was “an invaluable public servant doing a difficult job efficiently, honestly and tirelessly.” Ike concluded with pungent but perhaps ill-worded plea: “I need him.”

“For critics of the staff system and for those who liked to picture the president as a boob being led by the rock from the Granite State,” Herbert Parmet has written, “Eisenhower’s three sincere words became the ultimate confirmation of their suspicions.”

“Friendship with shady player brings downfall,” 1999 story in Concord (NH) Monitor

MARY SHELLEY is to be commemorated by a blue English Heritage plaque on the London house where she died — an honour proposed in 1975 but resisted by the vicar who then lived there. He objected to the words “author of _Frankenstein_”, presumably for fear of crowds of peasants with torches, and felt that “author(ess) and wife of the poet'” would suffice.

from this month’s Ansible is Dave Langford’s wonderful British sf/fan newsletter

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I have some sympathy with the vicar, because we lived for years in the Princeton house once owned by Albert Einstein. Einstein was adamant he didn’t want the house to be a museum–and it wasn’t–which didn’t stop tourists from ringing the front doorbell.

The most persistent in wanting to come in anyway were the Germans. In less charitable moments, I thought about pointing out that Einstein would happily have grown old in Germany if their ancestors hadn’t pitched him out on his ear.

I never thought of the English vicar’s solution–“Here lived an author, the husband to two Mrs. Einsteins.”

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A bunch of muffins in the oven, and the first muffin says: “Wooo, it’s getting hot.”

The second muffin says:

.

.

[wait for it]

.

.

[wait some more for it]

.

.

[waiting is part of the fun when you’re waiting for punch lines*]

.

.

The second muffin says: “YAAAHHHHH!!!!! A talking MUFFIN!!!”

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I love this joke, told to me by my friend Chace, who gives just the right scream for”YAAAHHHHH!!!!!

What makes this joke funny?

• Like most jokes, congruity plus surprise–mmm, maybe a bit more surprise than congruity.
• Congruity: I’ve heard a million jokes where objects talk–describing an oven as hot takes me further down the road toward imagining I know what’s going on–now I expect something silly about hot ovens.
• Surprise: I get surprised when someone screams, don’t you?
• Surprise: Oh–it’s the second muffin screaming, not my friend.
• Surprise + Congruity: The second muffin takes us up a level, out of the joke, back into the real world where–oh yeah, now I remember–muffins don’t talk.
• Plus about 8 more levels of mystification about whether muffins that talk believe muffins don’t talk.

This joke, alas, is funnier heard than when read. Joketellers have the advantage over jokewriters of more subtle delays–and much, much better screams.

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* If you like jokes and theories of humor, check out my “How to Write Funny” Department and Frank Paynter’s wonderful interview.

Every society needs a cry like that, but only in a very few do they come out with the complete, unvarnished version, which is “Remember-the-Atrocity-Committed-Against-Us-Last-Time-That-Will-Excuse-The-Atrocity-That-We’re-About-To-Commit-Today!”

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time, page 174.

One of the few uplifting things about Wilsongate* is that some conservatives** have denounced the White House leak. Next time we want to understand the other side of some complex political issue, we’ll know a couple of honest conservative voices worth listening to.

But from most of the Right, the response is pure Koom Valley.

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* The most popular name for the Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Robert Novak scandal–although I thought “Intimigate” was better, and if you know who coined that one, please leave a comment.

**For example, the usually conservative Washington Times is now urging Bush to “Out the Outers.”

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