Oscars.

So, as usual the only award categories worth their cheese were the screenwriting categories. Who'll back me up on this assertion? Mike Doughty will.

eggytoast.com

Rejoice, for eggytoast.com is back online. There was a while there where I was forced to use my own pitiful excuse for photography to coat my desktop. Now that eggytoast is back, I have an assortment of splendid images from which to choose. Hooray!

New story.

Tupac Accepts Posthumous Oscar. Enjoy.

Hunter S. Thompson vs. Sandra Dee

For some reason my morning paper--the Lewiston Tribune--decided to feature the death of actress Sandra Dee prominently on page 2A, but bury Hunter Thompson's suicide on page 5A (it is a small paper). Because 1) Thompson is more famous than Dee, and 2) Thompson died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, as opposed to Dee's "complications from kidney disease," I would have exercised my editorial discretion and called the Thompson story bigger. I suppose Bill Furstenau thought different.

Bad joke.

Which enlightened plague sits on the Danube?

Buddha-pest.

Now rejoice! For you are stupider.

SatireSearch and Humor Feed.

Having just mentioned Mr. Satire, I think it is time to tell the story of Yodelling Llama and SatireSearch.

SatireSearch, for those of you that don't know, is a news satire feed. Basically, it takes the headlines from a number of sites (chosen by its editors) and displays them in a nice and easy-to-use format. Great. So Yodelling Llama, in its infancy, was actually one of the several dozens sites that appeared on SatireSearch. This was before they had standards. YL, at the time, not only had fewer archived articles, it also was hosted on GeoCities (free version) and had no RSS (SatireSearch's only source at this point). So when their server crashed (their explanation) or they started weeding out the inferior sites (my explanation), YL got the boot. No explanation initially, mind you; I had to pursue a bit. After remedying some of the problems as I saw it (deeper archive, RSS, 1 & 1 hosting), I reapplied. Nothing. Oh well.

Humor Feed is a similar service. I gather they are a bit less prestigious (in that they lack The Onion), a bit more selective (in that they have 50 or so sites to SatireSearch's 200+), and a bit less focused (satire alone is not where it's at; Fark and BBSpot are included). I also applied to become part of this feed. Here is the letter I received--several months later--in response:

=====

Hi Chris:

First, let me apologize for the long wait on this. The review process
and procedures are a still a work in progress and I have let them fall
way behind. Sorry about that.

Secondly, here's a form letter I use to make sure I say the right things.

****

Thank you for submitting your site for consideration to HumorFeed. We regret to inform you that your site has not been recommended for admission at this time.

Our review board conducts detailed analyses of all submissions to HumorFeed; I have attached the results of your reviews. As you can see, while our evaluation found aspects of your site that would need some modification to meet HumorFeed criteria, we do think your site has potential. If you wish, you can resubmit your site after 90 days if you work to address the suggestions of the reviewers.

****

Okay, then I make comments here at the risk of saying the wrong things: You're reviews came back very detailed with some positive feedback. How the review system works is that if you feel any of the concerns the reviewers had are worth changing or working on you can do that and I'll re-open the reviews with the same reviewers. If you want to do that, just let me know when you're ready and I'll re-open it. Below are the text of the reviews.

Thanks and talk to you soon,
Sharky
sharky@humorfeed.com

*****
REVIEWS
*****

Overall: NOT ACCEPTABLE, but PROMISING
Overall Content: Good
Navigation: Good
Writing: Poor
Appearance: Poor
Technological Execution: Good

Comments: I will be the first to admit that I am a fan of Yodelling Llama. I enjoy the wordplay headlines a lot, such as, "Brawny Brain Brains Brainy Braun," "Date Dater Dates Dater" or "Cliff's Cliffs Notes Note Cliff's Cliffs." (I still direct friends to my favorite article, "The The Had Had No 'No Sex' Sex." These articles are both original and funny.)

The problem I see with Yodelling Llama is I'm not sure how far this type of content will go in the feed. Are the majority of HF links are going to be spent on articles like this one, "Lawyer Sues Newborn Daughter / MOBILE, AL--Southern lawyer Cornelius Tallmadge named his newborn daughter 'Susan' yesterday during a posh, well-attended Christening?"

It seems like a wasted link in comparison to other HF sites, who consider depth and breadth an important piece for HF. I consider Yodelling Llama more of a Joke-a-Day site than a serious satirical news service or humor ezine. But with that said, I think there's room for a site like Yodelling Llama, but at this point I'm not sure where.

The rest of the site's content is just as lite, see the film reviews as example of this. It isn't that the material isn't humorous, it's just that I'm not sure of its relevance to HF. I think maybe what could assist the site to be more feed friendly is the design, which also has some problems. If pieces were better sectioned or the site had a visual component, then I might consider it more of a strong satire site and
less of a one-off joke site. With its black and white design and an lack of images or font, I am led to think that this site is more about quick tidbits than any real substance.

If these issues were considered, which I'm sure would be a huge undertaking for the site, then there might be more room for joke based website like the Yodelling Llama.

*****

Overall: NOT ACCEPTABLE, but PROMISING
Overall Content: Good
Navigation: Good
Writing: Fair
Appearance: Poor
Technological Execution: Good

Comments: Yodelling Llama is a curious site. Main page is very plain, two columns of text links contain the current stories. New material is clearly marked with a star.

I admit the writing poses a bit of a quandry for me. On the one hand, the stories are very, very short - many are virtual one-liners. However, they are generally very well done. They remind me of the "briefs" on SatireWire, which contained some of that site's best material. Nonetheless I am not sure if they are quite long enough to qualify as stories for HumorFeed.

The site offers a good variety of material. The fiction section contains many longer pieces, which I gather are distinguished from the news by virtue of being about random subjects rather than topical news subjects. This is fine - I see no reason a site should confine itself to topical stories, and this site's fiction is just as good as its news. I wonder if readers may be turned away by the label "fiction" though. There is sporadic profanity and discussion of masturbation, but nothing egregious.

The film reviews seem to be linked to IMDb, which I didn't quite understand. Did the Llama webmaster write those reviews?

The comics are the weakest part of the site. I could forgive a lack of artistic talent, but the author has saved his best work for the other sections. Most of the comics are entirely forgettable.

Navigation is pretty straightforward - menus are not entirely consistent but are omnipresent. There are no headers, however, and the section menus are virtually indistinguishable as such.

The site is also almost entirely devoid of graphics. For all that it's pretty well structured and put together, it is absolutely undistinguished in appearance. Unfortunately, this really makes it look amateurish. Unfortunately, readers will not get beyond that first impression to find the quality work on the site. It needs some kind of a logo.

This is a difficult review. The webmaster obviously has talent and has maintained the site in some form for quite a while. Unfortunately, between the exceedingly short articles, uneven extra features (comics) and lack of attention to graphics, I will have to recommend this site not be admitted at present. However, I think that if the site were overhauled it could be submitted for re-review. I am not going to tell the webmaster how to write - as I said, he does have talent - but I would strongly recommend a complete graphic makeover and a modified presentation of the material. I think "fiction" and "etc." could be combined, and the submenus definitely need to be redesigned.

***********

Overall: NOT ACCEPTABLE
Overall Content: Poor
Navigation: Good
Writing: Very Poor
Appearance: Fair
Technological Execution: Good

Comments: I can't imagine you'll be surprised at this criticism, but my main problem with your site is that the articles are entirely too short...even to the point of being ridiculous. I actually had to question whether or not my browser was displaying your site correctly, because I had a hard time believing that the stories were between one and three sentences long. If somehow this was a site error or an incompatibility with my browser (although I use standard Internet Explorer on a standard Windows XP system), I would encourage you to fix it and resubmit; otherwise, such little content in your articles just doesn't work. In addition, I found your material itself to be fairly standard, even unfunny at times.

Your writing itself is solid, but without additional content and more original, geniunely funny material, I simply cannot recommend you for Humorfeed. Sorry.

**********

Mr. Satire.

A few months back I got an email from "Mr. Satire," who was starting up this site where he would pool together all the satire feeds for easy perusing. Which is only really useful if you like all Internet satire equally, or somehow don't have a good news aggregator or browser. Which is hopefully not true of anyone.

So anyway, Mr. Satire was looking for a short description of Yodelling Llama, the URL of the main page, the RSS feed's address, etc. He was also looking to conduct an "interview" with me (as YL's creator). Of course as an interview, the process left much to be desired; he had a list of tens of stupid questions, to which I was meant to come up with witty responses. The wittier, the better. Why should I partake? I thought perhaps he might get some traffic that may come my way if I played along. [That hope was dashed as soon as the site was up and running, when it became clear the emphasis would be on SatireSearch and Humor Feed, with the bulk of sites being lost in the misguidedly alphabetized mess.] So I played ball and answered his questions.

I noticed at the time that the site routinely misspelled the word "their" by transposing the "i" and "e." I assumed it was just a typographical error somewhere in its coding. I assumed it would be fixed in due time. After a few weeks, I grew so bothered I actually contacted Mr. Satire again. He wrote back and told me that he had noticed the error a while back and something about asking his retarded sister to spell check initially. So I assumed again it would be fixed shortly.

A few months passed. I just looked again at Mr. Satire. Oddly enough, "thier" is still there. What to do?

New story.

Flavor Chemists: Where Are US Subsidies for Ethyl Vanillin?. Enjoy.

Adam Felber, Corey Michael Mayo

So I've been reading this blog, Fanatical Apathy for a few months. While its humor is often spotty, it is always pointy and sharp. So it is worth a look. The most recent post is quite a good snark, so I suggest you give it a look.

On another note, I got a comment recently from the gentleman who runs If It Bleeds It Leads. I suppose it is complimentary. I'm not sure whether I should point out the name of his site really out to be more punctuated. Or whether I should mention how overwhelmingly busy his site design is. Or whether I should say how his site is actually quite funny at times, although perhaps not ten times as funny as Yodelling Llama.

Flag salute.

I'm taking this First Amendment class right now, mostly because I'm interested. We were assigned a case: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). Apparently West Virginia decided in 1942 to require students to salute the American flag every morning. And this is "require" in the "no exceptions" sense. Including no exceptions for the Jehovah's Witnesses enrolled in West Virginia public schools. Why would they require an exception? Apparently Witnesses consider the flag to be a graven image and the salute thereof worship. Hence, the required conduct made God angry. Or something.

So what was the punishment for such behavior? Some of the students were transferred to schools for the criminal delinquent. Others were expelled from school and, due to a quirk in West Virginia laws, were considered "unlawfully absent." Which meant the state could--and did--criminally prosecute the parents of the insubordinate student, sending them to jail and fining them. And, it should be noted, there were no other bad acts on the part of the student, rendering the failure to salute a "last straw" or the like.

Which just goes to show that some Americans are fucked in the head.