Humor

I love it. HugeURL.com takes a short URL and turns it into a long, complex one. Here’s the “better” URL for this blog.

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Today’s “Close to Home” pins the trend.

I let most celebrity deaths pass without commenting on them, because they usually don’t hit me. I’ve never been much into celebrity worship. But I do feel the loss of George Carlin. He’s among the select few who I am comfortable using the term “comic genius.” I’ll miss his irreverent and smart brand of humor.

Here’s one of my favorite stand-up routines from Carlin, about religion. It will offend lots of people, no doubt, but to me it’s f***ing hilarious. …

Farewell, George Carlin, from a fellow sun worshiper.

I’ve been reading Randy Cassingham’s This Is True “weird news” e-mail newsletter for many years. Well, Randy seems to be adopting more modern online trends. Now he’s doing video versions of his odd stories. Enjoy the latest:

(Actually, this is the first video of a “revamped” version of This Is True for YouTube. If I’d read his newsletter beyond the weekly funny news items, perhaps I’d have spotted the short (5-episode) first season! Oops.)

Kudos to DailyCamera.com (Boulder, CO) for adding a little creativity to what usually is a dull daily weather-forecast standup. (That’s Camera film critic Jeanine Fritz doing the weather.)

Here’s another thought to mix it up: Grab a random and interesting looking person off the street and ask them to read the weather forecast from your script. Call it citizen meteorology.

Don Asmussen’s video of the Making of the Phil Bronstein Blog Logo is brilliant!

And it was fun seeing some faces I recognize from my days (quite long ago now) at the San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently some folks had the sense to stick around and turn down those tempting buy-out offers that came around every once in a while. (Not so for me; I accepted one of those in 1993.)

And Bronstein’s blog logo really is outstanding:

April 1 seems like an appropriate day to debut a humor project: techGRL.com.

California artist Steve Kearsley (a colleague from my long-ago San Francisco Chronicle days) and I have been working on this for a while now, and today took the wraps off the site. We’re working toward “reinventing the comic strip,” applying social networking and social media concepts to the conventional comic, and developing other innovations.

This is an “alpha” release, so I make no guarantees that everything on the website is working yet. We’d love some feedback, and let me know if you spot any glitches, please.

As I write this we’ve got 5 comic strips live. Each comic has an accompanying blog item written by the main character, Lexi. Short term, we’ll be producing 2 new comics each week; we’ll ramp that up as we can. (This isn’t a full-time thing for either Steve or me.) Multimedia we’ll get to in time. For now there’s just the website; presence on other platforms will come soon.

Lots of stuff is planned, but this is as far as we’ve gotten so far. A key theme in what we’re doing is reader/user interaction with the comic strip and its characters. Readers can potentially become characters themselves, and can send messages to the characters (and get a response).

We’re really early into this, so we’d appreciate feedback and reaction. Thanks!

Google: a smart and funny company. Here’s today’s log-in page for Gmail:

This is too funny, and perhaps hits close to home. It’s from The New Yorker. (Thanks to Robert Niles, who pointed this out to Poynter’s Online-News list.)

I missed last night’s The Simpsons, but according to Mediabistro’s FishbowlDC blog, there was this funny scene:

“Did you watch last night’s ‘The Simpsons’? Like when Dan Rather introduced his panel of debate moderators, including ‘Ron Lehar, a print journalist from The Washington Post.’

“Prompting Nelson to point at him and say ‘Ha ha: Your medium is dying!’

“Rather: ‘Nelson!’ (Actually, it was Principal Skinner who says this.)

“Nelson: ‘But it is! There’s being right and there’s being nice.’”

A joke for we media geeks.

Addendum: Here’s the clip, found on DailyMotion.com: