My new PC Mag print column went live this week. It’s about Microsoft’s never-ending attempt to smear Linux. It’s also one in a series of columns with pun headlines based on other titles. This one based on the Fear Factor TV show. Another column called the Importance of Being Linux is based on the title, The Importance of Being Earnest — an old Oscar Wilde play.
At PC/Computing (and MacUser) we used to have an editor, Jon Zilber, who was masterful at creating compelling pun headlines. This is not that easy and he got to the point where he should have won a Pulitzer for it. Jon was eventually rousted and went into PR. I need to track him down.
Puns are considered by many professional comics (and the public too) as a low form of humor. But when done by a master they can be phenomenal, poetic. This is probably why the characters in Mensa (the social club for people with high IQ’s who want to actually hang out with people with high IQ’s to talk about their high IQ’s) think puns are the highest form of humor. Apparently the Japanese language is amenable to puns and considered an art there too. Fact is most puns are annoying, inane. The website Pun of the Day, proves this.
The thing about Zilber that was interesting was the fact that he stunk at these pun/headlines for years but insisted on doing them. It was one day when some curtain opened for him and each one was gold. Hopefully I can find some of the ones he did for me when I dig through my archives of old PC/Computing and MacUser columns to post on this weblog.
Thanks for the “Smear Campaign” article. I bet it emboldens many corporations.
I suspect that Gates, et. al., do that kind of stuff all the time. As a Burst.com investor, I may be just being hopeful in these two possible examples, but I also suspect that Mr. Gates mentioned to his Bridge Buddy Buffett, now economic advisor to your Governor, that a great revenue stream for the state would be to tax punitive damages (at 75%!), which the Governor did suggest publicly at least once (my idea being that it would scare Burst, or their contingency-based lawyers, into settling and keeping the case out of court and off the record).
I further suspect the same perps are whispering similar ideas to major-supplier Dow Jones, as Barron’s printed a recent article touting the benefits of federally taxing punitive damages (at 80%!). The WSJ editors have long (always?) been at least somewhat hostile to antitrust laws and outrageous jury awards (me too, actually, but in Microsoft’s case I have to take exception — I bet if the WSJ editors had a better grasp of tech than what they get from Walt Mossberg, they would be a little less Microsoft boostery — maybe you should apply for another moonlighting job? Then again, they may be afraid of the potential hit to the DJIA), but the timing still strikes me as suspiciously similar to the patterns you mentioned. (That is an awful sentence — sorry, I tried to make it better; I think it ended up worse.)
Thanks again,
Tom Guerin
(PS Is this an example of the type of post that should be at the PCMag board? If so, apologies. Also, a “Preview” button for us typo-prone would be nice.)