The Nashville Scene’s Fabricator column is a weekly hit or miss attempt at satire. They even put a message at the bottom of each column in the print-version that reminds readers to pretend it’s funny. Most weeks, one must really pretend. However, this week it actually is funny in an intelligent, nuanced and probably completely unintentionial way. It’s funny because it tries to satirize bloggers and blogger meet-ups. However, it’s so accurate, it’s, well, not fabricated. The talented humorist (or idiot savant) who penned this was able to deftly write an accurate story packaged as satire.

Quote:

“The main content in most Nashville-based blogs last week was about a meeting of bloggers at a restaurant owned by a blogger. Bloggers blogged about their anticipation of the event, they posted photos on their blogs of themselves with other bloggers, and many bloggers rushed home to blog about how nice it was to meet people who are bloggers—just like themselves!

See. That’s not actually satire: It’s a quite accurate report of what actually happened. It wasn’t fabricated. If you were a person with a sense of humor, you’d be on the floor laughing now as you’d realize it’s funny because it’s not funny.

Even the headline of the column is satirized satire: “Bloggers and Sophomoric Crap Dominate News Roundup” Again, note how skillfully the humorist didn’t fabricate what is being labeled fabrication: Media during the week, ranging from Time magazine to the Nashville Scene, did seem to be dominated by news about sophomoric crap — and bloggers. Where’s the satire? What about that is fabricated?

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal opinion page ran a similar piece that was funny because it was not funny. In their case, they let a young editorial page staffer pretend to have a meltdown on the idiocy of blogs. I think it was supposed to satirize the rant of certain types of bloggers like (I’ll just pick a the initials of a random blogger) Nick Carr who regularly feel called by some higher power to inform the masses how crazy they are for reading or commenting on or maintaining a blog. Again, this is serious, nuanced Ivy-League (at least Dartmouth in the case of the WSJ piece) level humor so you have to really be smart to get it. Fortunately, I learned all this from reading Nick Carr and John Dvorak and others who, frankly, should be complaining about the Journal and Scene stealing their schtick.

Anyway, I’m glad to help clear this up. Humor is a serious business.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, blogging

Mark Cuban, who recently appropriated the term blog-pimping to refer to what bloggers do when they comment and point to a high profile blog or blog post with the intent of drafting off of the traffic being generated by the higher profile blogger or post. Today, he actually demonstrates how blog pimping is done by pointing to (and trying to inject himself into) one of the strangest and least important pop-culture “feuds” ever conceived.

Note of historic importance: With this post, I am initiating a new practice called blog-pimp blog-pimping.

Related: Not that it matters, but is there some budding William Safiresque etymologist who can fill in me in on the term “blog pimp”? Or “blog-pimping”? While Cuban’s use of the phrase is just a few weeks old and somewhat fuzzy in meaning, at one time didn’t the phrase “blog-pimping” refer to “pimping out” ones blog with lots of bling, ala, say, blog bling zen-master, Fred Wilson?

Technorati Tags: bloggers, blogging

Nashville is going to elect a new mayor in 2007 and from my vantage point up in the bleacher seats, it seems easier to keep up with who is not running rather than with who is. However, via Brittney at Nashville is talking and an IM from Laura, I wanted to point to this YouTube posting of a clever YouTube-posted video from one of the candidates. It’s a witty and (surprisingly) well-done parody of a Geico ‘celebrity’ ad. Is this the future? Running campaign ads on YouTube is a lot cheaper than buying TV airtime. However, it better be plenty clever to go viral — even on a local level.

Disclosure: I don’t know David Briley but after viewing this, I’m thinking of hiring Bill Shick as my attorney.

Technorati Tags: nashville, politics, youtube

From one of his classmates (Lewis) comes a link to the news that Blair Stilwell was on a team of Vanderbilt Owen School of Management students who won the recent “International Case Competition” at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Blair was the original director of rexblog hackology which I’d like to believe helped prepare him for his role in his team’s development of “a plan that maximized production of raw vegetable oil and biodiesel and called for an aggressive construction schedule to build several raw vegetable oil and biodiesel plants to gain market advantage.”

As I always told Blair: There’s no business like lard business.

Congratulations.

• Preview of the del.icio.us publisher api | Matt McAlister
  Even before he worked at Yahoo! Even before Yahoo! owned del.icio.us, everything I know about del.icio.us, I learned from Matt’s blog. I’m still learning.
  (tags: delicious)
• How Apple Stores Beat Tiffany | Red Herring
  Apple’s stores have hauled in annual sales per square foot of $4,032, compared with Best Buy’s $930, Neiman Marcus’ $611, and luxury store Tiffany & Co.’s $2,666.
  (tags: apple)
• Holiday Link Directory on FirstGov.gov
  A list of links to federal government-maintained online resources that are holiday related (or that may come in handy during the holidays).
  (tags: lifehacks resources firstgov)
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  I’ll skip pointing to a certain troll’s related post describing participants in social media sites as ’sharecroppers’ — as I think anyone who links to or comments on his site is, thus, serving as his sharecropper.
  (tags: social+media google search)