Is Uglier Funnier?
Loyalists almost always regard the new look of a newspaper or magazine as an incomprehensible misjudgment that’s thrown away the soul of the original. They have no idea how sick of the old design the staff has become.
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“The paper hadn’t gone through a redesign for over a decade,” Martin explained by phone from New York. “Within that span of time, newspapers have really changed. What I basically did was take a massive comprehensive survey of what periodicals are doing around me, from the New York Times to small weekly newspapers. And so I would say the Onion is a shambling zombie cobbled together from the most important parts of what papers are doing. The whole key here is verisimilitude. We’re serving the jokes by playing it straight.”
The Washroom Wag
“‘Wonder what [defense lawyer Dan] Webb is going to say to the media,’ Ryan said, chuckling, spry enough in his allegedly weakened and infirm state that he bent quickly, like a portly gymnast in hard shoes, to see if anyone was hiding in a stall.
While the jury was deliberating at the end of the six-month trial, Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer dismissed two jurors for misconduct but didn’t declare a mistrial–and she made it clear that she understood the appellate court might reverse her. If Ryan was in a genuinely wisecracking mood because he’d just been handed a sentence he didn’t expect to serve, it wouldn’t have mattered much if it had been twice as long.
My Web search was able to establish that Zidane is one of five children, so odds are a sister’s in the mix. “He has not apologized to me and I certainly don’t have to apologize to him,” Reuters had Materazzi saying. “If anything, I owe apologies to his sister, although I swear, before all this mess I didn’t even know Zidane had a sister.” Apparently Materazzi has looked into the matter and knows that now.
