Truthiness! (Onion, Clickhole, etc.)

[Mongrel]

Buzzfeed and Clickhole are now effectively indistinguishable

[sei]

"look, one of our interns is learning javascript!"

[Thad]

I quit watching The Nightly Show regularly because it's just usually mediocre.

I DID go ahead and watch last week's episode with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and it does look like they've made a couple of the improvements I've been talking about since day one: only three guests on the panel, no dumbass Keep It 100 segment or fourth act Twitter bullshit. The show was better for it.

But it STILL suffers from not having very good panelists. Once again, the breakdown was one guy who knew what he was talking about, one guy who absolutely did not know what he was talking about, and one lady who works on the show who made stupid jokes instead of addressing the issues seriously. (By removing the fourth chair, we were spared the fourth type of guest, "standup comic on Comedy Central's speed dial who makes stupid jokes instead of addressing the issues seriously." And the guy who knew what he was talking about actually got to talk.)

I didn't need those other two idiots, or Larry's inane Soul Daddy segment. Just let Tyson talk.

[Mongrel]

http://reductress.com/ is basically a "Clickhole for women", i.e. riffing on women's magazines. It's pretty funny.

[Thad]

[Mongrel]

Clickhole: Newly revealed correspondence between Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald concerning the manuscript of The Great Gatsby

pfffflol

This is a good one.

[Mongrel]

Clickhole: 10 jokes from kids shows you didn't get as a kid

[Healy]

Are those all from George Carlin jokes?

[Brantly B.]

For some reason just the presence of Trash Heap makes me crack up.

[Thad]

[Grath]

This clickhole article is awesome. (Directly pointing out just how much content on Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, etc is shamelessly stolen from Reddit.)

[Mongrel]

Greeks Apologize With Huge Horse

:D

[Healy]

Harper Lee Announces Third Novel, ‘My Excellent Caretaker Deserves My Entire Fortune’

[Mongrel]

This is so perfectly elegant.

Clickhole: The Time I Spent on a Commercial Whaling Ship Changed My Life

[Caithness]

Oh man, Clickhole does it again: http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/time- ... -chang-768

:mongrel:

[Mongrel]

I always like to say that I'm well-prepared for senility, because I'm already there.

[Thad]

Lots of talk this week about Stewart's accomplishments and legacy.

Realistically, while he and his team put together a fantastic show, it sure doesn't seem to have changed much (as he wryly noted in last night's top segment). Politics and the news media are worse than when he started, not better.

As far as stuff he actually changed: well, he helped get Crossfire cancelled, but that probably would have happened without him.

And there was a brief, shining moment in 2005, during CNN's Katrina coverage, where they used Stewart's tactic of juxtaposing the Bush Administration's assurances that everything was going fine in New Orleans with footage of what was actually going on there. Stewart provided a template -- but nobody else has really used it much.

The most important single thing he did was probably his coverage of the 9/11 first responders' aid bill, which did help it to pass.

Other than that? Well, he's savvy. He helped people of a certain age and ideology engage with news and politics. And he was smart and funny and insightful. But sadly, I don't think he made nearly as much of a difference as some people are suggesting.

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

Next EU vote to include referendum option to restart WWII