In a class I took with Patrick Winston, one of our assignments was to write a press release on a topic I have since forgotten. The first rule, he said, was to put the most important information in the first paragraph, the next most important in the second, and so on, because various publications will chop the release at various lengths to make it fit their desired column inches. It made perfect sense, but I hadn’t seen a counter-example failing until today…
Yesterday, Amal sent out the following e-mail to putz both linking to a story and conveniently summarizing it:

From: Amal Dorai
To: putz
Subject: ironyx10
Summary: Marine has doctors cut off his finger to save his wedding ring. They do so, but end up losing his ring the commotion.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/12/12/marine.finger.ap/index.html

Today this same story appeared in the Metro, the free daily paper I read on the T every morning. Except there was something missing – the Metro, in its ongoing pursuit of journalistic excellence,
trimmed the story after the fourth paragraph. But the punchline doesn’t show up until the fifth paragraph. And suddenly I find myself grateful to Amal for sending out one of his stupid links because I knew why that story was tragically funny and the guy sitting next to me probably didn’t.

24 years ago today, my favorite member (sorry, Paul) of my favorite band was shot and killed by a lunatic. But thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, you can still talk to John Lennon. It’s not the most intelligent bot I’ve ever seen, but it is attempting to be John Lennon, so I took the time to play with it for awhile.
To enter the conversation, the site recreates Yoko Ono’s YES Painting, which John Lennon saw the day he met Yoko, so the story goes. I saw that piece when it was at The List Visual Arts Center at MIT. They no longer let you climb up the ladder, but I stepped on the first two rungs anyhow, just to be able to say that I climbed the same ladder John Lennon climbed. And then the curator told me to stop. I did a similar thing at the John Lennon exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland a few years ago. One of Lennon’s pianos was there behind a rope and I reached over and touched the low A. I briefly thought about playing it (the note, not the piano as a whole), but decided that I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.
“People say I’m crazy, doing what I’m doing…”

(Most of these taken from the History Channel’s This Day In History website.)
1823 — The Monroe Doctrine was declared. Surprisingly, this had nothing to do with jcbarret, jrandall, and johnston or even qmahoney. It was an isolationist foreign policy drawn up by US President James Monroe.
1859 — John Brown’s body was a-moulderin’ in his grave… actually, it was hanging in Charles Town, VA, by order of the US Marines.
1932 — Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, stars of the seven Road movies, appeared together on stage for the first time at the Paramount Theater. “We’re off on the road to Morocco…”
1942 — Enrico Fermi controlled the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. His laboratory was originally a squash court underneath Stagg Field.
1954 — Senator Joseph McCarthy was condemned by the US Senate for “conduct unbecoming a United States Senator.” You know, like calling everybody and his mother a communist and a spy.
1964 — Ringo Starr had his tonsils taken out and the Beatles temporarily replaced him with a guy named Jimmy Nichols.
1981 — My mother spent 18+ hours in labor while my father wondered why he didn’t bring a book. At 6:43 pm after much insistence that I stay where it was warm, I finally fell out of my mother’s uterus, attempting to hang myself on the umbilical cord.
… and don’t anyone say anything about Britney Spears.

Well, for the first time since last June, Ken Jennings is NOT the reigning Jeopardy champion.
While most people will say that he lost it on the final question answer: “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year,” I say he really lost it on the two double jeopardies he missed in the second round. Had he bet zero on those two questions, he would have had over $20000 going into final Jeopardy, which would have been more than twice his competitor. But hindsight is 20/20.
I would feel bad for him, but he won $2,522,700 over 74 games (not including the loss). So I don’t.