I think I like being used in an offhand reference without further identification for a gag lead in this LA Times review of three books about the web:

When the history of the Web is written, in what form will our progeny receive it? Via grainy promotional YouTube videos from Google? By listening to dusty Jeff Jarvis podcasts? Perhaps annotated, crowd-sourced and pre-preferenced Wikistories will be delivered directly into their cerebrums. (Personally, I’m hoping for a tiny avatar of a young woman in a flowing white gown and side-buns, interrupted midway by gunfire.) Yet whatever the medium, it seems unlikely that it will be the one that’s falling out of favor even as you read this: the plain old book.

At McSweeney’s Robert Lanham pitches his course in “Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era.”

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new “Lost Generation” of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.

Please don’t make me tell you he’s being ironic. That’s one problem he doesn’t cover in his syllabus: commenters who can’t read.

Even the BBC has bloopers. The Guardian reports that a stiff-upper-lipper lost it after hearing the earliest recording of a human voice. Problem is, she lost it reading an obit. Here’s the gigglefest.

I know this is silly but I was enthralled with the Davos toilet in the Congress Center. As soon as you flush, look what happens:

I just filled out my absentee ballot here in New Jersey and there was this:

STATE PUBLIC QUESTION No. 4
Constitutional Amendment Concerning the
Right to Vote for Certain Persons
Shall the amendment of Article II, Section I, paragraph 6 of the Constitution, agreed to by the Legislature, revising the current constitutional language concerning denial of the right to vote by deleting the phrase “idiot or insane person” and providing instead that a “person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting” shall not enjoy the right of suffrage, by adopted?

So it is now the law in New Jersey that idiots and insane people can’t vote. Why fix what’s not broken?