"I'd like to keep doing it as long as it's fun and it means something to people."
So speaks Rich Koz, better known (among the cool kids, anyway) as Svengoolie, in 25 years of Svengoolie's humor in the registration-required Trib. But you were just going to drop by BugMeNot.com to get around that pesky little detail, yes?
It was at WFLD that Koz perfected the "Svengoolie" brand of postmodern vaudeville, a combination of local jokes (few comedians have gotten more mileage out of a city than Koz has gotten out of Berwyn), song parodies (when showing the slasher film "I Saw What You Did," Koz transformed the Coasters' "Yakety Yak" into the more appropriate "Hackety Hack") and deliberately groan-inducing wordplay. The writing was as smart as the humor was silly, and the show transcended its low budget with a homemade feel (in an era before computers, Koz did nearly all of the artwork himself) and Koz's gentle humor."I've never been one for the ... humor at the expense of somebody else, by making them feel they're not cool or smart or as hip as I am," Koz says. "I'm just trying to give somebody a laugh."
Noticed at Gapers' Block, which name I keep leaving the apostrophe out of.
Finished the (remaindered) copy of Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web on the train yesterday. Bit dated, naturally, and (probably entirely accurately) more than a bit negative towards NCSA's behavior in the early days, but it does explain why Gopher died. Licensing issues, basically. Here I'd thought it was because Minnesotans, by and large. . . did I mention that living there convinced me that the Nation of Islam actually has some very good points?
Well, it bears repeating.
From WiKipedia:
Then, in February of 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that they would begin to charge licensing fees for Gopher's use, which scared off many people and organizations that ran Gopher servers. Some people believe this is what relegated Gopher to a footnote in the history of the Internet.
Well, it certainly didn't help. . .
Want to know more? Sir Tim Berners-Lee has a page about the book at w3.org. And there'd be some bit of business here about weblogs (those that allow comments, anyway) representing at least a part of his original vision for the Web, but there's more than enough self-congratulatory rhetoric on these damned things as it is.