Plea # 72 to The Onion: Become “Open Source”
April 3rd, 2009The open source world has a lot to do with where I am now. The first company I started was running on a shoe-string budget out of my band’s rehearsal space. That was 11 years ago, and since then I have grown a fond admiration for open source developers, products, and the collective movement that is wide open to that one great idea someone might have.
That person can build their idea into the conjucation and contribute to the product’s evolution.
I wish The Onion were that way, but sadly, they have an odd closed door policy of no article submissions from writers.
While The Onion is consistently good, I believe it could be consistently great if it were to allow a piece to be submitted from that lone person who just had a great idea at 3 AM.
Even The New Yorker, with their stolid, intellectually elite, cultural epicenter perspective allows contributions.
About once a week something happens to me that could make for a good, perhaps great depending on the writing, Onion article. I think of The Onion because this type of humor is on my mind. When my parents go shopping, my father follows my mother around as though she’s his seeing eye dog, becoming increasingly bored and fidgety until he drifts into a dream-state.
That’s when you see him by the make-up counter in Macy’s practicing his golf swing. The man thinks of golf, and his mind goes there instinctually.
My mind goes to the ironic, crass humor that The Onion has baked into their DNA.
Today an email slipped through our company’s spam filter, spoofed as an authentic Pfizer email regarding Viagra. The first thing I thought of was, “I wonder how Pfizer’s spam filter deals with the billions of emails about Viagra?”
Is checking the junk folder a regular part of a Pfizer’s employees’ day? How do they know whether the incoming email from Helen Moore at a hotmail address with Viagra keywords is spam or a woman concerned that her husband has had an erection for 8 hours?
I can imagine an Onion article title:

