New Precision Guided Humor Assignment: Boosting Osama's Ratings

So... Osama's got another tape out, which was met by a collective yawn. This guy is SERIOUSLY lacking in current terrorist street cred. I mean, assuming he's not dead - which is a toss up - he's living in a cave somewhere, no food, no money... all his lieutenants are dead or in jail... all he's got left are the kind of bumbling minions that could play the Penguin's henchmen on the old Batman TV series.

And at least Penguin's henchmen got to wear snappy-looking costumes.

Anyway, my point is that Bin Laden is rapidly losing his entertainment value. Research shows that his last video tape pulled down a 0.0 Nielsen share.

This guy needs some publicity tips.

Thus this week's Precision Guided Humor Assignment is to answer the question:

What can Osama Bin Laden do to make his next video tape more entertaining?

Post the answer at your own blog and leave a link in the comments to this post, leave a trackback, or e-mail the permalink directly to me at harvolson@charter.net. Entries due by 8pm CDT Wednesday, January 5th and I'll post the round-up Wednesday night. Late entries must be accompanied by a lame excuse.

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!

Comments

[oddybobo]

My ideas for Osama's ratings boost are at my new, and not yet fully defined blogspot!

[Susie]

And the url to the above-referenced post is http://boboblogger.blogspot.com/2004/12/new-precision-guided-humor-assignment.html

[Susie]

ml
html comes after assignment.
wonder if I can make the center column two pix wider without screwing it all up?

[Chris Edwards]

I have my post, here.

Why a few hours late? Next week is exam week, I've been slightly busy.

By the way, Susie, I was able to make the main column on my page wider with Microsoft's paint application, an image hosting service (http://www.imageshack.us/index.php), and a bit of messing with the template code. I found that I had to widen the background image if I wanted to make the main content area more than a few pixels larger. After enlarging the image, I increased the text margins of the main content section, and also increased the word-wrap (or maybe its just wordwrap) value. That value determines how many letters can be in each line, and causes text to move down to the next line (like what Microsoft Word does. I think you can turn wordwrap off in notepad, so you can experiment with that if you have no idea what I am saying). I also had to mess with margins for a lot of stuff, but that's not knowing what you're doing as much as it's knowing what you need to mess with and figuring it out by process of elimination.

But, if you simply want that column only two pixels wider, you can probably decrease the padding on the left and right by 1 pixel each. Padding is what creates that little space between where the main content box starts and where the actual text starts (if it were in a book, it would be called the page margin). You can probably go through the template code, find the section entitled something like 'main content', and mess with the values after everything that says "padding" (there may be 4 numbers, but the coding is made to work if only 1, 2, or 3 of the numbers are present as well. I recommend testing with small modifications to see what each value does). www.devguru.com should have some good advice on every type of computer code, including the stuff Blogger uses for templates, so they may help.

[tre]

Shipping out thousands of "100 Free AOL Hours" CDs doesn't seem to be working. He might try a SuperBowl commercial? Nah, the liberal left is cutting him all kind of slack... if he does nothing his rating tracks upward.