The Etymology of a post

Special thanks for the aged wisdom, useless flaunt and inane facts provided by Mr. L in preparing this post.

In typical FCN fashion, I will now presume to know how the faithful FCN think. There. I admitted it. You can now burn me in effigy and sacrifice me to the media gods for public ridicule. I submit freely and willingly to your abuse and reserve no right against slander with regard to my admission of presumption. Happy now? Then read the post.

It's very easy to visit a regularly updated humor blog like Funny Class Notes and assume the posts spontaneously generate themselves or that they come to be out of nothing. Some will even argue that our posts are in fact nothing, but that they are carefully packaged and positioned to look like something, but these people don't know the world of hurt they create with their cutting reviews.

Hang on a second while I collect myself.

I am here to dispel that presumed (by me for you) myth (the one about spontaneously generating posts; the question of whether or not FCN is "nothing" is still open, sniff) and give you an inside look into the etymology of FCN's content - or lack thereof.

Posts begin as little light bulbs that go off inside a contributor's head. This is the equivalent of the twinkle in your grandfather's eye idiom. The light bulb is completely unpredictable, although it usually goes off in times of complete and utter boredom like during class (as opposed to while lying in bed or in the shower). The average FCN contributor has a light bulb go off anywhere from seven to eight hundred times per day, but we are so lazy that we rarely write more than one post per day. All the other light bulbs dissolve in our heads, turn to gray mush and join the rest of the junk in our brains.

You are what you eat, my eight hundred dissolved light bulbs!

If the illuminated light bulb is strong enough to compel a post to be written, the writing invariably occurs clandestinely during class. Instead of texting our friends we write humor, but the result is the same. The scribbled note is usually nicely adorned with doodles that don't translate well to the blog format. We would scan more of our doodles for you to see, but, quite frankly, if you think we don't make good humorists, you should see our drawing.

In the case of F, who does not sit in class, he writes posts at work while his supervisor has his back turned.

When a paper version of a post has been prepared in huggermugger fashion, it still needs to be typed up. N once tried putting his note between the lid and the keyboard on his computer overnight in the hope that the CPU would incorporate the content by osmosis. Not only did it not work, the post actually broke his laptop!

Since N's experience, we have been typing up posts by hand, a practice that is as tedious as it sounds.

Once a post is typed, it needs to be scanned for the blog, an electronic process controlled entirely by Uncle Wally. History will never know what devious methods Wally uses to format posts for publication, but we are sure that if his deeds were public knowledge he would either be given the Noble Prize or incarcerated for insanity. We retain hope for the prize.

One thing we can tell you is that Uncle Wally has developed a Macro which searches the internet for a random photograph using search terms culled from the blog. The photo is automatically cropped and rehosted and is hidden from the FCN contributors until the time of publication. We therefore are unable to take responsibility for any offense taken at our graphics.

Sometimes Uncle Wally's methods cause digital disturbances in our posts. The problems can manifest themselves as anything from a spelling error to a major grammar faux pas. These "mistakes" were never present when the post was originally written by FCN, but are universally and without exception the fault of Uncle Wally.

The next step in the crawl toward publication is the mandatory censorship. Every line of every post is carefully weighed, debated and analyzed by the loving mothers of the FCN contributors and Mommy G. You can therefore blame them for anything that gets through the Mom filter.

What follows next is lovingly dubbed "fermentation" but, in other circumstances, is called bureaucratic delay. Like a starving actor waiting for his big break, posts need to sit in a hopper, patiently attending an opening in our busy posting schedule. When the time comes, the post zips out of the queue like a baby from the womb and nestles in among all the others.

FCN posts are, then, mechanized. We are a humor machine, not unlike Gene Gene. We approach comedy with the calculated air of Hal, except we are not as prone to practical jokes. You are reading a prefabricated product of the post-consumer society, a recycled and rehashed content that has more calories than nutrition. In the humor world, FCN is the freezer burn laden processed food.

But, unlike Harry Truman, the buck doesn't stop here; we always have someone to blame.