Web gets post-war funny bone

War, destruction, blood, looting. Enough. The news-consuming public was ready to laugh good and hard at something. The Net once again has delivered. If you weren't giggling over the mixed "pre-obit" of Fidel Castro and Ronald Reagan on CNN.com (or at least a non-public public site of CNN's), you might have been guffawing at the quote site for Iraq's ever-positive information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (a.k.a. Baghdad Bob or Comical Ali). And true insiders are agape at the poetic misshapen grammar stylings of one Puce, who went from blog troll to blogger (recent entry: "Statue fallens from Sadam, put Chucky Cheeze rastorant with cola in locate!").

The CNN.com brouhaha was a case of obits coming to light before the featured folks were dead -- a mistake that's bit the Associated Press and others in the past. Seems that a former designer, Peter Rentz, was casual about a development site used internally, sandbox.cnn.com, which made its way to an art project, a weblog, search engines, and most recently to Fark.com, The Smoking Gun (which cached the pages before CNN yanked them), and public perception.

Living people's obits aren't that funny, but one of them bizarrely mixed and matched facts and quotes from Fidel Castro and Ronald Reagan. One minor sideshow to the pre-obits was an AP story that mentioned The Smoking Gun's images but didn't mention Fark.com, which did get credit in The New York Times, OpinionJournal.com and others. The Fark bulletin boards were ablaze at AP's ommission, with a "fark them!" rallying cry taken up. The AP says it wasn't trying to credit anyone with finding the pre-obits, and indeed only mentions that The Smoking Gun was storing some of them. The wire service says it sticks to crediting "traditional media" outlets like The New York Times.

Fark is indeed a cheeky news aggregator, and doesn't pretend to have journalistic tendencies, though the Miami Herald's People column said the pre-obits were "discovered by the crafty journalists at Fark.com." Web crediting is indeed a tricky subject, and who can say who found these pages first? The Webraw blog had a link to Rentz's "sandbox" at CNN.com last August, though nothing specific about the obits. Only now does Webraw wonder why Rentz told him it was OK to link to the site back then. Blame probably lies with CNN for leaving its internal site open to the public for so many months.

Alive or dead?

Also sparking online speculation on reports of his death is Baghdad Bob, the Iraqi information minister who may have committed suicide, according to Iranian reports. The U.S. says he's missing, but he seems to be all over the Web, thanks to a groundswell of interest in his anti-American quotes, hurled while tanks were rumbling behind him. The quickie site, We Love the Iraqi Information Minister.com (how could that domain be available?), was selling mugs and T-shirts like hotcakes, while the missing minister was #7 on the Lycos 50 list of most-searched terms last week.

Despite the fact that he might be dead, might be in hiding, might have hung himself, and very well was on the losing side of the war (though he'd never admit it), Baghdad Bob still can tickle our funny bones online, with the requisite joke weblog and a special topic page on About.com. But wait! There's more! The exploitation doesn't stop there. ITV reports that Herobuilders.com already has a talking doll of al-Sahaf, with a voice chip that says "There are no Americans infidels in Baghdad, never."

A talking doll would be nice for the anonymous blogger Puce as well, though we don't know what he/she looks like or talks like. His pronouncements have a devil-may-care attitude similar to Baghdad Bob, with a lot more obscenities and references to America setting up fast food outlets in Iraq. Many other bloggers openly admire his poor spelling and bizarre humor, and an online poll was set up to guess who he was by the weblogs he has haunted. So far al-Sahaf and blogger Jim Treacher are running neck and neck as being Puce.

Treacher didn't let on to anything, telling me to let him know if I find out who he is, "because I want to join his fanclub." Funny or not, Puce has proven to be prescient, as one blogger notes that fast food outlets have indeed set up shop in Iraq already, albeit on a British military base. Sometimes the truth outfunnies the farce.