Read The House
June 15, 2025
In 1979, my first year covering technology, I was seated at a table of people in their 60s during an evening function. Today I laugh because I thought they were old.
Something--perhaps the devil--moved me to tell a joke I enjoyed at the time. “What happens when you cross an onion with a donkey? Nine times out of ten you get an onion with floppy ears. The tenth time you get a piece of ass that brings tears to your eyes.” You could barely hear the uncomfortable shuffling of the sticks up their back ends over the sound of me digging a hole into which I could crawl.
All of which reminded Clark Smith: “Nobody cries when you chop up an oboe.” And as Lenny on Law and Order quipped, “The ill wind that no one blows good.”