The infograph has always been one of my favorite parts of this website (IMHO uneven at times but otherwise consistently good). This week’s offering, however, had me scratching my head. Link: http://www.theonion.com/infograph/index.php?issue=4016
In particular: #2: Anytime you allow a pet near a keyboard, there’s a danger of something getting typed that shouldn’t be. This has nothing specific to the subject in question. #3: Man, I don’t even understand this one. #5: Tastes in music, despite what you may have heard from the news, are wide and tremendously varied. Most people like getting what they want for a lower price then they’d normally have to pay. What’s so damn funny about any of this? #8: Okay, this I kinda agree with, but it’s a red herring. One of the appeals of online music is that they’re able to get all kinds of music that aren’t available in stores. Online bookselling is more or less the same.
I’ve used CDNow.com on a number of occasions. I was able to find all kinds of out of print, hard to find, or just plain underrated albums, used but still perfectly playable, for a fraction of what I’d have to pay for them new. I’d be hard pressed to find any of those albums at any music store I go to, much less for what I paid for them. I was able to listen to music samples and read reviews by previous buyers to get a better feel of whether or not those CDs were worth buying. The buying process was simple and completely safe every step of the way, and every seller delivered the goods as promised.
It sounds like whoever does the infograph was just phoning it in this week.
Wal-Mart is the store that made Nirvana change its song title “Rape Me” to “Waif Me” on the back cover of one of its albums or else it wouldn’t stock the album at all. Wal-Mart is the store that refused to stock a Sheryl Crow album at all because it contained lyrics criticizing the store. With a track record like that, it’s no stretch to think that you’re NOT going to find a great selection if you choose to buy music online from Wal-Mart.
I agree this isn’t one of the funniest infographics, although I liked it a little better than you did.
Well it’s never funny if you have to explain it but I’ll try anyway.
The one about the cat is relevant simply because there is no danger that your cat will select your purchase at a non-online store. I’m not entirely sure why you don’t see the relevance. Did the reason I just gave tell you anything new, or had you already considered it and rejected it as sufficient for a relevance condition?
(BTW I have in fact had my cat submit forms online for me… purely without my consent of course.)
The Wal-Mart one has been explained–Wal-Mart just opened an online store. Further background info necessary to “getting” the joke involves the fact that people like to Joke about Wal-Mart generally having a lack of quality and being completely without a soul.
And the other two you mentioned are sort of poking fun at the imagined respondants’ musical taste. We (who read the onion) usually would laugh at someone concerned about how to buy the next JLo album. And though we might sympathize with the obscurist regarding musical taste, we nevertheless recognize that s/he is deserving of a teasing chuckle or two. The amount of sympathy appropriate to intermix with that laughter varies from person to person reading the infograph in question.
Have you now got the joke, and had a good laugh, as a result of this thorough explanation. If not then I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
In general The Onion has a bad week ever now and then. It’s weird that you brought this up because I was thinking to myself while reading this week’s Onion that this was a particularly bad week. It almost seems analagous to how Simpson’s can have a really good epsiode and a really bad episode depending on which team of writers was working on it at the time. The horiscopes are especially bad on these types of weeks. I can’t remember the last time they were this unfunny - I’m thinking it was at least 2 months ago.
Hijack: Anyone else notice that in nearly every article, at the end, they have a psychologist’s opinion on how the person in the article was acting? It’s getting kind of annoying to me.
but I’ll try anyway.