Charles Apple

Note: This is one of two posts I was trying to write Tuesday when our servers came crashing down around our ankles. Rather than let it go, I’m posting it a day late.
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Perhaps you noticed the Elena Kagan A1 art used Tuesday by three of the nation’s largest and most notable dailies.

Each of the three shows a completely different angle; gives a completely different look at the confirmation spectacle currently going on in D.C.

Click any of these for a larger view:

On the left is the Los Angeles Times with a shot by Pablo Martinez Monsivais that showed the lone nominee facing down the big, bad senators:

Average daily circulation for the LAT is 616,606.

Next up is this shot by staffer Luke Sharrett of the New York Times, brilliantly giving us an angle we just don’t see that often — let’s call it a Kagan’s-eye view:

Average daily circulation of the NYT is 951,063.

And finally, there’s this picture by Melina Mara of the Washington Post, who gave us a candid Kagan moment between the darts and laurels:

Average daily circulation of the Post is 578,482.

Three big papers, three different angles. All of them brilliant.

New York Times sports designer Josh Penrod will exchange coasts, moving to the Los Angeles Times, reports the SportsDesigner blog.

A 2000 graduate of the University of South Carolina, Josh worked as a designer for the Aiken (S.C.) Standard, the Herald-Journal of Spartanburg and the State of Columbia before joining the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2004 as a sports designer. He moved to the Times in 2005.

He’s also taught as an adjunct at Fordham University.

Tuesday’s New York Times included an article about a group of programing students at New York University who are working on what would be a successor to Facebook.

Cool idea. Cool story. So why do I mention it?

Because folks at the Geek System blog found a dirty joke on the blackboard behind the guys in the photo. It’s over there on the left. And perhaps it explains the smirks on the guys’ faces:

Robert Quigley of Geek System writes:

TOUCH
GREP
UNZIP
MOUNT
FSCK
FSCK
FSCK
UMOUNT

Wait a second: That’s not intelligible code! It’s almost as if it has another meaning.

Pretty much every command on the blackboard is missing the argument(s) that makes it useful (e.g. filenames for ‘unzip’ and ‘touch’). So: Dirty joke.

…The canonical dirty UNIX joke, as immortalized by countless message boards, is even more graphic:

unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes, fsck, fsck, fsck, umount, sleep

Apparently, someone eventually tipped off the Times. It cropped the dirty joke out of the photo. Here’s what it looks like right now:

Find the Geek System post here. Find the original NYT story here.

Thanks to the Nieman Lab for tweeting this today.