--Alfred E. Neuman

The world has gone mad.

That Internet stocks were insanely overvalued, I already knew. That, sooner or later, investors in technology stocks are going to have to look down, realize that they've run headlong off a cliff, and will have just enough time to look at the camera and wave "bye-bye" before plunging straight down... that already seemed certain.

But this... this is just insane.

As you must have heard by now, America Online is buying Time Warner.

That the two are merging doesn't surprise me in the least, actually. The trend toward consolidation into increasingly larger mega-corporations has been in place for quite some time, and that the old vanguards of the culture industry would be busily assimilating the new media upstarts was pretty much inevitable.

(I did a report on this a couple of semesters back. It was an attempt to apply the views of Walter Benjamin, and the team of Adorno and Horkheimer -- all Marxist writers -- to the Internet. When I started, I expected to conclude that Adorno and Horkheimer would have been pessimistic, but that Benjamin would have embraced the new possibilities, and that I tended towards the optimism of the latter. As it turned out, however, I ended up concluding that while Benjamin would have found it to be neither good nor bad -- just different -- Adorno and Horkheimer would have found no cause for hope, as the 'Net has turned out to be more of the same, with a few large companies taking control of everything to control the masses. Depressingly, I found that "their argument" (in quotes, 'cause it was my own extrapolation of same) was actually pretty convincing.)

But I digress. The surprising thing isn't that the two are getting together. The thing that knocks my socks off is that AOL is buying Time Warner, not the other way around. Steve Case is becoming the chairman of the whole shebang. It's insane, just insane.

And then, when I was already reeling, what do I find in an article on Yahoo! but the note that "AOL investors may have second thoughts about the deal as they consider the slower growth rate of Time Warner."

Let me see if I've got this straight. America Online, by virtue of being grotesquely overvalued, is somehow able to get a controlling stake in a gigantic media company. Whereas AOL's value is strictly in the realm of imaginary numbers, in people gambling on eventually making lots of cybercash in the future, Time Warner is actually making lots of real money in the real world. Let's see... magazines, record companies, publishers, television networks, studios, sports teams, and oh, just look at this list. (Please do.) While America Online? A second-rate ISP, Netscape, and ICQ. Oh, and MovieFone. And rather than laughing all the way to the bank, AOL investors might feel that they're getting the short end of the stick?!

Isn't something wrong with this picture?

Oh, Wonko the Sane was right. The world has gone mad.

Don Martin is no longer with us, it seems.

Don Martin... how does one describe the guy? The creator of Captain Klutz? He of innumerable one-page Mad Magazine classics? I don't even know where to begin.

Mad has gone seriously down the tubes over the years, and his departure some time back was definitely one of their heavier losses. And now he's gone for good. Sigh. He'll be missed.

(Incidentally, Yahoo!'s main article on the subject has a doozy of a typo, saying that "Martin chafed at the tradition that Mad, like most publishers, retained all rights to reprint and profit from his work that it used, paying him on a free-lance basis." "like most publishers" should read "unlike most publishers." Most magazines do not function on a work-for-hire basis. But Bill Gaines always did do things his own way... which is why Mad is always ready to do a blizzard of reprint specials; they're virtually pure profit.)

No, I don't actually care about my GPA, as such. But I am a perfectionist, and I do know I could have done better, had matters been different. Taking each course in a vacuum, I definitely should have been able to get an A in both Theories of Feminism and Indian History. (I feel zero guilt for Poetry Workshop -- and would not have, whatever the circumstances -- and am just glad to have gotten off as easily as I did.) But considering the way this semester was, and the way my course schedule worked out, I'm lucky my grades are as high as they are, and I know it. The lesson for the future is to plan my classes better, but, hopefully, I've learned that now.

Incidentally, it's a good thing I don't care about my GPA, 'cause this has just mathematically eliminated any remaining chance of my graduating summa cum laude. (Unless I add a bunch of extra courses and get an A in everything, but let's not get ridiculous about this.) Magna cum laude is still well within my grasp, though. But, again, it doesn't really matter.