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Old Jews Telling Jokes: What’s This Thing All About?

This season’s jokes were shot in a historic soundstage in Hollywood. Yes, that Hollywood. Tinsletown. The Dream Factory. Shooting there felt like we had come a mighty long way from our humble beginnings in an empty storefront in Highland Park, New Jersey. (In actuality it was 2768 miles, if you take 1-40, the Southern route, which you might want to do with the weather we’ve been having up North.)

In 1735 William Hogarth, after a lively public campaign, helped to pass an act giving engravers the rights to their work for 14 years from publication. It was a landmark in the history of copyright as it bestowed on engravers similar legal rights to authors and stopped sellers of prints from creaming off all the profits. Hogarth would be amazed today to find that in the US copyright has been extended to 70 years – not from the date of publication, but from the death of the author. In Britain it was regarded as rather bold of the Gowers report – on which the government will pronounce soon – to suggest that Britain should keep the existing limit of “only” 50 years after death.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/nov/29/comment.intellectualproperty

‘The other day I came across another such idea, one I hadn’t heard before. It’s called The Peter Principle, was first described by Dr Laurence Peter in 1969, and states that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Basically, the principle states that people get rewarded for things they can do well by being promoted to the point at which they’re doing something they can’t do well. At that point the promotion stops, and there they stay.’:

http://imomus.livejournal.com/503455.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

http://whitehouseglasgow.blogspot.com/