Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The Interniche
You know one of the neatest thing about Teh Intertubes? That wonderful glow I feel when I discover a place born of obsession, an idea developed from infant twinkle to dazzling star.
A place like Jump the Shark.
What’s Jump the Shark? It’s a site dedicated to a specific moment in the life of a television show: the point at which a program left its peak behind and began its stomach-wrenching downward plunge.
The name derives from an episode of Happy Days: Fonzie, water-skiing in the Pacific, literally jumped a shark. This (according to site founder Jon Hein) was the beginning of the end.
Jump the Shark spotlights a host of common themes. There are only so many ways you can jump the shark, apparently: a different actor steps in to play the same character (think Darren on Bewitched), the cute little kids on the show hit puberty (Leave it to Beaver, anyone?), a winsome li’l child gets introduced (Scrappy Doo!), a Movie is made, and so forth. Jump the Shark also claims that some programs never jumped the shark: X-Files, The Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and one or two others. I beg to differ on MASH, but a site like this lives and dies on public opinion, and I’m only one vote.
And that’s the other cool thing about Jumping the Shark: public input. You can vote on these questions all night long and you’ll barely scratch the site’s surface.
A whole website devoted to the beginning of the end. I’m so impressed with this, I’m giving this post its own new category: Interniches, websites that fill remarkably narrow niches.
Any other candidate Interniches?
D.
i dont know if it qualifies, but i have recently (aka today) become addicted to http://artpad.art.com/artpad/painter/
not only can you paint, but you can see other peoples paintings and watch how they were made…here’s one of mine! http://artpad.art.com/?jevhvi1jd3gs
🙂
Why, Steve, don’t eat it, of course… Now there’s an interniche if ever there was.
Bianca’s Smut Shack was an interniche way back in the days of Mosaic. Not sure where exactly it was ‘inter’, or what its niche was, but… Hey! You kids! Get off my web!
Where was I? Oh yeah – there used to be this coffeepot? See? And there was a camera, see? Eh. Never mind. In our day, we had to browse websites by hand. Uphill. Both ways. With blink tags.
That was fun, Shaina. Now if we can combine that with the smut shack . . .
PS, Steve, Don’t Eat It remains one of my all time faves. Good choice.
X-Files most certainly did jump the shark when they brought Doggett in to replace Mulder.
goddamnit.
I’ve got a deadline for an article biting at my ass and instead of working on that, I’m sitting here trying to figure out a stupid website candidate.
thanks a lot walnut!
protected static
Blink tags? <shudder>
Are you one of those people that started out with lynx, and still uses it from time to time? Yeah, me too.
Also: Didn’t someone actually jump a shark on The Simpsons? That stuntman whose name isn’t Evel Knievel? When Homer takes Ned to Vegas and they marry the hotel floozies?
Pat —
As it happens, no lynx here… My wife’s first job out of college was working for a lab at the National Institutes of Mental Health that was doing some early work on functional MRI (real-time MRI images of brain activity).
Since the scanner was needed for clinical work during the day, they could only get their scans scheduled after hours. Often by the time they were finished, public transportation back to our neighborhood wasn’t really an option, so I would pick her up at work.
Because their scans would often run over schedule, I often had time to kill. And in the control room there was a time-killer extraordinaire: a bank of Gauss-shielded SUN Sparc stations with Archie, Gopher, Mosaic et. al. installed – hooked up to what was then a blisteringly fast connection to the early WWW.
Ah, the early WWW. I fondly remember our how our earliest surf led us to Mirsky’s Worst of the Web, which led us to Slut Boy’s homepage. That was when I first understood the full import of the Web: anyone could stake a claim.
As for the Simpson: we stopped watching regularly about five or six years ago. I can’t recall any single jump-the-shark moment (nor can I remember anyone literally jumping the shark!), but it seemed to us that the writers had gotten tuckered out. Maybe when Flanders’s wife died?
How about the The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form? That’s a pretty narrow niche.
For word nerds (like yours truly): The Online Etymology Dictionary