As every child knows, when

you're craving attention it's

just as effective to hold your

breath until your eyes bug out

as it is to endure an actual

brush with death. Mom and Dad

may have seen the trick a

thousand times, but when your

face starts turning blue, who's

going to deny you anything?

After all, it could be asthma.

We try to keep this

Wittgensteinian riddle in mind

when we're confronted with

similar behavior in public life.

Is Tom Green just pulling our

legs, so to speak, with this

testicular cancer story? Was

Andy Kaufman doing the same

thing when he died? Most

recently, we've been moved by

the befuddlement of various Ted

Kramers who are bickering over

whether the merger/bailout deal

between McSweeneys.net and the

Massachusetts McSweeney

family — a deal that ostensibly

rescued the celebrated

zine from a very dubious-sounding

financial cliffhanger — was just

another case of a faker looking for an

excuse to see the cute school nurse.

No sooner had poor Janelle Brown

weighed in with a dutifully

loving write-up of the event

than she was hectored and

humiliated in a fairly brutal

manner. "A staggering claim

of incredible bullshit," clipped

the always game Jim Romenesko,

quoting a rude passage from a

reader email: "I'm no Janelle

Brown fan, but even she couldn't

be that stupid." Letter writers

at the .net site have been equally

caddish.

You can hardly blame these

cynics for loudly doubting the

official story. Art in general

and performance art stunts in

particular merely feed that vast

conspiracy to make poor people

feel stupid; and in 2000, nobody

wants to admit to being poor.

Suck, we're happy to say, rests

at a comfortable distance from

the poorhouse, but the stupidity

charge is one we've never

ducked. We're the first to admit

(and, in fact, we may actually

be the first to admit) that the

jokes at McSweeney's tend to go

way over our heads. If anything,

we're inclined to sympathize

with Janelle's failure to parse

a caper that retains its hoax

quotient even if it turns out to

be true.

The forensic evidence — ranging

from a handsome JPEG of

free-spending paterfamilias Gerry

McSweeney to a very fishy letter to

.net readers from same — continues

to pile up, and as with all of David

Eggers's stunts, the preen factor,

the media attention factor and the

who-gives-a-shit factor all

approach a state of infinite

intersection that in scientific

terms is called the Triple Point.

Our only concern is that others

are copying our fabled strategy

of publicity by suicide attempt.

We dispatched one of our

correspondents to speak with the

man who identifies himself as Gerry

McSweeney. Whether he's the real

deal or not is of no moment to us. At

the end of the day, all we really want

is to find nice people to talk with

on the phone:

With this last observation, the Suck

Investigative Committee decided

to conclude its inquiry. We continue

to wish Brown, Eggers, Romenesko,

McSweeney and all other concerned

parties the very best of luck in all

their endeavors.

Other bastions of literary

culture have also been busted recently

in garden-variety hoaxes.

Esquire's evergreen pranksters ran

an article about a Web site

offering free cars — a

phreak which would've been more

credible if the site hadn't been

registered to the author of the

article. It's stranger when

alternative media horn in on the

pranking action, dropping

longstanding complaints about

loosening journalistic standards

when there's a chance for cheap

laughs. The latest round began

last spring when New Times Inc.'s SF

Weekly orchestrated a rally for

the nonexistent Yuppie

Eradication Project. The paper

later gloated that it had

simultaneously pranked the AP,

the local media, and "a couple

of hundred people who take

neighborhood politics much too

seriously." That stunt prompted

first solemn coverage and then

angry editorials — and finally, predictable

excoriations. Not to be outdone, last week,

the rival Bay Guardian dedicated

an entire issue to fake news stories,

with jokes as dauntingly obscure

as the rabid articles that appear

during the rest of the year. But

karma caught Guardian freelancer

Mat Honan — also humor

editor at OneDemocracy.com —

who crafted a hoax about a group

of vigilantes moving cars into

illegal spots so city tow trucks

would create more parking

spaces. In a fitting irony,

Honan discovered his picture had

become the centerpiece of a hoax

by former employer Mother Jones,

when the watchdog magazine

announced that it was going

public.

Even artificial intelligence

cyborgs are developing a sense

of humor. When you ask Jeeves if

he's gay, Ask.com actually spits

back a special error file that

reads, "429 File None of Your

Business. (You have a lot of

nerve even clicking on this

link.)" Jeeves has already been

accused of having too much sex

on his mind. The company

recently began contemplating a

new character to handle queries

about adult sites — perhaps

Jeeves' identical twin sister,

Mimi the pervert. In January,

the company went so far as to

register the domain AskMimi.com

along with MimiSucks.com,

MimiBlows.com, MimiScrews.com,

and — well, you know the

joke by now. But behind the

ribaldry, another band of

Silicon Valley barons is

ruthlessly leveraging a brand

name to bolster a useless search

engine — despite all other

interpretations ("Ask Jeeves

about P. G. Wodehouse," one

Ziff-Davis headline suggested).

Countless entertainment hacks

have seized on the theme of

computers thinking for

themselves, but the hard truth

is that Jeeves is just a

figurehead. When plotting how

best to conquer the Japanese

market, Ask.com considered

replacing the butler with a

monk. There's already a certain

Zen in watching the program

grapple with the demands of

ordinary humans. All those funny

interviews in which the Ask.com

engine churns out non-sequitur

answers to humorous questions

make such great advertising that

you tend to ignore how bad they

reveal the product to be. The

sad truth is that the next time

Bertie Wooster accidentally gets

engaged to Honoria Glossop,

Jeeves is the last source he'll

want to ask for advice.

We know many of you out there in

Suckland would like to have us

publish your musings. And while

your happiness means a lot to

us, our lips get tired when we

read these really long

submissions. At Suck we've

always been partial to the

concept of a pitch, a

one-paragraph synopsis that

briefly and succinctly describes

the article you're planning to

write. As an example of proper

pitch form, here is a

précis of a full article

that came over the Suck transom

just yesterday:

This article was submitted to us

by one David Collier, but this

Collier alias is fooling nobody.

We know who you are, Mr. Katz,

and we're still not publishing

your stuff.