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Pastimes : Laughter is the Best Medicine - Tell us a joke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mighty_Mezz who wrote (5466)	5/4/1998 9:16:00 AM
From: Milk	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 62549

May 4, 1998 New York Times: The Online Choice for People's Most Beautiful: Angry Hank By AMY HARMON Even to those with only the slightest grip on the pulse of popular culture, it will come as little surprise that People magazine has chosen the teen-age idol Leonardo DiCaprio to grace the cover of its annual "50 Most Beautiful People" issue, which hit newsstands this last weekend. Less immediately explicable is the ascendancy of Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf, in the magazine's online reader poll on the same subject, conducted via its World Wide Web site at www.pathfinder.com. By Sunday afternoon Hank -- a figure whose scabrous, unfailingly belligerent persona has made him a popular guest on Howard Stern's radio show -- had garnered nearly 208,000 votes. That was about 17 times those received by the second-place DiCaprio, star of the movie "Titanic." The contest runs through Thursday. Some critics of the Hank write-in campaign dismissed it as a reflection of the cult following commanded by Stern, because it appears to have originated on an unofficial Howard Stern Web site before spreading across the Internet by e-mail. Others opined that the Net audience does not exactly represent the mainstream. "Frankly, I think it's stupid," said Susan Toepfer, People's executive editor. But many of the electronic campaigners themselves insist their message is more sophisticated -- an attempt to use the new media to challenge the cultural hegemony of the old media. It is an expression of cultural pluralism, these grass-roots guerrillas contend, that People's parent, the media giant Time Warner Inc., may not be particularly eager to embrace.