The best thing about print media is the jokes - and the story of how the USB Mince pie was born

It’s a common complaint that the way attention works on the web - specifically Google’s love of simplicity - means the art of the punning headline is dying out. The internet has allowed millions of jokes and humour sub-cultures to flourish, but there are certain jokes and puns that only really work in print. This is the story of one such gag, which I found on the blog of US writer and geek Derek Powazek. Over to him:

“In 1992, the features editor of Autocar magazine decided to play a little joke. He rewrote the ledes of the stories in the year-end “Road Test Yearbook” so that the dropcaps spelled out a message for attentive readers, spread across many pages. The message, with punctuation added, was:



“So you think it’s really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse.”

Unfortunately, one of the attentive readers was the editor’s boss. “When I arrived at work that morning,” said the culprit later, “everybody was looking at their shoes and I was summoned to the managing director of the company’s office. The thing had come out and nobody at work had spotted what I’d done. But all the readers had seen it and they’d written in thinking they’d won a prize or a car or something.”

The prankster editor was promptly fired. His name? James May, who is now one of the hosts of BBC’s brilliant car show, Top Gear.”

CPC has been the victim of many puns (I don’t think a single SLI article has gone by without the use of the phrase “slippery slope”) and a previous mince pie megatest featured a similar “character at the start of each sentence spelling a phrase” but the phrase we spelt is a bit too rude for this family friendly blog.

Our best gag remains the USB Mince Pie, which was the whole reason we started running a yearly mince pie megatest. At the time, I was writing the monthly Custom Kit pages, a round-up of fun gadgets, only a steady stream of depressingly unimaginative novelty-shaped USB sticks were crushing my spirit and making the section dull. We came up with the idea of a USB mince pie, so bought a pack of mince pies from Tescos, chopped up a USB cable and brough the two together. Josh added the piece-de-resistance, a green LED, to the top. We then thought that to make it seem more real, we should have it win a group test, and thus the idea of a mince pie test was born.

To make the fake pie even more distinctive, I then created a website (www.usbmincepies.co.uk) for it, and James and I came up with a whole backstory for it (it was made by GenCorp, which “was originally founded in 1978 by two brothers, both ex-crane fishermen. The company first made its name making firecrackers, bicycles and heavy industrial equipment. In the 1990s, GenCorp rode the IT boom and successfully diversified into computer hardware, suceeding, most notably, with its famous “Slaughterer” range of motherboards.”) We then publicised the joke website by sending it out to Engadget and Boing Boing.

After that, USB Mince Pies had a life of their own. We’d put an email address on the site, and people started emailing us from all over the world, wanting to order them. The FT, the Daily Mail, and several European newspapers got in touch wanting review samples to put in their Christmas gift guides. Various Far Eastern companies got in touch asking if they could license the design. Despite the fact we came clean to anyone who asked, the USB Mince Pie lives on - a couple of days ago, James signed into MSN and saw it on the front page there as part of a Christmas feature. We still get emails about them. People just refuse to believe they’re fake. We’d have been rich if they’d been real, which I think goes to show… there’s a sucker born every day? People love mince pies? Christmas makes people take leave of their senses? No idea. It was a lot of fun putting it together though