One of the questions most often asked in the media monsoon that followed the initial uploading and subsequent promotion of SHECKY! A magazine about standup... was "Does your magazine have anything to do with Shecky Greene?" The short answer is "No."

The long answer is that, while our magazine doesn't have any direct connection to Shecky Greene, famous comedian, there is an indirect connection. The name "Shecky" has come to mean something other than the legendary comedian, something more. It has taken on a larger meaning in our language. It has come to be shorthand or a generic term for anyone who is funny.

I'm watching Today once, and Tom Brokaw cracked wise about something in the headlines. The camera goes back to Katie Couric and she says, "Thank you, Shecky Brokaw." See that? Shecky indicates a willingness to amuse, a propensity to crack wise. It's now part of the culture.

The second most popular question posed by the folks of the fourth estate involves green, as in money, not Greene as in Shecky. "How do you expect to make money from this venture?" they asked, with such an edge in their voice, I wasn't quite sure that I didn't actually owe them some.

How does anyone make money by publishing on the World Wide Web? One way is to publish fake or bootlegged naked pictures of Pamela Anderson or Gillian Anderson or any other famous woman. If you post them, they will...come. Well, we don't have the hard drive space for that kind of operation.

Another is to offer a site that actually does something. Yahoo! comes to mind--a search engine is a handy device for the droves of technophobes and neophytes wandering the web in search of...naked pictures of Gillian Anderson. We're kinda behind the curve on that one. And, truthfully, we lack the technical expertise.

Yet another way is to offer a site that a "significant number" of people will feel compelled to point their browsers to on a regular basis because it offers content of a consistently high quality with a distinct identity. The theory is that after you create this stampede of surfers, the folks who want to advertise to your herd will give you bales of cash so that they might make their pitch to the droves of folks who show up at your virtual doorstep.

We'll see. In the meantime, we're adding to our store of knowledge in such disciplines as HTML design, publicity, the WWW, publishing, editing and customer relations. But we're concentrating mostly on offering content of a consistently high quality with a distinct identity. And, after tinkering for hours with Adobe PhotoDeluxe, I've figured out how to graft the head of Lynne Russell onto a photograph of a centerfold from an old Playboy from 1961. Watch for it in the June issue of SHECKY!... Just kidding!

Brian McKim, standup comic, is the head HTM-eLf of SHECKY!. He was also once a member of the fourth estate. He was also adjudged to be "too smart" to perform in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.