The most comprehensive English language database of jokes, if you believe the claims of its creator, and I do, is a collection of 50,000 jokes maintained, in strict secrecy, by Frederic Davis, a former journalist, sometime computer industry gadfly, and author of the “Windows 3.1 Bible,” the “Windows 3.1 Bible With CD,” “Windows 3.1 Bible in Chinese” and a dozen other books about how to get your software to do what you want it to do. For the record, Davis is also a CEO of Lumeria, a Web start-up that manages personal information. But this story isn’t about Davis’ day job.

You see, Davis has an idea. Maybe it’s not as high-minded an idea as information profiling, but it’s a money-making idea. The idea involves plastic vomit.

“It’s hard to buy high-quality plastic vomit nowadays,” Davis says. “You used to be able to get it in gag shops, but they’ve disappeared.” (Davis does not volunteer, and I do not ask, the difference between the high-quality and the low-quality kind.) The plastic vomit is important because Davis cannot count on running an advertising-supported site.

“The reason there’s no supersite for comedy,” Davis says, “is because nobody wants to advertise. Eventually, you’re going to offend everybody.” That’s where the plastic vomit comes in. Davis wants to sell that in the section devoted to gross-out jokes.

“In the religious jokes section,” he says, “we’d have the punching nuns.“

It is a little weird that I should be writing about Davis’ joke database because I’m not a joke person. Don’t take this to mean that I’m getting all highbrow on you. What I mean is that while I often find jokes funny if they are told well, I don’t collect them, I don’t often forward them and I don’t remember them. My friend Tomaz is a joke person. His audience hangs on his every word for the 10 minutes he takes to tell a joke, and doubles up in laughter at the punchline. This is all the more amazing because so many of his jokes hinge on fine points of Eastern European political history. I’m a little envious of his facility with the form.

But even if it’s not exactly your cup of tea, 50,000 jokes is still something impressive. Fifty-thousand jokes means you can be pretty certain that the one about Bill Gates and the light bulb is there, and the one about Gary Hart and the parachute and the one about the Frenchman, the Englishman and the electric chair. Think of it as one-stop shopping for the humor-starved.

Davis has spent six figures harvesting his 50,000 jokes. Many of them came from the Internet newsgroup rec.humor. Some were taken from printed books. The longer ones had to be slightly rewritten to avoid copyright issues. (“You can copyright the wording of the joke,” Davis says slyly, “but you can’t copyright the idea; you can’t copyright what’s funny about it.”) The database isn’t yet open to the public, though there’s a sampling online at Laff.net. A few of the jokes are funny. A lot are unfunny. Most are funny in a way, but not really funny enough for an adult to laugh at, unless they are told very well indeed.

I asked Davis to tell me a joke. This is the one he chose (I asked him not to pick anything off-color):

A little kid ask its mom, “Where is God?” Mom says, “God is everywhere.” “You mean here in California?” asks the kid. “Yes,” Mom says, “here is California.” “You mean here in our house?” “Yes,” Mom says again, “here in our house.” The kid picks up a glass. “You mean here in this glass?” “Yes,” says Mom. The kid picks up the glass, turns it over and slams it down on the tabletop. “Got ‘im!”

You see? It’s amusing, but only very mildly. In fact, the best part of it is probably Davis’ peculiar reference to a child as “it.” I found that funny.

I am not sure if Davis’ idea will succeed. Davis has statistics to back him up, a whole theory of what you might call Humor Commerce.

“There was a study that showed that 10 percent of the traffic on the Net was people sending jokes to each other,” Davis says. Frankly, I don’t believe him. Either he has made up the number, or the study was likely flawed. The figure sounds apocryphal — but certainly less pernicious than most of the other nonsense numbers thrown around on the Net.

I probably wouldn’t visit a site that let me bombard my friends with a selection of 50,000 jokes. Then again, I might be mistaken — sites that let you bombard your friends with animated postcards are among the most successful on the Net. And they don’t even sell plastic vomit or punching nuns.

And yet it seems to me that none of this matters, because I’m awfully glad that somebody is bothering to stockpile the detritus of the culture. I rather think that the less funny the jokes in Davis’ portfolio, the better. After all, people with better memories than mine will recall the funny ones, but the not funny ones would just fade away.

“I think this’ll be an important anthropological site,” Davis says. I believe him. Don’t scoff. Fifty-thousand bad jokes is no laughing matter.

At this conference, however, Masayoshi was basking in triumph. He owned a third of the stock in Yahoo, then a $6 billion company. He owned a third of GeoCities, too, a Web-hosting service that had inspired the public markets to go gaga (and which has since sold out to Yahoo). Son was finally being accepted as what he wanted to be: a true Net mogul.

As Son spoke, slides flashed on a screen behind him. There were slides with circles, slides with line charts, slides with equations and summation signs. But there was one particular slide that got the audience palpably excited. It showed a small square with the names of some old school industrial companies written below it, a bigger square with new companies like Dell Computer, a still bigger square with the names of huge media companies, and a last, biggest square with the next wave of Net companies. The squares were supposed to represent the relative values of each generation of business giants. And the point, ultimately, Son claimed, was that the top companies of the Net generation would have a market value 10 times that of their predecessors. Of course, it was all hype. But the audience loved it.

I could not help thinking of Masayoshi Son earlier this month when three investors — Son’s Softbank, plus the investment bank Goldman Sachs and the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital — let it be known that they had paid $275 million for 6.48 percent of the stock in Webvan. Webvan, as many readers of the business pages know, is an online supermarket headed by Louis Borders, founder of the Borders chain of bookstores. Webvan currently delivers groceries to customers in the San Francisco Bay Area. In investment speak, Webvan is a national online retail play trying to capture a big piece of the $350 billion dollar a year grocery market.

But more precisely, Webvan right now is a very big warehouse in Oakland, Calif., a headquarters office in Silicon Valley, an attractive logo, a fleet of trucks, some 300 employees, a computer system that links all these pieces together with an e-commerce Web site, a contract with construction giant Bechtel that commits the fledgling company to building 26 more warehouses at a cost of $1 billion, and a lot of hope. That’s it. Six and a half percent of this is worth $275 million, which gives the whole thing a nominal value of $4 billion. That’s an awfully pricey warehouse.

If you are scratching your head wondering how a warehouse with operations in just one small part of the country can be worth so darn much money, however, you’re probably wasting your time. There are certainly ways to calculate the potential value of the business. You can look at the value of Safeway, the giant grocery store chain, whose stock has a total value of $26 billion plus. You can, conversely, look at Peapod, the first online grocer, a service that the Wall Street Journal plugged in 1994 with the headline “Peapod’s On-Line Grocery Service Checks Out Success,” whose stock is muddling along at a single-digit share price. You can talk about profit margins and argue about whether online groceries will succeed in achieving the 5 percent profit margins they hope for — though most backers of online groceries will tell you that traditional supermarkets have margins of just 1 and a half percent and Safeway’s are at 3 percent. The problem is that all of this entirely misses the point.

In fact, there is one overriding reason why this warehouse in Oakland is worth $4 billion: The money managers who have invested in Webvan have already made a whole lot of money in other Net companies. And so, like Son at his conference, they give the entire project a halo of invincibility, no matter how preposterous the financial assumptions. Those money managers are two Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Benchmark Capital and Sequoia Capital.

Venture capitalists right now are the darlings of the business world. In fact, to call them simply “money managers” is asking for a fight. Venture capitalists insist that what they do is not manage money but build companies, and this is partly true. They certain provide management advice, some of which is good; they help recruit employees; and they contribute, to the best of their abilities, at board meetings. But their reason for existence is, put bluntly, managing money, much of which represents the investments of university endowments, pension funds and some of the large number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals. They invest this money in companies — including many technology companies — at an early stage of their development, hoping to multiply their funds 10- or 20-fold with every successful investment.

In Silicon Valley there is a definite pecking order among venture capital firms, and Sequoia and Benchmark are near the top, getting into the most sought-after deals. (Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, which made its money and its name on early investments in Netscape and Amazon.com, has long been at the pinnacle.) Sequoia and Benchmark are on top now largely because each of them has had a single stunningly successful Net investment. For Sequoia, it was Yahoo; Sequoia provided $1 million of startup money for a 25 percent ownership in the company; Yahoo’s stock is now valued at $26 billion. Michael Moritz, the Sequoia partner responsible for backing Yahoo, is also the partner who sits on Webvan’s corporate board. Meanwhile, Benchmark is one of Silicon Valley’s younger venture capital firms — just four years old. Benchmark was the initial investor in the auction site eBay; its share is now worth about $880 million.

But here’s the big irony of the Silicon Valley pecking order: The biggest advantage of having backers from the club of top money managers is the mystique they bring. By their vote of confidence in a company, the top venture capitalists attract other investors, who put in even more money in later rounds of financing. Webvan counts as investors not only Softbank and Goldman Sachs, but also the French billionaire Bernard Arnault, newspaper company Knight-Ridder and CBS. All of them have ponied up tens of millions in financing to go along for the ride with Benchmark and Sequoia.

Well, guess what. Once a company has raised over $400 million, it’s almost certainly only a very short step away from selling stock to the public. Chances are that investors will bite once business magazines report that a company has a “value” of $4 billion. What that means is that the last 6.48 percent of the company was sold for $275 million, which implies that the whole company is worth $4 billion dollars — even though Benchmark and Sequoia got big pieces of the company early on, for much, much less. If the company does go public, the investors in the public markets will no doubt be eager to get stock in a company that comes with the imprimatur of gilt-edged money managers. On top of it all, the fact that Webvan and Yahoo share Softbank as an investor (in fact, Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle has a seat on Webvan’s board of directors) implies a deliriously full future for investors eager to bet on the future giants of the Net.

A scenario a lot like this played out last week, when investors bid up shares in Drugstore.com, an online pharmacy backed by Amazon.com and Kleiner Perkins, the most prestigious and powerful of all of Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms, by 179 percent in one day. The stock of Drugstore.com, a company that opened for business five months ago, is now worth just over $2 billion. (Amazon and Kleiner Perkins have also teamed up on a direct competitor to Webvan — HomeGrocer, which is already operating in Seattle.)

There is not a single venture capitalist who does not say that his goal (they are mostly men) is building “the next Microsoft.” But here’s the ugly truth: It makes no difference to a venture capitalist’s returns if a company grows to dominate an industry or goes bankrupt five years after selling stock to the public. A Boston Market (formerly Boston Chicken) can be as good as a Microsoft because a venture capitalist needn’t wait for the company to prove itself; not long after a company goes public, the venture capitalists can cash out. In fact, a Boston Market — a high-flyer which went bankrupt — can be better than a Microsoft, because all of Microsoft’s stock taken together wasn’t worth a billion dollars until the company had been around for nine years.

What venture capitalists are looking for is — don’t laugh — a “liquidity event.” That’s biz speak for selling a company or taking it public, turning their ownership stake into cash. Typically, a year after a company goes public, venture capitalists are allowed to sell their stake. Sometimes they will do that. More often the venture capital firm will split the stock up among investors in its fund, letting them quietly sell it in small bits and reap huge winnings. Or they might hold it, if the investors think the company really will be the next Microsoft.

The upshot is that venture capital firms are not in the business of taking a long time to build companies. At one time, they might have been, but that is certainly not true in the age of the Net. Like Masayoshi Son at the San Francisco conference, they are in the business of retailing dreams of corporate grandeur. If they succeed in selling those dreams, they can make a lot of money. Whether they come true, however, rarely need be their main concern.

“Day trading” means trading stocks very quickly — sometimes several times a day, or even several times an hour. Day-trading offices like the one at which Barton had traded until April, the Atlanta branch of the All-Tech Investment Group, are essentially collections of computers with fast connections to stock trading networks. Successful day traders will try to pick up profits on volatile stocks, sometimes buying and selling the same shares several times in the course of a week.

The most often-repeated advice in day-trading circles is “cut your losses and let your winnings run.” In other words, sell a stock that’s losing money quickly. The problem is that this advice is a lot easier to quote than to follow.

Day traders like stocks that fluctuate a lot, holding out the prospect of big gains in a single day. Generally, that doesn’t mean big industrial companies; it means either very small and thinly traded stocks or, in many cases, Internet stocks.

Now consider this: In late April, Internet stocks reached an unprecedented high, and since then, by any ordinary standards of the market, they have been in the throes of a wild drop. Robertson Stephens technology analyst Keith Benjamin’s index of Internet stocks has fallen by a full third in just three months.

A day trader who bought a raft of Net stocks at or near the high and didn’t “cut his losses” could be in the hole for an awful lot of money. In fact, it’s even worse than it looks at first sight: Most traders borrow money to trade from their day-trading firms. A trader who was already at his borrowing limit could have seen most of his money disappear since the end of April. Conversely, a trader who in the months before April had “sold short” Net stocks, betting they would go down, could well have been bankrupted by a March and April runup.

Inexperienced traders who put money in very small companies could be in even worse shape. Many such stocks are driven up by hype, and fall a lot more quickly than they rose.

In other words, for the unlucky day trader, any day can be a Black Monday.

It’s not clear that any of this directly precipitated the Atlanta tragedy. Barton’s wife and mother-in-law had been bludgeoned to death in 1993. That crime remains unsolved; Barton reportedly was a suspect.

Day traders themselves are skeptical of the link. “Probably got gum on his shoe on his way to work,” wrote one day trader, complaining of the awfully tenuous connection.

It’s certainly fair to be skeptical of any direct links between day trading and murder. It’s a bad way of understanding either of them. But it is also useful to remember that when all one’s savings and thus all one’s life prospects are at stake, one’s emotional well-being is also on the line.

The dating guy is actually closing in on a major deal. He is talking to an insurance company about buying the carcass of a failed online dating site, Goodcompany.com. It is not exactly clear why he thinks he will succeed. He is convinced that streaming video introductions over the Net is the answer. He plans to charge an awful lot for his service. The press agent and I exchange skeptical looks.

Then the banker gets into the conversation. The banker runs a small investment advisory firm. He, too, has a big Net play up his sleeve. He is going West to investigate partnerships for an online mortgage brokerage that he has invested in. He thinks it is not getting enough publicity. I ask him for the name. He gives me the stock ticker symbol, APLY (it’s trading a little below $3 a share).

“We should talk,” the banker insists to the dating guy. He does not wait for an answer. He jumps the line to ask the ticket agent.

“Can we sit together?” “That is,” he adds to me, whose place he has taken, “if you don’t mind.”

I don’t mind at all. I am not sure what kind of deal they will cut. I have the suspicion that the banker will try to sell the dating guy on taking his company public. Does it matter that the online dating service doesn’t exist yet? Not really. First sell it, then build it.

The dating guy looks to be more interested in pitching his company to the press agent, but he faces the task of talking to the banker with equanimity. If all goes well, he might get off the plane with a new banker and a new PR firm. Not bad for a late-night flight on the cheap airline.

We get to our seats and the banker locks himself in rapt conversation with the dating guy. But then something funny happens. I look at them just a minute after takeoff, and the banker is already asleep. The dating guy has a lost look on his face. He is trapped in the window seat, hemmed in by his sleeping companion. He looks in my direction. Do we have any pressing business to conduct?

I nod politely and turn away. He’s on his own. The competition is hard at work, and meanwhile he’s here trapped in an airline seat, no deal, no networking, no chance of any movement before the banker wakes up. Five more hours of flight ahead, all wasted. Five hours — a precious commodity indeed in the Internet gold rush.

The overflow crowd has turned out to see the debate on “open access.” Open access in the current vernacular means forcing cable companies - in San Francisco’s case, AT&T - to allow competing Internet service providers to offer high-speed Internet access over the cable firms’ networks. In this instance, as everybody involved admits, the problem is largely theoretical, because the local cable system has not yet been upgraded to support cable modems and, as yet, nobody in San Francisco can get cable modems at all.

So why is the San Francisco Board of Supervisors taking up this issue now? Because AT&T has pretty much gotten itself into a regulatory pickle. After buying cable giant Tele-Communications Inc., AT&T has had to seek approval to transfer TCI’s cable franchise rights to its name in each and every jurisdiction where TCI owns a cable system. And unfortunately for AT&T, some city governments aren’t making it easy. Already Portland, Ore., and Miami have imposed an open-access requirement on AT&T as a condition of the transfer. That means for AT&T to offer cable at all, it will have to share its cable spectrum with Internet service providers and America Online. Of course, AT&T is fighting tooth and nail and has taken its case to court; it does not want to share the cable networks it has spent billions to acquire.

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Most of the hip young engineers in San Francisco’s City Hall on Monday are actually employees of Excite@Home, the high-speed Internet service provider partly owned by AT&T. They have taken much of the day off, with the company’s explicit blessing, to let their voice be heard and to cheer for the home team. The problem is that they came at around 3 o’clock to see a rip-roaring debate, and, well, it’s just not shaping up that way. More than an hour is devoted to other issues before Tom Ammiano, president of the Board of Supervisors, introduces an amendment to the franchise legislation that would immediately require open access if the federal courts allow it in Portland or if AT&T voluntarily agrees to it anywhere. Then another supervisor introduces an amendment to the amendment. Or maybe it’s a substitute amendment — hardly anyone is quite sure which. And the only rip-roaring debate is about whether an amendment to the amendment is really permissible, and in case whether there should be an up or down vote on Supervisor Ammiano’s amendment before a vote on the substitute amendment (or maybe the amended amendment).

The funny thing is that there’s a much easier way of finding out what’s going to happen than sitting around watching the politicians fumble for their papers. If you’d really been in a hurry to know the outcome, you could just as well have asked Blair Levin, a consultant to AT&T who had parachuted in from Washington, D.C. Levin is a bona fide veteran of the telecom regulation wars, having been the chief of staff to Reed Hundt when Hundt was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

If you had asked Levin at 4 o’clock what was going to happen at 6:30, he would have told you that Ammiano’s amendment wouldn’t pass, but there would be a substitute amendment. The substitute amendment would put off the issue until the Portland case was decided, and if the federal courts ruled that local governments could in fact require open access to their cable systems, then San Francisco would take up the issue again. That sounds a lot like a victory for open access, but in fact it commits the city to do nothing more than wait, see and study — and maybe, just maybe, take up the issue again at some indeterminate future time. So it’s a victory for the cable company, no question.

Plus there would be another provision, Levin would tell you: Cable-modem providers will have to offer access to the Internet that doesn’t force proprietary content on its users — like an unchangeable start page, for example. Excite@Home already lets users choose their content, Levin would tell you, but America Online, the most vocal proponent of open access, doesn’t; it pops ads up instead. So AOL, thinks Levin, has basically shot itself in the foot by making a big issue of the franchise transfers — though without open access there is little chance of AOL being on AT&T’s cable system in the first place.

“If,” Levin adds, pro forma, “my intelligence is correct.”

Don’t bother taking that profession of modesty too seriously. Of course Levin’s intelligence is correct, because the substitute amendment (it turns out to be that, not an amendment to the amendment) is the result of negotiations between AT&T and the board of supervisors. And aside from Ammiano, most of the supervisors seem not to have the stomach for a full-fledged brawl with AT&T. Maybe they’re impressed that the new franchise agreement includes all sorts of goodies like high-speed access in public computer centers (courtesy of AT&T) and rebates to subscribers. More to the point, the whole issue is off-putting even to professional legislators. In fact, it gets a good half-hour for the supervisors to get a clear explanation of the differences in the two proposals. (Astonishingly, the telecommunications aide to the Board of Supervisors calls the differences in the language — which are the very reason that AT&T has flown in lobbyists from around the country — merely “technical.”)

Around 6:30, the open-access provision goes to a vote. Eight aye, three nay. The substitute amendment is next. It passes, nine to two. For the record, Levin’s intelligence is correct virtually to the letter.

There’s only one question that still remains. Where did subsection (c) of the substitute amendment come from - the one that calls for “one-click access” to the Net, freeing users an obligatory start page? The AT&T guys are really excited about it. Levin mentions it. Thomas Gallagher, an AT&T lobbyist down from Seattle just to watch the big show, mentions it. Milo Medin, the chief technology officer of Excite@Home has been holding court out in the lobby for most of the hearing, and he’s excited about the one-click provision too. This is not exactly his favored venue — it’s clear that he would much rather chat with supporters out in the lobby than listen to a muddling legislative debate — but talking about one-click access puts him in a nearly jubilant mood.

By 7 o’clock, the room is clearing out. Tom Ammiano is surrounded by a posse of reporters, most of the other supervisors are out looking for any press they can find. Milo Medin is still out in the hall, amiably chatting with a supporter who is telling him that America Online blocks access to Yahoo.com, the most popular site on the Net. Medin doesn’t bother to correct him. At technology conferences, Medin, a Net mega-millionaire and a crowd-pleasing speaker from the Steve Jobs mold of tech honchos, is a star. Here at City Hall, he goes largely unrecognized.

So, Milo, where did that one-click provision come from after all?

“We wrote it,” Medin says, happy to take credit. It’s a funny moment. Lobbyists write legislation all the time, but in Washington a lobbyist admitting that a piece of legislation was written by the company lawyers is tantamount to a chef at a fine restaurant walking around saying that the secret ingredient in his mussels is catsup. It’s just not done, and it tends to scare off the customers.

It’s an almost charming slip-up. At least Medin scores points for honesty. And it doesn’t much matter for now, since AT&T has already won the San Francisco battle. Still, if you were an AT&T lobbyist, you’d probably tell Medin to be careful. If you go around talking about how you write legislation, you might just not get to write it anymore.