Good Thing I Never Stop At Two

Eating two servings of red meat increases risk of diabetes: study

Although after seeing this headline yesterday, I had planned to buy some beef for dinner, but then I remembered that my beautiful wife had mentioned a hankering for pork chops earlier in the week. So I brought home pork chops to grill instead of steaks. But not because a headline steered me away. Because I love to please my wife. And we traditionally have steaks on Fridays.

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Announcing It Makes It First Degree

COME HOME TO ROOST My neighbours complained about my roosters being too loud – now council says I might have to KILL them… I’m devastated

Although the pronoun with a questionable antecedent does not make it clear whether the woman needs to kill her neighbors or the council.

Maybe the roosters, but it’s only one of three nounds in the subheadline (the capitalized headline has home and roost, none of which could be the direct object of the second).

(Note the article makes it clear they’re talking about the cockerels.)

You know what? I’ve been goofing on headlines like this for nearly two decades, but we’ve gotten to a point where I write posts like this, and I think Is this enough to serve as a pretext for a pre-dawn armed raid by the authorities because I’m posting calls for anti-authority violence? What an exciting world we live in now!

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Could It Happen To Me?

The headline oversimplifies a bit: Man left in coma after tearing bicep at gym wakes up to find he’s lost his arm:

Holy cats, he strained so hard he put himself in a coma? Not so much:

“I tore my bicep in the gym, and had some surgery a couple of days later,” he remembered.

“Two weeks after that I had a postoperative infection called necrotizing fasciitis, which gave me 11 major surgeries during a 10 day coma.”

He caught an infection in a National Health System hospital in Britain.

I would comfort myself and say that couldn’t happen here, but who knows?

I’d better take it easier.

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Breaking News From Obscure Nonprofit’s Fundraising Appeal

Beloved monarch butterflies now listed as endangered by conservation group

It’s basically a press release from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, but apparently the news story has quotes from ecologists not affiliated with the nonprofit saying the numbers of monarch butterflies have declined recently.

How recent counts match with history is impossible, because the prehistory–the time before written records were kept–of counting monarchs ended probably only decades ago–that is, all counts of monarchs, probably based on computer models rather than an actual census, began recently.

So science is probably only tangentially involved.

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Don’t Know Much About Historical Geography

So I spent some time on Thanksgiving with an X-Acto knife and fifteen-year-old copies of magazines like French Cottage and English Garden that I bought at an estate sale in the autumn and that languished on the desk in my parlor ever since. Don’t ask me what for.

But I did snicker at this article headline.

French Bohemian flair? That’s like saying Canadian Mexican flair. One suspects the headline writer only knew Bohemian as the adjective for funky hippie artistic, not that Bohemia was an actual place in Europe that’s now part of, what, the Czech Republic? Although it has been held by the Germans and the Holy Roman Empire in the past, it has never been part of France.

Oh, all right, I’ll tell you why: Because this autumn, I did a couple of découpage projects, and I bought a big bottle of Mod Podge for them, so I thought I’d pick up some magazines to look for images to use in collages. So I finally got around to cutting out promising looking images and discarding the remainder of the magazines. When my beautiful wife asked me about it, I gave her the real answer: I am generating raw materials for crafts that I won’t get around to doing, much like already clutter the shelves in the garage.

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I Have All Her Albums

But I was not standing shoulder to shoulder with her other fans: Loren Cook Fans protect Republic, MO Amazon Fulfillment Center

Just kidding. I have never heard any of her music. Is she any good?

One moment: I have been handed a note–apparently, this is a sponsored story by a ventilation company, not a group of like-aestheticked individuals coming together to stop looting.

Never mind, carry on.

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Start ‘Em Young

Old and busted: Wine Moms.

New hotness: Wine Kids.

Winery owner to buy Missouri nursery

Wait a minute, I’ve been handed a note: The Springfield Business Journal headline is misleading. Apparently, the corporation owning the winery is buying landscaping companies.

Never mind, carry on.

And recognize that this might well be the very last time, at least according to the chronology of the writing, where you read Old and busted/new hotness.

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Got The Magic Words In The Headline (II)

Plymouth shooting gunman ‘is America obsessed gun nut who shared Donald Trump quotes’

Undoubtedly, his favorite was the one where Donald Trump said if you cannot get laid, you maybe should try injecting some lead into random people; it couldn’t hurt.

You might be forgiven, casual news glancer, if you started to connect Donald Trump and QAnon and Republican with anything bad ever happening anywhere on the planet.

Forgiven? Heck, you will be rewarded with up-twinkles.

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