Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Stone Temple Pilots coming to Family Arena

The only way that could get any more incongruous would be if the next part of it was To Open For Muppets on Ice.

Jobless exploited by worst long-term unemployment in 62 years?

To block this out for the theatrical release, put long-term unemployment over there, brandishing a whip over the jobless, compelling them to toil in its salt mines without enough food nor water.

No, scratch that, that’s work. Me, I’m stumped. Someone get that particular headline writer on the phone and ask him what that means, exactly.

Warm days, nights in 60s, NWS says

Dudes, that was forty or more years ago. Come, join us in the 21st century. Focus on our weather now.

St. Charles police officer shoots suicidal man.

His heirs are the proud owners of a single additional bullet.

Just snarking. The man survived, although he was the sort of suicidal who fails on the first shot, tries to draw the cops into killing him, and has to live even then.

Ex-Marines, knitter among Blagojevich jurors

The actual writer might know some:

A former Marine severely injured serving in the Middle East, a voracious reader of knitting magazines and a man born in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Put that in a stylebook somewhere, kids: there are no ex-Marines, only former Marines. Show some respect.

Missourians warned not to eat raw crawfish

Telling people here that raw crawfish can make you sick won’t work. They’re from Missouri: you’ll have to show them. Pass the raw crawdads, please.

Death rates decline sharply in kids under 5

You are healed!

St. Charles to host medication disposal event Saturday

Rapper Guru dies at 43 after battle with cancer

It goes against type, but our society will be a better place when more rappers die of old age and related diseases than shootings.

In 2005, this would have been bad news: Talented employees now affordable:

Don Carroll, a former financial analyst with a master’s degree in business administration from a top university, was clearly overqualified for the job running the claims department for Cartwright International, a small, family-owned moving company south of Kansas City, Mo.

But he had been out of work for six months, and the department badly needed modernization after several decades of benign neglect. It turned out to be a perfect match.

In the year 2OE, however, this is good news.

If G.J. Meyer was reduced to being a Wal-Mart greeter, this would now be a great networking opportunity

Marko spots a headline and draws the obvious conclusion.

I ain’t the only one who speaks English and reads them, you know.

Suspect reportedly shot by Springfield police during chase in jail

Snickering about the miswritten headline aside, which implies that the chase took place in the jail, we get this nugget about the shooting:

After the vehicle became stuck in the mud following a high-speed pursuit, Hilt allegedly tried to run over several police officers and was shot in the neck.

The suspect tried to run down the officers with a truck that was stuck in the mud? I see.

Reminds me of an incident in the St. Louis area a couple years back where a deputy pulled over a car full of kids in a manual transmission vehicle. When the deputy got out, the vehicle rolled a little purportedly because the driver didn’t put the parking brake on, and the deputy fired a barrage into the vehicle, killing some and wounding some more.

Jeez, guys, be careful.

UPDATE: I am not convicting the cops here in the court of my public opinion, since I am only working off of the newspaper’s reporting of the event.

Angelina Jolie visits Haiti with UN refugee body

Maybe she should have a sandwich or two on the plane ride back.

Audit suggests driver training for K.C. police

Missouri seeks court ban on intoxicated gun possession

All joking aside, is this really how “law” is supposed to be made? The legislature whips something confusing up, and then the government lawyers get the courts to actually determine what the law is? Because that’s not my understanding of a constitutional republic with a separation of powers.

Business owners admit fraud

Crap, they’re onto us. We charge more than things cost us!

Sarah Michelle Gellar, husband welcome baby girl

That husband, of course, is former “actor” Freddie Prinze, Jr.

Or, to AP headline writers, nobody.

RI highway trooper delivers baby in pickup truck.

Man rescued from Mississippi

(I know, I don’t have much these days but comments about headlines and book reports.)

Obviously, when a 733t Skillz H34dl1ne Wr1t3r smears the pallete and mixes up some new metaphors, like in this St. Louis Post-Dispatch header:

Democrats shake up their slate

You see, you used to erase slates with an eraser or a cloth when you wanted to change information on them. But this headline writer updated the metaphor by including the shaking erasure style used by this new laptop called an Etch-A-Sketch. Apparently, this new gizmo has an LCD screen or something you can manually clear by, get this, shaking it!

By including it in the headline, this master craftsman ensure that today’s kids “dig it.”