Category: Headlines

Looks like everyone’s running with this story today: Study finds we’re human-chimp hybrid.

Revel in the logic, friends. It’s GNUs Not Unix all over again. We, humans, are a cross between humans and chimps. The humans that they crossed with the chimps were a cross between humans and chimps. Which in turn must have been human and chimp hybrids.

Sloppy headlines reveal sloppy thinking. And we get a lot of that in the papers today, ainna?

Charity freeze money collected from raffle sales

To someone at the Post-Dispatch, no doubt charity is the plural of the original Latin charitum.

And if you click through the link to the story, note that it deals with one of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s current crusade stories. On any given day in the last week or so, you can find the front page of stltoday.com banging on the drums in its current outrage kit:

• The Overland mayor who, after a close election, wants to throw out some of the city officials (today’s story: Hearing on Overland police chief to begin Tuesday). The Post-Dispatch, the people’s paper, sides against the elected representive of the people on behalf of unelected officials and cheers all sorts of procedural moves and an ultimate trip to the judiciary to thwart the rabble. Go, team! (For a complete list of stories and attendant column inches regarding this small municipality in the last month, click here.)
• A somewhat dubious charity called Gateway to a Cure that has run expensive raffles in the area for the last ten years. The Post-Dispatch has run articles digging for dirt for over a month now. They’ve not uncovered a smoking gun, but they have gotten another investigation of the charity. Kudos to the Post-Dispatch for ensuring that a struggling charity has to pay legal defense bills. (For more stories from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the charity, click here.)
  Full disclosure: Heather and I rented a hall from this guy’s brother for our wedding reception, so for the price of a low rate, I’ve obviously sold the integrity of the blog. We never got our Shania Twain CD back from the brother after he played that innocuous “From This Moment On” for our first dance, so perhaps I ought to jump on the bandwagon and pillory the charity owner.