Category: Headlines

Man, I hate Common Core word problems.

Is hundreds the numerator or the denominator here? Were hundreds of houses from x houses decimated, or were hundreds of houses decimated with x destroyed?

Missing king cobra snake found under dryer in Florida

The title, I don’t need to remind you, alludes to “Rikki-Tiki-Tavi” by Rudyard Kipling. I just read that story to my boys two weeks ago. Now, they’ll be chittering for a mongoose for sure.

Especially since Springfield, Missouri, had its own missing cobra scare in the 1950s.

The headline is Sweep, it is: Gordon, Volquez guide Royals past Twins 7-2.

Friends, countrymen, do you think the 20 something Web producer has mangled an allusion to The Jackie Gleason Show, where Jackie Gleason used the catchphrase “How sweet it is”? Do you think the phrase has been thrown into the blender of modern American culture over the last fifty years, divorcing it from its origins, so that people today almost repeat it without knowing where it came from?

If so, it’s quite the metaphor for modern America in so many ways, where current utterances and thoughts are far divorced from their origins.

Or I suppose the headline writer could have put those words together that way because Yoda would. But Yoda would have used the article in front of sweep.

San Francisco strikes a blow against sugary sodas

Way to play it straight, CNN. It’s not that San Francisco has raised taxes. It’s that San Francisco has attacked a beast or adversary of mythological scope.

Sting recovers collection of stolen car titles, keys

An unfortunate juxtaposition of headlines:

7 homicides recorded in just over 48 hours in Milwaukee
Metro Milwaukee home sales shoot up 25.6% in March

Perhaps if they could find those metro home sales responsible for all the shooting up, Milwaukee officials can curb appeal the violence.

With terrorists operating with impunity in tribal areas of Pakistan, there was one man who could bring order to the provinces.

A decorated veteran, he turned his back on the military until he was drawn reluctantly back into battle.

Older now, a world-weary sportsman leaps from his patrol boat with nothing but his M-16 and his determination to set things right.

Kerry II: The Warlords of Pakistan.

The movie has already been written from this headline:
Kerry in Pakistan to shore up counterterror cooperation.

I’ll blurb it: “Reminiscent of Genghis Khan!”

Meat Prices Predicted to Rise Despite Tumbling Oil Prices

This just in: Meat is not a petroleum product.

White House: ‘Sophisticated actor’ hacked Sony.

The hardest part about making fun of this headline is that I can’t think of a living actor I’d call sophisticated. Maybe Morgan Freeman. George Clooney? Almost.

Help me out here. Who do we have that’s sophisticated?

Woman who left gun in Brookfield church faces new charge:

Eight months after an Oconomowoc woman left her loaded handgun in a Brookfield church restroom, she is facing a new criminal charge, while her husband will likely avoid prosecution for a similar incident at a Door County amusement park.

Susan Hitchler, 67, beat the initial charge of negligent handling of a weapon when a Waukesha County judge dismissed a criminal complaint in June.

Now, a prosecutor has charged Hitchler with disorderly conduct. Gun rights advocates say Hitchler turned down an offer to avoid the charge if she would give up her concealed carry permit and forfeit her Ruger .380 caliber gun.

Apparently, it is not explicitly against the law to accidentally leave your gun in a bathroom in Wisconsin. But that’s not going to stop the prosecutor, who will try a little button-mashing on the statutes to get some conviction. Because this prosecutor knows this woman’s actions were wrong, and this prosecutor apparently is in the business of prosecuting those who do wrong instead of those who break the law.

Reading the article, it looks like the woman and her husband either have a major case of the whoopsies in this department, or they’re having the normal number of whoopsies in this department but the authorities have their eyes all upon them.

In no way am I advocating careless handling and forgetting of firearms, but I don’t wonder if they represent a talisman of extra bad. People leave dangerous things lying around once in a while, including knives, chemicals, prescription drugs. I mean, my pocket knife falls out of my pants pocket once in a while. Is that negligent handling of a weapon or disorderly conduct in Waukesha County? If the wrong person or a child picked it up, couldn’t something bad happen? Isn’t that the argument usually made to go treat guns differently from everything else?

If leaving a heater unattended is going to be against the law, perhaps a legislative body should pass this as a law explicitly and leave the prosecutor’s creative endeavors to model trains or weekend painting classes.

“Milky substance” that contaminated creek may have been — milk

Note that the film, Dragnet. from 1987 features police officers in military gear. Come to think of it, Die Hard from 1988, did, too. So that’s been going on a long time, ainna?

Third person planning Springfield City Council run

I predict He will beat You.

Study: Parents Stop Using Booster Seats Too Soon

I gave mine up too soon.

Arkansas Mulls Alcoholic Beverage Ballot Issue

They’ve added spices to it and served it warm?

A Blind Legend, the All Audio Video Game for the Blind

If it’s all audio, it’s not video. It’s an all-audio computer game.

UPDATE: Welcome, Neatorama readers. Don’t forget to check out John Donnelly’s Gold, my novel about four laid-off IT workers who plot a heist against their CEO for revenge. It’s available in paperback, in the iTunes store, and for the Kindle (for only $.99!).

Stealing canned corn could bring 10-year prison term

What is this? A story of a three-strikes-and-your-out mishap, where some starving miser steals a can of corn to feed his malnourished children and faces an inhumane sentence because he’s stolen two cans of corn previously? Not hardly.

The specific charge to which both Nunn and Sherley pleaded guilty involves a theft that occurred on May 11, 2013, at the Snappy Mart Truck Stop in West Plains. Nunn and Sherley stole a 2000 Wabash trailer (valued at $7,500), which contained a load of Green Giant canned corn (valued at $73,008).

The trailer, owned by Bryant Freight, was in transit from Minnesota to a food bank in Arkansas. Nunn and Sherley admitted they traveled through Missouri and Indiana with the stolen cargo before being apprehended in Michigan.

They stole a trailer full of corn. Bound for a food bank.

And they’d done this before.

Canned corn, indeed. Maybe the headline writer couldn’t spell trailer and load of cargo.

Headline: Two Missouri dads arrested after fight at kindergarteners’ play.

It sounds like it might be an instance of a couple of competitive paterfamilias duking it out over whose urchin made the better barnyard animal or something, does it not?

In reality:

One of the men was the stepfather of a child in the play. The other was his biological father.

Yeah, that’s a domestic disturbance in an exotic location.

Bonus points to the actual article writer, too, for making it sound like a double homicide.

The government subsidizes a living creature, and when the money runs out, it’s dirt nap time:

Federal funds are running out at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center and officials plan to close the site and euthanize hundreds of the tortoises they’ve been caring for since the animals were added to the endangered species list in 1990.

You see, they have these endangered living creatures that they can no longer continue to provide for with tax dollars.

So do they put them out in the wild and let them take their chances? No, that’s inhumane.

Do they put them up for adoption in case the individuals or organizations can take care of them? No, that’s inhumane.

Euthanasia is the only answer.

The threat of just killing the turtles (If we can’t have them, NOBODY CAN!) is designed to either get the Federal fiscal firehose turned back on or get more private donations. But private donations are fickle, and Federal funds are forever, or the tortoise get it.

Well, that’s not how the papers cast it, of course. They say Missouri still lags in passing key driver safety laws, mainly driving while texting.

Have you ever noticed how the newspapers always point out that this district or that community (or state) has ‘fallen behind’ others in their rates of taxation and that when legislative bodies don’t rush headlong to curtail freedom by outlawing this or outlawing that or by spending public monies profligately, that the government is somehow falling down on the job?

It’s almost as though the papers think freedom of the press means only the press should be free or something.