June 27th, 2006
Former Defense Officials Urge Strike on Missile Site at Washington Post - Yahoo! News headline
Huh ... I didn't know the Washington Post had a missile site!
(As it turns out, CSS makes all the difference: The last three words are a smaller, lighter font that highlights the fact the preceding words are a hyperlink. But in my style-indifferent browser settings, it looks like one sentence).
"There's no connection between our product and anybody becoming ill from it." - a spokeswoman for Cadbury
It's not fair to criticize spokespersons' spoken statements, really, but I would bet good money that she didn't mean that the way it came out. Basically, she just admitted to the world that people were getting sick from their chocolate in the second half of a sentence attempting to deny just such a thing.
It kind of reminds me of a line from the movie, The Last Remake of Beau Geste: "My dearest, don't try looking for me—especially in Africa."
(By the way, if you want to watch a funny movie featuring a great comedic talent, Marty Feldman, who died so senselessly and far too early, then I recommend this movie. It has another favourite of mine: Ann Margaret. Not to mention James Earl Jones, Peter Ustinov, and Michael York [thanks IMDB for reminding me] and the ubiquitous "cast of thousands".)
* * *
Now, there is a lengthy list of funny headlines ("Eye Drops off Shelf", "Iraqi Head seeks Arms", etc.) as well as the famous History Lesson, which is, presumably assembled from the mis-spellings and erroneous word choices (not to mention amusing anachronisms) of students over a period of years ("Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men", "Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper", etc.)
So I just had to take a look at the veracity of those. You know, spoil the humour somewhat by revealing them to be mere fabrications ... urban legends, if you will. So I checked them out on Snopes.com:
- Without much explanation, they deny the truthfulness of the "Real Headlines"
- But there is nothing at Snopes or any of the other "Urban Legend" websites about the History Lesson, though that is hardly surprising; I saw a version of it in 1980, so its origins are apparently lost in the mists of time. (It has changed over time, too. For example, "ten men" became "a hundred men" and "Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet" became "...heroic couple".)
I have a friend who is very much into words, moreso even than I am. He likes palindromes, such as "detartrated" or Napoleon's statement, "Able was I ere I saw Elba" (love that one myself) or even the extensible version of, "A man, a plan, a canal ... Panama!" (some people have written computer programs to insert hundreds, possibly thousands of words into the middle of that sentence to create a massive palindrome, but it seems less elegant than the simple "natural" original one).
Normally, I am not into adding a metric assload of links to the pages of my Rant-o-Rama. If you think about it, nothing but a bunch of links makes a crappy (and kinda lazy) blog. But, for today only, and only because it behooves me at this particular instant, here are some relevant links:
- My friend - Tom Magliery. A dude both smart and clever, killer sense of humour ... and an all-around great humanitarian.
- Snopes.com - Debunking urban myths and legends ... and sometimes confirming them! Always interesting, and just the right hint of common-sense-based humour and irony in the write-ups.
- The Last Remake of Beau Geste at IMDB.com - You can read a little about this movie, including the impressive cast. Links to Amazon.com if you want to buy it.
- Here is a Google search for the history lesson - There are some links to forum discussions where the origins are discussed. Lots of theories on where they originated. Also, lots of people who express the disbelief that I also feel about their authenticity as "real excerpts from students' essays".
- A discussion of the "A man a plan ..." palindrome - Includes a bit of history, and examples of computer-generated (i.e., cheating) extensions of it.
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