Poorly timed hed of the month

Did you look under the snow?

Colin? Boog? Lewis F.?

None of the above. If you recognized the protagonist at all, it might have been as Husband of Missing Mom -- which admittedly doesn't narrow things down a lot, but at least it has more to do with why the story's in the paper than his family name does.

Advice for hed writers, with a nod to Strunk and White: If you're going to go tabloid, go tabloid in a way that broadsheet readers can understand.

You through?

Disclosure time first. Your Editor doesn't pay much attention to football and thus deferred watching the 2012 Chrysler ad -- the two-minute epic starring Clint Eastwood -- until this morning. I wasn't all that impressed initially, but having watched the Fair 'n' Balanced Network's evolving reaction over the course of the day, I'm inclined to revise that opinion. Any mediated event that puts a knot so large in Fox's knickers is fine with me, and that's over and above the innate awesomeness of Clint Eastwood.
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Snowpocalypse now

In which nonfunnny humor columnists demonstrate that they can be nonfunny across platforms.

It's called 'chance'

Yes. Yes, there is.

It's called "chance."

No, but thanks for asking

What a delightful illustration of the difference between question-begging and Stupid Questions! What would we do without The Fox Nation?

OK, the embedded question isn't actually question-begging; it's the interrogative form of question-begging called the "fallacy of multiple questions." You can't answer a question about what "Obama's class warfare rhetoric" did without acknowledging that there is such a thing as "Obama's class warfare rhetoric." That's an informal logical fallacy, as opposed to the Stupid Question, which is evidence of brain-dead cluelessness. Here, we can answer the Stupid Question by asking how many times the hated name of the Kenyan Muslim socialist usurper is mentioned in the story -- either the 390-word version at Fox Nation or the glorioous 1,300 words of AP prose at Fox proper.

The answer in both cases is, um, none. Not only is there no known "class warfare rhetoric," there's no Obama. Whatever the Trotskyite rascal is up to, he isn't up to it here.

One of the fun things about teaching a methods course is reminding the younguns that screwing up isn't necessarily an ethical failure. Lying, on the other hand, is. We all screw up sometimes, but lying is a matter of choice. Or, at certain news outlets, a matter of policy. Please don't hesitate to point out the differences.

Super-de-dooper-de ... oh, forget it

A suggestion for our friends on the fog-shrouded island and its environs? Next time the first thing pops into your mind, hedwise, wait for the second thing to pop into your mind.

You'll be glad you did.