'I'm not a quitter'

I don't want to get into the habit of quoting myself, but -- Jesus Christmas on a steam-powered Segway, do these people have no sense of shame?

At right, thanks to the cousins at the Wonkette, we have a view of a page from Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" in which (can you see it in the back there?) the author says "I'm not a quitter." Which wouldn't be especially remarkable, except this is the same (ahem) vice presidential candidate of a particular major party who told a crowd in Iowa last year that their weather "reminded me a lot of Alaska, so I put my warm jacket on, and it is my own jacket. It doesn't belong to anybody else." Sweet leaping lizards, does this person channel Richard Nixon by accident, or is it sheer ancestral malevolence, or could it be her newfound claim to international expertise? Also.

Stupid heds? Aisle 4B

The biggest little daily in Collegetown is obsessed with writing active heds, often to the detriment of good sense:

Deer hunter suffers accidental discharge

No he didn't. There's an aisle in the pharmacy for those products. What this guy suffered was a gunshot wound to the abdomen, inflicted when a fellow hunter's gun went off accidentally, and that's the why-is-this-in-the-paper that the hed writer apparently couldn't find.

It's hard not to write a better hed -- at least, a more informative one -- if you use the passive voice:

Hunter wounded as deer season opens
St. Louis hunter accidentally wounded

You non-journalists out there might wonder why the pros do hed writing so badly. Or why the story is so turgid and poorly organized: We have to wait for the last graf to find out how serious the injury is, though the third graf reminds us that deputies "responded," and someone apparently thinks "an accidental discharge occurred" is the official way of saying the rifle went off accidentally. Hey, this stuff takes training!

Double dip

Marvel at the inventive brilliance of the AP as it manages to squeeze two of the Great Cliches into a single eight-word lede:

CARACAS, Venezuela — Call it the Bolivarian battle of the bulge.

It's easy to see why this was big news at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, where Hugo Chavez functions as a sort of one-man Insane Clown Posse of strategic peril to our entire way of life. Why it's a big deal to the AP is, or should be, harder to fathom:

President Hugo Chavez said in a televised speech Friday that "there are lots of fat people" in Venezuela and advised his supporters to exercise and eat healthy to trim their waistlines.

Cancer cured, Mideast at peace, and Latin America so completely without developments of interest that there's a place on the budget for executive-branch dietary advice! Whatever else we're throwing over the side, it's nice to see that the American journalistic tradition of rendering the rest of the world as a cartoon is alive and well.

Yeah? Eredf this, pal

And the dummy type claims another victim -- here, the Lexington centerpiece. Unless You Kids really have Destroyed The Language and "eredf" is the verb and "gbdb" the object?

Soldiers of the unknown

This showed up on the radio this morning. I'm pretty sure it was one of the national CBS people, but I didn't catch his name (or, owing to basic driving safety habits, the entirety of the quote). But it was a reference to the president's plans to attend a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington and lay a wreath at "the Tomb of the Soldiers of the Unknown."

I'm just about certain it was an error (rather than a clandestine plug for the Missouri grunge band of the same name). I'm at a loss for how it came about, though. There were some similar "of" references in the preceding item -- soldiers of Fort Hood, guardians of freedom -- but "Tomb of the Soldiers of the Unknown" is pretty hard to fathom. May we all be spared the need to speak live on the air, I suppose.

Dam busters

Wouldn't it be nice if we had people who read the stuff before it went to press? We could call them, oh, "copy editors" or something.

Non sequitur of the week

What's the latest in the Astronaut Love Triangle saga, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

Wearing a wig and trenchcoat, Nowak followed victim Colleen Shipman to the parking lot and tried to get into her car, then attacked her with pepper spray. Shipman had begun dating Nowak's love interest, former space shuttle pilot Bill Oefelein, and was able to drive away.

Glad that worked out.

'Break out the Kryptonite'

A president's place is in the ... wait, what? Let's see what the top news looked like back on July 15:

In his first six months in office, President Obama has traveled abroad the equivalent of twice around the world.

... Somebody break out the kryptonite already.

Obama, whose international upbringing was touted as an asset during the campaign, has by far logged more frequent flier miles early on than any of his recent predecessors.

At the same time, Obama's foreign travel means he's not spending as much time at home -- a review of past administrations showed previous presidents devoted more time to traveling inside the United States.

The usual commentators "weigh in" on the topic, so let's look:

Obama's mini study abroad adventures have cemented the notion that he's a international figure, but not an international leader. Bush may have been tough, but he was respected, and so was the United States. With all past Presidents, the ones who are limp and quick to concede our liabilties abroad weaken our standing and make us more vulnerable. Too bad Britain's leaders didn't give Obama a history book.

Perhaps the next stimulus will include 300 million T-shirts declaring: "Obama toured the globe and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." At least he didn't start a war and every day there was one less here.

And how did it seem during the campaign?

John McCain is working on solving America's energy crisis and getting gas below $4 a gallon, while "the Barack of Obama," as I know like to call him, is globetrotting in Europe, hob-knobbing with the finest and the elites, but not having time to visit with American soldiers.

Glad we could clear that up for you.

Topless-coffee shops and other delights

Not all ambiguity is equal. Come to that, not all ambiguity is even ambiguous. But there are cases in which the casual elisions and collisions of news language produce something that risks a serious misunderstanding.

First, the innocent ones. You're likely to get this one right:

Topless Coffee Shop Owner Wants To Re-Open In Office Trailer

... even without hyphens, even if you haven't been following this earth-shattering case over at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. It goes (topless coffee shop) (owner), not (topless) (coffee shop owner): "Shop" is the business end of an attributive noun phrase modifying "owner," giving us a "shop owner," not a "topless owner." It'd be quicker and clearer as "Topless coffee shop's owner," but it's hard to make a credible case that "topless owner" is the likely reading.

The Freep online* hed shown above is a different matter. If you think we're talking about tapes of the alleged party itself,** you're making a very reasonable guess. Unfortunately, you're wrong. It's "a cache of 911 dispatch tapes or cops' computer files" stemming from the investigation.

There aren't a lot of great alternatives. "Did Manoogian probe tapes vanish?" is a bit of a crash blossom, and worse, it's still a Stupid Question. If you've dug up testimony this interesting:

A day later, when State Police went back to a vault where both sides had agreed to store the 36 tapes in a sealed box, the investigators found the seal broken and 30 tapes missing, according to the testimony.

... it'd be nice to tell me, rather than asking me.

* It's "Did Manoogian tapes vanish?" in print -- not great, or even good, but not as obviously misleading as "party tapes.".
** Judging from the archives, it looks as if there's a stylebook entry decreeing that the proper first reference is "long-rumored Manoogian Mansion party."