Unsatisfactual

There's your painful, irrelevant lede. There's your wrong-cliche lede. Then there's your painful, irrelevant lede that grabs the wrong cliche in the bargain. Step forward the competition:

It’s actual -- ABC Labs reports growth in sales
Shareholders of homegrown Analytical Bio-Chemistry Laboratories must be singing "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah" because everything seems to be going the company’s way.

Why, one wonders, must they be singing anything at all? (Like, what happened to the great tradition of shareholder mime?) And if stockholders are routinely bursting into song because everything's going their way, why isn't it "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" ("Everything's going my way") rather than "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah" ("Wonderful feeling, wonderful day")?

It's hard to talk writers out of ledes like this -- at least, until after we've killed a perfectly good pine tree or two and printed the thing for all to see. And offering a lesser-known but apropos alternative (HEADSUP-L would have suggested "1983 ... A Merman I Should Turn to Be") doesn't butter a lot of parsnips either. But if you can whack 'em upside the head with the lyrics, you might be able to strangle the damnable thing before it escapes.