One born every minute

On the list of Magic Beans for which you can almost always get a newspaper to trade the family cow -- or better yet, some 1A space -- surely this ranks near the top. Local(ish) Prof Stands Up To Big Science! Topped with a return appearance by the Shroud of Turin!

Read the whole thing, imagining yourself in the role of the editor in the budget meeting who tries to point out ... nah, that might take the fun out of it.

Now: Could newspapers have even more fun than a little breathless 1A sindology? Sure. And if your newspaper is about to run the following, go stop it right now:

Osama bin Laden must be chuckling in his safe house. After all, the 2008 campaign could very well give Al Qaeda the ultimate propaganda tool: President Barack Hussein Obama, Muslim apostate.

And disgruntled readers still complain that the N&O is a librul newspaper. As an editor -- well, there are no false opinions, and it's all scholarly and stuff, but ... if I was* publishing an editing encyclopedia and needed a public-domain illustration of "paranoid fearmongering droolfest," I'd start there.

Once this sort of babble has been waved through a few gates, it's hard to slow down. But just for fun, read the whole thing and come up with a list of propositions and assumptions that would have to be true before you'd toddle over to the law library and start poking holes in the alleged data.

* I'm not prepared to declare this a counterfactual condition just yet