Headlines: Just add taste

Don't you just hate it when a perfectly good annual cliche -- say, "Ready, set, shop" -- is marred by one of those pesky deaths? Credit the New Haven Register with this robust blend of mixed 1A signals for your breakfast enjoyment.

"Taste" is always going to be a notoriously tricky thing to define, and sometimes it's difficult to improve on old Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it, and this isn't it. Some hed specs simply don't match the story; it's hard to fit "news" (especially when you're nearly half a day behind the place where the news is happening) into the hammer-and-deck setup Waterbury employed here. As our design cousins would point out, this isn't a fault of design so much as a fault of bad design. It's also a fault of the desk for not pushing back against unruly specs.

As long as we're in the northeast corridor, how about the Post's treament of the Wal-Mart mayhem? Hard to imagine a Postier hed (though the Daily News's "Death by shopping" is right up there). Moral: If you want New York Times heds, don't put your quarters in the box that says "New York Post."