These uncertain times

In These Uncertain Times, it's nice to know that the Elongated Yellow Fruit still stands ready to do its duty.

Rotund yellow fruit

The Elongated Yellow Fruit* is only the beginning! Stay tuned for the existential threat:

Over two pages, Markay and Suebsaeng explain that Trump would interrogate his former chief of staff Reince Priebus about the black, white and grey creatures.

The questions would arise at such opportune moments as “when Priebus was attempting to brief the president on matters of healthcare initiatives, foreign policy, or Republican legislative agenda”, they wrote.

“Are they mean to people?” Trump reportedly asked Priebus, perhaps thinking of badgers’ very long claws, which they use to dig the burrows that make their home. “Or are they friendly creatures?”

Trump would also demand to see photos of badgers, ask Priebus to give details on how badgers “work”, and wanted to know if they had a “personality” or were boring.

Priebus was also called upon to explain “how the critters function and behave, what kind of food they like, and how aggressive or deadly they could be when presented with perceived existential threats”. 

Sounds like he's asking whether badgers could get Mexico to pay for WALL if they said "caravans!!1!!11!1!!!" often enough. Securitization theory isn't clear on that, but that doesn't mean it's not a good question.

* Thanks to Q. Pheevr, from the northeastern reaches of Our Southern Neighbor. 

Call your doctor if ...

I'm not at all sure this is good for the brand here, but -- it looks like we have a candidate for Meta-Elongated Yellow Fruit of the (still fairly young) Century:

Gill’s not the only naysayer. One Reddit user recounted a harrowing, cautionary tale where he used a banana skin to masturbate and allegedly ended up “falling in the mess I made, hit my head on the toilet and barely lived to tell the tale.”

However, supporters of the organic orgasm inducer feel it’s too good to pass up. 

Yes, we could quibble: organic bananas are usually another 20 cents a pound down at the local grocery, and who's to say the Post's generic illustration is a certified organic banana? And is there something a little ... well, since it's the Murdoch press, can we say a little anti-American? -- about "banana skin" in the preceding graf? That's because the story is a pickup from The Sun:

On the bright side, it isn't the Post regaling you with Tales of Brave Giuliani.

Toasted yellow tumult

OK, not technically an Elongated Yellow Fruit (because insufficient adjectives), but these few grafs manage to go off the rails in alarming numbers of ways. One, I don't think you can pull "toasted" all the way around to modify "tumult." (And 1A, even if you can, it's not an excuse for the alliteration.) Two, culinary hegemony over what? Three, enough already with the schmears, for the same underlying reason as four, "some defenders"? If you're going to drop a pun, don't rub it in (3), and (4) stand up for the poor thing; don't fabricate some people who cried a cry we doubt ever got cried.*

Even the Times lets the writering get out of hand sometimes. Go forth and don't likewise.

* H/t some old New Yorker column filler or another. they were great

I think that I shall never see

Well, if you've already said "longleaf pine" once, what would you call it?

Aiken has a new national champion.

It’s not a basketball squad, a golf team, a horse or even a boxer.

Instead, the latest No. 1 with local ties is a tree – a longleaf pine that stands in Hitchcock Woods.

Based on three measurements and a points system, the woody perennial plant is the largest of its kind in the United States.

Won on points, did we?

Somewhere there's heaven

All together now: When our crater-ridden neighbor hits your eye like an iconic four-square Detroit-style pie, that's some writering. (That's some writering.)

I'm still trying to figure out how the horizon got to be above the Space Center, but that's probably a good place to stop.

Betcha can't eat just one

Nobody can resist a chunk of Elongated Yellow Fruit! Though you'd like to think that anyone who'd include "butt-shifted" in the report could have added the preferred additional modifier: "clutch-challenged ursine invader." And you have to appreciate the Boulder County cops for remembering that when perps exit the vehicle, it's always "in an unknown direction."

Thanks as always to the Bremner Center for the Popular Orange Vegetable.

Elongated yellow fruit flies like a banana

Isn't that just the thing about stylebooks? They'll demand that you inflect "alumnus" all the way through for gender and number, but they won't tell you to lay off of the elongated yellow fruit.

And a tip of the fur-lined headgear, as always, to the Bremner Center for  Popular Orange Vegetables.

Double hat trick of iconic forbidden things

This is one of those issues you live for in Copy Editor Bingo: a Triple Forbidden Things Score on one page,  bisected by a Triple Forbidden Word Score running vertically through the A section.

At top, on the business front, there's a Stupid Question in the hed, followed by an "iconic" teeing up a perfectly formed Elongated Yellow Fruit in the second graf:

Called the "Sole of the UX," the tires were revealed at Elliott’s New York Fashion Week after-party on February 9. They were modeled after Elliott's AF1 shoe partnership with Nike. The iconic perforated leather shoes, which retail for $150 a pair, are sold out on Nike's website. 

What really makes the magic, though, is the intersecting iconic axis, starting on page 2A:

and going on to the second business page (12A):

 We're not in the word-banning business around here, really. But some shops can feel free to put particular words off limits until the susceptible get over it. In rule form, it goes something like: If you're tempted to call something "iconic," that's a sign that you don't need to.

Elongated yellow fail

No, no, no. An essential characteristic of a properly constructed Elongated Yellow Fruit is that it's definite. "A popular orange vegetable" might as well be a sweet potato, and "a furry rodent" could just as easily be Alvin the Chipmunk or Squirry the Squirrel or Boris the Undead Rat from the Path Lab. The weather gods do not listen to them. The reference must be at least to "the furry rodent," and for best results, insert an adjective: "the avuncular furry rodent."

Nor is it "a shadow." The groundhog cannot use its little groundhog fingers to make a cute bunny or a horsie or a Dalek. The groundhog needs to see its own shadow. 

Too much space to spend complaining about a post-Groundhog Day brief? Imagine the trouble we'd save if you simply stopped running the damn things.

Iconic leafy double play

Yes, it's an elongated yellow fruit, NOW with added Iconic®! And it's only the first installment:

We're going to have to wait on the Bremner Center for a ruling on "the leafy plant," which is technically short one adjective of being a popular orange vegetable, but the supplementary "iconic" in the first example ought to make up for it.

Elongated yellow determinism

On the bright side, we're spared the "tundra-trailblazing beavers" of the main headline.

Thanks, as always, to the Bremner Editing Center and Elongated Yellow Fruit Presidential Library.

Hold those calls, ladies and gentlemen!

... it looks like we have a winner in the Elongated Yellow Fruit* of the Year competition! It's as if the pandas had been lying in wait all along.

Somehow, it seems that there are no mountains left to climb.


* With thanks to the Bremner Editing Center in Lawrence, home of the World's Most Elongated Ball of Twine

Elongated yellow fail

I think we're all saddened at the news that Superior Fish is closing, but come on -- couldn't we do better than "the eight-legged sea creature" for the required Elongated Yellow Fruit reference? I was expecting at least a "slimy eight-legged cephalopod."

Up, up and elongated yellow fruit

Well, what would you call metallic balloons on second reference if you were the power company?

SCE Urges Safe Handling of Metallic Balloons
WHAT: Southern California Edison will promote safe and responsible handling of metallic balloons to increase public awareness about the hazards and hundreds of outages caused annually by the free-floating colorful gifts.

With thanks to reader Carol, because not all popular orange vegetables are available online. Though you do have to give SCE some credit for getting the right number of hyphens into "one-month high of 191 metallic-balloon-caused outages last June."

Try it on your cereal

Courtesy of the indefatigable Bremner Editing Center, the latest in elongated yellow fruit: Sriracha, the pungent Thai condiment!

Carnivorous yellow fruit

Why do you suppose the Raleigh paper uses a story from Charlotte (which, unless we're leading with the earthquake, is quite a bit farther inland) to warn its readers not to feed the elongated yellow fruit?

A seal sighting reported by the National Park Service on North Carolina’s Outer Banks has prompted a warning to tourists: Seals bite.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article195917444.html#storylink=cpy

... The ocean-going marine mammals come from growing colonies in New England and Canada, it is reported.

Thanks as always to alert fruit-spotters in the Old Home State. And, because the elongated yellow fruit AND the popular orange vegetable both come in bunches ...

In the first study of its kind, the researchers carried out an in-depth audit of various sandwiches throughout their life cycles and found the triangular meals could be responsible for the equivalent annual carbon emissions of 8.6 million cars in Britain alone.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article195917444.html#storylink=cpy

More about that one later.

Martinis, steaks and cold-blooded belles

So with the UN slapping America in the face, Republicans finally wising up to the Kenyan usurper's Mideast perfidy and Massster's beautiful tax cuts held hostage by those pesky budget rules, what do you figure should have been the world's fourth most important story on Thursday afternoon?

Aw, you peeked. Having done so, though, you might have wondered how the elements of this story fell into place so naturally, so let's have a look:

She’ll drink to that!

The Latvian woman who watched her fiancé drown in the Hudson River walked out of prison Thursday — and celebrated with a martini and steak lunch.

There's no "police said" or "according to eyewitnesses" or "Fox News can reveal" (though there is that delicate accent on "fiancé," in case you've forgiven the French for anything in the past few decades). But there is an outline of the structure under which we're supposed to understand stuff. "Walked out of prison Thursday" is an easy claim to verify. "Martini and steak lunch" is close, but .. hang on a little and we'll get back to the martinis. "Celebrated" is actually a bit different from what you see in sports photo captions, where at least people are usually jumping up and down or something. As for who's drinking to what -- well, you can't call it a lie, because there's nothing for it to be true or false about. It's a framing device. It doesn't tell you what to think, but it tells you how to think about the things you're poised to learn.

Watching one's fiance drown, of course, is substantially different from drowning one's fiance; both have the makings of a good country song, but to make sense of the second paragraph, you need to know in advance that this isn't your ordinary Latvian woman. She's the one ... oh, come on, you read about it a couple years ago, it's on the tip of your tongue, she's the one in that story! So now you're ready to look at how tabloids make news. Indeed, let's just go ahead and shift over to the New York Post, the Murdoch stablemate from which Fox appropriated this story:

The part that Fox added to the hed -- the steak dinner -- seems to be the better attested,* but what the heck. How many martinis, and how do we know?
Read more »

Elongated yellow Hormel product

The only Elongated Yellow Fruit reference in the text of this Post masterpiece is to "the Hormel product." But surely the headline gets bonus points for "the wildly popular 'mystery meat.'"

Should you wonder how far the gospel of "omit needless words" has fallen? No, don't:

Elsewhere on the island at about the same time, three women loaded up shopping carts at a Long’s drugstore with 18 cases of — you guessed it — Spam. They made a rush for the exit.  Fortunately, an alert customer, Pleasedon't Embarrassmefurther, saw the attempted heist in progress, stationed himself at the door on Spam patrol and stopped them in their tracks. They shoved the carts toward at him and took off, Embarrassmefurther told KITV4.

Could you go on? Of course. But eventually, you'll find yourself asking whether the story itself is one long string of needless words.

Nonelongated starchy tubers

And the Starchy Tuber joins the Elongated Yellow Fruit and the Popular Orange Vegetable in the what's-for-supper category!

Thanks, as always, to the Bremner Editing Center and World EYF Headquarters.