Today in the News

As I casually reviewed news this morning -- in the cafe, upon arriving at my desk -- two headlines jumped out at me as being ridiculous for very different reasons.

"Cheney Says Shooting Was His Fault" (WaPo)
Wow, really?! What a guy! Just kidding. That was not my initial reaction. My initial reaction was "Well I certainly f*@#$*g hope so, you shot the guy!" While this very well may be the first time anyone in the Bush administration has taken ownership of a mistake, it still just blows my mind. Every news outlet in the world has been flashing headlines and tickers since Sunday, attributing this shooting to Cheney (including, in the case of DC's ABC station, with an exclamation point -- "Cheney shoots friend in face! News at 11"), and four days later, he pipes up and says yeah, it was me. Don't worry though, he's still towing the party line: "Vice President Cheney accepted full responsibility yesterday for shooting a 78-year-old lawyer in a hunting accident in Texas last weekend, calling it "one of the worst days of my life," but he expressed no regret about waiting until the next day to reveal the incident to the public." This is a political rant that belongs more over here, so I'll stop devolving. On to the next.

Update: Jese, blatant typo in the headline I quoted. Sorry about that. I know this sounds like BS, but my work computer is b a n a n a s and has a tendency to insert random letters and characters wherever it thinks they belong. Our IT guy is baffled. And no, it's not the keyboard -- I've replaced that twice, and it happens with the laptop keyboard too. *Sigh. It's a machine posessed, and it's got a will to be heard.

"Three Dead in Giant Cartoon Protest" (AIM Today)
OK. I know. This is a really horrible situation. I'm not making light of it. But just read that headline. Pretend like you didn't know about the tension between the Muslim world and Denmark that has been raging on for days now. And just read that headline, with heaping spoonfulls of literal interpretation. "Three Dead in Giant Cartoon Protest." It's funny, right? It's funny because it conjurs visuals like this:

Other funny-out-of-context headlines on this subject include:

• "Anatomy of the Cartoon Protest Movement"
• "Cartoon Protest Mobs Set Fire to Fast Food Shops"
• "4,000 Cartoon Protesters Tear-Gassed"

To clarify: in context -- not funny. Out of context -- yeah.