Omnibus Stupid MFers in the news thread (Part 2)

I always imagine how Frank Parnell must have reacted when he saw it.

For a linguistics class, we were supposed to make up a word and write the dictionary definition of it. I wrote about the shrdlu, a rare type of Purple Mongolian Snub-Nosed Wombat.

What are we supposed to be seeing?

Read the text on that… Very surreal.

It makes my eyes hurt. But I got the gist by the third paragraph.

Spoiler for people who don’t want to strain their eyes: The article has made-up words that have no meaning.

More accurately, it takes segments of words that belong in the article and repeats them over and over.

I would not it be surprised to learn that newspaper has 1 fulltime employee plus the owner. And both are drunks with day jobs at Denny’s or 7-11.

Professionalism is an unrealistic expectation where 2024 small-town journalism is concerned. That’s a damned shame that may well kill Democracy as we know it. But I think that is the situation, lamentable as it is.

If you mean the article with the extreme misprint (and not the guy writing articles with AI) that was from April 18th, 1980:

(Also, I see in the Youtube comments to a dramatic reading of the article there is a guy claiming to be the reporter who wrote the article. No explanation for the errors, though.)

Update. The company(and owners) has been charged with defrauding an insurance company.
Stealing legally parked cars to extort fees, business practices that lead SF to bar them from city contracts, an attempt to tow an occupied vehicle in traffic(that has no repossession order against it) isn’t enough to get the company shut down but try to defraud insurance and hellfire rains down. (Except for the fact that all the past history might only bar the company for 5 years.

Lincoln towing says “Hold my crowbar and watch this!”

Until they write a song about you, you’ll always be second best.

I’m not sure that small-town news outlets were way more professional in the good old days. Seems to me that the key to survival in the vast majority of cases was to feature “happy news” events, get the locals’ names in the paper as often as possible and not print anything that would offend advertisers.

I was just reading about a success story in which a small town’s newspaper was set to close after many years. A local resident managed to buy the paper and keep it going. She explicitly said that her focus was on printing “good news” and highlighting things like people’s birthdays, church events and the like.

Which is nice, but not exactly investigative journalism.*

*speaking of which, one of the biggest newspapers in Kentucky, the Lexington Herald-Leader, recently put out a plea begging for donations (not subscriptions) so that it could hire a reporter to do investigative journalism. They currently have far more coverage of bourbon promotions than any investigative reports.

Note to self: Read less news about Trump, more about bourbon promotions.

Either stuff you read, it’s probably going to make you want to drink more. So your mind may be happier with one over the other, but your liver is gonna be pissed at you either way. :wink:

This woman stole food from low income school children during the COVID crisis, and this football player thinks the right thing to do is try to pay to set her free? Besides things not working like that, why would a person think this is a good thing?

I think he did it so people could say, “Aww, what a nice guy.” As long as they didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.

I think he maybe didn’t spend much time thinking about it either. Hopefully!

Or he been hit in the head too much.

That’s a blast from the past. I haven’t heard that song in years. Thanks to Dr. Dimento for introducing me to it.

Tough guy CEO attacks fairly scrawny 15-year-old for accidentally sprinkling water on his wife.

Hopefully he can find a good Strangulation Attorney.

Even strangulators deserve legal representation.