Bad Headlines

Writing headlines is hard, I know -- both my parents and my in-laws owned newspapers, my wife used to write tons of press releases, and I worked on the school paper in college, and it's nowhere near as easy as you'd think. Sometimes you mean to say one thing, and then when you go back and re-read what you wrote you've actually said something quite different.

Even the Big Boys get it wrong.

For instance, MSNBC.com is the largest news site on the Internet. And yet, sometimes even their headlines are really, really bad. Here's a sampling from today's edition that made me laugh, along with the alternate interpretation I had when first looking at them:

• American Cheek 'blew everybody away' in 500M - You would think it would be American Lips doing the blowing, but apparently no, it's just the cheeks.


• Cheney's accident victim stable - He needs a whole stable to keep his accident victims in?! I thought it was just one guy he shot!


• British soldier held in videotape beating - When, oh when, will the military quit abusing videotapes? I could see it if they were beating DVD's but video?! That's just cruel.


• Hurricane homeless lose hotel battle - I find it sad that so many homeless hurricanes are wandering the streets without a hotel.