Down with pronouns

Is it too much to ask? Let pronouns be pronouns, and let antecedents -- even the first-out-of-the-cliche-bag ones like "missing teen" and "abductor" -- do the heavy lifting in headlines? I know all the cool kids these days are writing deliberately vague heds, but come on. Even Fox (despite the adjective overload and the little oops with the "allegedly" thing; compare top and bottom) did better:

Back to CNN, though: Further points off for any headline that begins with "What we know about" or ends with "Here's what we know." Forbidden under all circumstances, at least until a neighbor has described the suspect as a quiet fella who kept to himself. And don't say "Here's a photo of ..." when what you have is a link, especially when it's a link to the same photo you've already shown.

Four shalt thou not count

Dear CNN: Do you suppose arithmetic ought to be one of those Five Things "you need to know to Get Up to Speed and Out the Door"?

If you're on the edge of your seat with the home version of our game there, yes. There is a Door No. 5:

Not that I'd mind if it was getting harder, but no, it doesn't feel like that, and if it did, it probably would be my imagination (though the water did show up straw-free at the local last week, huzzah). I'm not in Seattle, and it isn't 2020. This, kids, is why we try to avoid addressing the reader directly.

And this one is kind of the last straw, though it's actually the first, being why I clicked on the damn story in the first place:

See, in the old days, once you got to five or six or seven things you had to know to get out the door that day, you drew them on a "dummy" and called it the "front page." Do you sort of see how that might be an improvement?

Currency devaluation

Nobody ever walked out of the old bandbox commenting on the gem just twirled by the portly portsider. Really. That's just the way sports deskers fit the elongated yellow fruit of their craft into the merciless space left after the ads were sold. (On the other side of the room, ire was stoked as bus slay punk was bailed and thousands fled blaze.) So there's a bit of nostalgic charm in awakening to a perfectly preserved relic of the past -- sort of like seeing a triceratops on the front lawn, rubbing the painful bruise on its head and looking around for its wallet and keys.

The top of the picture is included here for scale. There's actually room there for "to defeat Twins" or something equally mundane, but that's really another point. "Gem" doesn't yield to an exact definition, though we expect a lot out of it: if not always a no-hitter, at least a pretty good shutout and/or minimal hits. Not -- with all regard to anyone who increases the odds of the blimp being overhead for October night classes -- giving up two runs in 6 1/3 innings. I'm all for the sound of ash against horsehide, of manual typewriters, of rotary-dial phones being slammed down on the hopes of press agents, but let's have a little respect for the game here.