Unclear on the concept !
• Sending technology work to countries like India, China and Eastern Europe [Molly Callahan gets first-contribution honors!]
• Moore had received prompting through a microphone in her ear
• Engelhard’s director of corporate affairs said a jogger running behind a PZEV car equipped with PremAir would breathe cleaner air than if he or she were in front of it. [most likely he'd breathe it longer, too.]
• Mars' larger orbit means each sol is 39 minutes longer than an Earth day ... [When the city desk fixed this one, they described the fix as a “clarification.”]
• a sultry summer evening when neighbors spilled into the streets, mingling like never before
• the open-air roof
• Much of the Euclid Avenue project will be covered with federal money.
• Many of these contracts were signed during a crisislike atmosphere following Sept. 11 [if 9/11 didn't create a crisis, I wonder what would]
• Heavy rains turned the Cuyahoga River mud brown [it's usually purple]
• A man was found dead in an empty motel room Wednesday
[fact box:]
Baseball cap
HOW IT'S USED: Worn on head.
• Whiz down Perkins Avenue in Cleveland's MidTown, and the street looks and sounds like a typical industrial thoroughfare. [splashing noises, a wet spot.]
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Heads with 2 left feet
SCRAPPY SECONDS [Willoughby News Herald, in 60-point type -- on the vice presidents]
N.Y. mayor comes out
to support civil unions
Birth control coverage up, in part due to Viagra
Rumsfeld meets rival warlords in Afghan visit [Philly.com]
The card
you won’t
even need
to swipe
NETWORKS FIND REALITY HAS BECOME A PART OF LIFE [AP heading]
Neglect Swallowing Abandoned Cemeteries of South [eschew eating rugs, too]
Minnesota man
identified as body
in Dayton home
[Ole Sigurdsson denies it; "I’m not dead yet, he says"]
Scheme targets
stocks for illegal
naked short selling
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Typos!
• the state’s most high-profile gay marriage opponents, including Archbishop Sean O’Malley [what a difference a hyphen makes]
• mad cow-like diseases [think about what another hyphen might accomplish. Mooo!]
• Jeff Horvath, Cuyahoga County's chief brief inspector. [checking for boxers]
• urban flavor-seekers [dieting metrosexuals]
• the 10-year cost of the Medicare perspiration drug benefit Congress passed in November.[A half-trillion-dollar deficit would make me sweat, too.]
• If you know of any groups of Clevelanders who moved en masse to that area, please massage Marc Bona. [the medium is ...]
• Ohio Attorney General Jim Petrol. [oily]
• the matter will be a mute point.
• Our children schemed, plotted, alibied, and engaged in culvert activities [ditch diggers’ surprise party]
• If the allegation is proven true, Miller could face Senate censorship or criminal prosecution,
[why couldn’t it be persecution, and make it a 2-fer?]
• Department of Homeland Securities [now they're selling stock?]
• railroad police and state and local law enforcement officials and road the rail [well, it is the railROAD.-Mary Ann]
• perched atop a latter, [Hear about the barnyard tragedy? A former fell off a latter!]
• If the levy fails, the district will cut bussing to state minimums [Ohio, the kissing state]
• “I’m thankful for Pasado De Mino, the world’s greatest tenor [from Tim. And I mutter about MY name being slaughtered]
• a cash horde of at least $56.4 billion [verdigris tide]
• [just perfect, from Mary Ann:] homeowers
• a roadside telephone poll
• WCAX-TV poll of 403 likely voters (margin of error, plus or minus 5 percentage points):
Kerry: 53%
Bush: 40%
Unsure: 47% [voting the graveyards]
• As with all artwork, quilts must be of high quality and suitably hanged. We hope everyone enjoys the show. [But I don’t like to think about a well-hung quilt, either]
Top
The weird of the news!
•This category got really big this year. But then, it was an election year!
• Goodyear blimps get no respect. This year, one came loose from its moorings in California, drifted into a parked truck and nose-dived into a fertilizer pile beside a plant nursery.
• GM dropped the Saturn. It had “been unprofitable in 12 of the 13 years since it was founded in 1990 on the premise that better customer service and more employee input” would make money.
• A worker prompted a bomb scare at a Philadelphia rail yard with what turned out to be a motion detector he had set up to warn him when his boss was coming.
• This appeared in Lexington, Ky: "It has come to the editor's attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement," the clarification read in Sunday's editions. "We regret the omission."
Products:
• Snowmobiles with plastic skis that can be used only at night, because the sun damages the plastic;
• An entrepreneur P.T. Barnum would have admired has sold 20-acre parcels on the Moon to 2.5 million customers, collecting $6.75 million. He’s also working on creating his own “Galactic Government.”
• An area company that sells bobblehead dolls of Al Capone, weatherman Dick Goddard, first ladies John Kerry and President Bush said its best-seller is Anna Nicole Smith, followed by Jesus.
• Struggling with an airbag problem, Hyundai recommended that owners of affected cars tell passengers to sit in the back seat.
• Advertising writers in Florida were planning to pitch hemorrhoid-relief products with a commercial featuring Johnny Cash’s classic song “Ring of Fire,” but his family says there’s no way they’ll let it happen.
Cops:
• A couple of cops discovered they could keep prostitutes, drug dealers and gangs out of vacant buildings by making a stink: Ultimately they found a petroleum-based gel called SkunkShot on the Internet. “It’s pretty weird,” said the cop, “but it’s brilliant.”
• In Akron, Anthony Parker broke into a church and stole everything not nailed down. Not long afterward, the cops nailed him. He had been unable to peddle his haul, which included two eight-foot-tall reliquaries, which officers found while arresting a woman at his apartment. [eyes not only bigger than his stomach, bigger than his back seat.]
• A guy who stole 120 car keys from DeLorean Cadillac was caught when someone took a $61,500 Escalade a few days later. The satellite-equipped vehicle led cops on a 40-mile chase, but Mike McIntyre pointed out needn’t have bothered: the thief left a ransom note seeking $10 billion and provided his name and Social Security number for an easy bank transfer.
• And then there was the discovery that Cleveland Heights police routinely check folks’ trash; irritably, the chief complained that publicity would force his force to stop.
• Playboy model Carmella DeCesare, 22, was accused of assaulting a woman at a bar in Cleveland ... The bar? Tramp's.
• On Valentine’s Day, a woman dating a fellow drunk got into a fight with him. He went outside to smoke in front of the garage door. Taking the sitter home, she ran over him. Seeing what she had done, she put the car back into the garage. Arrested, she later left this message on the victim’s voice-mail: “If you're alive could you come and get me out of the First District Jail?” Alas, he wasn’t.
• A law student was caught trying to launder the proceeds (small bills, stained red) of a bank robbery by putting them one-by-one into the coin machine at a car wash. Accosted, he found he couldn’t run with 20 pounds of quarters spilling from his pockets. [Columbus turns out the best nuts, but we get a good one now and then]
• But the best, or worst of them all was in Marietta, Ga., where a couple of buddies went drinking and one of them felt sick on the way home. As the driver sped his pickup along the side of the road, he sideswiped a telephone pole guy wire, which took the passenger’s head off. Not noticing an ominous quiet from the passenger seat, the driver went home and went to bed; a passer-by reported the corpse.
Nuts:
• There was the guy who got rid of his wife’s rat collection by letting them go in the neighborhood.
• There was Mrs. Battle, who insisted that she had won the lottery but lost her ticket in the parking lot;
• There was competitive eater Coondog “David” O’Karma, who has been pestering his state senator to make the hamburger the state food;
• There was candidate Thomas Zych, who vowed to "abolish the tyranny of alphabetical order.”
Ohio, the Idiot State:
• Slaby said she opposes gambling, but would support gaming if enough proceeds benefitted Ohio schools.
• Phillips said Bush's Christianity keeps him grounded. "When he landed on that aircraft carrier after the war in Iraq started, he strutted. But it was a cute strut, a Christian strut," she said, chuckling.
• A Cleveland roofer became a Darwin Award nominee by clearing bricks, tools and debris from a waste chute by standing beneath it and shaking it. He died of head injuries, the coroner said.
• The get-out-the-vote effort came to the Lorain County jail. The sheriff wouldn’t let them in. "I'm not doing it. I am not changing my mind. This is my jail," he cried. After a day’s thought, he compromised.
• “I understand his desire to search for intelligent life in outer space, because obviously he doesn’t find it in the mirror in the morning.” [state administrator, announcing he had fired a programmer for using state servers in the Search for Exterrestrial Intelligence program. Probably the programmer would still have a job it he a) had asked permission; or b) had resisted bragging about it.]
• Someone scribbled on his door, “Hanlons Gone Your Next.” [even idiots need editors]
Lies, damn lies and statistics:
• Enough Lego blocks have been produced over the years to give an average of 52 to each person on Earth. [and America has consumed most of them!]
• [Hard work, hard time]: David W. Brankle, who robbed banks for a living for two years, got $175,141, or an average of $4,073 per robbery.
• A new government study found that about 2,500 people a year are treated in hospital emergency rooms for injuries incurred while using a toothbrush. Most of the injuries were caused by running or getting into a fistfight with one in your mouth.
• An estimated 972,372 bottles of urine are dumped on Ohio's roadsides each year. [That's not Mountain Dew! And avoid the plastic bags.]
• Sixty-one percent of American voters say they planned to watch Kerry's speech accepting the Democratic nomination on Thursday, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. [lies, statistics and damn lies].
• Flaggers or barrels will assist motorists. [Assist? Damn lie]
Top
Arts section
• principal dancer Alicia Graf was poignant in the role of the girl who falls to the floor.
• Abbado conducted in large, fluid gestures, sometimes drawing meaty sonorities
• In the book “Jazz Dance,” Marshall and Jean Stearns define the Shim Sham Shimmy as “a one-chorus routine to a 32-bar tune with eight bars each of the Double Shuffle, the Crossover, the Tack Annie (an up-and-back shuffle) and Falling Off a Log.” That sounds impossibly complex but “can easily be faked,” the Stearns wrote. [it's really butt simple.]
• “I developed a severe nosebleed in the lobby after the ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ performance, and I want to thank and express my gratitude to the man and woman, stayed by me until the bleeding stopped.” – Westlake
• old-school ramalam
• Byzantine prog-punk
• impressive soloistic say. [painterly piffle, say I]
• the uilleann pipes - a bellow-driven instrument [usually, someone bellows STOP THAT!]
• Whenever she wasn't touching the keyboard, she made Mozartian love to the orchestra through wild and desirous arm motions.
Top
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Names!
• Sir Richard Dearlove, head spy [sweet]
• Thomas Kindness, ex-congressman
• Michael Tumulty, Scottish music reviewer [loves the tumult]
• Dr. Floyd W. “Moby” Dick, Navy veteran and general practitioner
• John Grampa [imagine being grampa Grampa]
• Noah Hall, water expert
• Norman C. Humbarger, meat processor
• Marionette Richardson at the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission. [puppet.]
• Troy Brats, of Cuyahoga County Young Democrats
• Lisa Bottoms, Cuyahoga County Children and Family First Council [swats]
• Richard “Shakey” Harris, chief of the Licking County fire investigating team [Shakey evidence?]
• Pat Crank: Complaining about methamphetamine in Wyoming.
• Timothy Bungo Cleveland traffic commissioner [the Bungo squad!].
• Benjamin Grumbles, acting assistant administrator of the EPA
• Vice Adm. James Hull [notoriously stern, he takes a bow]
• Bunnatine Greenhouse, Army whistleblower [too sweet for role]
• Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who also goes by the names "Foopie," "Fupi" and "Ahmed the Tanzanian"
• Ruben Studdard, “American Idol”
• William Hung, “American Idol” loser
• Alan Heavens, astronomer
• Vito Terribile Wiel Marin, scientist who learned skull in Petrarch’s tomb belonged to a woman, assumed to be someone else. [terrible!]
• Dartanyan Fitch, born in 1973 — the year "The Three Musketeers" came out ...
• Mason Stockstill [You have to set up a post to see if he's moved.]
• Ken Tuck, deputy managing editor of The Dothan (Ala.) Eagle [wrong state]
Some names can’t be rendered in English:
• Fitsum Gebreegziabher
• "Beste Entwicklungsumgebung" programming prize.
• Parfait Mbaye Haiti communications minister... puts out puff pieces...
• Jeff Putz [one not to acknowlege in middle school.]
• Dominique Bidet/Paris Fire Department [this doesn't seem fair, but there it is]
• The Rev. Karen Dammann of Washington state, charged with practices “incompatible with Christian teaching” [you can't make these things up!]
• Charles Boggus, auto mechanic, [imagine buying a car at Boggus Motors]
• Henry Lie of the Harvard University Art Museum, says "It clearly is not a fake."
• Dan Longest, senior vice president for integrated marketing and promotion at the ABC television network division of ABC in New York [longest title, anyway.]
• R. Charles Muchmore Jr., Halliburton controller.
• Laura Soave Stoppe, marketing plans manager for Mercury sport utility vehicles. (no one named "stop" should be selling vehicles, even suavely.)
• Ed Silliere, an analyst at Energy Merchant [the analyses of consultants are silly, but his are sillier]
• Clint Stretch, director of tax policy at Deloitte
• Jose Rascal, an economist with Merrill Lynch
But my hat’s off to ...
• Al Gore and David Blood —for forming the investment firm of Blood and Gore
"
Top
Huh?
Leads from hell:
• The alphabet soup of health insurance and savings options has swelled by one, leaving many wondering how to spell relief.[one what, thumb?]
• Ragweed. The word alone is ugly enough to make your nose drip. [Rather snotty approach, I thought]
• Faculty at the University of Akron say when they last saw colleague Douglas Shaw on Wednesday afternoon, he was cheerful. But by early Thursday morning, police found Shaw dead.
• John H. Brant had a foolproof way to capture the attention of young boys and girls. He would show them that with just 10 cuts into a block of balsa wood, he could make a pair of pliers.[goo-o-o-lllly]:
• People of all walks, from busboys to bankers, will get the chance [busboys stagger a little. Bankers waddle]
• Bob Vila, meet Martha Stewart.
Two venerable icons and brands, Vila the pitchman for Sears Craftsman tools, and Stewart, the home-goods queen for Kmart, might be sharing shelf space at a Sears or Kmart near you. [It sounds as if they'll be sharing a cell!]
• Robinson is an early example of “reverse brain drain.” [where we got mental sludge before TV.]
• But at this rate, his strawberry fields will be rice patties. [tastes like cardboard]
• “There has also been some serious work done on making sure the body can absorb the energy of a crash while keeping the passenger compartment intact.” [whose body do you mean?]
• SYSTEM MESSAGE: does anyone have my moans attached to their headlist?
• NY-HIGHSPEED-TRAINS (New York) will not move [Nospeed trains]
Peter Piper Prize for Most Egregious Use of Alliteration:
• Sending secret intelligence and stratagems instantly to soldiers in battle would, in theory, make the military a faster, fiercer force against a faceless foe.
Top
Clabbered cliches!
•• “As they say in church, ‘You gotta show some sign,’ ” Smith said. “We’re answering the clarion call of the people.”
• Like most residents, they were not home when the fire broke out. But reality set in when their cell phones began ringing. [at work, i'm lost in a fantasy. story also boasted "blackened shell" and “charred remains”...
• Ohio’s new high-speed fiber-optic network puts the Buckeye State in the passing lane on the information highway, according to its architects.
• They also explored ways to bridge cultural gaps and stereotypical walls. [I think that I shall never see/a wall as lovely as a stereotype]
• The officials “used a veritable playbook of corporate fraud to cook the books every which way they could,” she said at a briefing in Brooklyn, N.Y. [it's widely known that if you try to cook with a playbook, you won't be successful]
• "We have inspectors all the time," Luis Reyes, the NRC's executive director for operations, said. "We are there where the rubber meets the road when it comes to inspections." [I hope so. Or we'll all be where the shit meets the fan.
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Danglers and other bad connections!
• • homeless attacks
• an explosive detecting portal [doesn' like your shoes, it explodes]
• garbage spewing punks [thud, thud, thug ...]
• artificial wall-climbing enthusiast [a robot that has hysterics on the hour]
• a teeming half-square mile — the other half is a circle
• Mario Massari, ornamental plasterer
• Letterman emerged from a car wearing dark sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, holding a cup of coffee and casually taking a phone call. [Would you buy a used man from this car?]
• “I feel like I’m being shot at all the time,” Morgenstern said, as bags of plastic foam packing peanuts laid [eggs?] on the floor next to his black medical bag. [He could stop stepping on them .. .]
• Neighbors sat in chairs in the back of pickup trucks parked in driveways waving Kerry signs [must have been asphalt. Concrete votes Republican]
Marcy Bollman, befriended co-worker
who was Japanese during WWII
[by the end of the war, the woman was Norwegian]
• John D. Ong, handpicked by Bush to be Norway's ambassador. [more American arrogance]
• Police spokeswoman Lt. Linda Kaspar said Franko was not seriously injured and treated at Huron Hospital. [denials, denials]
• The fire department will show children ladders and a rescue squad
• The company is ending efforts to develop Viagra for women who have trouble becoming sexually aroused because of conflicting results from studies involving about 3,000 women in the past eight years, [Why anyone would want a pill to make conflicting results arousing, I don't know. Maybe it's a talk radio thing]
Massive Baby Faire invades I-X Center
TOP
They said WHAT?
• “I’ve got energy up the wazoo,” said kicky 66-year-old Sister Dianne Skubby
• “Sleeping with David Beckham was a momentous day for me, not just a one night stand,” Marbeck, who now lives in Australia, was quoted as saying.
• “There is nothing in life we don’t use that is not in some way connected with hogs.”
• “We want to encourage people to confess,” Justice Antonin Scalia said. “Why do we want to encourage them to hire a lawyer so they will get off on an irrelevancy?”
Politics
• “The right-wing Republicans think the roads come from Jesus,” Democrat Ted Mondale, [tax-sharing in Minnesota]
• "It was the beginning of taking the rust off the belt of the town," Voinovich said.
• “We are dedicated to make Euclid a city of Euclidians," Euclid councilman. [perfectly square]
• One of the few down sides of living in paradise is that God gives us hurricanes from time to time," Bush said. "But it is still paradise." -- Jeb Bush.
• “You either quit and go to Monterey and watch whales,” he says, “or you go into electoral politics.” Ralph Nader, on why he runs.
• “It never made sense to me as a banker and somewhat of an intelligent guy,” Andrzejewski said. [Eastlake councilman. supported building stadium that city can't afford.]
• “If funded properly, I would have supported building the park.” [truer words never spoken, from a rival.]
• “Giving a few more dollars to a TANF family isn’t going to help them,” welfare administrator Tom Hayes
• "You can buy a lot of love with $50 million," said LaTourette, [Doesn't mind spelling it out.]
• "It is 18 days before an election. It is also clear that my opponent will enlist the help of any cretin, slimeball or degenerate, including the Ohio Democratic Party." [LaTourette, threatening to get mad, after private eye releases photos of him at home of girlfriend Jennifer Laptook]
Crime
• Bernice Smith said her son told her he would return. “But he never came home,” Smith said. “He was a typical boy.”
• "He’s not a mean alcoholic, she said. He’s a fun alcoholic." Girlfriend, of man who beat and stomped a bigger man to death in a fight .
• "I'm really a good guy with a good heart." Kid who robbed baseball player
Animals
• “My friends think it’s crazy to get this excited about a bull,” said Brenda Schnell, 51, “I love him as much as Sean Connery.”
• "I named it Pocohantas because it pokes its head in and out" — girl who adopted turtle.
• "I applaud the people that are trying to save species that are endangered, but it might be good that we don't have dinosaurs now. We've gotten oil from the dinosaurs. If we had preserved the dinosaur, we wouldn't have that oil." — lobbyist Gretchen Borck
• "A third of everybody who sells a home in Cuyahoga County moves out," said Tom Bier [two thirds retire to the cellar]
• "If the public wants grass mowed and restrooms clean, that's what we should be providing them, and that's what we'll do our best to provide." — park director. [if the public wants to jump off a cliff, would you do that, too?]
• "We need surgical masks, water and food," said Frantz Bernier, who was burning tires to protest the lack of government help. "We don't have anything." [so, how does burning tires help, again?]
Insight of the year:
• "You only have two armpits." Barbara Hulit, a vice president at the Boston Consulting Group who runs the firm's global packaged goods business. [I think I've collected this before. But why would anyone say something like this twice?]
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Readers, gotta love 'em
• “One would think women would keep public restrooms a little neater and not be so messy. Ladies, ladies, get a grip!” — Cleveland
• "I wanted to thank the young couple who, at the Heart concert, turned around and gave me a pair of drumsticks that they had gotten from the band, to give to my husband. The gesture of kindness that they showed cannot be expressed in words." - Garfield Heights [needs life]
• “It’s hard to decide. I’ll miss them all. Without ‘Frasier,’ ‘Friends’ and ‘Sex in the City,’ I couldn’t make it. Basically, I’d have no life at all without them.” – Parma Heights [he's right about that!]
Valentine’s day memories:
• My boyfriend of 1-1/2 years took me out to dinner and broke up with me on Valentine’s Day, but then two months later, I met the wonderful man who is now my husband, and he is now the love of my life.
• My lovely wife sitting by my side drinking a beer with me. Cleveland [But did he ever take her dancing? Huh.]
• Mine was the day my husband of 56 years got down on his knees and asked me to marry him. [waited a while, didn’t he? ]
• "I'm thankful for the person who stops when you run out of gas." - Independence [owns Gas Tank of Dorian Gray]
• “I’m thankful for my parents. They keep me grounded.” – Olmsted Falls
• Because of what is going on in the world today, it could be changed if the bad people doing bad things would pray to God for forgiveness and then learn to dance the polka.” – City unknown
• “Imagine Bush wants to send humans to Mars and the Moon. This is why we’re having all the flooding. Stay off the Moon and Mars. Be ready for the world to end.” – Rocky River
Should parents be required to buy a Browns ticket for a baby?
• "Yes, I think they should pay for their ticket. You're not allowed to smoke in there, I don't think screaming kids should be allowed in there." - Parma
Who's your favorite movie monster?
• Frankenstein is my favorite monster because he reminds me of my husband, who’s big and mean, but he’s a big softie on the inside. Cleveland
• My favorite is my wife, and she’s still alive. Strongsville
• Michael Moore -- Parma
• "Shame on Channel 8 and Tops Supermarkets for their ridiculous turkey bowling! Throwing turkeys to knock down cans of cranberries and vegetables when Cleveland has families that must go to shelters for Thanksgiving dinner is obscene!" — Rocky River
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(sail back)
