Fun_People Archive
4 Dec
BONG Bull Bits No. 545!

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sat,  4 Dec 99 01:26:12 -0800
To: Fun_People
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Subject: BONG Bull Bits No. 545!

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Excerpted-from: BONG Bull No. 545!
From: Charles Stough <copyboy@dma.org>

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      THE BURNED-OUT NEWSPAPERCREATURES GUILD'S NEWSLETTER
                             BONG Bull
        Copyright (c) 1999 by BONG.   All rights reserved.
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THINGS TO DO IN SEATTLE WHEN YOU BLEED. A visiting reporter's
phrasebook for covering the riots:
   "You call that a billy club, officer? Why, in Chicago back in '68
-- ow, hey!"
   "Look, they set fire to it! We have to call the desk! Bartender,
better just make that a single!"
   "Sorry, can't quote you. Real anarchists don't wear underwear."
   "Yeah, you're right! The mountains look really pretty through a
gas mask!"
   "Those aren't maniacal revolutionaries! That's the local newspaper
interns' protest march!"
   "Every press conference is pretty much the same, but the labor
unions could teach the tree huggers a lot about buffets!"
   "Was this microbrewery trashed by radicals or is it supposed to
look like this?"
   "J. Edgar Hoover masks! Getcha red-hot J. Edgar Hoover masks!"


THE GAFFE BRIGADE, PART 289.  Richard A. Sherer <rasherer@ix.netcom.com>
recalled, "I was at the late and hardly lamented Los Angeles Herald Examiner
sometime in 1965 or 1966: The racing handicapper left the letter out of the
name of a horse that was the pick of the day for a Sunday race card. Since
it was the weekend, the mistake appeared in the racing charts in 14 pt type
in the Saturday and Sunday papers, a total of 17 editions, before a copy
cutter who was planning to spend the day at the track noticed it. The
horse's name was Some Count." Guess which letter was omitted from the second
word.
   -- Lois Breedlove <breedlov@cwu.edu> couldn't resist: "OK, I give in:
The Washington State University yearbook in the mid-1980s ran a feature of
the guys who lived out at the dairy barns to make money for college. The
staff had a very nice picture of one of the men hugging a cow under a
headline of 'My roommate the cow.' Unfortunately the yearbook publisher
swapped the photo with another." Which is how the bovine headline appeared
with the photo of the 40 women who lived in a certain dormitory.
   -- Harry F. Rosenthal of Washington, D.C., <harryros@erols.com> won't
let a pal forget. "In the early 1960s, when TTS replaced all- caps teletype
machines, all of us laboring for the Associated Press were forced to learn
and apply double underlines for cap letters.  With the huge amount of copy
handled by the east-west relay desk in the Kansas City bureau, this proved
taxing for even most experienced editor.  And so it was that in his haste,
my colleague Tom Turley, marked up a piece of copy to read ``Police found
Jimmy Marks on the door.''
   -- Ron Wolf of AScribe newswire <rwolf@ascribe.org> attests: "One of my
favorites occurred at the San Jose Mercury News shortly after the epidemic
of mysterious deaths in the Southwest caused by the previously unknown
hantavirus. I got to write one the early stories saying investigators
suspected that carrier of the virus was the deer mouse, a common rodent
found throughout the western states. An editor in need of art dug around in
the morgue for a photo. The story ran with a shot of a mouse deer, an
ungulate about two feet tall that dwells in the forests of Southeast Asia."
Wow, that explains the really small stuffed heads on the hunters' walls in
Albuquerque, Ron.
   -- Steve Myles of the daily (Nicosia) Cyprus Mail
<Stephen.Myles@cytanet.com.cy> offered: "This one was told to me when I
worked on a weekly paper in Portadown, N. Ireland, in 1973. It may of course
be apocryphal. The small ad read:
   "To John and Jane Doe, a son, Junior. One insertion only."
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