His charisma is killing me

I was walking past a stack of newspapers on my way to the printer this morning when I saw a headline out of the corner of my eye that literally stopped me in my tracks:



"Obama's Charm Offensive."

Man, I thought, you just can't win with some people, no matter what you do. People are offended that he's a nice guy who's good with people?

Then I caught the subhead: "Radically different from Rahm." Wait, I thought Rahm was the offensive one. I'm so confused.

Luckily there was a second subhead that shed more light: "Republicans clearly flattered by personal calls." And suddenly I got it. "Offensive" is a noun here, not a verb. He's waging a charm campaign. Killin' 'em with kindness. Ha ha!

I immediately remembered the list of funny actual headlines we got in one of my college journalism classes -- things like "Iraqi Head Seeks Arms" and "Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge" and "Kids Make Nutritious Snacks." In fact, I just found a similar list here:

Funny Newspaper Headlines:

• Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
• Safety Experts Say School Bus Passengers Should Be Belted
• Survivor of Siamese Twins Joins Parents
• Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
• Eye Drops off Shelf
• Reagan Wins on Budget, But More Lies Ahead
• Shot Off Woman's Leg Helps Nicklaus to 66
• Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Axe
• Two Soviet Ships Collide, One Dies
• Two Sisters Reunited after 18 Years in Checkout Counter
• Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
• Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge
• Deer Kill 17,000
• Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
• New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
• Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
• Chef Throws His Heart into Helping Feed Needy
• Fire British Union Finds Dwarfs in Short Supply
• Ban On Soliciting Dead in Trotwood
• Lansing Residents Can Drop Off Trees
• Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half New
• Vaccine May Contain Rabies
• College Opens Doors to Hearing
• Old School Pillars are Replaced by Alumni
• Include your Children When Baking Cookies
• Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
• Bank Drive-in Window Blocked by Board
• British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands
• Air Head Fired Steals Clock, Faces Time
• Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms
• Farmer Bill Dies in House
• Teacher Strikes Idle Kids
• Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash
• Probe Told Miners Refuse to Work after Death
• Drunken Drivers Paid £1000
• War Dims Hope for Peace
• If Strike isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last a While
• Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
• Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft

(This list also kind of reminds me of some e-mail forwards I got circa 1998, back when it was cool to forward funny jokes and I would even print some of them out and put them in a binder -- true story. Didn't grasp the whole Internet thing at all back then.)

Anyway, I'm kind of proud to have discovered my very own unintentionally funny headline.

And here's another thing about this front page that you might have found interesting: the picture of the guy with the white hair. Um, that's not Rahm. Or Barack. Did they get mixed up and put someone else's picture under that headline? Nope. Turns out that pictures belongs with the story BELOW it, headlined "Larson: I'm not afraid of Speaker."

Note to editor of The Hill newspaper: Might be time for a small chat with your copyeditors and layout folks. (Try not to be too offensive, though.)

Salaam alaykum

This is how awesome/nerdy my family is: A week or so after I got home from Egypt, Jordan and Israel, we used freeconference.com to set up a conference call. It included a web feature where they could all see my desktop, and I walked them through roughly 400 (out of 1500 ... ) pictures I'd taken. And not only were they actually interested right up to the end, they were jumping in with additional wikipedia info on things I didn't know!

I won't put all of you through that, but I will post a few pics and highlights here (an even better album of the best pictures with soon-to-come captions is here here):

I am a n3rd

I can't help it -- I love this (from John Tierney's column at NYT):

Q: Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the other doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, 'Do you want to pick door No. 2?' Is it to your advantage to take the switch?

A: Yes! I know, I know, I couldn't get my mind around this. But check it out -- play the game here and then read the explanation at the end. If you do it enough times you see the pattern -- 33% success rate if you don't change, 66% if you do!