Book of the Dumb Headlines
Posted on June 20, 2003 Posted by John Scalzi 7 Comments
I spent most of the day writing articles for The Book of the Dumb, and while I can’t share those with you right at the moment, I thought you might enjoy the headlines to some of the articles. Puzzle at their context-free non-sequitur-ositiy! Contemplate what they might be about! Pre-order the book! (Actually, you can).
Anyway, headlines:
* And Iowa’s Streets Will Flow Cornhusker Red!
* Later in the Day, The NRA Went Through The Halls Shooting Blanks
* You Know, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Had a Fabulous Singing Voice
* For Extra Credit, Fight Off the Burly Cellmate Who Calls You “Girlfriend”
* And Every Sunday, She Buys New Pumps To Dance on His Grave
* On The Other hand, Give Them 15 Minutes And You’ll Have a Danielle Steele Novel
* 50,000 Volts Is Just God’s Way of Telling You to Play Through
* First We Take Austria. Then Lichtenstein Will Fall Like a Plump Grape.
* Also, When You Send Your Pet Cow to Kansas City, Don’t Expect it to Go Sightseeing
* Hakencreuzing For a Bruising
Yeah, I’m having fun.
Well, it certainly looks like you are having a good time. I do feel compelled to tell you, though, that Hakenkreuz is spelled with 2 Ks and is pronounced sort of like hahken-kroits.
FYI: http://www.bartleby.com/61/wavs/78/H0017800.wav
So it doesn’t rhyme with bruising at all.
Um…
– some sort of drunkenness thing?
– school shooting and/or NRA idiocy
– Um… no
– Credit card fraud gone wrong
– Money-related, stupid boyfriend thing?
– All’s I can think of here is the Infinite Monkey Theorum (aka “Danielle Steele’s writing process”)
– Playing golf during a storm
– Probably related to the Thirty Years War
– Uh… probably *not* Wizard of Oz…
– WTF is Hakkencreuz?
(I’m way off, aren’t I?)
Oh yeah, on the theme of dumbness, I heard on the radio a while ago they were polling for Worst Driver in Canberra. Some woman rang in to nominate her 17-year-old son: why? Because, late at night, half-pissed, he decided to “drag” with the blokes in the car beside him. Alas, the car beside him was an unmarked police car, and they weren’t too amused.
Iowans are Hawkeyes. Nebraskans are CornHuskers.
Zelda: I know. Remember — you’re missing the context.
So John: was I close?
Two of them are very close, Mark. But to drive you completely insane, I won’t tell you which two.
I know I’m late to the party, but I wanna play!
*I didn’t know there was a border war between Iowa and Nebraska. (The one between Minnesota and Wisconsin grabs all the headlines).
*NRA? Dang, misread it as NBA. Thought the rate of missed free-throws had skyrocketed…
*And I thought they gave free passes OUT of the Gulag for prisoners who “sing”.
*They gave up on educating prisoners to be good citizens and are now trying to teach them to be better prisoners.
*You’ve made a psychic connection with John Belushi and he really regrets doing that “last survivor of SNL” sketch. (John Edward Scalzi? Yikes!)
*It’s that ‘monkeys writing Shakespeare’ meme, isn’t it? What are the monkeys in that experiment doing these days… besides blogging?
*Hey, the combined five-iron/cattle prod is very useful on many Midwestern courses.
*Lichtenstein fell like a plump grape long ago. Now it’s a plump raisin.
*Sing along! Everything’s up to date in Kansas City!
They’ve gone about as fur as they can go!
For fifty cents you can buy a…. uh… nevermind.
*I used to Hakencruez, but this new wonder drug cleared it all up (however I still have a krebulous discharge from my hangunschleugen, and an occasional recurrance of Schadenfreude)
But I digress.
What I really wanted to know is:
Apparently, Amazon already knows that the book you’re writing is going to be 320 pages long.
What happens if you’re right in the middle of a really good story when you hit 320?