Nappy New Year
Some stories are destined to go around the world a few times. Take, for example, the story of 7-month-old Mi-Asia Anderson, the incredibly lucky baby who took a stray bullet in her diaper during the New Year’s Eve service at Memphis’ Greater Faith Tabernacle church. Most media outlets treated the story delicately, treating the near miss as the near tragedy it was. And then there’s Anorak.com, an online parody of the British tabloids, which sported the ridiculously no-nonsense headline, “Baby Catches Bullet In Her Nappy.”
Vanities
Marilyn Loeffel’s most recent “Right Perspective” column in The Commercial Appeal can be easily summarized: Crime is soaring because we’ve lost our regard for the sanctity of life and because we don’t kill nearly enough people: “Vendetta-style firing into a person’s home is pure cowardice,” the former county commissioner courageously stated before asking what may be the most accidentally hilarious question in history: “Have gangs and thugs become our mafias?”
“Even the fictional Corleone and Barzini families had a code of honor that left the women and children out of blood feuds,” Loeffel continued, confusing cinema and reality and showing a flagrant disregard for the films of Martin Scorsese in the process. First she blamed abortion for violent crime in Memphis. Then she blamed the infrequent use of the death penalty. Then she prayed that the senseless killing of 11-year-old Kentaria Traylor wasn’t “in vain.”
Headlinezilla
It’s only January and already we have a contender for most inexplicable headline of the year. Most papers that ran a recent AP story about the future of Scouting in America used headlines such as “Boy Scouts woo Hispanics into ranks” or “Boy Scouts Target Hispanic Recruits in South Bay.” The Commercial Appeal decided to go with this one: “Scouts honing survival skills on Hispanics.”
