Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

We still have time to mess this up!

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

T R E 4 5 O N

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Come on, man.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Their freedom requires your slavery.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You are here: Home / Humorous / Derp! [Updated!]

Derp! [Updated!]

by | 75 Comments

This post is in: ,

Copy editing FAIL

I died of many laughters:

Open Thread.

UPDATE: TooManyJens pointed out that this is an old headline from a student newspaper. I reckon it’s making the rounds again because of this:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said definitively on Monday that President Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill will not be brought to the floor as a package, despite repeated calls from the White House to move on his legislation.
“The president continues to say, ‘Pass my bill in its entirety,’ and as I’ve said from the outset, the all-or-nothing approach is just unacceptable, and I think from a purely practical standpoint, the president’s got some whipping to do on his own side of the aisle,” Cantor told reporters.
Instead, Cantor said the House will move forward on legislative initiatives in October in which there is some agreement between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue: making permanent the 3 percent withholding provision for government contractors included in Obama’s jobs bill; passage of three long-stalled trade pacts with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea; further repeal of regulations restricting business; and a bill coming out of the Financial Services Committee that will increase small business owners’ access to capital.
“All of these things the president has spoken about and represents areas of commonality where we can boost economic growth and produce an environment for job creation,” Cantor said.
Movement on the trade bills is the most significant announcement. Aides to Cantor said a more detailed announcement was expected as early as Monday afternoon outlining how Congress will move forward on the trade pacts.

Phew! A quick save by me. I’m totally current, y’all. You’ve heard about “lolcats,” right?

[cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]

Reader Interactions

75Comments

  2. 2.

    PhoenixRising

    Citation or it’s photoshopped.

    There is no editor that backward in America. Seriously?

  3. 3.

    trollhattan

    Hah! That’s not fail, baby, that’s WIN (as in somebody snuck that by, successfully). Nominee for BJ rotating header status.

    Nice catch. :-)

  8. 8.

    Citizen_X

    Pretty much gets to the meat o’ the matter, doesn’t it?* Hell, it kind of sums up the last three years.

    *What I did there, U see it?

    ETA: @TooManyJens: Holy crap, you see? It’s from January 2009! And it’s still true in late 2011.

  15. 15.

    fasteddie9318

    @taylormattd: Well clearly she’s using this newspaper “headline” to continue to shame Godly Real Americans by perpetuating the femislamunistofascist myth that the male organ can extend beyond the three inches that we know is its physical limit. Jesus’ General clued me into this kind of garbage a long time ago.

  16. 16.

    tom

    The article is from the Eastern Echo, the student newspaper of Eastern Michigan University. It originally ran a couple of years ago, but makes the rounds every so often.

    EDIT: TooManyJens #7 beat me to it.

    And, by the way, though the article’s author and I share the same name, I am not he.

  18. 18.

    RalfW

    That’s actually copy editing success. It is, however, senior editor fail.

    Copy editors often try to work in headlines that are clever, this one’s just a bit more edgy than some. Senior news editors fairly often put the quash on the fun. Not sure how this got thru.

  19. 19.

    Catsy

    That’s an oldie but a goodie. And it works on so many levels.

    I spent the last four days having a blast at BrickCon 2011, a convention for adult Lego enthusiasts that happens every year around this time at the Seattle Center. Along with 500 other AFOLs, I exhibited a number of my creations (including my Lego GLaDOS, from Portal 2), got to spend time with out-of-state (and -country) friends I only get to see at BC, and came home with much loot.

    I still get a little weirded out at the whole experience of having fans. I pose for pictures and things like that when they ask because it’s meaningful to them, but it always feels a little uncomfortable and pretentious.

    Oh, and for the third year in a row my arms are killing me from toting this rifle around for the public hours on Sat and Sun. I swear, this will be the year that I build myself a shoulder strap for it. I just need a few thousand 4L bars and U-clips…

  20. 20.

    Geoduck

    @RalfW:

    Not sure how this got thru.

    From my limited experience in the field, when you’re frantically pasting the paper together at two in the morning so you can get it off to the printers, it’s real easy for stuff to get through.

  22. 22.

    low-tech cyclist

    Lili Von Shtupp: Tell me, schatze, is it twue what they say about the way you people are… gifted?
    [sound of zipper opening]
    Lili Von Shtupp: Oh, it’s twue. It’s twue. It’s twue, it’s twue!

    Sorry, couldn’t resist. :)

  23. 23.

    Amir Khalid

    @RalfW:
    It’s a pity that you’d never see this sort of headline in a stuffy, full-of-itself Newspaper Of Record like the New York Times. You don’t need it on every story, since that would kill the joke by overuse; but it would certainly put a smile on a reader’s face. And who knows, that might sell an extra copy or two.

  24. 24.

    frogspawn

    I still like the BBC Web classic “Naked Playboy Airwoman Faces Probe” from a few years back. I wish I’d taken a screenshot because it wasn’t up long.

  26. 26.

    Catsy

    By the way, I utterly failed to get any BrickCon photographs the entire time–I told myself I’d do that on Sunday before public hours, overslept, and then found that my camera battery had drained completely anyway. Next time I get my photos in on Friday or Saturday so that I have time to go home and charge if I need to.

    Nonetheless, I did manage to find a nice shot of GLaDOS taken by someone else on Flickr. When I originally photographed her to post online, I built an ugly, makeshift Technic support structure to hold her up that was never intended to be seen. So when it came time for BrickCon, I realized I had no way to display her to the public without using that horrible Technic frame. In the space of a few hours on Friday (and after running home to grab parts) I managed to throw together a decent-looking support structure, and paired it with my custom Chell minifig and an older Portal vignette to make a scene that I think came out really well:

    Lego Portal/GLaDOS at BrickCon 2011

    Photo credit to Kelly McKiernan; link goes to his photostream. More BrickCon photos in the BrickCon group pool.

  27. 27.

    Davis X. Machina

    I remember being informed back in the ’80’s that the Boston Bruins had been reduced to using their backup goalie when the Herald greeted us with “Bruins To Play Series With Peeters Out.”

  34. 34.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Amir Khalid: Yes. But it was damned uncomfortable. Ice hockey involves, you know, ice.

    AP had a classic in the late ’70’s from the early probes sent to the outer planets: “Satellite Reveals Gaseous Rings May Circle Uranus”. That one was on the fridge for years.

  36. 36.

    Raven (formerly stuckinred)

    @ABL: We were in LA and went to that nutty eatery in San Pedro. My pal flew down from Bezerkely to the Long Beach Airport so we was just bumpin around that area.

  37. 37.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @evinfuilt:

    I, and my circle of regular once a week have dinner together friends, were all hoping beyond hope that those would be Obama’s first words into the microphone on 20 January 2009.

    Alas, didn’t happen. But wouldn’t it have been utterly boss if it were?

  38. 38.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Davis X. Machina:

    An actual sports section headline during the 70’s in The Oregonian, for an OSU/SoCal basketball game:

    “Beavers unimpressed by Trojans.”

  41. 41.

    Gromit

    @Catsy:

    Catsy, if you don’t mind my asking, how do you accumulate all the parts for your lego models? Do you just buy thousands of dollars in kits? Do you use DesignByMe to stock up on specialized pieces? Is there some kind of gray-market in individual pieces?

    I’ve spent more money on Lego kits for my son than I care to contemplate, including the Hero factory sets, which offer a pretty awesome variety of pieces, and I still have most of my old pieces from when I was a kid, but I still can’t imagine being able to put together anything like what guys like you do.

    Speaking of which, I’m sure you’ve seen this, but this is pretty incredible.

  42. 42.

    JGabriel

    National Journal:

    Instead, Cantor said the House will move forward on legislative initiatives in October in which there is some agreement between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue: … further repeal of regulations restricting business protecting consumers

    Minor fix for a typo there. Don’t know why Republicans always make that mistake.

    .

  43. 43.

    El Cid

    Half of Republican internet fankids don’t know what “GOP” stands for, but By God, don’t you get in between them and their e-bumperstickers!

    Just more than half of Republicans (51 percent) and 45 percent of Americans overall correctly identify the meaning of “G.O.P.” as Grand Old Party. The second most popular choice, with 35 percent of the overall vote, was “Government of the People.”
    __
    “Grumpy Old People” received 7 percent of the vote, “God’s Own Party” 3 percent, and 1 percent thought the abbreviation stood for “Gauntlet of Power.”

    Personally I prefer those Republicans who think their own party is nicknamed “Grumpy Old People,” which is fairly correct except the leaving out of the “White” and “Confederate-friendly” parts.

  46. 46.

    TooManyJens

    “The president continues to say, ‘Pass my bill in its entirety,’ and as I’ve said from the outset, the all-or-nothing approach is just unacceptable, and I think from a purely practical standpoint, the president’s got some whipping to do on his own side of the aisle,” Cantor told reporters.

    “Excuse me while I whip this out bill” – Obama

  47. 47.

    Catsy

    @Gromit: A lot of my parts do come from sets, but the vast majority I’ve gotten either from Pick-a-Brick or Bricklink.

    PaB is a section of the Lego retail stores where they have surplus elements of various colors and types on a wall. You pay a flat price for a given volume (typically around $8 for a small cup and $15 for a large one) and can take home whatever you fit in it as long as the lid closes. Obviously it’s more cost effective to get small parts this way rather than large ones. There is also an online PaB, but there you are paying per part rather than by volume, and it is usually a little more expensive than Bricklink.

    Bricklink is the “gray market” of which you speak–it’s kind of like eBay for Lego; it functions as an intermediary for people to buy and sell new and used parts. For certain parts–especially older ones that are no longer made, or even current parts in large quantities–there’s simply no other way.

    I also sometimes get parts in quantity from “drafts”, which is where (typically) between four and ten people each bring the same set, we sort each part and color into separate bins, and everyone takes a turn picking a bin. So for example, on Saturday night we drafted #7326 Rise of the Sphinx, which contains two pearl gold cheese slopes (slang term for 1×1 slopes), which are hard to come by. There were 11 people drafting, so when I picked that bin I got 22 of those slopes. Win.

    And yes, I just saw the Lancer this morning on The Brothers Brick. That is an absolutely killer build.

    Edit: FYWP! Fucking worthless moderation filter.

  48. 48.

    Sasha

    Add obligatory GOP talking points of having said packages “rammed down their throats” and you’ve got comedy platinum.

  56. 56.

    Gilles de Rais

    Funny how no one even bothers to ask Boehner what’s going on with the House anymore.

  61. 61.

    wesindc

    LOL ABL don’t feel bad. I’ve seen this same pic on several other sites the last couple days. The internet isn’t endless and tends to warp in on itself at times.

  62. 62.

    Catsy

    Is there any way that an administrator can adjust the settings of the moderation filter so that it doesn’t do ridiculous bullshit like flagging posts solely because they have three or more links in them? It’s an idiotically small threshold for a site where people routinely post comments with multiple links, and where merely using the Reply code adds a link in and of itself.

    And if that’s not possible, how about at long last replacing the spam filter with one that wasn’t written by an incompetent CompSci dropout?

  64. 64.

    Comrade Mary

    @geg6: Junod got a lot of hate elsewhere for his Rolling Stone Stewart profile. (True, the writing was rather cutesy and florid — not his best writing by a longshot — but the Stewart fans just hated any criticism of him.)

  65. 65.

    Amir Khalid

    Some encouraging news from the Grauniad’s Occupy Wall Street liveblog, in the wake of the Brooklyn Bridge incident, which seems to have been the work of provocateurs:

    3.37pm: Occupy Wall Street have published the minutes from today’s direct action working group, which appears to have considered how protesters can learn from Saturday.
    __
    Four new march procedures have been listed, which organisers presumably hope will help to avoid arrests on the scale we saw at the weekend:
    __
    1. Training for pacers who while help keep the march controlled and protestors safe will be held 30 minutes before each march.
    2. Announce march guidelines to protestors five minutes before march begins. If possible, hand out march guidelines flyer with legal information on it.
    3. Announce the end of planned march at the endpoint.
    4. Should an autonomous action take place during the march that is illegal, pacers need to immediately inform crowd of their options.

    These guys look like they really know what they’re doing.

  66. 66.

    Ash Can

    @Jay in Oregon: What slays me about that bit is that the doofus with the mic is trying to defend Fox by saying, “Hey, we’re out here interviewing you and giving you a chance to be heard; would a real propaganda outlet do that?” And when it comes to actually airing the segment, which would be what gets the guy, ya know, actually heard, well… ::crickets::

  73. 73.

    Gromit

    @Catsy:

    Yeah, I’ve seen the pick-a-brick wall at a couple of Lego stores (the one at Downtown Disney was pretty big). I always say I’m going to buy a bucket, but somehow never do. My son is still a bit too young to see the value in it, opting instead for the build-a-minifig station.

    Interesting stuff about drafts and such. Thanks for the info.

    Do you ever use the Lego Digital Designer?

  74. 74.

    Catsy

    @Gromit: No, but I know people who do–sometimes just to get the parts! It’s generally not very cost effective for that purpose.

    Right now I’m brainstorming a collaborative Portal Test Chamber display for BrickCon 2012, and I’m using MLCAD to design the chamber modules and develop a parts list. MLCAD is a popular Lego CAD program that works as a front end to the LDraw parts database. (http://www.ldraw.org)

  75. 75.

    Gromit

    Okay, you just blew my mind. I was impressed by the Digital Designer, but this ldraw stuff is incredible. I had no idea.

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