As far as I can ascertain, it garnered no reaction whatsoever (confirming certain suspicions about readership of sports items).
Somehow, this line got by me, two other staff writers, my editor and the entire copy desk:
"When the flowers and leaves of the cannabis plant are smoked (in a pipe or cigarette) or eaten, it produces a high, but has some side effects like memory loss, dizziness, rapid heartbeat, loss of coordination, memory loss and increased appetite."
Needless to say, I took a lot of ribbing from my friends (since I did smoke it at the time), but never mentioned it to anyone at the paper.
I thought the whole thing had blown over until I got a call from a very observant reader about a month after the story ran.
"Did you see Jay Leno last night?" the reader asked.
"No," I replied, "Why?"
"The memory loss line from your marijuana story made it on to Headlines. How did you ever slip that into the story?" the reader queried.
"It wasn't intentional," I snapped, "How the heck did Leno find out about it?"
"I submitted it," he laughingly replied. He thought it was hysterical.
In retrospect, it was.
I wasn't so amused, as I did not want to arouse any suspicion about my extra-curricular activities. It was a "drug-free workplace" and I had narrowly passed the pre-employment drug screen a couple years prior.
Sure enough, I visited the Headlines Web site and there it was, as plain as day.
As far as I know, no one at the paper ever found out about it. If they did, they never told me. Now that I'm out of the newspaper biz, I can air my confession to the world.
2. The large male news reader, following a story about pizza toppings, turned to the petite female news reader, and intoned "whatever you do, don't mess around with my sausage". 3. The petite female news reporter, twice in one story, referred to a gathering of ambassadors at that big building in Manhattan as a "Neat-o meeting".
Then again, what's that phrase? Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, or something.
"I haven't had sex in 29 days, and I'm hard as a rock."
After we stopped whimpering and picked ourselves up from the floor, we decided to let it run, on the theory that 1) we'd never get another chance to put a quote that good in a newspaper; 2) when you're only making $210 a week, you don't have much to lose., and 3) who the hell was going to read eight paragraphs of quotes from Roxell (Rocky) Mosely Jr. anyway?
Karyn ColomboCopy EditorCommercial Real Estate Directkaryn.colombo@ipgdirect.com
Gogarty -- who penned the immortal limerick about Khartoum, the last lines of which are the oft-quoted "they argued all night over who had the right to do which and with what and to whom" -- also wrote some serious and important poems and literary criticism, none of which are remembered.
About six or seven years ago, just after Thanksgiving, about 7 or 8 of us copy editors on rim were talking about all the puns headed our way for the holidays. Instead of wearily fighting them off, we decided to embrace them, hoping people would get the message with some reverse psychology. We decided to have a contest: See who could get the phrases *'tis the season ...* and *Santa's little helpers* into display type the most often. Losers had to buy drinks for the winner, or something like that.
Well, on Dec. 24 (the final night of competition), I was pulling a rare slot shift and was winning by one cliche. My closest competitor (now a New York Times editor!) sent a *'tis the season* over. Naturally, I rejected it on the grounds it was TOTALLY inappropriate for the story. He cried foul, but I said it was completely fair. I stood firm. For third edition, he just sent his headline to the backshop directly, bypassing me. But because he was new on the desk, he didn't quite know how to pull this off without me noticing. I let it sit there until a few minutes before deadline and had the headline physically pulled off the page.
He didn't learn until Christmas Day his sneak attack failed, and I was the winner. Our regular slot, upon learning of our contest, said she was puzzled about why so many cliches were coming at her all of a sudden, given our usual efforts to never write them and remove as many as possible!
