Headline writing is a neglected art, as I observed today reading my local newspaper. It seems that today’s generation of editors just does not know how to write a good headline. There was a time when headlines conveyed much of the tone of a publication, and some papers had such a distinctive style that you could instantly know a headline came from that particular source. A good example would be the staccato Hollywood alitterations of Variety magazine. I think the best headline I ever saw was a parody of this style in a Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s, it read “Lax Styx Wax Clicks.” The headline is incomprehensible unless you read the article, where it is revealed the band Styx had not produced an album in several years, and the new album is a hit.
Headline writing has a long tradition of stylistic conventions. I remember my first training in headline writing in a journalism class. We got handouts of long lists of common verbs, with synonyms sorted by length in ems. You’d find a word like “win” and you’d find a list of dozens of synonyms that you could choose to shorten or lengthen the head to fit the space. It took quite a bit of skill at copyfitting and some artistic ability to say as much as possible in a short headline. But the average hack just used the list to rotate verbs once in a while to keep the headlines from sounding stale. Unfortunately, your average hack will also drive those synonyms into the ground. Look at your average sports page and see how many times you see relatively disused and odd synonyms for “win” or “defeat.”
I particularly began paying attention to headlines when I started reading Japanese newspapers, the styles are entirely different. Headlines often omit verbs, leaving the reader to complete the sentence. Long complex word structures are often abbreviated with a string of even more complex kanji. The main headline may not be the primary focus, a subhead may be the core story. I remember reading a headline of an airline crash in the US, the top of the page had a massive bold headline, “No Japanese Killed.” The secondary, much smaller headline said “250 People Killed in Airliner Crash in US.”
I’ve found that as I read more Japanese, some of my English writing skills deteriorate. My essays tend to be written in kishotenketsu style, which is not really very straightforward. My headlines are dull, they start with dull words like “the” and use cliches like “The Art of..” I haven’t decided on proper capitalization rules. So I’m going to go back to school and dig up my 25-year-old papers on the art of headline writing. Some research in Strunk & White and the AP Stylebook seem to be in order.
Author: Charles
The World Has Gone Mad: Pat Buchanan Makes Sense
The world has surely gone mad when I find myself agreeing with conservative nutcases like Pat Buchanan. He argues that the terrorists will win, and that the US should give them what they want: an end to US support for the corrupt Saudi dictators.
The Whole Warhol
Bravo channel is running an amazing documentary at this very moment, The Whole Warhol. It’s replaying later tonight so be sure to catch it if you can. This show has everything, but my favorite part is the tour through Warhol’s personal archives.
I’m especially a fan of Warhol’s earliest works when he still painted everything himself, his later mass-produced Pop works don’t interest me as much. I used to live down the street from the LA MOCA Temporary Contemporary museum, they had a nice collection of early Warhol paintings, one of my favorites is an odd painting of shoeprints with numbers on them, as in a diagram of a dance step. Warhol didn’t really return to this style of working until he collaborated with Basquiat, shortly before he died.
My all-time favorite Warhol image is a photograph my sister showed me in a Parsons School class catalog. It shows Warhol attending a drawing class at Parsons, there is a row of drawing tables with students working in the background. In the center, Andy with his black clothes and shock-white wig, is standing next to the model: a partially dissected cadaver, hanging by chains from a huge metal tripod.
41 Things To Do on the Worst Day of Your Life
When I used to live in Downtown Los Angeles, I used to walk a lot and I’d encounter random documents that blew around in the streets. I had a habit of picking up and reading almost anything, but I never found a document quite like this one.
One day my girlfriend Susie and I were walking from Traction Avenue in the Loft District towards Little Tokyo. I remember we were in a horrible mood of gloom and despair, some major disaster had struck. I can’t remember what the disaster was, but since we were starving artists it probably had something to do with money. We were walking in the blazing hot sun along a disused industrial street when I found a brochure stuck in the weeds. I picked it up and read it, and I couldn’t stop laughing. Susie thought I’d gone crazy, then I showed it to her, and she couldn’t stop laughing either.
MacOS X Web Badge
I decided to make a proper MacOS X web badge, since even Apple didn’t have one that fits their own usage guidelines. Apple had a nice badge for “Mac OS X Server” so I chopped it apart and fixed it up. It’s a little wider than it needs to be, but I decided that it should match the width of the Moveable Type badge. If anyone wants to use the badge, go ahead and grab it.
Site Rework
It should be obvious I fixed up the site graphics. I decided to sit down and learn CSS so I could lay in some background patterns. I hope this design is visually pleasing, but I don’t know if it will look good on everyone’s monitor. If you have any comments then please click the comments link at the bottom of this messange and tell me your opinion. It would be really easy to change things, it’s fun. Oops, I just noticed, all my little horizontal lines don’t line up. I’ll have to RTFM a bit more.
For my next trick, I’m trying to set up an internal email link so you can send private comments internally. This will require sendmail, so I’m moving carefully and slowly. It would be really easy to set up a cgi script to run sendmail that would be a huge security hole for spammers.
Spam Fighting
I just sat down and wrote my first procmail scripts. I put the top 10 spammers in a special pre-processor to send them straight to /dev/null. Now their spam doesn’t go through the SpamBouncer filters and waste further CPU time. With a little tuning, I can send more spam straight to hell, and less will remain to be filtered by SpamBouncer.
I’m thinking of updating my MacOS X spam documentation, it was an extremely popular document that attracted thousands of hits. But it is almost too late, Apple has announced that the next version of Mail.app will include an integrated spam filter. So whatever I produce will be obsolete in about a month.
Disinfotainment Slept, Dreaming of No Spam
I woke up this morning and discovered the server was asleep and unresponsive. I checked it out and discovered that a very strange thing happened.
I run heavily shielded spam-filtered mailboxes, every time my filter routines catch spam, a little pop up little monitor window appears. My mail is set to automatically download every 5 minutes. I get so much spam that the little popup window appears every 5 minutes, like clockwork. But apparently, for the first time, I did not receive a single spam message for a period of over 1 hour, so the popup did not pop up, and my CPU went to sleep. Oops.
My server stays on 24/7/365 chowing down the spam, it never goes to sleep. But there was a strange spam hiatus for a single hour, and my machine took a snooze. So I set it to never sleep and of course that will solve the problem. Funny that I never noticed it was a problem before. Apparently my machine has never experienced a spam siesta, it gets spam at least every 30 minutes, every day.
Moveable Type – Apache Security
One of the first security measures I took with this server was to lock out folder browsing. I complained about the open directories in other blog software, now that I am self-hosting I can control these parameters myself. Just a single word of alteration to httpd.conf and it’s all locked down. A few more quick edits and I’ve implemented custom error messages, just for fun. Moveable Type considers this a fundamental security measure, sufficiently important to deserve a special note in the documentation
Bob Hope: Robber Baron
Media outlets are gushing about Bob Hope’s 99th birthday, they describe him as the goofy comedian we know from his media image, but I know who he really is: a greedy land speculator who raped and pillaged Los Angeles. It is not widely known that Bob Hope is one of the largest single land owners in Los Angeles County and several surrounding counties. Bob Hope has a long history of using his Hollywood profits for land speculation and profiteering, and it made him wealthy beyond your wildest dreams of avarice. And therein hangs a tale, a complex chain of events that destroyed Los Angeles’ urban architecture.
California has long been a leader in the world environmental movement. Environmental regulations cover everything from urban planning to gasoline sales. One of the seemingly innocent laws enacted in the mid 1980s mandated a change in the gasoline pump nozzle. In order to cut down on spilled fuel, restrictor nozzles with backflow preventers were required on every gas pump in California. This new nozzle was only able to pump gas about 75% as fast as the old style of nozzle. The gas sales environment changed overnight, smaller stations with 4 or 6 pumps could not pump gas fast enough to remain profitable. Larger gas stations with 8 to 12 pumps were still profitable, and some gas chains decided to retrofit old stations with more pumps in the same space. However, one of the largest chains, Standard Oil, decided to sell the vast majority of their stations in Los Angeles. Standard stations were everywhere, in many ways they are a symbol of California. For example, Ed Ruscha’s Standard prints are an icon of California art.
Robert Venturi wrote an influential essay about urban planning called Learning from Las Vegas. Venturi wanted to examine the urban landscape from the viewpoint of the car. He asserted that Los Angeles had a unique form of urban architecture of widely separated locations spanned by surface roads, with a few tall buildings as landmarks to navigate by. He described driving in Los Angeles as analogous to airplane races in the Nevada desert, where old surplus WWII fighter aircraft would race along the ground, making required turns at tall pylons that marked the path. Los Angeles was full of these architectural “pylons” and navigating LA in a car was largely a point-to-point driving experience, like the air races. And along the route were scattered minor landmarks, the gleaming Standard Oil stations to give rest and refueling to the traveller.
But no more. The new nozzles made the stations unprofitable, and Standard sold them in one huge block, one of the largest auctions of urban properties in modern LA history. And Bob Hope bought them. His company, La Mancha Development, immediately set to developing these properties, which were mostly corner gas stations, many in residential neighborhoods.
I remember when the gas stations closed. I lived in Studio City, and stations at both ends of my street were closed. Large signs for La Mancha Development announced that construction would begin soon. All across LA these signs appeared, followed by buildings that were the start of a new wave of architecture that would totally change the LA urban environment: Mini Malls.
In the space of a few short months, gas stations disappeared and mini malls appeared all across LA. Everywhere you went, wherever there used to be a gas station, now there was a mini mall with a convenience store, maybe a tanning salon and a donut store, and a few miscellaneous businesses. The traffic the malls attracted was intense, the old gas stations never had this level of traffic. Mini malls became the places to stop on cross-town drives, displacing traffic patterns into commercial zones adjacent to quiet neighborhoods. Once the mini mall became an established feature of Los Angeles architecture, the city would never be the same.
I won’t even go into the further horrors committed by Bob Hope and his company La Mancha Development. Turning LA into a city full of mini malls is horrible enough. But I could easily go on and on, like for example his notorious fight with the LA Nature Conservancy. So I’ll just conclude with the reminder that Bob Hope is just another greedy money-grubbing Hollywood scumbag.