4/27/2009

Journalism's cannonball crisis continues

Flash from the professional wordsmiths among us: "Civil War-era 'cannonball' may be just a ball."

How do you mock a headline that stupid? Answer: you read down into the story where it begins to mock itself:
An iron ball that a gardener dug up from his yard is apparently just a solid-iron ball, perhaps intended to ornament the top of a wrought-iron fence post, and not a Civil War-era cannonball, a bomb-squad official says.
There's just no way a Civil War cannonball would be solid! Thank goodness for the bomb squad.