Is everyone here for the editorial meeting? Ok, good. Heavy news week this week, so only the best stories are going to get space. We'll start with Cheddar Headlines. Ten words max, and the headline can be self-explanatory as in 'The Independent', or horrendously convoluted, as in, erm, The Cheesy Headline Game. Once the headline is finished, I'd like a few words containing the story in a news style, please. Subs, clear your desks, and let's get the presses rolling. Spike it once we reach the usual back page move.
Submariner Walter E. Graves is up to it again. Returning to the wreck of the sunken clipper ship SS Nutty Shark just off San Francisco Bay, he has now reported the retrieval of additional artifacts from Davy Jones' locker by his robotic rover Our Sea Ditty (aka RCDT). He reported that yet another gold tooth was found in one of Jones' many mouth organ cases just as in his previous dive last year. Davy Jones, of course, was the foolhardy '49er prospector, who having made his fortune in the Gold Rush, went and had his long-neglected teeth filled with gold by the noted dentist Chu Wing in San Francisco's Chinatown. Shortly therafter he acquired a substantial harmonica collection and bought himself an aged clipper ship to set sail for the International Harmonica Convention of 1850 held on the South Sea Island of Cacophonia. Being an inexperienced sailor and inebriated as well, he got lost in the fog shortly after embarking on this voyage and sunk the clipper in the bay after colliding with some submerged rocks. Graves' theory is that Jones was fond of playing naughty nautical songs on his mouth organs, but his loose golden teeth would occasionally get stuck within them and then fall off. These, Graves surmises, were stored carefully in hs locker by Jones in his mouth organ cases. The teeth are on display at the Monterey Museum of Maritime Dentistry until July 10 and the decorative mouth organ cases may be seen at the San Jose Salon of Musical Memorobilia until July 16.
[penelope] This is well spooky. See the post I made on Orange in Holmes Raided in Mystery Dawn Swoop to irach shortly after you made this one. I swear I hadn't looked here first...penelope - BOLD Botherer - TEXT
The Campaign for Plain Text announced today that it was "offended" by the latest development in text messaging: the ability to send messages using multiple fonts, sizes, styles, and colours. A spokesman said, "This is just a ploy to get people to replace their phones more often by offering new, glitzy features that no-one really needs. If your message is worth sending at all, it doesn't need jazzed up with dingbats and Star Wars fonts. Children should be taught proper texting in school, and not be encouraged to do the equivalent of scrawling a letter in crayons."
Uganda's Ministry of Wildlife today announced the alarming news that the rare subspecies of wildebeest Connochaetus boombamii which is found only in that nation's most remote Meanamin National Park is close to extinction. Ministry spokesperson Idono Nathan said that global warming is the likely cause. This wildebeest variety has a unique built-in mechanism of controlling its own population (as do lemmings), in that aged animals who can no longer digest the native grasses adequately build up vast quantities of methane gas in their abdomens which cause them to explode in the midday heat. But now due to global warming, another grass species had proliferated in the park, which when grazed, builds up vast amounts of methane in the abdomens of even young animals, causing them to explode prematurely. This has led to the unfortunate decimation of the population of this lovely animal. The World Wildlife Fund is expected to announce a grassroots campaign to save this unique species of wildebeest.
BBC4 spokesman I.M. Sanguin announced that July will be "Vampire Movie" month. Movies, informative documentary features, plays, musicals and operettas, ballets, Kabuki and Noh dramas and chat shows relating to Dracula and vampires in general will be broadcast around the clock. As a promotion, they are offering the first 100 viewers who sign up on their website and complete the sentence "I'd like enlarged Dracula teeth because...." to receive free of charge (and post paid) a set of oversized glow-in-the dark canine teeth. Further details can be found at www.special_offer/bbc4Canine/VV.