Lame, lame, go away

The front page of today's paper is sporting a giant, glittering example of a crappy rhyming title: "Trapped on a plane, instant fame". This is not a rhyme, this is a near rhyme, and my take on this is, if a near rhyme is as close as you can get, skip the damn rhyme!

Here, I'll fix it for them: "Trapped on a plane, instant fame/The Star Tribune is totally lame". There, now it's a real rhyme.

I swear I'll write about something other than rhyming headlines, but for the moment that's all I have time for, since I'm starting a new job today and have to catch the bus in about an hour.

What rhymes with "Lutherans"?

I know I'm beginning to sound like an old vinyl LP with a big gash through it but why does the Star Tribune insist on the rhyming headlines? Today's sports page says, "Twins not out of clout". I suppose I should let this one slide (heh) considering that baseball has a longstanding tradition of inspiring rhymes, i.e., "Casey at the Bat" and "The Sultan of Swat". Also, as a Twins fan, I'm glad they're not out of clout, even if they aren't exactly in it to win it. (I mean that sarcastically, of course; I'm fighting the urge to put in one of these: :P)

I'd give "out of clout" a pass if it weren't for this horribly ridiculous headline on the front page of the Variety section: "Getting the News out to Jews". The article is about a blog "aimed at helping young Jews find their way through a religion that many have lost touch with." Aren't the Strib writers lucky it isn't a blog aimed at Lutherans? Additionally, since when is it acceptable to end a sentence with "with"? Should it not be a blog "aimed at helping young Jews find their way through a religion with which they have lost touch"? It might be fine to have "with" as a dangling preposition in casual conversation, but is it acceptable on the printed page?

Oh, and what about the little rhyme hidden in the body of the article: "So what's a young Jew supposed to do today?" Oy. Hello, this is a newspaper, not the current events according to Mother Goose! How long will it be before we see articles that begin with "There once was a man from Nantucket"? Why don't they just write the whole damn paper in Limerick form? Better yet, they should assign each section of the paper a different form of poetry...the Metro section should be composed entirely in sonnet form, while the Taste section ought to be free verse, and naturally, the Op-Ed section should be in haiku form because the world would be a nicer place if Op-Ed commentators were allowed only seventeen syllables.