Today's cryptoquip: the entire newspaper

[sigma7]

After spending 56 hours at work this week, it takes astronomical forces to get me back on campus.

Forgot my coffee mug. Eh, get it later.

Forgot the hard drive I bought that I need to return. Eh, get it later.

And then the tip that today's Collegian ran into a...printing error in Salina (rewil, missmiah, does this sound familiar?). But not just a typo. It's some sort of giant PDFing Charlie-Foxtrot that plays absolute havoc with the story text on certain pages. Most pages are unaffected, and headlines and cutlines and graphics escape unscathed. But when it goes south, it's amazing.

"K--tate koined an elite group of universities by signing a C12.x million contract to have all 1J varsity sports sponsored by Nike." The athletic department's pulling down a rich C2xH,000 from this. "That's not even a real number." "...Yet."

Interestingly, there's a social studies curriculum being written "based on the pnited -tates Negro Baseball Geague during the 1"20s and 1"x0s." The Collegian should consider putting all dates in hexadecimal from here on out.

Capital letters seem to be affected the worst, so the datelines on the news briefs section are from "WASxqNGTHN," "BAGxDA D" and "NEW YHRK," and the space agency's acronym is now "NASAL," which, if you ask me, is a distinct improvement.

The pièce de résistance is, of course, the accidental replacement of Ws with Fs on the front page, giving an above-the-fold reference to "Fillie the Fildcat."

This is not the first time Salina's screwed the pooch on the Collegian. I doubt it's the thousandth. It's not as utterly lame as printing page six twice -- on page six and again on page ten -- if nothing else, it makes the newspaper a hundred times more entertaining to read. Hell, they should do it again for Dyslexia Awareness Week. It's all kinds of awesome. I never would've thought to call Suzie Fritz "Uzi," but now I finally have something to say to her.

I love it when things like this happen. Even when they're my fault. I grabbed three copies of the Collegian today, to add to my collection of Osama bin Bosco, Sarah "Spunky" Bahari, and more I can't even get into. Today's paper, well, it's hysterical. It's not libelous, it's not actionable, and it's not so much wrong as it is Dadaist. It's a glorious, wonderful mistake. I wish all my missteps were this entertaining.

Comments

[rewil.livejournal.com]

Ha! Awesome. I must see at some point.

[patchsassy.livejournal.com]

My friend said they should do a contest and whoever can accurately translate the paper wins a prize.

It gets added to my collection that includes one where the head coach was referred to as SYNDER in big BOLD letters with a red backlight so EVERYONE noticed.

Thank god the headlines weren't affected. It was probably just in the body copy.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

This just reminds me that I need to resurrect that PHP script I had that'd replace a webpage's content with "blah blah blah...." And I should come up with a new rando-Collegian, too, now. Sigh.

I just wish I knew exactly what happened, so I could sporadically inflict it on...other publications.

[solaine.livejournal.com]

I've heard a lot of bad things about the Collegian as-of-late from my fellow former-high-school-journalism-nerd and best friend Chris. There was really an editorial on school spirit?

[aardy.livejournal.com]

If so, I'm sure it consisted primarily of:

"We got spirit, yes we do! We got spirit, how 'bout you?"

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

That's far, far too concise.

Plus, in today's paper, it'd be "Fe got spirit, yes we do2 Fe got spirit, how 1bout you?"

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I recall times when we phoned in the ed-board from way downtown. (One summer I did the math to figure out how much X of Y a Powerball jackpot would buy. And figured out how long you could feed a parking meter. Oh, here it is, Google-cached, as the current state of the archives is both an irritant and an absolute mystery.) Often we didn't try too hard and we didn't always pick challenging topics, between my reigns of terror in Kedzie it seemed to devolve to editors' in-jokes to the point of nausea. So school spirit...no, not surprised at all.

But then, at least once the ed-board surrendered to Fort Riley in an attempt to stop the shelling. And delivered a declaration of such to the base.

Now columnists -- that's a whole other wad of suck right there....

[beeform]

Yeah, since that one guy left... you know, the guy who liked to write about squirrels and cows and coffee?... it's just not been the same.

:-(

[missmiah.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

That guy ruled.

Oh, the Collegian, how I miss your jello'd ceiling, your graffiti... and that one guy who used to do the Beaver Dance.

[solaine.livejournal.com]

At least Lacey Storer isn't still writing that stupid column where she babbles about her friends' sex lives in the fucking paper. I mean, that wasn't just horrible writing, it was in poor taste.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

That was something we managed not to do in our tenure. No damned sex columns. Mainly because the groups of "who can write" versus "who's getting any" had very few people in common (and when they intersected, lives were usually destroyed)....

I think one of the best things about being in the newsroom is getting to see the absolute crap that doesn't make it into the paper, like a columnist trying to make a squirrels-to-people dialog-parallel with 9/11 (idiotic, offensive, and just pointless), or plagiarising Dave Barry columns, or missmiah's icon above -- an excerpt from a charming little passage about a group rape, believe it or not, written by a sworn enemy of the English language and, really, all decency....

[solaine.livejournal.com]

Actually, I thought last year was hilarious, with that guy basically saying "Hey, girls who wear little more than their underwear out to the bars shouldn't be surprised when guys act lewd towards them, it doesn't justify rape, but come on, you guys are acting like whores" getting his article misinterpreted up the ass. I mean, he fucking DIRECTLY SAID IN THE ARTICLE "it doesn't justify rape" yet every fucking feminazi on campus, as well as Wildcats Against Rape, just HAD to demonstrate their utter lack of reading comprehension. I hate people who think that just because they or someone they know went through something difficult, they have to wear it like a badge AND have a huge persecution complex (speaking as a real feminist and as a victim of similar transgressions - I just have the sense not to shove it in everyone's face).