Extra, Extra

I'll apologize if you were looking forward to a post on the trashy TV show about Hollywood celebraties, Extra. But hopefully you will enjoy my post about headlines in The Hindu, India's national English-language newspaper, as much as you enjoy watching Extra in the middle of the day. The Hindu has some of the best headlines I have ever seen. They are often misleading, obscure, or completely unrelated to their respective stories. I will try to keep a list going to share some of its gems with you all. In one section of the paper printed Jan. 23, 2009, you can find such headlines as: "Campaign geared up to keep sea free from stink of evil: Coast Guard's Chennai-Kanyakumari expedition begins" now if that isn't a page turner, I don't know what is. Clearly, the seas should be free of the stink of evil. I mean really, how did people on the coast put up with that awful stench until now? However, if you read the article, you'll learn that when they say stink of evil, they really mean pirates and terrorists that may arrive by sea. Another pearl is: "North Chennai people bubble over with gratitude, hope" which makes me think of things in North Chennai as being both hot and a little soupy or perhaps milky. The headline of an interview with the former editor of Granta, a British literary magazine, reads: "Literary publishing is like playing a fruit machine' Now, I can only assume that by fruit machine, they mean slot machine. I can agree with that, but if a fruit machine is something else, that is probably why I have not gotten into the New Yorker yet. Now, I'm giving the Hindu a pretty hard time, but perhaps they're just trying to pep up the old newspaper format and move some paper. Either way, when I see the headline "Cremation engulfed by smoke" I'll read on.