Today's cryptoquip: the entire newspaper

Sep 01, 2006 17:48

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.

newspapering, omg, kansas

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