CSotD: SHALL WE PLAY WITH OUR FOOD?
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When I first looked at today's Rhymes with Orange, I thought it was going to be a riff on excessive government spending, tied in to the Secret Service scandal (such as it is) and the GSA scandal (which I'm tired of).
There actually are secret government cafeterias, and the food there is reportedly rather above the shit-on-a-shingle fare you see in Beetle Bailey. In particular, it is said that the offerings in the cafeteria buried deep in the nuclear-bomb-proof-depths of Cheyenne Mountain are very nice indeed. Not stuffed quail eggs and whole suckling pigs, mind you, but "we should come here more often" good.
Or, to put it another way, "Nobody who has clearance to be here would pipe up and ruin the party" good. Like eating at the officers' club instead of the mess hall.
In any case, today's RWO turned out to be a commentary on real policies versus stated policies in the form of a silly and memorable pun.
We proclaim our "freedom fries" but actually dish up "dictatortots."
I like it.
I had a managing editor at one paper who used to say that, if you were going to write a punning headline, it not only had to be a good pun, but it had to also be a good headline for the story.
So, for example, a headline that read "She's no flash in the pan" about a young girl who had won a photo contest was a bad headline, in part because it's the wrong kind of "flash" anyway, referring to flintlocks and not cameras, but, more to the point, because we don't know if the kid will ever amount to anything. Maybe this was the high point of her career as a photographer. Maybe she was, indeed, just "a flash in the pan."
The copy editor had become so obsessed with working "flash" into the headline that she lost track of what the story was about.
My favorite headline — and I pride myself on my headlines — went over a highly critical column about the ridiculous miniseries Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg made for NBC back in the 90s: "NBC's 'Gulliver' is not real Swift."
It made the pun but also deftly summed up the objections to the program.
Of course, the headline should not be the best part of the article, but sometimes it just turns out that way. And, in a one-panel cartoon, the caption should, indeed, be pretty good.
Dictatortots.
*snrk*
Meanwhile, over at The New Adventures of Queen VIctoria, Pab Sungenis also scored this morning by coining a memorable new term. It has neither the appealing silliness nor the deep moral underpinnings of "dictatortots," but it's gonna be a whole lot easier to sneak into a serious conversation as if you'd thought of it yourself:
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