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This might just be one of the strangest scenes in The Shining, but The New York Times Correction on the matter might just be even weirder. Here goes:
Correction: January 29, 2012
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described imagery from “The Shining.” The gentleman seen with the weird guy in the bear suit is wearing a tuxedo, but not a top hat.
It’s darn good they changed that. I mean how would the readers possibly lived without knowing the bear was not, in fact, wearing a top hat?
Last Sunday was the 160th anniversary of The New York Times. Throughout those years, The Times has created quite a reputation for itself and has even garnered the nickname the “newspaper of record.” These days, the paper is the third most popular in the world, only ranking behind The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, neither of which are location-based like The Times. But how did the paper get to be so well-respected and widely circulated? Read on to learn more about the illustrious “Gray Lady.”
The Times was founded on September 18, 1851 by journalist/politician Henry Jarvis Raymond (that’s him above), who eventually became the second chairman of the Republican National Committee, and former banker George Jones(below). Originally the paper went by the name of the New-York Daily Times and was sold for one cent. Rather than just diving into the news of the day, the first edition attempted to explain why the editors created it and what positions the paper would take on issues, stating:
We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good;—and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform. We do not believe that everything in Society is either exactly right or exactly wrong;—what is good we desire to preserve and improve;—what is evil, to exterminate, or reform.
Within only a few years, the paper changed its name to The New York Times and in 1858, the paper was doing well enough to move into its own building, making it the first newspaper in New York City to be housed in a building built specifically for its own use. Ten years after its original release, it started adding a Sunday edition. Prior to this time, it was fairly rare for any paper to print on a Sunday, but public demand for news updates about the Civil War caused the change in papers around the country.
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Artist Kim Rugg specializes in re-arranging shapes and text on paper. We’ve previously posted about her discovery that Royal Mail stamp reading machines would take any shaped stamp, so as long as they had the correct colors. Rugg responded by making her own usable stamps.
More recently, she rearranged the letters in the lines of text on the front page of a newspaper so that they were in alphabetical order. The linked video is an exploration of that project, as well as Rugg’s other experiments.
Gallery Link and Video Link via Boing Boing | Photo: Mark Moore Gallery
Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is a continuation of the popular Typeface/Off series. We’ve tried to guess movies and TV shows by their title fonts; now we can try to figure out what magazines and newspapers are represented by their typefaces. I scored 7 of 10, which would have been 8 out of 10 if I typed decently. You can do better! Link
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Here’s a blog that consists of newspaper headlines that appeared in comic books. The lack of context makes them funnier than they were ever intended to be! Link -via Metafilter
“Crash Blossoms” are ambiguous headlines that can be quite funny. They result from the space-saving technique of leaving out articles, conjunctions, and sometimes even verbs.
For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.
My favorite example from the article is “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Link
Crash Blossoms is a blog that collects these headlines for your amusement. Link -via Metafilter
Urlesque blog has a tribute of the funniest scanned print ads and newspaper articles that have been floating ’round the web. They’re oldies but goodies!
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by interweber.
