This Week In The News

This week, your illustrious author had the pleasure of finding a forty-year-old copy of the Daily Mirror from the swinging sixties. Aside from the minor sexism and scarily prescient TV guide (full of Dr Who episodes) I discovered a gem of a story that could teach any journalist a lesson in brevity.

The piece was printed as follows on Saturday December 28th, 1968: -

A REAL COOL JAZZ MAN… IN THE NUDE
A bearded musician leaped on to the stage at a jazz convention yesterday in Adelaide, South Australia, and stripped naked.
The audience jeered.
He retrieved his clothes and fled

Perhaps he merely had a vicious sub-editor, but the elegant simplicity of this article has inspired me to summarize the events of today in the same vein. Just three sentences of glory, no waffle, no chaff, 100% whole-wheat, in an Ian Botham style homage.

Extinguished: Order to smoke more cigarettes
Local governors in Gongan county, China, issued a decree to force officials to smoke 23,000 packs of local cigarettes a year to boost the regional economy. The employees said no. The law has been extinguished.

Pandemonium
An outbreak of Swine Flu dominated world news this week as the World Health Organisation issued warnings of a potential pandemic. A few people did get ill. A lot more of them got scared of getting ill.

It was at this point in my life that I stumbled across an article in the Metro that restored my faith in modern journalism. Here there was, an example of the caliber of my swinging jazz man penned my a modern newsman.

I therefore reveal it in all its original glory in order to give my article a sense of completeness normally reserved for the end of the Hollyoaks omnibus just after your hangover goes away:

A traveller was caught with 14 live birds strapped to his legs under his trousers, customs officials said today.

US customs agents at Los Angeles International Airport discovered the birds under Sony Dong's trousers.

According to a Department of Justice officers searched Dong, 46, and 'found bird feathers and droppings on his socks, as well as birds' tail feathers visible under his pants.'