Saturday, July 16, 2005

Word Games

My friend the Magazine Man is a compulsive word gamer.

I am a compulsive lampooner.

MM once created eight different anagrams out of the name of a particuarly odious management type that was sitting in on one of our edit meetings. Camaro fluid was the funniest one I saw, One Calm IUD was his favorite as I recall.

What MM does with words, I do with reality. Here's a game I play called "Today's Swipe at the News." Rules are simple: Taking an actual news story, spoof it. You must use the headline and at least the opening sentence. The deeper into the story you get before you have to start re-arranging facts, the higher the point score. No, there's really no point score. But there is the malicious pleasure of leading your innocent reader farther and farther down the primrose path before you spring the hidden lion in the bushes upon them.

So coming right up, an interlude. The first of some weekend "Swipe at the news" stories.

1 Comments:

Blogger Magazine Man said...

Wow, I'm so touched you remember my favorite pasttime for surviving dull-as-dirt editorial meetings.

But I'm pretty sure that second anagram was something like "a IUD for calm" or "A Calm IUD for--?" or maybe "O calm IUD -- arf!" Anyway, the letters work (there's no "n" or "e" in "camaro fluid")

My favorite anagram of all time--if I do say so myself--was for a college girlfriend, whose name I managed to anagram into "virgin rage rod." She was less amused than I...

6:33 PM  

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