In the category of Seussical impressions regarding grammatics . . .

this email from September 2005 wins first prize.  I was once again doing a random search through my inbox archives (shut up, it's my thing) and was delighted to see how the following poem evolved. 

It came at a time when I had just started working for a publisher in Washington, DC.  As an editorial assistant, I was tasked with bathing copy in red ink before it went to press.  The rest of the time I spent emailing with my dear friend Angela in Chicago.  We were both feeling like lone reeds ("standing tall, waving boldly, in the corrupt sands of commerce") and so would cheer each other up with silly back-and-forths about nothing.

This was the observation she made to me that day:

"I think all those years of not capitalizing things is trying to make up for lost time. I keep inadvertently capitalizing random words in the middle of sentences. I feel German or something..."

To which I replied:

"I'm so proud of your turning of the proverbial capitalization new leaf.  Wow, if any of my old professors would have read that last sentence, I shudder to think of the amount of red ink that would have been spilled in the writing of 'awkward phrasing'."

 

That last bit put me in Dr. Seuss mode, which then resulted in the following limerick I sent back to her:

 

Upon penning the most jumbled of phrases,

I awoke from the most dazed of hazes.

I shuddered to think of the amount of red ink

to be lost in my grammatical mazes.

 

Coincidentally, this poem also wins first prize in the category of Nerdiest Limerick Ever.

Assonation in our nation's capital.

I received an email from my dad this morning that read, "Can I be assonated?"  My first thought was, "assassinated?"  Is there a threat?  Is it real? Don't you have to be a public figure?  Maybe I should scroll down further. 

Then I gathered that my dad was sending me a tip for a blog entry based on the crazy incident he witnessed (though it did NOT involve assassination).  He works in D.C., and apparently a taxi cab crashed into the U.S. tax court right in front of him.  It just dove straight into the side of the building-- an enormous federal building, which is encased in granite.  Luckily no one was hurt, not even the driver.  Of course, this being near Capitol Hill, every fire engine, police car, and ambulance in the mid-Atlantic region clogged the street. 

Now, you might assume as I did that this would be news.  I searched high and low, hoping to find at the very least a picture.  No such luck.  Instead I wrote a news headline in the form of a haiku to pay tribute to the cab's flight of freedom (or protest against taxation):

Taxi cab no match
for granite face of justice:
tax court collects win.

Then I started to wonder if a lot of news headlines are secretly haiku and I just never noticed before.  (I was also a bit slow to admit defeat to spell check regarding the plural of haiku being haiku.)  This launched me on a search across the web to see if I could find any haiku headlines.  Sadly, I saw only one that fit the bill.  From the LA Times:

Obama rejects
criticism that he's been
too hard on Wall Street.

So then I got carried away (this is becoming a theme), this time to turn today's headlines into a form of Japanese poetry: 

Yom Kippur party
leads to random drug test fail:
Lohan back to jail?

Prop 19 splits state,
prompts law officer debate
for November vote.

Photo puts firemen
into hot water over
nude chili party.

Okay, I think I now understand why no reputable news sources incorporate haiku into their headlines.