Here's the thing with the Big Three newspapers this morning: After all the hype of Ernesto, they had to come up with a giant front-page headline about how nothing really happened. And that's all that was really important, since the stories, well, they were all just filler crap, pages and pages of filler crap, some of it with triple bylines. Writing such headlines can be a challenge, especially since they can't get edgy or politically incorrect (which put, say, "Ernesto Just Another Wetback" out of the running). The best, though, was easily the Sun-Sentinel's banner:
"Ernesto's All Wet."
Not bad at all, a bit of of a double entendre that says it all. The Miami Herald comes in a distant second with:
"What A Relief!"
Not good. It's not only too generic, but it also has an annoying and unnecessary exclamation point. And not everybody is feeling relief. Meteorologists, for instance, are still pissed that almost everything they said for 48 solid hours turned out to be pure B.S. Would-be gougers everywhere are in veritable mourning. Hundreds of homeowners who failed to cash in on Wilma are gonna have to wait a little longer for that new roof. But the Herald's dud headline was a classic next to the Palm Beach Post's:
"Wet, wobbly puzzle."
Wet, wobbly puzzle? What lazy ass team of editors signed off on that one? Puzzles aren't wet and wobbly and if ever they should be, we would throw them in the garbage and quickly forget about them. It's almost like the editors were trying to cover their ass. "I know we kept saying that Ernesto was "targeting" and "zeroing in on" you during the past three days, but hey, this meteorological stuff is really complicated," they might explain. "It was virtually a wet, wobbly puzzle."
