January 20, San Francisco -4 at Atlanta

NO ONE THINKS THE FALCONS ARE GOOD ENOUGH: A VILLANELLE

No one thinks the Falcons are good enough,
Even though they finally won a playoff game.
The Niners are a complete team, they will be tough.

Quarterback Matt Ryan surely has the right stuff.
Running back Michael Turner has been kind of lame.
No one thinks the Falcons are good enough.

Colin Kaepernick is definitely no cream puff,
Running for touchdowns and passing with aim.
The Niners are a complete team, they will be tough.

Atlanta has plenty of weapons with which to bluff.
And tight end Tony Gonzalez will be hard to tame.
But no one thinks the Falcons are good enough

San Francisco’s defense any offense can handcuff.
If they lose there will be no one to officially blame.
The Niners are a complete team, they will be tough.

They almost lost to Seattle due to the defense’s muff.
The Falcons must hope for the rookie QB to flame.
Somehow I do think the Falcons are good enough.
The Niners are a complete team, they will be tough (but fun). PICK: FALCONS

January 20, New England -9 v. Baltimore

THE PATRIOTS WILL WIN BUT IT WILL BE CLOSE

Tom Brady is the human I love the most.
And though I will be sad to see Ray Lewis go,
The Patriots will win, but it will be close.

New England’s offense has a lot to boast.
Even with Gronkowski and Woodhead laid low.
But Tom Brady is the human I love most.

Joe Flacco might make the Pats D look like toast.
He plays with confidence and he can throw.
The Patriots will win, but it will be close.

Foxborough is quiet like a library, a generous host.
Belichick will wear a cut-off hoodie even if it is 70 below.
Tom Brady is the human I love the most.

In the fourth quarter the Pats’ secondary is a ghost.
Their run defense will make Ray Rice look slow.
The Patriots will win but it will be close

Torrey Smith made Champ Bailey look like a pot roast.
That the entire game depends upon Shane Vereen makes me feel gross.
Tom Brady is the human I love the most.
The Patriots will win but it will be close. PICK: RAVENS

Football Picks Haiku’s record for the post-season is 2–2 so far.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Golden Cowrie

Flamingo tongue with a Saturn-ringworm shape,
mainly very polished, part
abalone sea-ear,
probably named “cowrie”

for the fissure’s resemblance to the vulva
of a sow, or the breast-implant-
function it would later
fill. The Romans called it

“porculi” for porcelain and little pig.
The Greeks, “a column, a spiral
staircase, a rococo
currency.” Today they’re

known as “turbans,” “seizing Europe with the same
fervor as Tulipmania.”
Nonetheless, cowries use
holes to breathe. “The raised parts” —

nervures and aureoles — protect by hugging
“mantle lobes, labral portions,” when
movement occurs. They live
on submerged reefs emerg-

ing suddenly and slide over them with ease.

Sara Sutter’s work appears in Fence, Windsor Review, Konundrum Engine, Portland Review and various artisan journals.

Ayo, so many more poems up in this piece. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

The great menace in headlines in 2011 was that either every headline was “11 Ways to X” or that it was “Y Happens to Z [SLIDESHOW].” You know, whatever our pals at Business Insider and Huffington Post’s Celebrity Sideboob’s page were doing. Well, guess what, we all got used to it, and now it barely registers as tacky or grabby, except when it’s over the top. Sure: promise me 11 things, I will at least read three of them. Fair’s fair.

The menace before that was the “How” headline, which is so hard to avoid. “How X Became Y.” “How Apple Something Something’d.” “How Your Mom Became Your Dad.” That kind of thing. We all use “how” because “The Story of…” is boring and gross as a headline. “How” will never die.

But that is all like Victorian poetry compared to the new headline colloquialism that flowered into dominance in 2012. Headlines now are a strange cross between imperative and inviting. The tone is soothing, seductive and at least a little bit demanding, like every character ever played by Linda Fiorentino.

Need an example? It uses constructions like “Take a Break,” as in this rather aggressively marketed headline from Gothamist.

I don’t know about you, but I was definitely ready for a Sandy break. (Hmm.)

These headlines don’t always include “you” directly; usually the “you” is implied. But they do often include “watch,” which blogs inherited from the bigger news sites, like CNN, which famously invite us to WATCH LIVE: TODDLER KILLED BY GOAT and the like constantly. (In a rare variant, websites invite other modes of consumption: “Read Floyd Landis’s Lawsuit Againt Lance Armstrong, Which The Government Could Join Any Day,” suggests Deadspin today.) This is a cousin to the “Here’s the Real Reason Why…” headlines, which is a time-honored go-to. Effective, but sometimes deathly.

(Spoiler: the real reason is that the “new Indian yuppie” wants is “a clean, quiet, comfortable, air-conditioned space, to work, meet friends or linger for hours, no questions asked.” Unlike, you know, everyone else everywhere. Which makes that headline a good bit overbuilt.)

Also headlines now often include a weird colloquial address. “Good Morning, X Happened to Y” is one of those weird situations. “Good morning” is a Deadspin classic. (Related: the use of “everyone.” As in: “Everyone Wants to Adopt This Adorable Three-Legged Dog Who Was Caught on Camera Stealing Pet Food from a Supermarket.”)

What’s oddest about this form of headline is that it’s disassociated from conveying news. Instead it conveys interaction. Headlines once were stuffed full of proper nouns. But it turns out, old-fashioned headlines don’t convey things that aren’t news well. “Three-Legged Dog Desirable”? Nope. It doesn’t work, because there’s nothing there. Nothing except “aww.” And service pieces — how to do x, why not to do y — need the help for their softness too.

Along the way, the second-person has become a bit overwhelming. For this, we can likely blame Thought Catalog, whose entire industry is about the “you”: “The Cycle Of Love You’ll Go Through With Your Phone.” And so on. It spreads! Today, on BuzzFeeᴅ: “The 10 Places You’d Rather Be Right Now” and “Hey, You’re Doing A Really Good Job Today!” (That’s not true, I am not.)

This headline style hit the big leagues finally, with Stephen Rodrick’s Times Mag piece on Lindsay Lohan, with the headline “Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie.”

Fascinated by web headlines that begin “Here Is” or “This Is.” Why do we need to be told it’s “here” or it’s “this”? ow.ly/gKG2F

— Zachary Pincus-Roth (@zpincusroth) January 14, 2013

Out of context, it’s jarring.

A lot of this vernacular arrived at Gawker at the same time that AJ Daulerio arrived at Gawker from Deadspin. [Note: Cause, effect, coincidence: no idea.] Now it’s totally saturated. “This Guy Is The Reason Hurricane Sandy’s Wikipedia Page Didn’t Mention Climate Change Until Today” was the Gawker repackaging of Popular Science’s headline “Meet The Climate Change Denier Who Became The Voice Of Hurricane Sandy On Wikipedia.”

[Update: And here’s a funny iteration: “I Can’t Stop Staring At….” Google results are heavily Gawker Media sites.]

Here’s a flashback. In 2007, a popular video of a baby getting dropkicked by a breakdancer (hard to believe I just typed that) was headlined “Times Square Still Extremely Unsafe for Children” on Gawker, which is pretty so-so as a headline but still funny. There’s no way that would get that headline now. (“Breakdancing in Times Square — Baby goes flying!” was the YouTube video headline.) “Watch This Baby Get Drop-Kicked By a Subway Breakdancer” is what I’d predict for our age. You have to really tell the folks on Twitter what’s happening for your clicks ’n’ shares, you see.

One other note: this is pretty distinctly American. You won’t catch a whiff of it on The Daily Mail.

Another part of it is the BuzzFeeᴅ “joy” component. The headlines come to offer the “you” pleasure and entertainment. Here’s back-to-back stories from their “Best of 2012” page.

Now that’s a lot of enthusiasm.

And the real problem is… overall, these new headline actions are infectious. Once you hear the headlines this way, and get into their rhythm, you can’t stop.

• Here’s the First Trailer for Harmony Korine’s Contra-Disney Movie, Spring Breakers.

• Watch this: Sony assembles three of its hottest gadgets in just five minutes.

• How the American Who Outsourced His Own Job to China So He Could Watch Cat Videos Could Have Gotten Away With It, According to the Man Who Caught Him.

• How Two Teams Found a Way to Lose a Three-Team Trade.

• Here’s The Big Beautiful BMW That Will Replace The 3 Series Coupe.

• Who Wants To Read 120,000 Pages Of Boy Scout Sex Abuse Documents?

• Why You Shouldn’t Find A Job On Craigslist.

• Meet The Man Who “Made Love” To A Dolphin.

But I don’t want to perform or learn or observe any of these things. Nor do I want to meet any of these people, particularly the ones who have sex with dolphins. I mean, I might? But the real reason I don’t is because almost all these constructions are so passive; the verbs are so weak or insignificant. When you start looking for verbs, sometimes you hardly find any. “Here Is X” robs us of chances for passion and action. “Watch” boxes us in as consumers, just a pile of receptors down at the dark end of an Internet tube. These constructions acknowledge a truth: our actions are increasingly passive online, and we really are just looking for something to watch, click, share and receive.

Photo by Porsche Brosseau.

“IMAGINE, if you can, drinking 33 litres of vodka.”
 — Oh, I can, New Scientist. I can, I can, I can! I’m sorry. Where were we?

When you think of a bigoted anti-homosexual non-profit organization that routinely allows its adult male leaders to sexually abuse the boys entrusted to the organization’s care, you usually run screaming from the room because now you can’t get the image of Pope Ratzinger out of your mind. Oh no he is wearing the bejeweled dress with the red Prada slippers again, and the Santa hat, oh no. But this story is different. This story is about the Boy Scouts of America.

A Southern California judge has ordered the Boy Scouts of America to release two decades of internal files detailing sexual abuse allegations […] The ruling by Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Donna Geck clears the way for roughly 120,000 pages of internal files to be made public if they are entered as evidence in the case. The Boy Scouts sought to prevent the disclosure of the documents, but the state Supreme Court rejected its appeal earlier this month.

Optimists look at this awful story and say, “Well, soon the Robots will be caring for all the children and anyone else needing assistance, such as the elderly and the poor.” Pessimists, however, will note that the Robots will be programmed by humans, until such a time as the robots no longer require human programming, at which point humans themselves will no longer be required.

Yes, by all means, go ahead and wear “winter shorts.” I can’t be responsible for the foolish decisions you make any more.

“It seems that the odds are stacked against snow in the five boroughs this year.”

Did you know that sending out mass emails is often illegal? You perhaps didn’t. Particularly if you work as a politics blogger, for which an important part of your job is “blasting out” your stories.

But the deeply flawed CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 codified some mass email behavior, and described what’s spam and what isn’t. The FTC describes what emails are subject to the Act: “’any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,’ including email that promotes content on commercial websites.”

So, yes. Your mass email promoting your “content” at Politico or BuzzFeeᴅ or your Tumblr or your mom’s Facebook is considered spam, if it does not include a real mailing address for the sender in the body of the email, or if it doesn’t explain how to opt out from the email list that the recipient hasn’t chosen to be on.

As food safety authorities “try to find out how beefburgers on sale in UK and Irish Republic supermarkets became contaminated with horsemeat,” a helpful soul “has launched an online calculator — so burger fans can work out how many horses they could eat in a lifetime.” I mean, let’s be honest, you’re eating a lot worse than horse when you’re having a burger, but sure, oh no the ponies, etc.

The Tumblr of Newsweek, which still exists, unlike Newsweek, and which is run by the DailyBeast “senior editor for social media,” announced a new policy yesterday. “You pin, we unfollow” was the communiqué — by “pinning” they mean the Tumblr commerce initiative wherein, for a small fee, one can make a Tumblr post “adhere” to the top of each follower’s dashboard until each follower “clicks” upon the post to make it disappear. (By “unfollow,” they meant that they would no longer choose to receive said pinners’ posts in their dashboard.) “The pins are like dashboard cockroaches. Turn on the lights every morning and unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin,” the Tumblr explained.

Newsweek — do I still need to be typing italics tags by hand around Newsweek now that it is no longer a magazine? — rowed back this policy shortly after some fun and gif-games. And after a lot of people called them names. (“Hey, idiots, I think you guys are the ones who need all the followers you can get,” wrote the Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins.) All in all, it was a brave brief stand against unusual user-side monetization techniques. But that’s all over now.

Newsweek’s Tumblr also employs a javascript that transforms the reader’s cursor into a mustache.