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Today’s best newspaper opening sentence

November 22nd, 2008 @ 1:31 pm - by NMC · 7 Comments

“All but one of about 19 calves that ran through downtown Tupelo on Thursday had been captured on Friday.”

The sentence, from this story, has the virtues of leaving us wanting to know more (and even creating the possibility of a cliffhanger), while really telling us all we probably need to know.

Filed Under: Herald & Examiner

7 Responses so far ↓

  1. duckweedpond says:

    Oh, I don’t know. I just sent you a link to one that I think trumps this one. But to be fair it’s from three days ago in Australia.

  2. lotus says:

    Well yes, ducky, time-disallowed though it be, I speck I’ll remember that pasta-sauce jar caper longer.

  3. NMC says:

    That’s not today’s best, but it’s probably the years best . I don’t think I have ever seen a sentence take three such dramatic shifts in direction– first, uh, then the pasta jar, and then the high speed police chase. What a lede sentence.

  4. duckweedpond says:

    The sentence ending in “Jack Russell Terrier” had me laughing til I cried. Til I started worrying about the poor dog.

  5. lotus says:

    Not funny, but for Today’s Most Interesting Paragraph, here’s my candidate (so far):

    Hölldobler and Wilson’s central conceit is that a colony is a single animal raised to a higher level. Each insect is a cell, its castes are organs, its queens are its genitals, the wasps that stung me are an equivalent of an immune system. In the same way, the foragers are eyes and ears, and the colony’s rules of development determine its shape and size. The hive has no brain, but the iron laws of cooperation give the impression of planning. Teamwork pays; in a survey of one piece of Amazonian rain forest, social insects accounted for 80 percent of the total biomass, with ants alone weighing four times as much as all its mammals, birds, lizards, snakes and frogs put together. The world holds as much ant flesh as it does that of humans.

  6. Ben Cole says:

    The police reports in the Tupelo rag are often “curious.” A coupla weeks ago they reported an “arrest for driving with an inspired tag.” If I had been the cop, I probably woulda just let that one go.

  7. lotus says:

    And they think WE tawk funny?

    Oz driver pulled with todger in pasta sauce jar
    Continued to crack one off ‘while resisting arrest’

    “The role of the Jack Russell in the incident is not noted.”