"CNN confirms that fugitive polygamist Mormon sect leader..."

did you manage to catch this headline this morning? it was at the top of the cnn.com homepage, in that big red 'alert' bar.

i saw it ...and i had to read it five times over. my hang-up was that i couldn't believe it was actually real. let's look at this one more time just in case you're missing the hilarity:

CNN confirms that fugitive polygamist Mormon sect leader...

this was published in the good faith of journalisitic intergrity by one of the largest news sources in the nation; and, i'm not talking about the relatable fact that the phrase conveys (which is ridiculous in itself: does this really happen?). i'm specifically ridiculing the language.

fugitive. polygamist. mormon. sect. leader.

someone at cnn has officialy lost his mind. this isn't news; it's the line out of a sitcom. it's a long lost seinfeld episode. i'll tell you how it goes: this mulitisyllabic villain is actually elaine's bad date for the night. he ends up being married to george's new girlfriend, who ran away from her husband because he was too controlling. she came to new york to start over and reinvent herself (no wonder george thought she was 'wild'). meanwhile, george has actually come to believe in his new girlfriend's reinvention rhetoric and decides that he is no longer 'george'. he is 'jorge'.

this is a bad joke if someone thought that the entirety of the english-literate world would take such a headline seriously.

but what's perhaps more disconcerting is the fact that this title had to pass by so many people. cnn has got to be a labyrinth of fact checking gnomes, one only slightly larger than the next (redundancy is invaluable at a company that large). these words passed by countless eyes, seeing the words and the fact, but nothing else. i guess it's fault and folley: it's upsetting that this was published, but it's also really fucking funny.