Rumors of Vice President Dick Cheney’s death are greatly exaggerated. The same goes for the Pope, Bob Hope, and several other people whose premature obituaries were discovered on CNN’s website on Wednesday.

“Canned obituaries,” written about famous people while they’re still alive, are a standard practice in journalism. But CNN had accidentally made them publicly accessible, and the fine folks at Fark.com noticed. The Smoking Gun managed to quickly capture seven screenshots before CNN yanked the pages from public view.

In the case of the Gerald Ford obit, above, a certain Dana Carvey skit comes to mind. (For a full transcript of that skit, click here and scroll about two-thirds of the way down the page, to Robotninja’s post at 04-16-03 07:18:07 PM.)

Then there’s Hope, who will turn 100 next month.

But perhaps the most jarring is the obit of the very-much-alive Cheney, who is eulogized as the “loyal point man for two Bush presidencies.”

Hmm… can you say liberal bias? Gerald Ford, Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan… look at all the Republicans that CNN wants dead!!! Hehe.

Naturally, headline writers everywhere had a ball with this. Australia’s News Interactive wrote: And this just in: Pope not dead. The Scotsman declared: CNN makes a deadly mistake. Britain’s The Register quipped: CNN kills Castro early. CNET News states: CNN postings send some to early graves.

There’s nothing to be found about this on CNN’s web site now, but the Associated Press reports that CNN says “human error” is to blame.

Fark, which started this whole thing, now has a wonderful bunch of fake obits modeled on CNN’s pre-obits. A couple of good ones, below, for South Park’s Kenny and for CNN itself:

See also obits of Osama Bin Laden, Jacques Chirac, Peter Arnett, Pat Robertson, Michael Moore, Wil Wheaton, William Jefferson Clinton (”Life is like a box of cigars”), Scruples (”Destroyed by Fox News”), The Constitution, and Hollywood’s Last Idea.

Becky’s relatively new blog has its first two blogosphere links: from Aubrey Turner and Caerdroia. Way to go, Becky!

Kudos to the Daily Trojan for stepping up to the plate in its coverage of the bomb scare across the street from campus, with a good article and a good layout:

Click here for a PDF version of the front page.

Here is the story, by Elizabeth Brotherton, Alexander Nguyen, and Denise Oshodi:

Employees were evacuated and several streets around campus were shut down Thursday morning after a man walked into the Felix Chevrolet car dealership on Figueroa Street claiming to have an explosive device strapped to him, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman said.

Employees at the car dealership were initially evacuated to the body shop and then to the Shrine Auditorium back parking lot. Some employees did not know what was happening when LAPD evacuated the dealership.

“It was like 10:30 when one of the managers said, ‘You have to move it, there’s some guy with a bomb,’” said Enrique Tolebo, an employee at Los Angeles Downtown Motors. “So we left.”

SWAT team members and LAPD bomb squad were called to the scene and the suspect was taken into custody, said Sgt. John Pasquariello. The explosive device looked real but turned out to be a fake, he later said.

(more…)

So here I am, wandering around campus this afternoon, unaware that anything unusual had happened, when Andrew calls my cell phone and tells me he just heard on the radio that Felix Chevrolet, across the street from USC at Figueroa and Jefferson, had been the victim of a “pretend suicide bomber.” Being the consummate journalism student, naturally I had no idea. (D’oh!)

Felix is a major campus landmark.

This article suggests the situation is still in progress. I’m a little confused, but I may head in that direction and see if the police are still there.

UPDATE. 4:21 PM Pacific time: I just walked past Felix, and everything seems to be back to normal. The only visible sign that anything happened is the presence of five local TV vans.

UPDATE, 5:10 PM Pacific time: Channel 7 just reported on its 5:00 news that the Felix incident was apparently an extortion scheme, with the would-be bomber demanding money. There is evidently some possibility he may have been forced to do this by others who threatened his family, though police aren’t commenting on that.

Becky says Jefferson Boulevard was blocked off east of Hoover when she walked to class around 10:30 AM. I think I remember seeing some police lights flashing a ways away when I walked to work a bit west of there at 9:00 AM, but I didn’t think anything of it because, hey, this is L.A… you get immune to police cars and helicopters after a while.

UPDATE: I have two additional blog posts on this: one discussing the Daily Trojan coverage in the April 18 paper, and one discussing the April 22 DT coverage.

Another Anaheim team has scored a big postseason win — and this one doesn’t even have a jumping simian on its side.

The Anaheim Mighty Ducks defeated the defending National Hockey League champion Detroit Red Wings last night, 3-2 in overtime, to sweep the first-round series, 4-0. The Red Wings were the #2 seed in the NHL’s Western Conference.

The #7-seeded Ducks advance to play either #3 Colorado or #6 Minnesota. (Colorado leads that series, 3-1. Playoff schedule here.)

Could Orange County own the World Series title and the Stanley Cup at the same time? Hey, it could happen. Somebody get these Ducks a rally monkey!!

A manic-depressive web server speaks! Hehe. (Thanks to my mom for the link.)

We all know about Al Gore’s (admittedly blown-way-out-of-proportion) claim that he invented the Internet. Well, now the Nashville Tennessean — Gore’s one-time employer — is claiming to have invented the phrase “A.M.”

The Tennessean, a newspaper with a daily circulation of 186,106, is suing a small, 15,314-circulation paper in Rutherford County, Tennessee, the Daily News Journal, because the DNJ wanted to publish a section with the phrase “A.M.” in its title, which the Tennessean says it has, uh, trademarked.

Uh-huh. Yeah, and I trademarked the dot-com in my website name, BrendanLoy.com. In fact, I have the dot trademarked. (I’m still waiting for those royalties to begin flowing in.)

(Thanks to HobbsOnline, via InstaPundit, for the link. Circulation figures here.)

The Daily Trojan has a news story today discussing student complaints about the USC Student Health Center. Kudos to the editors for finally publishing something about this long-simmering issue — though the story could have been a bit less deferential to the administration. But that’s the DT for you.

Even so, the article does have a couple of good anecdotes of student anguish. Those don’t surprise me, however, having suffered one or two minor ones myself, and having seen Becky suffer, oh, a dozen at least. What really appalls me is the comment by the Health Center’s director, Dr. Lawrence Neinstein, who seems to think that patients who have had bad experiences shouldn’t complain because, hey, the doctors are trying really hard: “I get frustrated when people are beating their heads against the wall to see as many students as they can and I get a call saying, ‘I want to talk about what’s bad.’”

Um, that’s your job, dude. Find out what’s bad so you can make it better.

I suspect Becky will blog about this later today, and I’ll be sure to link to it when she does.

UPDATE: As promised, Becky has blogged. She recalls four of her own personal bad experiences with health center, and two acquaintances’ experiences. (I know she’s got more, too.) And then she makes this excellent observation:

People who have been burned majorly by the [Health Center] once just don’t go back, that’s why they don’t show up on the damn surveys.

Well said. Read the whole thing, as they say. :)

I got a link from InstaPundit this morning at 7:18 AM Eastern time (4:18 Pacific)! Unfortunately, as I just discovered, my counter/tracker was not working properly on most of my pages, so my “InstaBoost” is not being tracked properly. I just fixed it, so my daily hit count (listed at a rather implausible 31 as of a couple minutes ago) should begin to soar.

I just thought of this punchline: “I’ll get you, my pretty — and your little blog, too.”

Now I just need a joke to set it up. Ideas, anyone?

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Instapundit! And thanks for all the suggestions, fellow bloggers! While you’re here, take a look around — I just redesigned my site and upgraded my blog, so there’s lots to see. Check out my girlfriend’s blog and her cat’s blog (hehe).

UPDATE: I’ve gotten a bunch of good suggestions from InstaPundit-directed bloggers. Keep ‘em coming! So far, though, I think my favorite comment comes from my old friend Sean: “Have you considered involving a Wicked Witch of the Left? Flying rally monkeys? A No-Spin Man without a heart?” Heh.

UPDATE: Okay, I’ve posted my own suggestion for the joke. (Click here and scroll down.) It’s a bit of an inside joke, but hey, those who get it will appreciate it. Thanks to Sean for the rhetorical inspiration. Thanks to my good upbringing for not inspiring me to alter the word “witch” in any way. :)

I swear, I have gotten at least a dozen pieces of junk mail in the last 48 hours inviting me to buy my very own set of “Iraq’s Most Wanted” trading cards. Sheesh.

The government has lowered the terrorist threat level from orange to yellow.

But, after yesterday’s Easter Bunny attack and now this umpire assault, the national drunken-idiot alert has been raised to red.

Oh, that liberation.

Oh, that terrorist connection.

And here Dara almost had me convinced America is evil.

(Not.)

Report from the home front, via e-mail from my mom: “tonight after some drama and much chaos, leanna loomer [i.e., my mom] drove the adollyan [i.e., my family’s] 2002 tax filing to the north meadows [post office]. joe loy [i.e., my dad] took on the greater task of trying to repair leanna’s glasses, and the president and spiritual advisor of adollya, president mr. bun and nubbles the white [okay, this is far too weird to explain], stepped in as proxies for the two missing adollyan human residents who have taken the annual drive. the delivery occurred at some time around 10:30 p.m. (leanna time).”

This is an almost sacred annual tradition in my family: the almost-midnight drive on April 15 to the only nearby post office that’s open until midnight.

Meanwhile, back in L.A., I don’t think I owe any taxes because I only made about $1,500 in 2002, but I didn’t do the paperwork in time to be certain, so just in case, I e-filed for an automatic four-month extension. I paid $10 in the process ($11, actually, with the “convenience fee”), but if it turns out I didn’t owe anything and I never see that money again, I’ll consider it a donation to the war effort.

CNN has the obligatory tax day article, of course.

Becky’s latest Daily Trojan column is fantastic, as usual. You can read it on the DT website or in Becky’s blog.

In other news from the Daily Trojan, the USC Student Senate has decided that it supports the troops. The troops breathed a heavy collective sigh of relief upon hearing the news.