If you're looking for a glimpse into what's going on in a copyeditor's head, put them in a training class and ask them to write a headline.

I've been spending a lot of hours the past few months working on a new computer system at work, in addition to my regular duties. (That is why blogging has recently been sparse.) As part of this testing I've been writing snarky headlines, teasers and all sorts of other stuff. People have been amused by my teaser top of the page teaser: "WORLD ENDS -- Women, Minorities hardest hit when volcano spews lava / B3." It's the fact that a story about the end of the world would be on B3 that amuses them, not the dig that the media reflexively focuses on the hardships of women and minorities when disaster strikes.

Anyway, I was running a training class yesterday afternoon, and as part of the excercise I was pulling some wire stories and having some copyeditors write headlines. These headlines are strictly for practice and thankfully there was never any danger they would get into the paper.

You can't swing a dead cat in the newsroom without hitting a liberal, so I wasn't really surprised when one popped in this headline-writing exercise.

The story was this one from the Associated Press on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once again decrying the use of foreign law to create law understand the Constitution's deeper meaning. The headline: "Scalia is a pain in the a$$."