awkwardly

Wednesday

One day about a month or two after the start of the war, I was watching CNN at work in the cafeteria. To prevent your eyes from resting too much, they always show a set of headlines at the bottom of the screen, usually different from what the anchor man is talking about. They have to abbreviate things and try to fit long ideas into very little space, maybe 70 or 80 characters on two lines. Some of the 55 Most Wanted Iraqis from the infamous deck of cards were being captured every few days, then they would reshuffle the cards to make it seem like they had caught somebody more important. (#26 would shoot up to #15 after he was caught, something like that.) Not much space, but you can read between the lines. These guys all had names unpronouncable to Americans anyway, so why bother listing it? One day on the little headline space at the bottom of the screen, it listed "Queen of Diamonds caught, Minister of [whatever]." In some versions of the headline, they might have used his surname, but the one that caught my attention was when they just gave his card ranking. Viewers could do without his name, but they really needed to know what his card rank was.

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