Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

June 24, 2011

Is that the world’s worst knock knock joke?

*knock knock*
“Who’s there?”
“Me.”
“Me wh- hey, wait a minute, what are you doing carrying a dead weasel?”
“It’s not a weasel, it’s a marten.”
smashes resident in the face with weas- er, marten
“Maybe it’s a mink.”

But that’s not the Imponderable. And neither is “what the heck is a marten?” (A marten is in the same family as minks and weasels, and those are all just ferrets to me.) The Imponderable comes from the following article which reports the same story from a very different point of view.

Why does the writer of the article think that the salient point of the story is that a man mistook a marten for a mink? And bonus points if you realized that the headline got it wrong- he mistook a mink for a marten.

The AP article doesn’t mention motive, which anyone reading that article must be dying to know. Wouldn’t you want to know why a man hit another man with a dead animal? The first article gave the motive, that they were dating the same woman. The second only hinted at a motive, that he was looking for his girlfriend. Believe it or not, the New York Post had the better reporting.

The AP article must not find that angle interesting. It devoted more space to the identification of the animal, its scientific family, and its habitat.

Why does the Associated Press find it more interesting and important that a man misidentified a mink than the assault?

The question is Imponderable.

Tags: AP, assault, Associated Press, bmj2k, crime, headlines, Hoquiam Washington, knock knock jokes, marten, mink, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, Mr. BTR, NY Post, police, police blotter, reporting, weasel